others have reported upon seeing our Chosen One for the first time—no tingling, no existential satisfaction, no blinding lights, choirs of angels, or impulses to prostrate myself before him. I find those reports to be ridiculous, as they elevate meeting Mage to a religious experience when it is in fact just encountering a child who has raw magical ability.
“Hello,” I said to the boy, and I sat across the table from him. Someone had brought him the magic-development game Perception Interception. It can be programmed for a single player and had been for Mage. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t used it or even touched it. He had instead been sitting in the examination room unoccupied for the better part of an hour.
“You didn’t want to play?” I said.
Mage shook his head.
“All right,” I said. “What have you been doing in here?”
“Watching,” he replied.
“Watching?”
“Yeah, the—strings.” He wiggled his fingers. “If I concentrate, I can see them.”
“Strings,” I repeated. “What do they look like?”
“They’re like when you see the sun through fog,” he said. “In rays. Bright, a little hazy.”
“I don’t,” I replied. “I think maybe you are describing an experience with magic that we simply haven’t documented yet. Magic is new to us, and we are only just beginning to understand it. So I am inclined to believe you.”
“Oh.” Mage brightened at that, but then, almost in the same moment, he deflated. “My mom and dad told me not to talk about it.”
“I think your mom and dad were just trying to keep you safe,” I said. “Because there are some people who get mad when they hear things they don’t understand.”
It was a shame, really, to see how readily he accepted that, to know how young we learn these lessons.
“Can you tell me more about what you see? How long have you been able to see them?”
He shifted in his seat.
“A long time?”
“Since I can remember,” he said. “Not always, though, just when I try really hard.”
“Well, that makes sense,” I said. “When we talk about a work of magic, we often use the word intent, which is like having a goal or a purpose. Magic doesn’t work without intent. So when you concentrate on the strings, as you call them, your intention is to see them. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever tried to touch one?”
He shrugged, but even crafty children are not skilled at keeping secrets. It was clear to me that he had, in fact, experimented with his unique ability. And since one of the major criteria of Sibyl’s prophecy was that the Chosen One would have a magical ability heretofore unseen on Genetrix, I needed to pursue it further. “Will you show me?” I said.
Mage nodded. He lowered his eyes, so he was no longer staring at me but instead at the table. He drew a slow breath, in and out through his nose. It was clear to me that he had spent a great deal of his idle time doing this trick, because there was a process to it already, even though he was a mere ten years old. In and out he breathed, steadily, until a kind of energy came into his eyes, like the answer to a tricky problem had just come to him.
He reached out with his left hand . . . and pinched.
As to what happened after that, please refer to the video footage for a more complete understanding. Gravity failed, and everything in the room—myself included—began to float. The chair I had been sitting in bounced off the ceiling. I specifically remember one of the game pieces from Perception Interception, a glass eyeball, drifting past my face.
But sitting in his chair below, as if nothing had changed, was the young man we came to know as the Chosen One.
TOP SECRET
19
SHORTLY AFTER SLOANE returned from the library, a young woman named Cyrielle knocked on her door and introduced herself as Aelia’s assistant. She was dressed head to toe in purple, the only exception the silver glint of her throat siphon, which Sloane now recognized as a status symbol. It was a simple cuff around the woman’s neck with a string of purple beads at the back.
Sloane spent the rest of the morning receiving deliveries from Cyrielle: food, shampoo, soap, an old-fashioned straight razor, a pile of clothes, an assortment of shoes. By the time Sloane was dressed—in a high-necked black sweater with sleeves that stopped just