A surge of magic coursed through the box in Benji’s hands. He savored that surge. He paused, then hoisted the box onto the top shelf along the back wall of the storeroom. Everything had a place in this room, falling into a sensible order of stacked shelves lined with even boxes. This particular artifact dispersed water, which placed it firmly on the waterworking shelf. Benji positioned it alongside the other waterworking boxes, all of which hummed with magic.

  The bell rang at the front desk. Benji walked out along the narrow rows, locking the storeroom behind him.

  A man stood at the desk, scratching a long fingernail over the wood. His gray eyes matched a scraggly beard that didn’t quite cover his chin. Benji had once called the people who came in looking to borrow magical items “customers,” but that didn’t feel quite accurate since they were available for loan to any adult in the city.

  “What can I help you with?” Benji asked.

  “You got a metal attractor?”

  “Like . . . a magnet?”

  The man was making such intense eye contact that it felt like he was intentionally avoiding looking away. “But bigger. It’s got to be able to pull metal through a wall about yea thick.” He held out his hands about three feet wide.

  “What kind of metal are you looking to pull?”

  “Coins,” the man said without missing a beat. “Accidentally buried some of my savings.”

  “Sure,” Benji said, thinking that the man was describing the exact width of the vault walls at Thelspoint Peoples Exchange, the bank down the road. “We’ll see what we can do. Can you please look into the green dot here?”

  The man flinched as Benji maneuvered a wire arm attached to the desk until the green dot at its end was at the man’s eye level. The device lit up as Benji opened the flow of magic into it. A complex series of clicks and whirs sounded from beneath the desk, and a file card popped out of the slot at the top. The device’s identification magic wasn’t perfect, but this time it had done its job well. On the right side of the card was a portrait against a background that could only have been a cell at the city jail. A slightly younger, slightly less scraggly version of the man in front of him stared menacingly out of the image. Besides his name, his occupation (no known legitimate occupation), and a few notes on relations and known aliases, the card also showed a summary of his criminal record.

  The summary was so long that it ran onto the other side of the card, and stopped midsentence when the other side ran out of space as well. As if realizing its mistake, the identification device shot out three more cards, each a continued description of the man’s rampant life of crime.

  “Sir, it seems there’s been a slight problem,” Benji said. “You see, by policy we can’t loan out magical items with a potential to enable criminal activity to anyone with a criminal record similar in nature to . . . well . . . the potential criminal activity.”

  The man took a second to process Benji’s jumbled explanation. He was framed by wide leaded windows that would have looked out on the street, had they not been frosted to protect the privacy of the office and any light-sensitive items. Benji had a fleeting wish that the windows were clear so he wasn’t quite so alone with this man. Then, without warning, the man took a swing at him.

  Benji didn’t flinch. At least not much. The woodworking engrained in the front desk activated, raising a solid wall of oak between him and the assailant. The man’s knuckles smashed into it.

  “Sorry about that, the security measures, you know,” Benji said as the enraged man shook his bruised hand.

  The man took a few more testing jabs across the desk, but each time was foiled by the woodworking. A lightworked lamp on the desk blinked helpfully to let Benji know he was in danger.

  Undeterred, the man came around to the side of the desk, where a wooden arm blocked an otherwise unguarded gap. It looked frighteningly small as the man approached.

  “Maybe it’s not a magnet I need, maybe it’s your nose.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “I really would prefer it stay on my face,” Benji said.

  As the man attempted to leap over the flimsy-looking arm, Benji added, “I really wouldn’t—”

  The warning had been halfhearted, but accurate. Just as the man became airborne, the arm snapped up, fanning out so it was no longer a single piece of wood but instead resembled a washboard. The striations raked across the man’s leg before squeezing together, grabbing the hem of his pants by force and hurling him backward. Benji winced as he struck the floor.

  “Please, I would hate to have to get the security staff involved,” Benji said. He really would hate to do that, mostly because the office’s security had a penchant for treating misuse of even minor magical items as if it were a sin on par with plotting the overthrow of the government.

  With a sound that could only be described as a growl, the man got to his feet and slunk toward the door.

  “I’m very sorry we couldn’t serve you today,” Benji said, his voice tailing off as the door slammed shut.

  Though Benji didn’t particularly like being attacked by customers, the incident had at least given the day some much-needed excitement. After sliding the file cards back into the slot in the desk—marking them with an instant decline stamp—he reached for the book he kept hidden beneath the registration log on the desk. The title, So You Want to Go to Mage College?? might have contained exactly one more question mark than Benji would have liked, but it was still the definitive resource for anyone taking the entrance exams to attend Thelspoint University.

  Benji knew every line of it. The typical student started a ten-year course of study at the age of thirteen, around the time magic usually emerged. Meaning, at twenty-seven, Benji was now significantly older than even the mages in this year’s graduating class.

  “I’m very sorry we couldn’t serve you today,” came a wry imitation of his own voice from the office door at the other end of the room. Reena stood in the doorway, intimidating as ever with her high curl of silver hair and tattooed arms. Allegedly, the tattoos were to cover the scars she had earned tracking down dangerous criminals in her days as part of the magical crime division of the Thelspoint constabulary.

  “I always try to stay polite, you know,” Benji said. “Though I suppose it probably didn’t make him want to beat me up any less than he already did.”

  “Everything else alright?” Reena asked.

  “Yeah, quiet day.”

  “Leaves plenty of time for studying,” she said, eyeing the book on the desk.

  Benji had moved to hide it, but knew Reena’s sharp eyes had probably noticed it before she announced her presence. At some point Reena had given up reprimanding him for studying on the job. He’d managed to wheedle his way into a position that was often assigned as a work study program for university students, so he guessed he wasn’t the only one to squeeze in some hours with a textbook while manning the front desk. But he was no student, and Reena knew it.

  “Another entrance exam tonight,” Reena said, crossing her arms. “If you haven’t learned everything by now, you’re not going to learn it by then.”

  “It’s more of a review,” Benji said. He ran one finger along the spine, which had once been sky blue and now frayed at the edges. The book had so many dog ears that it bunched up horribly at the top, further stressing the spine.

  “I won’t be the one to discourage academic pursuits,” Reena said, then hesitated.

  “But?”

  “But isn’t this a tad excessive?”

  Hurt bubbled in Benji’s heart, hurt he was not willing to show more than a hint of to his boss. “You once told me that I couldn’t be promoted here without at least three years of magical training.”

  “We both know that if you were committed to growing here, you would find other ways that don’t involve facing the absolute ordeal that is the entrance exams.”

  “They’re not that bad,” Benji said, managing a smile. “I would know.”

  Reena sighed. “I suppose you would. Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to ask you. Are you able to hand off the desk an hour early tonight?”

  Benji’s heart sank. “For a collection?”

  “Hopefully nothing as intense as what you’ve already experienced today. We think the loanee probably just forgot he’d taken out the item in the first place. I have someone coming at four to cover the desk, but they’re a student so I can’t send them out unaccompanied. That leaves you to make the collection.”

  Oh great, Benji thought. It would be a tight squeeze. The entrance exams started promptly at six, and whatever magical item he needed to retrieve would have to be brought back and catalogued in the storeroom before he could go. He hoped against hope that the collection would be nearby. When he asked, the dread he’d been feeling since Reena entered the room grew further. The address was all the way on the other side of Thelspoint.

  “Come now,” Reena said. “It’s not as if this is any more difficult than the mere idea of you passing the entrance exams.”

  A part of Benji wondered if Reena had devised this task so as to give him a reasonable excuse to miss the exams. It was almost kind. They both knew Benji lacked even the sliver of magic required to attend the university. He could study as much as he wanted, had even suspected he’d done better than most on the written portion of the exam. None of that mattered. Thelspoint University was a magic school, and that meant its students needed to actually possess magic.

  Benji, no matter how hard he tried, didn’t.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Reena said. “They do say that your fourteenth time taking the exam is the charm, don’t they?”