I wrench my gaze away. Can we not do this here? I thought we were done with this fight.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
The professor sighs, running a hand through his wispy white hair. “I feel guilty for this part. It took us too long to fully separate and identify maz-15 and to confirm that it caused spellsickness. It took us nearly a year, then another six months to have our findings independently verified by one of the other MMC labs, then another month to get all the data assembled and ready to submit to the board. And in that time, MMC had already done two crucial things.”
He ticks them off on his fingers. “One: they stepped in and became the world’s saviors. Even though many of their own employees were the first killed, they were the ones to organize community cleanups, assist local governments in creating orphan care programs, donate to public relief funds, bring in outside aid workers from less affected cities, all that.”
I glance at Ania, who nods along. Her own parents were some of those outside aid workers. “Yeah,” she agrees. “We were just kids then, but I still remember all the shiny happy vid ads.”
Jaesin barks a laugh. “They used to have MMC employees in uniform visit the orphanages for photo ops with all the poor, sad plague orphans. They loved Remi. Even back then, they were too good-looking for the cameras to resist.”
Remi rolls their eyes. “Please. They may have loved to point a camera at me, but especially back then, no one wanted to come anywhere near me. Don’t you know spellsick kids have cooties?”
I wince. Even I had been like that, at first. And then, sometime later, I started keeping my distance again. For different reasons, though. Hormones. Feelings. Attachment is dangerous. Remi was always planning to leave eventually. No point in wanting what I couldn’t have.
Yeah, clearly that went well.
The professor’s lip curls. “Yes, they put on quite a public face of goodwill and charity. And don’t get me wrong, they really did do quite a bit of good in those early days, and there were many people at MMC and beyond who truly did want to help. But the very highest leaders at MMC knew from day one that they had somehow caused the spellplague. It was too big of a coincidence to ignore. The plague just happened to begin at station twenty-nine, right as they pierced the inner mantle for the first time?”
My stomach lurches, and I nearly run for the bathroom again. For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder—was my dad part of the drilling crew that did this? Was he just collateral damage? Did he know what was going on? I don’t remember what exactly he did for MMC, I was too young, but I know he wasn’t a scientist or engineer or anything. Something that made him come home smelling of sweat and dirt and machine oil.
Until he didn’t come home at all.
The professor talks on and drives the knife deeper, oblivious to my private crisis. “Everyone who witnessed it was killed instantly, obviously—”
Obviously.
“—so it was only too easy to spread the idea that the first big earthquake caused the plague, and make no mention of the earthquake being caused by their drilling.”
Ania waved a hand to get our attention. “Okay, so you said two things. What was the second thing they did?”
The professor’s expression darkens. “They’ve been actively making it worse ever since, making the breach wider and deeper every year, training the planet to make more maz-15 and totally ignoring the effects. It’s disgusting. They didn’t manage to kill us all when they released maz-15, but they just might finish the job with all these hurricanes and such. They used the tech we developed to separate maz-15 from the other strains to expand their reach. They built satellite stations all over the world, one in every city, and used that technology to collect more and more maz-15. And why do you think they bothered to do that?”
I finally find my voice again, clearing my throat to speak past the acid-scraped rawness. “There’s only ever one answer to that question.”
The professor scowls. “Too right you are. Here’s where the money comes in. They couldn’t sell it directly without revealing their secret, but they could use it to power all of their buildings cheaply and develop new products, protected by their internal patents. All that legalese kept maz-15 tied up beyond reach. Even our lab teams were forbidden from doing anything with it or about it without MMC’s permission. Immediately after the plague, all ten research and development labs were focused on the spellplague problem. But slowly, after we isolated maz-15, the labs were diverted to work on developing new profitable uses for it. Over the next few years, the MMC executive board turned into a dragon perched atop a truly enormous mountain of treasure, and there was no way they were ever going to give that up.”
So that’s what we’re really up against. All this time, I had thought Kyrkarta was just a struggling city trying to bounce back after a disaster, doing its best to adapt and salvage its reputation, held aloft by the goodwill of the few who could afford it. Apparently, though, it’s a criminal empire built on ten years of lies and death, bound by one company, controlled by a handful of people exploiting its citizens for bottomless profits.
Maybe we should just burn it down.
The professor spreads his hands and shrugs, helpless. “And that’s where we are today. MMC has their money, their power, and their secrecy. At this point, even if someone does tell the truth, who would believe them? Their reputation is ironclad, and they’ve got law enforcement and governments all over the world eating out of their hands.”
Jaesin shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. “We really don’t stand a chance, do we?”
“No. None,” the professor says, sounding defeated for the first time.
Ouch. Don’t pull your punches, old man.
A thump, then a loud crash sounds from above our heads. Professor Silva’s head whips up, eyes wide.
“I’m fine!” John’s muffled voice calls through the floorboards, followed by another clang. The professor sighs and shakes his head.
“Put some damn pasta in the pot and get out of the kitchen, you menace,” he yells up.
A beat of silence.
“Where do we keep the pasta?”
The professor drops his face into his hands.
“Oh, for the love of—you’re a bloody genius, John, I’m sure you can figure it out by process of elimination.”
The whole thing is so hilarious, so sickeningly heartwarming, that it manages to crack through some of the heavy awful despair hanging thick around us. Remi finally meets my gaze for the first time since the train, their hand over their mouth to stifle a laugh, their eyes crinkled. I smile back, a helpless tug in my chest. I wish there was a cure for this, too.
Ania grins, but her smile fades when another crash sounds overhead, louder this time. The professor throws his arms up and stalks back toward the staircase.
“Damn it, John, just put everything down and I’ll—”
Somewhere above us, a door bangs open, and John yelps.
Professor Silva’s eyes go wide, and he bolts for the stairs, already summoning maz to his hands.
“John!”
Twenty-One
THE FOUR OF US DASH up the stairs after Professor Silva, Remi and Ania already calling firaz to their hands. Jaesin’s fists clench, prepping to strike. We burst into the upstairs laboratory and out into the hallway, and as we round the corner into the kitchen, the professor stops dead in his tracks.