The Calibration

The scraping of students’ chairs echoed across the gigantic hall as each name was called to receive their test results. Sunlight poured through the glass ceiling, glinting off the white marble desks of silent students wearing carefully blank faces, dressed in the magocratic academy’s formal robes. The sun shining off the desks illuminated their faces within little spotlights, as if this was their stage and tonight was the performance they had been practicing for all their lives. Stiff navy wool pressed into Evelyn’s neck where the silver clasp held the robe shut like a choker, engraved with the academy’s sigil: Libertatem per Potentiam. Freedom through power.

The Calibration test decided where you would lead. Not whether, but how. Every student here was destined to shape the world; this test was just the classification of their dominance. Each person here had been handpicked to attend the academy, selected for the nature of their magic and their trajectory capacity over their existing value. Evelyn included.

Names continued to be called, and plain silver envelopes were passed. Upon opening the envelopes and determining the individual courses of their lives, the students remained civilly silent, eyes shining with hidden knowledge.

“Ari Hassan.”

“Mariel Ito.”

“Camden Liu.”

“Sasha Elwood.”

Sasha retrieved her envelope and sat back down at her desk next to Evelyn’s, quickly flashing its contents to her roommate. In black, ornate script, the word ‘Architect’ was written. She smiled quickly at Evelyn, raising her eyebrows in excitement.

Evelyn nodded back. Of course Sasha was an Architect, she was the best in their class at geomancy and warding. She could easily conjure structures and would thrive in the Architect Order, designing the future of sovereign spaces. That was the game, you weren’t allowed to hope out loud, but everyone did. You were supposed to act as though the Calibration was completely objective, and that the test merely revealed what you were. But it didn’t actually feel like that. To Evelyn, these designations were pre-determined, like everything else in her life. No one was ever actually surprised.

“Evelyn Marr.”

When she got up, her stomach felt like it had stayed behind in the chair. She briskly walked to the proctor and took the envelope. The paper was heavier than she expected. She walked back to her desk and opened the envelope.

She read and reread the paper, confused. She wanted to hide, to leave the grand hall.

Indeterminate. Further assessment required.

The envelope crumbled to ash in her hand, though she hadn’t willed the incantation to release it.

The summons arrived before dinner, materializing on Evelyn’s bathroom mirror in the same swirling cursive as the rest of the institute’s communications. The commandment was signed with a triangle, the mark of the Magister. Evelyn was to report to the office immediately. She hadn’t been hungry in the slightest, and this only contributed to the waves of nausea that had gripped her stomach since the morning.

She walked across the dormitories to the north building, going against the grain of students headed to dinner like a salmon swimming upstream. Eyes fixed curiously on her, and she felt the judgment of her peers. Their gazes burned into her back as she moved quickly to the door at the end of the hall and knocked.

“Enter,” said the soft, deliberate voice of the Magister.

Crystal chandeliers floated overhead, bathing the room in a cold, bright light. The floors were the same strong white marble as the rest of the academy’s buildings, the walls contained old books, enchanted with white spines to hide their contents, and even older art. The Magister sat in the center, seated at a desk of black obsidian.

She rose as Evelyn entered.

Tall and poised, she possessed a sharp beauty. Her midnight hair was pulled into a sleek, low bun at the nape of her neck. Her long black silk robe fell like a blade down her spine, pooling behind her and trailing across the floor as she walked. “Sit,” she spoke, indicating with her long, silver-ringed fingers at the leather chair across from her.

Evelyn sank into the chair, nervously waiting.

“The Calibration is never wrong,” said the Magister, resting her hands back down on top of her desk. Her pale skin stood out on the shiny black material as she brushed her palm across the surface, bringing the symbols of the Orders into view. She tapped each of the six crests with a long, red fingernail, listing them off, ”Architects, Technocrats, Vox, Healers, Judicators, Curators. Everyone always finds their place.”

“What does Indeterminate mean?” Evelyn asked.

“It means you do not conform to any known Order,” she said simply. “Your resonance is… layered. Which means you can be shaped.”

Evelyn narrowed her eyes. “By you?”

“By us,” the Magister corrected swiftly. She brushed her hand over the desk, swiping away the Orders. “An Indeterminate verdict is a rare opportunity. One you must claim, if you can. There have only been a handful in our history. Indeterminates have gone on to do great things, through powerful and necessary means.”

“What? If I can? I didn’t ask for this,” Evelyn protested.

“No one truly does,” said the Magister, voice softening like the silk brushing her skin. Was that sympathy in her voice?

“But it doesn’t matter. The sun doesn’t ask to burn, yet it blazes on.”

Whatever sympathy might have been there was gone.

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Evelyn quietly.

The Magister offered a faint, unreadable smile. “We will be seeing a lot more of each other. ” A slight tilt of the head. “We will begin your formation through a series of lessons, a special track, if you will. One-on-one meta-cognitive development. Unstructured progression.”

“Unstructured?” she asked.

“You will not learn new spells. You will learn what chooses to reveal itself to you.” She glanced up suddenly and stood abruptly. “That is all for today. Professor Thorne will be waiting for you tomorrow morning.”

“But-“

“Thank you, Miss Marr.”

The next morning, after breakfast, she was summoned again. Her mirror glowed with a crimson glyph, and the path to a room in the west wing presented itself in her mind’s eye.

The room was located in a place where classes were not usually held, so there were not any students around. A single silver sconce with a green flame lit the entire hallway, and seemed to guide the light around her to illuminate the path ahead. She knocked once at the door, which opened without a sound.

Professor Thorne looked odd. For a professor, he seemed younger than he should be, yet dressed older than he appeared. He wore robes the color of dusk and had kind eyes, with crow’s feet crinkling at the corners. “Evelyn,” he said warmly, gesturing inside. “Please, join me here.”

“I assume the Magister gave you little explanation,” he said, pouring a pink coffee-like substance that smelled faintly of burnt almonds.

Evelyn nodded, accepting the cup he offered her.

“Good,” Thorne said. “Explanation dulls perception.”

She took a sip, waiting, unsure if that meant there would be no more information.

He folded his hands. “You are one of a very rare, amazing kind, Evelyn. An Indeterminate. It’s happened before, though not often. The last was… well, some years ago, and she was capable of incredible acts of magic. But she is no longer spoken of.”

“What-“

He raised his cup, as if shushing her and toasting her simultaneously. “When you complete your formation, you will know. You will know a great many things.”

Her lessons didn’t happen at set times. Sometimes the summons came in the morning, and other times she’d wake up from a dream already walking toward the west wing. If she missed a class, her other professors never called her out. Even weirder, she stopped feeling the stares of other students, and they never asked about where she went. She had stopped asking how or why.

The lessons were unlike her regular classes. There were no books, homework, tests, or notes. Thorne asked questions and simply watched her react.

“Imagine a version of yourself without a body.”

“Where do your thoughts begin? Can you remember the first memory you ever had?”

Evelyn would answer, or at the very least try her best to. Though it seemed pointless and strange, something inside her was slowly shifting. After each lesson, she’d notice something new. She paid attention to how long people thought before they spoke, and patterns in their speech. She wondered why two people might have the same answer to a question, yet express their response in entirely different ways.

And then, she knew. She just knew what they would say, followed by why they said it. It didn’t always happen, but it happened often enough to terrify her.

She needed less sleep, then no sleep. She hadn’t talked to Sasha in months, and she would pretend to be asleep whenever she came into their shared dorm room. She lay in bed and waited for the daylight to creep through the windows before rising.

There were many times during those long nights when she felt like crying, but it seemed that her eyes had forgotten how. She began to forget other things, too, like her family. She couldn’t remember what color her father’s eyes were, or her mother’s laugh. She couldn’t remember the reason why she had been chosen to come to this school in the first place, or what Order she had hoped to be assigned to during the Calibration.

She wrote things down, using pen and paper, like the ancients. My name is Evelyn. My roommate is Sasha. The Magister smells like smoke and violet. I like the taste of cinnamon. My family has a pet imp named Bartholomew who has white fur, and I love him.

Each lesson gave her more, and took something else away.

“You’re stabilizing faster than the others,” Thorne remarked happily after one session.

Others.

She waited until curfew, then made her way back to the lessons room. She found the drawer beneath Professor Thorne’s desk, sealed with a vibrant green sigil she did not recognize. She focused on the symbol, willing it to break. She had come to expect that the things that she wanted to happen would become real if she focused hard enough.

Inside the drawer were six files, each associated with a different student. One file was barely older than she was, all stamped with the same emerald sigil. These were the other Indeterminates.

She opened one, skimming through what appeared to be clinical notes and observations.

Subject lost appetite by week three.

Subject began speaking in constructed languages.

Subject entered unresponsive trance on day forty-two.

Subject unrecovered.

There were photos in the files. A girl with golden hair in one, another showing a boy staring past the camera without a smile. None of these looked like they had been taken with the students’ permission. All of the files ended poorly, with the “subjects” becoming “unrecovered.”

Evelyn felt something resembling nausea, or would be if she felt things like that anymore.

The Magister met her the following evening in the atrium near the lake. Thorne stood nearby, quietly observing.

A circle had been drawn on the stone floor in quicksilver, humming with old magic. Two glyphs pulsed within, and Evelyn recognized one as the green symbol for Indeterminates.

“You’ve reached the threshold,” the Magister said. “What you are becoming now asks to be named.”

Evelyn felt her feet step forward to the edge of the circle.

“This is a permanent invocation,” Thorne spoke. “You may choose which glyph to bind to. Ascend, and your gifts continue to evolve. Remain, and they will be silenced.”

Evelyn studied the glyphs. Green for Ascend, to agree to fully become an Indeterminate. Red for Remain. For silence. It would be nice to remain, to go back to being normal. To reverse whatever had been happening to her. It sounded like safety, not having to be an experiment anymore.

Her eyes flickered to the Magister and Professor Thorne. She knew how they would react if she chose to remain. She knew exactly what they would say, as she often did now.

She whispered a spell, her hand moving toward Remain.

The circle flared, and she felt the magic surging through her, but as quickly as it had flown out of the glyph, it was gone. Was it done?

The glyph faded. She waited for relief, or to feel… something. Anything. To hit the floor in fatigue, maybe. To burst into tears. But no feeling or change came.

She looked up. The Magister did not smile, her scarlet lips a thin line. Thorne watched her with pity in his young but old face.

“You chose to remain,” the Magister said in her soft voice. “But it appears the calibration was already complete.”

That night she lay again in her dorm bed, listening to Sasha’s snores in the dark. The sound was warm and familiar, wasn’t it? It was a good sound. She needed to remember it.

She wrote in her notebook: My name is Evelyn. My roommate is Sasha. I am an Indeterminate.

Would she remember this moment? Would she remember being scared to forget?

She stared at the pages in her notebook as if from a distance, not knowing what parts of her were already gone. Somewhere inside her, she felt a pang like hunger or loneliness. No, that wasn’t it. Those feelings didn’t come from her hands.

A flicker of heat seared beneath her skin, and she gasped as green light manifested, starting at her fingertips and spiraling toward her heart. The Ascend glyph, the one she hadn’t touched, was forming in her palm, carving itself into her flesh. It glowed for a breath longer, pulsing again before sinking below her skin, invisible.

She clutched her hand, not in pain, but in understanding.

The choice had never been hers.