October 2nd, 2012 -– The Black Forest, Germany
The stone would not move.
That was the whole trouble of it. Niko stared at the stone. Seven children stared at Niko. And the flat grey pebble sat in the dirt between them and did exactly what stones had done since the dawn of the world. Absolutely nothing.
"Do it," Lukas demanded again. He was thirteen, a head taller than the rest, and he held a silver camcorder to one eye with its red recording light blinking steadily. "You said you had powers. The London magic. The broom rider stuff. Do it."
Just a week ago, Niko had been a nobody. He was the strange new boy in the grey house at the end of the lane. The one who ate his lunch against the brick wall because his family had come from somewhere none of the others could pronounce.
He had made absolutely no friends. Which was exactly why he had done the stupid thing. He had tried to make himself interesting.
He had told them he could do magic. He had bragged about the afternoon a football had rolled away across the field and he had wanted it back. He had just wanted it, and it had flown straight into his hands across ten meters of open grass. He had not managed to replicate the feat once since. But he knew what it meant. He knew he was special.
So, in a desperate quest to make friends, he had told Lukas. Lukas had told everyone else. Now everyone was here.
It was, Niko thought, the finest afternoon of his entire life.
Right up until it wasn't.
"Float the stone," said a girl with a tight blonde plait. "Go on. Make it float."
"It only works sometimes," Niko said, his voice coming out terribly small. "When I really want it to."
"You are a liar," Clara sneered, folding her arms. "You just said it so we would talk to you."
"I am not lying! The football came to me. I just looked at it and it came."
"Then move the rock," Lukas threatened, "or we throw you in the freezing creek for wasting our afternoon."
Niko crouched desperately over the pebble. He wanted it to lift so badly his teeth ached. He reached down inside himself for the warm, easy pull he had felt behind his ribs with the football, the thing that had made it all so simple.
It was not there. The stone sat stubbornly in the dirt.
Somebody laughed. It was not a kind laugh, and once one of them had done it, the rest found it very easy to join in.
"He is making it all up."
"You are full of it," Lukas scoffed, lowering the camera. "You marched us all the way out here for nothing." He stepped aggressively into the circle. "Little liar."
"The new freak made it all up."
The word landed somewhere soft and vulnerable. Freak. Niko had been called a few things in a few different towns before. That one was new.
The circle of older children drew in tighter.
"I can't," Niko pleaded, shrinking back against a pine tree. "It does not work like that. You cannot just force it to happen."
"Then what good are you?" Lukas grabbed a fistful of Niko's jacket and hauled the smaller boy up onto his toes. "Last chance. Do the magic. Or I will give you a real reason to cry."
Niko did not think about the football anymore. He did not think about the stone, or London, or the broom riders. A white spike of terror went through his chest, and the only thought left in his mind was the oldest, simplest prayer a child has.
Get away from me.
The magic ripped out of him all at once.
There was no light. There was a sound, low and enormous, felt in the chest more than heard, and then the clearing shoved. Lukas left the ground as though a car had hit him. The wave rolled out across the dirt and took the rest of the circle off their feet, tumbling them into the ferns, the breath punched clean out of them.
For two full seconds the forest clearing was silent.
Then the pained groaning started.
They sat up slowly. They were scattered, grass stained, and heavily winded, but not one of them was truly hurt. It was a small miracle that nobody there was quite old enough to be grateful for. Lukas stared up at Niko from the dirt with wide eyes. Clara looked from the flattened grass to the small, shaking boy at the tree, her mouth hanging open.
They were terrified.
And yet, under the terror, already rising, was the thing they had come for. Awe. They had actually seen it, the thing from the news, the thing the people in London could do, and it had happened here, to them. The fear and the wonder sat in them side by side, and neither one cancelled the other out.
Niko stood pinned against the pine, crying harder than any of them, more frightened than all of them put together. He had done it. And he would have given absolutely anything to take it back.
Suddenly, three sharp cracks sounded in rapid succession, like a whip breaking the sound barrier.
Three tall figures stepped out of nothing. They wore long, sweeping black coats. Their faces were stern and emptied of feeling. They were field operatives of the German Ministry of Magic, dispatched automatically the very instant powerful underage magic flared in a Muggle zone.
"Confirmed," the lead one said in German, already drawing his wand. "Underage manifestation. Multiple Muggle witnesses. Initiate standard cleanup."
The shocked children did not even manage to scream.
The wizards moved through them without any hurry. It was the precise, practiced movement of men navigating a tedious job they could easily do in their sleep. Wands came up in unison. The dim clearing flashed with blinding white light, again and again.
"Obliviate."
The fear went out of the children's faces. So did everything else, for a moment. Their eyes glassed and their heads dropped, and somewhere behind those eyes an afternoon was being lifted out and replaced with a duller one, where nothing had happened and no one had flown.
The cleanup was thorough. It always was. They counted the children twice. They found the camcorder in the grass with its light still burning and turned it to a handful of ash. They went through pockets, walked the tree line, quick and professional, and within four minutes the field held nothing but sleeping children who would wake believing they had spent a dull afternoon doing very little at all.
"Clear," one of the wizards announced.
"Not quite." The lead wizard had a fistful of Niko's jacket. The boy was awake, and sobbing, and the only child in the clearing who would remember a second of it. "We take this one. Family interview, assessment, the usual." He looked down at the weeping boy with something that was not quite pity and not quite anything. "Late bloomer. Strong, though. Nearly took the big one's head off."
Three more cracks echoed through the trees.
The black coats were gone, and the boy was gone with them, and the clearing was left to seven sleeping children and the slow drift of disturbed leaves settling back down.
The German Ministry thought they had done the job perfectly.
They were wrong. They had missed exactly one thing.
When Niko's accidental magic had thrown the circle wide, it had thrown more than just children. A smartphone, previously clutched tightly in Clara's small fist, had gone flying with her. It had been flung up over the low stone wall and into the crook of an old oak a good twenty feet from the field.
Its camera lens was pointed directly at the clearing. And it was still recording.
It had caught all of it. The boy. The stone. The blast. The dark coats stepping out of empty air to wipe seven children's minds clean, before vanishing back into nothing.
It would sit up in that quiet tree for two full hours. It would sit there until its owner woke up, scratched at a strange itch she could not name, and finally thought to look for it.
And once she pressed play, the magical afternoon that no one remembered would permanently belong to the entire world.