Ania comes through with a blast from her fast-diminishing stores of nullaz. The maz, so black it seems to radiate darkness, hits the unicorn and breaks apart, individual threads wrapping around the woven motaz and vitaz that give it the appearance of life. The creature stumbles like it’s stepped into quicksand, struggling as it goes down in a tangle on top of Jaesin. His nullaz suit flares as it makes contact with the maz, and Ania hisses a warning.
“Watch yourself! We don’t have enough to patch your barrier if you wear it out.”
“I know that,” he grinds out between clenched teeth, heaving himself up onto one side. I offer him a hand and pull, hauling him to his feet, then turn back to the field before us and compare our position against the map. It’s all I can do. I’m fast and agile, but not beefy like Jaesin. I’m not good at wrestling things. I can’t use maz.
I can navigate, though. I can run, find us a way around obstacles, blaze a trail to the point on the map that hopefully marks the professor’s secret wasteland fortress. Just like running the streets and rooftops of Kyrkarta, right?
“This way!” I call, leading us around a patch of dense beach scrub and scrabbling over a waist-high boulder without even slowing down. It’s a bit longer to go around the scrub instead of through it, but at least this way we can see where we’re putting our feet. There’ve been trip wires, mines, ankle-twisting holes, and even the occasional aggressive crab. I’ve never been more aware of my feet in my life, and I jump off buildings on the regular.
“Try to step where I step,” I say, adjusting the opacity of the map overlay so I can clearly see the ground while staying on track.
“You know, I’m not sure I want to meet Professor Silva anymore,” Ania says, panting with exertion. Remi barks a short laugh.
“You have to admit, his work is genius,” Remi says. “Twisted, but genius. I think I admire him even more now.”
“Who’s shocked,” Jaesin deadpans.
The next quarter mile is deceptively quiet. I call out the locations of mines and other traps, and Remi spends a few slow, careful minutes feeding a bare trickle of terraz back into Ania’s ware, trusting me to guide them as they do. The ware really isn’t designed to be loaded that way, and Remi can’t accomplish much while we walk, but it’s something. Enough for Ania to keep the structure of her shield strong around us while Remi feeds energy into the system, just in case a giant missile falls out of the sky or something. At this point I won’t rule out anything.
We crest a sandy dune and step through a curtain of seven-foot-high beach grass, which seems determined to get in my mouth. I bat it away and spit, my nose itching with some kind of unfamiliar pollen. I’m not sure I like this nature shit. It’s so empty, too much nothingness on the horizon, and it’s so quiet when there’s not a cannon going off next to my face. About a mile in the distance, the gray-blue ocean churns against the coastline, eroding the land little by little. And a quarter mile away and to our right is a little cottage nestled in a dune valley, surrounded by rock gardens and flowers and rogue tufts of waving grass. It’s adorable.
Between us and the house is a curtain of fire.
“Well,” Remi says, matter-of-fact. “That’s effective. What do you think, Ania?”
Ania grunts and stumbles down the front of the dune to get closer to the fire, oblivious to the razorweeds slicing at her trousers and ankles. At the bottom, she steps up to the wall of fire until her nose is nearly touching it.
“It’s not giving off much heat. Try the usual stuff?” she says, turning to look back at Remi.
“May as well,” they reply. “Might tell us more about it, at least.”
The two of them put their heads together and chatter back and forth, trying combinations of aeraz and wataz that have no obvious effect, but which always prompt some kind of muttered, “Hmm, interesting.” Jaesin and I glance at each other and roll our eyes, and I fight down a surge of warmth. Just because we can share humorous appreciation of Remi’s and Ania’s complete and utter nerdiness, that doesn’t mean he’s going to forgive me. I can hope, though.
This whole stars-forsaken experience reminds me of being on the playground in my first group home, where I met Remi and Jaesin, but before I met Ania. I was so confused about Remi for so long, following them and Jaesin around, sneaking food from the kitchens with them and sharing in the blame when we got caught. Whenever they managed to steal a bit of maz, though, I’d turn tail and run, hide on a roof somewhere and not speak to them for days on end. Jaesin had the total opposite reaction. Growing up without much maz around, he was totally fascinated, and he made Remi drill him on all the manual-dexterity exercises they taught us in school. When we all got tested for maz aptitude in fourth year, he was heartbroken.
I’d never been more relieved in my life. I didn’t want that crap anywhere near me. Remi, of course, was fast-tracked for every advanced placement maz course in the catalog. I avoided them for two weeks straight after the test. I guess I’d been hoping, somewhere in my irrational child brain, that their weaving was a fluke. That it wouldn’t really stick, and they’d be in mundie classes like the rest of us.
There was never anything mundane about Remi, though, not from the start.
We were ten when Remi and Jaesin came and found me hiding on the roof of an abandoned factory across from the group home. They’d used some stolen maz to fight off a girl who’d been threatening them both for weeks, and the whole thing had scared me so bad I’d seriously thought about running away to a new group home, somewhere far across the city where people were still properly afraid of maz. Remi pulled themself up on the roof, panting with the exertion and obviously overtired, but refusing Jaesin’s help all the same. Even though I was terrified, and therefore angry, because even at ten years old I was still me, I remember being so worried. They looked like they were ready to collapse.
Remi crawled across the roof and sat down cross-legged in front of me, expression unusually solemn for them. They reached inside the front pocket of their ratty blue hoodie, pulled something out, and pressed it into my hands. Their palms gently cupped mine as together we held what looked like a mottled egg the color of melting chocolate-chip ice cream. As Jaesin knelt beside us, the egg rocked once, twice, then split open to reveal . . . a tiny golden puppy?
But puppies didn’t hatch from eggs. And they didn’t come in brilliant glowing shades of silver and gold, though it felt real enough as its tiny paws scrabbled at my arm, climbing as high as it could before it started licking me furiously. When I finally realized what it was, I froze, nearly bolted, but the two of them soothed me, drew gentle fingers over the puppy’s floppy ears and scratched its fuzzy golden belly. Eventually I relaxed enough that we all made a big triangle with our legs for the puppy to run around in, making it do tricks and play fetch. By the time the maz lost its energy and the puppy crumbled away, I was sad to see it go.
I climbed down off that roof and went home with Jaesin and Remi that night, and we threw our blankets and pillows on the floor between two of our beds and slept in a pile of limbs and snoring. I’ve never totally lost my fear of maz, but I guess I absorbed the fact that Remi and maz were a package deal and I had to get used to it. And I did, well enough to be around Remi and their little maz creatures, at least. Eventually I figured out that I could work with maz too—to contain it, control it. Make it safer. I started to work on ware, then build my own. Maz gloves, drones, stable storage vials, everything I could think of. I was good at it. If Remi and Jaesin had given up on me back then, I might never have found my talent.