“Yes, yes,” he says, flapping a hand at her, then he turns to his own stool and sits primly atop it, folding his hands on his crossed legs as we awkwardly clamber up. “Now, what can I do for you. You wish to study with me, yes?”
“Yes!” Remi says, then bites their lip, glancing back at the rest of us. “I mean, I’d like to, really, but we’re actually here about something else. Something more important.”
The professor’s posture stiffens, and he lifts his chin, waiting.
Remi swallows, but pushes on. “We’re here to ask about some of the research you supervised while you were at Kyrkarta University.”
The words are barely out of their mouth before the professor is up off his stool, shooing them away.
“No, I’m sorry, absolutely not. I’ve signed an agreement, I’m legally tied, I’m sure you understand.”
Remi leaps off the table, palms held out in front of them. “Wait, I know, but—”
“Then you know I can’t help you.” The professor throws open the door to his lab with a bang and ushers us out with a little tailwind of aeraz at our backs. When it’s my turn to leave, though, I brace both hands in the doorway and hold on.
“We know that maz-15 caused the spellplague,” I blurt.
The professor stops and holds himself against the hallway wall with one hand, leaning over as if to catch his breath.
“What did you say?” he wheezes.
Remi, sensing an opportunity, puts on their most solicitous student act and turns back to the professor. “MMC has it out for us too. Because we stumbled across maz-15. And now that I know it’s what made me ill . . . I can’t just not do anything about it, you know?”
Silva looks up sharply and locks his gaze on Remi as if seeing them for the first time. A lump catches hard in my throat, and I step forward.
“We’re going to keep investigating this, one way or another. But I think you know things that could help us understand our situation . . . and the spellplague. Not just for Remi, but for everyone. What is maz-15? Why does it make people ill? Can it . . .”
I can’t finish. The professor gets my meaning anyway, though. He turns and leans against the wall, suddenly looking every hour of his seventy years, rather than the spry leprechaun of a man we first met. Footsteps sound at the end of the hallway, and the concerned face of Professor Silva’s husband peers around the corner.
“You okay?” he asks, staring the rest of us down warily.
The professor waves a dismissive hand. “Fine, I’m fine, John. You heard?”
“I heard,” John confirms. He pads forward on slippered feet and takes the professor’s hand. “I’ll get some dinner started for you all.”
The professor snorts. “No you won’t, you old goat.”
John’s grin is lopsided and charming. He must have been quite a heartbreaker in his youth. “It sounded good, though, didn’t it?” he says.
The professor’s eyes crinkle with warm mirth. “At least put a pot of water on to boil, will you?”
“That I can manage, my life,” John says, giving the professor’s hand a squeeze. He shuffles off down the hallway, and once the clanging of pots and pans sounds from the kitchen, the professor turns, blinking as if resurfacing from a daze, and leads us back into his study in silence. This time, instead of messing with stools and improvised table seating, he walks straight over to the IN CASE OF EMERGENCY door.
He leans over slowly, pressing a hand to his lower back with a wince, and pulls the door open with a groan, propping it against the wall. The passage below lights up, and at first glance I think it’s string lights lining the staircase. As we step into the narrow stairwell, though, I get a closer look at the tiny glowing balls of sunnaz in the shape of lightning bugs, adhered to the wall at regular intervals.
“They’re beautiful,” Ania says, reaching out to touch one of the tiny fireflies. It twitches away from her finger, then takes flight, settling higher up on the wall. Ania lets out a delighted laugh, eyes shining in the dim light.
“But where do you get enough maz to run all this?” Jaesin asks, ever the practical one. “There’s so little ambient maz out here, and to buy this much would be so expensive. In Kyrkarta most people can barely afford the maz to keep their houses standing.”
“Because Kyrkarta is a cesspool,” the professor says with disdain. “I’m the one who invented the scrubbing technology that separates out the maz-15 from the rest of the freely occurring maz. MMC may own that patent because it was created in their labs, but I’d love to see them try to stop me from setting up a private system in my own home. We have no competition for maz out here, and we’re barely two miles from Jattapore’s maz source, the caves down by the shore. We have all we need and more.”
The staircase dumps us into a room with a single door and nothing else. The professor presses his palm to the door, and the metal under his hand glows a faint steely blue, followed by an echoing click. The door swings open, and the room beyond flares to brilliant life.
The ceiling looks as if it’s been painted with pure sunnaz, the whole thing emitting a soft daylight glow throughout a room exactly the size of the one above our heads. Fourteen vast cylinders line the far wall, brimming with the fourteen common maz strains, more maz than Remi and Ania could go through in five years of daily use. Another smaller cylinder sits at the end of the row, glowing with eerie violet light. Maz-15. A deck screen the size of a bay window occupies another wall, displaying spell design sketches and calculations that are way over my head.
“Does this extend under the entire house?” I ask.
The professor nods. “Mimics the layout exactly. The kitchen is fully stocked with nonperishable food and enough water for a year. There’s a bedroom, a bathroom, everything we have upstairs. Once that door shuts above us, it triggers a concealment spell on the other side. Even if someone who means us harm manages to cross the wasteland and get into our home, the chances of them finding us or my work are slim.”
“Brilliant,” Remi whispers, reaching out to touch one finger to the giant cylinder of magnaz. The sheer amount of power contained within those glass walls is honestly unsettling. To me, at least. Remi looks ready to lick the glowing golden magnaz chamber.
“How long did it take you to gather this much?” they ask.
The professor strides forward and lays a hand against the cylinder of firaz, sighing. “I started collecting shortly after MMC ran me out of town. I built this place as soon as I was able, and once both levels were finished, I kicked on the extractors.” He raps a knuckle against a series of pipes that run into the ceiling next to the cylinders. “They’ve been full for the last two years. Feel free to replenish whatever you used to get out here.”
He notably does not apologize for the berserker rabbits.
Ania paces over to the deck screen to study the formulas while Remi refills their stores, but Jaesin hangs back for once, at a loss and out of his depth. I feel much the same way, honestly. The whole place positively drips with maz, more maz than any of us has seen since we were children. For Ania and Remi, it’s like something out of a fantasy. For Jaesin and me, it’s a whole vast world of power and knowledge we’ll never be part of. Our eyes meet, and for once, he doesn’t glare at me. He just shrugs, and his gaze returns to Remi, watching their attention bounce from thing to thing, bright-eyed and amazed. After a moment, though, he clears his throat and steps forward.