Forsaken

He wakes up in a body that has been asleep for eight years, and it will not answer.

He is not the boy who owned it. The boy is gone. What is left is a thirty-eight-year-old stockroom worker from a world with electric light, lying in the dark in a house that bankrupted itself keeping this body warm, unable to lift his own hand.

He has nineteen days to be standing in a hall four hundred miles away, because a place at Holt Varren Academy is the last thing his family owns.

Everyone at that academy has trained since they could walk. He has no talent, no bloodline, no cheat, and a body that has forgotten how to be one. What he has instead is the first night, and the little finger of his left hand, and the willingness to tell it to move eleven thousand times.

But the real trade is not taught at the academy. It is taught below it, on a street called the Course, where people are hired by the hour to carry other people's magic in their heads — twelve-hour shifts, paid by complexity, wearing out one mind at a time. Nobody at Holt Varren considers this interesting. It is what servants do.

He is going to go down there and ask them how.