“All done,” she brightly said. “You wanna see if it worked?”

Jill and Jamie shared one of those kinds of deep looks that twins had—like they could read each other’s minds and knew exactly what the other was thinking. And neither one of them looked like they trusted Detroit’s new contraption.

“Of course she does,” Daniel kindly said. “Maybe start with something small.”

The girls looked at each other, then nodded. “Does anyone have a bottle of water?” Jill asked.

“I’ve got one,” Scout said, then dug through her messenger bag and pulled out a bottle. “It’s only half-full.”

“No problem,” Jill said. She walked over to the table and put the bottle on top, then stepped back a few feet.

We all scooted back a little, giving her room to operate. Just in case.

She stood there for a moment, hands at her sides, and squeezed her fingers rhythmically into fists. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. Her long hair fell across her shoulders, which she rolled a little as if loosening them up.

“Is it wrong that I’m really freaked-out right now?” Scout whispered.

“That she’ll turn us all into ice?” I wondered.

“That it won’t work at all.”

That was probably the scarier option.

Jill raised her hands in front of her body, and with a whoosh of sound—like she’d exhaled really hard—she pushed her hands out and toward the bottle of water.

The room was silent—and the water wasn’t even a little bit icy.

The tension in the room was awful. It wasn’t exactly fun to watch another Adept completely unable to work her magic, especially knowing we were all in the same boat.

“Try again,” Daniel said softly. “Just one more time.”

Jill nodded, then repeated her magic prep again. Fists open and closed, rolling shoulders, the pushing of the hands.

But the bottle didn’t waver.

Jill let out a soft sob. She turned around, tears brimming in her lashes, and went to her sister. They hugged.

“This is going to last forever, isn’t it?” Paul asked, panic in his voice. “That machine doesn’t work, and we don’t have any other ideas, and we’re screwed. Our magic is gone.”

“It’s my fault,” Detroit said, her voice softer this time and not nearly as confident. “The machine doesn’t work. I’d hoped—” she began but she shook her head, then wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “I’d hoped I could still do it. Anyone can make a machine. You don’t need magic for that. But I make machines that interact with magic. They recognize it. Test it. Use it. That’s my power. That’s my talent.”

She quieted and looked away, and this time didn’t bother to stop the tear that slid down her cheek. “My magic is gone,” she said. “Now I’m just a two-bit hobbyist. I might as well start building battle bots.”

“I like battle bots,” Michael said, a quirky smile on his face. Detroit looked at him and smiled, but you could see the hurt ran pretty deep.

“Our magic isn’t gone,” Daniel said. “This is Chicago—not some fairy tale city. Magic doesn’t just disappear without a reason. Someone is behind this—someone has turned off our magic, which means we focus on figuring out who that is and making things right again.”

This might have been hard for all of us, and it might have been hard for Daniel, but you couldn’t see it to look at him. He was a good motivator—a “never let ’em see you sweat” kind of guy. It was just the kind of thing we needed right now.

Unfortunately, it didn’t give us our magic back.

“Don’t lose your heads over a temporary circumstance,” he said. “And that’s what this is—a temporary circumstance.”

“Or it’s practice,” Paul said. “Like losing our magic before we even get good at it. That sucks.”

“See? It’s an opportunity,” Daniel chuckled. “You guys are seriously making me feel like Pollyanna today.” That got a laugh in the Enclave. “Look, this is hard. This situation sucks, and I know that for sure, because I’m a lot closer to giving it all up than you are. It’s hard to face a lifetime without it. But it’s not impossible. It’s a gift, a really particular kind of gift, but life goes on. And now you know that.”

Jason’s phone rang, breaking the silence. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen, then frowned. Without another word, he walked to the Enclave door, pulled it open, and walked outside. It shut with a heavy thud that sent a little frizzle of panic through my chest. Was this the call? The one that pulled him home again, never to return?

Michael walked over. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, eyes still on the door. “Family stuff, I guess.”

“He’s been quiet about that lately. I don’t think he wants to go home.”

I looked back at Michael, wanting to believe him. “Why do you say that?”

Michael shrugged. “He doesn’t talk about it a lot. I think he has a lot of frustration about them, about their ways. He came up here to get away from it, but it seems to follow him. He wants to have his own life, you know? A separate life.”

“Separate from their rules?”

“Yeah. He told you it was a curse?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“It weighs on him. He joined up with the Enclave to help make a difference, because he wanted something good to come of it. He thinks you’re something good to come from it, too.”