My deck buzzes as a notification pops up in my vision, and I nearly choke in my haste to open it. Remi or Jaesin finally getting back to me? Or calling for help?
1 missed vid call
(private) Davon: You okay? I heard there was a crack near your building.
Vid me. I’m worried about you.
A trickle of cool relief soothes a fraction of the anxiety gripping my lungs. My one bit of real family left in this world, my cousin who’s more like my big brother in every way that matters. I assumed he’d be fine, inside the well-warded Maz Management Corporation IT center he works at, but still. One down, two to go. No time to respond, not now.
I shoulder my way past our downstairs neighbor (age seventeen, pronouns he/him, straight passing grades, blares porn at all hours) and leave the whole clamoring scene behind. Ania sticks close, one hand fisted in the back of my hoodie so we don’t get separated. She sticks out like a gleaming jewel in the dirt here, like an easy mark, though she’s anything but. No one would dare mess with her. It is known—she’s ours. Me, Remi, and Jaesin, we have her back. To mess with her is to mess with us.
Assuming Remi and Jaesin are still okay, that is.
My pulse is a choking throb in the base of my throat as I skip the lift and race up the stairs two at a time, weaving around occasional rubble and coughing the dust from my lungs. The whole building gives an ominous creak with every gust of wind, speeding my steps faster even as my chest burns.
Remi. Remi. Remi.
I burst through the stairwell door for the top floor and don’t slow until I reach the door to our flat. My hand slips on the door controls, the handle beeping in protest when it can’t read my fingerprints. I take a breath and force myself to slow down, give the door a second to read me, then throw it open.
“Remi! Jaesin! Are you—”
The words die on my lips.
Remi sits upside-down on the couch, their back on the seat and their feet propped up against the wall like always, tossing a brightly sparkling ball of sunnaz from hand to hand. A breathing mask is fitted over their nose and mouth, glittering green with the aerosolized vitaz they breathe in, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Just their nightly treatment. They roll their head to face me, their expression turning quizzical as they slide the mask down and switch off the nebulizer.
“Oh, hey, Diz. Why is your hand bloody?”
The urgent pressure in my chest unwinds in an instant.
Anger fills its place nicely. My lip curls into a snarl.
“Oh, hey, Diz? Really? Did you even notice the earthquake? The building’s reinforcement spells failed.”
They shrug and resume their one-person game of toss.
“Yeah, but Ania renewed our interior walls earlier this week, and I kept an eye on things during the quake. Everything’s fine. Jaesin’s making dinner before we leave for the club, you want some? What are you wearing tonight?”
I close my eyes and breathe.
They’re okay. Jaesin and Remi, they’re fine.
And they’re assholes.
Three
I WIPE MY BLOODY KNUCKLES off on my pant leg and slam the door as soon as Ania is through, triggering the flat’s cheerful welcome protocol, complete with my latest modifications.
“Good evening, Supreme Overlord Dizmon. The time is seven fifty-seven.”
“Thank you, Uni,” I reply.
I set my bag down inside the front door and take off my boots, arranging them in a neat line next to Jaesin’s sleek and sporty running shoes and Remi’s turquoise sneakers. A holdover from my dad, apparently a thing with my grandparents who lived in a city on the Small Continent. The front room of our apartment is a bit of a disaster, but an organized disaster, and I like it that way.
In one corner is the kitchenette, where Jaesin stands in his neatly pressed going-out shirt. His hair is done somewhere between casual handsome bedhead and total mess, and he’s frowning into a skillet as he pokes something around inside. Another experiment for dinner, then. Great. It’ll either be amazingly delicious or horrifically, bowel-shakingly terrible. Ooh, the anticipation. He doesn’t even bother looking up from his cooking as he welcomes me home in his usual fashion.
“Dizzy. My dear. My darling. If you get us evicted for messing with the flat’s network yet again, a week before we move out, I will do unspeakable things to your dinner.”
I roll my eyes. “Unicorn Sparkles McSunshine, will you tell Jaesin to please eat his own dick?”
“Mister Jaesin, Supreme Overlord Dizmon requests that you please eat your own dick,” the flat cheerfully relays.
Jaesin barks a laugh and replies silently with a single olive-skinned middle finger. The corner of my mouth tugs up automatically, but I force the grin away. I’m mad at him, damn it. He should learn to answer his calls. Ania swoops past me to peek over Jaesin’s shoulder at the food, conveying “I am above your plebian nonsense” with every step.
None of this fazes Remi in the slightest, who still lies upside down, fishing under the couch for a vial from their maz stash. Why they won’t just work at a desk, I don’t understand. They’ve twisted the bright ball of maz they were tossing around into a web strung between the fingers of one hand, pulled thin and woven into a complex improvised pattern only they can understand. There are spellweavers, and then there’s Remi, weaving prodigy, genius on a whole other level.
The string lights on the wall over the couch and the faint glow cast by the weave play on their cheekbones and the tip of their nose, and shine off lips that have been licked in concentration too many times. Their face is still a bit thinner than usual from the weight they lost earlier this summer, when their illness flared up again. It’s generally well controlled, so long as they’re super careful to stick to the diet, exercise plan, and many daily treatments prescribed by their care team. The end of the school year and graduation had been too much on top of everything else, though, and they’d suffered for it. I don’t totally understand it—some kind of cell count gets high or something, and suddenly they’re guaranteed to get the next infection that’s going around, and fighting it off is rough. They were laid up for almost a month.
Each time is utterly terrifying. The spellplague killed so many people within minutes, hours, or days of exposure, but the few who survived the initial infection live in a precarious limbo with their illness that I can only imagine. Remi has a pretty normal life now (illegal activities aside), but it’ll get worse with age. Everyone starts to decline eventually. The only question is how many years it’ll be before it happens. It’s rare for someone with the spellplague to live past thirty.
Today seems okay in general, though. Remi’s eyes are bright and alert, their cheeks flushed with healthy color. They came straight home with Jaesin after the job to get some rest before tonight, and it seems to be doing them good. They’ll still take it easy tonight, I bet, but at least it doesn’t seem to be a crash day.
“How long till dinner?” I ask, tearing my eyes away from Remi.
Jaesin snorts. “Ten minutes? Depends on if Remi can let me work.”
At that, a fat golden bee zips across the room and rams itself into the back of Jaesin’s head, then zips right back to Remi’s hands, where it dissolves back into individual threads. Jaesin startles so badly that his cheap plastic stirring spoon flies out of his hand and splatters the wall with thin brown sauce, only just missing Ania’s face.