“I don’t like it,” Jaesin says. “What if it gets worse?”
“We should go, Diz,” Ania urges, but I cut her off.
“No, we’re almost there. Just a few more vials. I’ll open the valve a bit wider so we can go faster. The pressure stabilized, it can handle it.”
Ania shakes her head.
“That sounds dangerous, Diz—let’s just take what we’ve got and go. We can get the rest another day,” she pleads.
“And let this guy back out of our deal, or refuse to pay the rest because we couldn’t deliver all of it by his deadline? We need that money.” Remi needs that money. Jaesin needs it too, if he wants that shiny apartment in Jattapore he’s been drooling over. Ania doesn’t need anything. I sure as hell do, though.
I’m not leaving without this maz.
I open the valve farther.
“Diz!” Ania snaps, and Remi sucks in a breath and rocks back on their heels, taking on the extra flow. The vials fill faster. Five. Six. Seven. Just one more, the one for Remi.
Then the pressure spikes, and Remi lets out a cry.
“Dizzy!”
“I see it!”
I open valves all up and down the line, but something’s wrong. The pressure climbs higher instead of stabilizing, traveling down the pipe like a cannonball racing toward us. I trip the failsafes, trigger every emergency protocol, but nothing, nothing’s working. My heart hammers in the base of my throat.
“Get out,” I say, yanking my cable free, turning to meet Jaesin’s and Ania’s wide eyes. “Go, GO!”
“No time—get back,” Remi gasps, just as a shrill screech splits the air and the spigot blows off the valve, grazing Remi’s forehead and drawing blood. They let out a hoarse shout, but redouble their efforts, raising both arms toward the pipe to catch the enormous flood of maz, freezing it in the air above them—and all the blood drains from my face as I note the color. It’s a flickering tangle of gold-red-orange, almost entirely firaz and magnaz. Practically a bomb.
The ominous silence falls like a stone as Remi holds the giant cloud of twisting, twining threads there, their face crumpled in pain, tears leaking from the corners of their eyes. Ania holds her arms up too, but techwitch ware can’t control maz outside its own chambers. She’s helpless, crying as Jaesin races back toward us, his eyes wild, stopping just outside Remi’s wards. Remi groans and redoubles their efforts, pushing, pushing . . . until an earth-shaking BOOM rocks the tunnel, sending dirt raining down, and the maz Remi was barely holding at bay is suddenly sucked back down the pipe. My ears pop with the sudden reversal of pressure, and I stumble to my knees, scraping them bloody through my trousers.
I don’t even feel the sting. Because right in front of me, Remi crumples, eyes closed, face pale, slipping through Jaesin’s arms to the ground.
Every single almost moment flashes through my mind.
The rooftop, just a few hours ago, shoulder to shoulder, stars in my hair.
Out at the club, dancing close, hands on waists and hips.
That one time, when we were barely fifteen . . . that first almost . . .
No.
“We have to get out of here,” Ania says, voice gone calm and even. “If there’s another pressure surge, we’re all dead.”
“Diz, help me,” Jaesin snaps, and that shakes me out of my horror. One of Remi’s hands flopped outside the second set of wards when they collapsed, and I leap forward to grab it and help Jaesin haul them back. Once they’re clear of the protective barrier around the tap point, Jaesin and I throw Remi’s arms over our shoulders and half drag, half carry them back to the access hatch, Ania jogging ahead of us to clear the newly fallen debris from our path.
Behind us, secondary explosions ring through the tunnels, with screeching pipes and a threatening rumble that feels almost like an earthquake aftershock. Remi’s electric blue rain boots drag over the moist, nasty concrete, the color quickly erased by grime and clinging wet weeds.
By the time we catch up to Ania at the end of the tunnel, she’s woven a quick combination of vitaz, the healer, and magnaz, the amplifier, an odd bright green glow in the cavernous filthy darkness of the sewers. Jaesin and I brace Remi long enough for Ania to slip the tiny spell onto their tongue, where it dissolves in a wash of green static.
An eternal ten seconds pass before there’s any visible effect.
Finally Remi’s eyelids flutter, their breathing going uneven for a moment, then cool gray eyes stare back at me, growing sharper and more alert by the second. The relief nearly chokes me breathless. My eyes burn with the effort to hold back tears.
“Can you walk?” I ask, brisk and clipped. They pull away from me, letting their arm fall from my shoulders and trying a tentative step.
“Yeah,” they rasp, pressing a hand to their temple with a wince. “Ania, gimme some of that.”
Remi gestures at the vial of extra vitaz Ania has pulled from her bag, and the maz lifts out of the vial like an ivy vine, twining through the air toward them. A bit of magnaz from the stores in their necklace, a tight and complex weave, and the whole thing goes straight into their mouth. A bit of color returns to Remi’s cheeks, but it’s a temporary fix at best. Without a word, they shrug Jaesin’s arm off and step onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Jaesin follows them up, close enough to catch them if they fall, and we climb until all four of us are back at the hatch. There’s no time to make a clean, stealthy exit, not with Remi’s condition and the constant threat of more explosions at our back. I push my way to the front and throw the door open, letting the late-morning sun spill over us, and step back.
When I turn to watch Remi emerge behind me, the wreckage beyond the park comes into view.
The explosion wasn’t just belowground.
Fire. Debris strewn through the streets. People running, screaming, crying. Loose maz pouring into the air from a gaping wound in the junction station.
Then the contamination sirens kick on, wailing their shrill warning, a savage punch to the gut.
Is the maz spilling from the station untreated? It’s moving fast, overtaking block after block, spilling, infecting.
Killing?
I wrap my arms around my middle, physically holding in noxious, nauseating dread.
What have we done?
Nine
I CAN BARELY SEE WHERE I’m going as we stumble through the park to the sight of people running through the streets, away from the junction station. My vision blurs, my mind one solid, silent scream as we run, my feet following Jaesin on autopilot as they have for the past ten years, since our first day in the group home together.
“We need to get to the train station,” he says, his voice hoarse. He wraps an arm around Remi to keep them on their feet as he turns toward an alley that dumps out on the nearest main road. “Come on!”
The four of us blend into the crowd, our breathing as harsh and panicked as everyone else’s. I hardly see any of it. My brain spins in endless circles, replaying every second of the hack. What did I do wrong? There were no indications that there would be a problem, no overload notices, no complaining sensors, until that one pressure blip out of nowhere. And there’s no reason bleeding off the pressure at the other tap points shouldn’t have worked. Even Remi didn’t feel anything until it was too late, way too sudden, just—HOW?