“Hey, look, Van,” I say, glancing down at his name tag again to double-check. “You obviously know who we’re looking for, and you’re feeling protective. No need for that, okay? The same people who are after him are after us.”
Seriously, we’re four half-drowned teenagers still wearing our awful disguises from the train. Jaesin’s eyeliner is running, Remi’s shirt is nearly transparent from the rain (not that I’ve noticed), Ania’s curls are sagging, and my terrible skirt feels like it’s going to slide right off with the weight of the water it’s soaked up. Do we really look like MMC assassins come to murder the good Professor Silva?
Van pauses in his struggle against Jaesin’s pressing forearm. He studies me, but still doesn’t speak. I step back to include the whole group in my next words.
“Maybe we should take this chat into the office?” I say, nodding toward the door the clerk used to get the drop on them.
Van scowls.
“Fine,” he says, holding up his hands. “My badge is on my belt. You’ll need it to get through the door.”
Remi snags the badge in question, and Jaesin hauls the guy off the wall and around the corner with Ania following, still pouring concealment maz into her shield. We all awkwardly squeeze ourselves into the tight space of the post office back room, where Jaesin finally lets the guy go, but not far. Van straightens his shirt and huffs, then sits back against a desk.
“Well? Why are you here?” he asks carefully, his eyes on Remi. I shift closer to Remi’s side and watch the guy. That was a carefully worded question, fishing for information while failing to actually confirm our own. The answer, now that I try to summarize it in my head, sounds utterly absurd. I snort a laugh before I can help it.
“Remi, do you want to explain our situation to this gentleman?”
They glance over at me with a tiny smile, and my traitorous heart stirs with hope. It’s more than I ever expected to see directed at me again. It lasts barely a second, though, before Remi steps forward to confront Van.
“You obviously know who Professor Silva is. You know what maz-15 is?” Remi asks.
Van’s eyes widen, and he looks away for a long moment, then finally nods.
“Okay, well, so do we,” Remi says. “Long story short, we found out about it, MMC tried to kill us because of it, we went to the archives in Kyrkarta to try to learn more about it, and that research led us here. We know Professor Silva is alive. We know he discovered the cause of the spellplague. We need his help.”
They pause and smile the bright, infectious grin that grabbed me and refused to let go right from our first meeting as kids. “But also, I’ve been such a fan of his work my whole life, and just the chance to meet him would be . . .”
They trail off with a flail of excitement, then seem to remember the circumstances and shove their hands in their pockets.
“That’s pretty much it, right?” they ask, looking around to the rest of us, even me.
“That’s the basics,” Ania says, stepping up to lay a hand on Jaesin’s shoulder.
Van braces his palms on the desktop and looks at the ceiling for a long moment, then back down at Remi.
“You’re spellsick, aren’t you?” he asks.
“Sure am,” Remi replies without missing a beat, though the rest of us turn hot glares on the guy. How dare he bring it up without their permission?
“Why do you still weave?” Van asks, oblivious to the ire directed at him. “Knowing that it’s maz that made you ill. How can you stand to look at it every day? Why don’t you stop?”
“Could you?” Remi says, matter-of-fact. And apparently that’s the right response, because Van finally relaxes, nodding.
“I’ll tell you where to find him,” he says. “If you make it there, I know he’ll be happy to help you.”
If?
Van zones into his lenses for a moment, then a map share notification pops up. Jattapore fills my view once again, but on the opposite side of the city, near a crowded merchant district, a single marker blinks outside the faint blue line of the city’s wards. Remi zooms in and checks the box to show distances. The marker is approximately two miles outside the wards, but it may as well be two hundred, for all that anyone can get there.
Beyond the city’s wards, around the whole world, contaminated maz is dispersed in the very air, the way clean, natural maz used to be. In the past, a spellweaver would have been able to draw trace maz from thin air and spin it into threads to use on the spot. Free, like it should be. To be fair, they could still do that . . . but they’d probably die of the plague before the day was out.
“Ahhh, this might not be too bad,” Ania says. “I can buy us some nullaz, and Remi and I can get the suits and wards set up in an hour or two.”
It’s so nice to be able to just money your problems away.
Jaesin nods, already bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It’s not as far as I thought it would be.” His eyes are aglow at the talk of being outside city wards for the first time since childhood, his grin already slipping back into its boyish seven-year-old version, all toothy and unrestrained.
“It’s not far, no,” Van says, leaning against the desk with his arms crossed.
Then he winces.
“Um. Good luck?”
I wave a dismissive hand. “Please. We got this.”
After all, we’re the best siphoning crew in Kyrkarta. We’ve got skills. I’m pretty sure we can handle a two-mile walk.
Eighteen
ONLY TWO MILES, WE SAID.
Should be easy, we said.
I flinch as the boom of another cannon shot rends the air, but I’m not fast enough—I take another sunnaz blast straight to the face, my vision whiting out in a wash of stars.
“These godsdamned cannons!” I shriek, as near to hysterical as I’ve ever been in my life.
It’s the third direct hit in ten minutes. I’m starting to worry about permanent vision damage.
A two-mile walk shouldn’t have taken more than thirty minutes. Twenty-five minutes in, we’re barely halfway there, and I’m about to collapse.
“I’m running low on everything,” Ania calls over the sound of another cannon blast. “I’m already out of firaz!”
“How the hell are you already empty?” Remi shouts back, dancing around a mine and jabbing a fist into a charging gorilla so realistic I can barely make out the weave that holds it together. Remi’s fingers find the seams just as the beast’s jaws slam shut an inch from their nose, and with a rough yank, they pull the whole thing apart like a threadbare sweater.
“I’m a techwitch,” Ania snaps, her partially suppressed accent back in full force under duress. She’s in her total concentration mode, where she forgets to be poised and ladylike. “I can’t just cannibalize one of these—fuck—one of these demon rabbits for its maz.”
Two swears from Ania in less than a week. This is just a day full of unicorns.
And then I trip over a maz mine, which summons a literal charging unicorn, and I deeply and instantly regret every thought I’ve ever had in my life.
“Look out!” Jaesin calls, then puts his shoulder down and rams into the unicorn’s side, knocking it just far enough off course that I don’t get kebabed. I hit the ground and roll in a puff of sandy coastal soil, coming up on my toes to spring away from those stomping unicorn hooves. An ominous CRUNCH comes from my backpack as I roll over it—I don’t even want to know. Jaesin throws himself at the unicorn again, his arms flexing around its neck, slowing it down until someone can get a good shot in.