The new year came, and with it, a kind of reckoning. Mira had been on Earth for six months. Her magic had dropped to three percent—a loss she felt most acutely in the mornings, when she woke up and reached for her power and found it less than it had been the day before, the way you might reach for a word you use every day and find that it has moved, that it is no longer where you left it, that the language you thought you knew is slowly forgetting you. The decline was relentless. She was losing...