Free Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) by Mercedes Lackey

me what you can do.”
    Tomas still had that cartoon-stunned look on his face, but it didn’t affect his abilities. His hands moved surely among the parts and the tools in a way that looked as arcane as anything VeeVee could do. Dottie watched silently over his shoulder, saying nothing, eyes thoughtful. After a moment, Aaron Clark and Brian Walker—the latter a drawling tow-headed backwoods kid from Appalachia, the former a square-built black boy from Atlanta—sidled over to watch too.
    After about fifteen minutes, Dottie put a hand on Tomas’s shoulder, making him jump. “That’ll do, homie. You’re in.” She grinned, and slapped his back hard enough to make him stagger a little. “Tell Ms Clifford. For the next three years or so, your ass is mine. Now, you finish that rebuild while these two knuckleheads watch.” She gave the other two a sidelong, amused look. “On the whole, boys, you’ll discover knowing what you’re doing rather than trying to intuit stuff from the way the parts are shaped tends to work better.”
    “Well, what do you think?” VeeVee said.
    Auto Shop class was over—she didn’t think she could have pried Tomas out of the garage with heavy machinery, and so she hadn’t tried—and the students were cleaning up, putting away their tools and getting ready for dinner. “Think you’re going to like it here?”
    He’d been smiling and easy with the other bolt-heads, but now she saw him hesitate, and visibly remind himself he wasn’t supposed to want to be here.
    “It’s still a prison, rubia,” he said.
    “Fine,” she said. “Come on and have dinner, then.”
    The next morning, Tomas went to see Ms. Clifford.
    He wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Que linda rubia had told him Sarah Clifford was the school Guidance Councilor, who would set up his class schedule. What he knew for sure was that he wanted to spend every minute down at the garage and no time anywhere else. Dottie Davies might be a crazy smack-talking old lady, but Tomas liked her already, and she spoke his language. Cars.
    Ms. Clifford was another matter. He’d met her kind before, back in El Paso. Social Workers who didn’t have a clue, who figured any problems you had were all your own fault. She take one look at him and probably tell him he’d have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get what he wanted, because that was what her kind always did.
    But that wasn’t what happened at all.
    He’d been supposed to go to her office right after breakfast. He’d deliberately made sure to arrive fifteen minutes late.
    She hadn’t been angry. She’d been reading a book when he came in, and she just waved toward a chair. “Tomas. It’s good to see you. My name is Sarah Clifford.”
    “Yeah,” he said rudely, flopping into a chair and putting his feet up on the cushions. “I know.”
    At that point he’d expected a lecture on manners—and to be told to put his feet on the floor—but Ms. Sarah Clifford just smiled. “Good. Now. You’re going to be with us for the next three years—as you already know. I’ve got your transcripts from El Paso, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of where you need to go academically.”
    Tomas slouched even further down in his seat. “I don’t need to go to school.”
    Ms. Clifford actually looked sympathetic, which he was sure was a complete act.
    “I’m afraid you’re going to at least need a High School Diploma, or a GED—that’s a General Equivalency Diploma, which means you’ve passed a test that means you know everything you would have learned in High School. You’ll need one or the other in order to get your mechanic’s license, which involves passing the mechanic’s course we offer here and getting both a regular drivers’ license and your Class III driver’s license as well. And it’s a condition of your probation, so we can’t really skate on that.”
    Tomas sneered. This was going about the way he’d expected. They were going to promise him that if he