Spellhacker

by M. K. England

  “Fine, yes, half for that one vial,” I say. “Can we please close this deal now? We’ve got places to be.”

  Mattie scowls but pulls out his deck and sets to work on the credit transfer. A moment later, a transaction notification pops up on my lenses. Payment cleared. Our bank account once again has more than two digits.

  “Pleasure doing business,” I say, throwing the vial case back in my bag and walking away, Ania on my heels, before Mattie can find another excuse to complain. As I reach the elevator, I bring the group chat back on-lens with a grin.

  Epic Group Chat: LAST JOB EVER Edition

  you: Against everyone’s better judgment, he did not kill me.

  We have our money

  Remi: DIZZY YESSSSSSS

  SHE LIVES

  Jaesin: Thank god, now we can CELEBRATE

  Ania: Let the Grand Farewell Tour commence!

  you: You all were in mortal peril today too, you know

  Ania: Yeah, but we don’t inspire murdery feelings in everyone we meet

  Remi: Yikes, shots fired

  I shove Ania’s shoulder, and the elevator fills with our laughter. I can’t wait to get home, even as I feel a weird sort of nostalgia for those little vials of maz we just left behind. Ten years of friendship, two years running jobs together, and now it’s over. The others are understandably ecstatic, brimming over with the thrill of getting away with one last haul and looking forward to their shiny futures. Futures that require moving away.

  In seven days.

  Hence our Grand Farewell Tour of Kyrkarta: seven nights, seven locations, one amazing last hurrah before we go our separate ways.

  Before they all move away and abandon me here, more like.

  Ania startles me out of my mood with a quick excited double clap.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she says, throwing an arm around me and leaning down to rest her head against the top of mine. I cringe but endure her cuddling. Might as well take it while I can.

  “I hate surprises,” I say. “What is it?”

  She grins and holds up one hand, waggling her fingers as the elevator stops and the doors slide open. Her wrist and the inside of each finger are lined with thin metal, unassuming, but actually packed with bend sensors, accelerometers, and other techy bits. The tip of each finger ends in a small implanted extruder that, by her command, releases threads of whatever maz she had loaded into the chambers strapped to the underside of her wrist. She doesn’t have the natural ability to work maz with her bare hands, like Remi does, but she’s good with her hardware. She’s had her maz license since the day she turned eighteen—not that the lack of a license stopped her before. Not with me as a friend. I may not be able to work with maz myself, but I can build ware better than anything her mommy and daddy can find in an overpriced shop. Her ware is a Dizmon Hela original, and I’m proud of my work.

  “This is a fun surprise, promise,” she says, flipping her hand over to glance at her nails instead. “I went in for an A-level maz certification practice test today, and I think I pushed it a little too hard. The fifth position flow was kinda weird and uneven during our job. Wanna fix it before we go out tonight?”

  I perk right up, then narrow my eyes. “You know I do, but don’t think this gets you off my list. Fussy? Are you serious?”

  “I love you, Dizzard Lizard,” she sings, syrupy sweet, and I fight down an unexpected surge of anger. She obviously doesn’t love me enough to not leave. None of them do. I want to sink in to that anger, to let its talons grip tight and pierce and fill my veins with heat. It’s right there under the surface, all the time, just waiting for the wrong turn of phrase, the wrong change of subject.

  But if I say anything, I’ll only lose them all sooner.

  My shoulders slump, and I take three long, deep breaths, one for each word.

  Let. It. Go.

  “Come on, then,” I say, beckoning her forward. “Let’s see what poison Jaesin has on the cooker tonight, and I’ll take a look at that mix sensor before we go out. You didn’t notice it until we were already in the middle of the job?”

  She hums in agreement but doesn’t elaborate as we cross into the crowded intersection at Four Bridges, where the three rivers converge at the business sector. Too many voices clamoring for airspace, and Ania hates to shout. We pass glowing storefronts nestled in the bottom floors of bulky office buildings, offering everything from maz tech to spellweaving services, rare foods to custom aesthetic implants. We don’t need any of it, of course, and I wouldn’t be caught dead paying business-sector prices even if we did. We already have Ania for a techwitch, and Remi the spellweaving prodigy, and I have all our hardware needs covered. Jaesin rounds out the group with most of the mundie skills, like keeping us from starving to death. And hitting people. But only sometimes.

  We pass into the slightly more run-down part of town I call home a few minutes later, and the Cliffs, the dorm complex I live in, comes into view. With the chaos of business behind us, Ania finally answers my question.

  “Yeah, I had some magnaz loaded in fifth position, and by the time I finished setting up our wards at the draw point, it wasn’t flowing as easily as the rest. I was having to force it a little more than normal, and I can’t stop thinking I’m gonna pull on that thread so hard I’ll blow my own hand off.”

  “Nah, I’ll take care of that. If it’s not the sensor, it’s the extruder, and both are easy enough to fix. Should be no problem to finish it before we go out tonight.”

  Out to one of Ania’s fancy clubs, where we’ve been begging her to take us for ages, for night one of seven. The beginning of the end. My stomach sours.

  Then the ground . . . shivers.

  Ania and I stop dead. Wait, absolutely still.

  Another tremble, longer. Definitely not imagined. Our eyes meet as the ground shifts under our feet, harder this time, a threat.

  A promise.

  Another earthquake.

  We run.

  Two

  IT’S THE FOURTH EARTHQUAKE THIS month, and honestly, I’m done.

  Ania and I book it toward the nearest bit of open greenspace, a park at the corner of the block that’s the sole splash of natural color among the city’s shivering, flexing high-rises. The trees were cleared away years ago—too much of a hazard in a quake—leaving nothing but a wide open area. Sirens wail in the distance, and high overhead, the aircar and RidePod traffic drifts to a halt. Mostly. Emergencies have a way of bringing out the worst in some people.

  An aircar with the loud lime-green markings of Kyrkarta City Law peels off from the roof-height emergency lanes and dives, sliding to a stop near the park with a high-pitched whine of protest from its ground brakes. I groan. Didn’t I just leave these jerks behind?

  People pour from the surrounding buildings and streets, running in blatant defiance of every public safety advisory, because humanity sucks. Two officers climb out of the aircar, a techwitch and a spellweaver, judging by their rank patches. The tall, dark-haired one weaves a quick amplification spell, then presses the glowing tangle of threads to their throat.

  “Please proceed calmly to the ward zone,” the low voice booms, echoing off the surrounding buildings. “If your building is reinforced, stay indoors and leave the ward zone open for others.”

  Hah. Right. People are assholes, as the officers quickly discover when a shoving match breaks out between two men at a bottleneck between parked vehicles. They dive in to separate the instigators as another threatening rumble vibrates through the soles of my boots. I look toward home, my gaze magnetically drawn to the grimy window of my top-floor apartment.

  At the end of the street, the hastily erected buildings that make up the Cliffs pulse with a deep reddish glow as their structural reinforcement spells activate. The sheer, featureless walls they’re named for flare bright for a single second, then immediately begin to fade as they burn through what little energy is left in the spells. The buildings were cobbled together from whatever crappy materials wer
e on hand after the spellplague, sloppy constructions of wood and brick built without the aid of maz in the days when anti-maz paranoia was at its height. They won’t last much longer.

  But two of my closest friends are in one of those buildings, in the tiny flat we share, making us food and getting ready to go out tonight. The fading red spells burn a permanent warning onto my eyelids.

  I can’t help them. I can’t do anything at all.

  “Diz!” Ania shouts, seizing my arm. “They’ll be fine, they know what to do. Come on!”

  I wrench my gaze away from the blocky towers, so out of place among the unyielding steel buildings around them, and give in to Ania’s pull.

  We reach the greenspace ahead of the crowds and head straight for the warded area in the center, large enough to hold maybe two hundred people. It’s marked off by small solar-powered lights that light up orange to guide people to safety. Ania and I set up at the outer edge, where she crouches down and touches one hand to a glowing line etched into the ground. The edge of the ward circle. A twitch of her fingers, a complicated movement, and she draws away with a threadbare piece of the woven spell, hanging from the tip of her finger like a ragged spiderweb. It casts a sickly sort of gray-blue pall over her skin as her eyes scan the pattern, no doubt identifying weaknesses and formulating a plan to reinforce it. Shielding and warding spells are her jam.

  “I really hope your ware holds up,” I murmur under my breath, needing to say it but not wanting to distract her. She shakes her head.

  “It’s only the magnaz that’s acting up. This’ll be almost entirely terraz. Watch my back?”

  “Always.”

  It’s a good thing she’s got terraz in today. She can only have five of the fourteen strains of maz loaded up at one time, max, and it would be a hella bad day if she had nothing but fire in all five chambers.

  I shift from foot to foot with useless, nervous energy as more and more people, civilians and officers, arrive at the ward zone. The mundies like me stand helplessly in the center, while the techwitches and spellweavers gather around the edges to hold the wards together, pouring new energy into the complex system as the quake begins in earnest. Ania’s gestures are graceful and restrained as she loops tangled threads of linkaz, the maz for tying and binding, around the strand she holds pinched in her left hand. Each loop is precisely formed, providing the structure that holds the wards together.

  Once she’s made twenty perfectly even loops, Ania taps the tip of her thumb to the pad of her middle finger, cutting off the linkaz and activating the flow of heavy shielding maz instead. The terraz flows out in thick bronze rivulets, slipping through each loop until, with a scooping gesture, Ania cuts off the strand and pulls the binder tight around it. It flares bright, then fades as the strands lock into the overall pattern, a shield between us and the threats outside.

  Without even a second to admire her (honestly perfect) work, she pulls up another worn piece of the weave and begins again, repairing it like a thrift-shop blanket. The weave isn’t as tight as the threads that make up fabric, but it’s far more intricate, the patterns so much more than a simple grid. Each section of threads crystallizes as they’re tied off and finished, the energy slowly bleeding back into the system.

  “Reloading,” a techwitch calls from down the row, holding up his hands and stepping back from the wards. He’s overly optimistic, though; trying to load new maz into his delicate hardware with the ground shaking is a near-impossible feat. A middle-aged woman takes his place, her ware old and grimy but the flow of her maz strong. Her clothes hang from her bones, ill-fitting and probably secondhand, and I press my lips together with sympathy. She probably can’t afford to replace the maz she’s using, but there she is, pitching in to help anyway. Around the circle, the natural spellweavers work their maz in a continuous flow, the threads drawn to their fingers like iron to a magnet. They’re limited too, now that maz isn’t ambient and abundant like it was before the plague, but at least they can burn straight through their entire stock all in one go.

  Most of the time I’m glad I’m no good with maz. I’ve gotten used to being around it again, after the plague, but that doesn’t mean I want my hands all up in it. But times like now, I almost wish I could do . . . something. Anything.

  The earthquake builds with more and more frequent tremors, and before long the ground is bucking and rumbling worse than it has in over a month. Every earthquake brings a special kind of terror to native Kyrkartians. It was an earthquake that unleashed the spellplague ten years ago, cracking open the ground and bleeding some kind of contaminated maz into the world. A building could fall on us and the wards would shrug it off like dust, but none of it would matter if a fissure opened up and leaked raw tainted maz into the air inside our bubble. Boom, Spellplague II, Revenge of the Plague, spellsickness for all. No thanks.

  The ground gives a particularly hard kick, and Ania stumbles backward, losing her grasp on the complicated pattern of the weave. I catch her around the waist and ease her back down into a crouch while she snatches at the falling threads. A few slip through her grasp, but she draws a little more linkaz from her reserves and renews her focus, exchanging threads with her neighbors to weave their sections tightly together. The gauzy web of spell threads glimmers in the night like moonlight off a spiderweb, the color shifting slowly from desaturated gray to a healthier blue-bronze. It’s working.

  I spit Ania’s textured curls out of my mouth and brace her with my shoulder as the quake tries again and again to topple her back. Jaesin and his recruitment-poster shoulders would be so much better at this, but my little five-foot-four ass is all she has right now. At least she smells good, like expensive sweet perfume and freshly cast maz. The people around us stumble and slam together like an accidental mosh pit, stinking of fear and trampled dirt instead. Gross.

  As always, it’s only a matter of time before things turn ugly. As the wards’ protective circle fills to capacity, people start shoving, crawling between legs, bordering on violent in their attempts to get inside. One man, his eyes unnaturally bright and sharp, gets right up in Ania’s face and grabs her by the shoulder.

  “Don’t you dare touch her!” I snap in the man’s face as he tries to yank her out of the circle.

  “She can weave her own wards, she doesn’t need to be inside,” he snarls, and shoves her hard. She rolls and hits the ground on her back, hand held aloft to protect her ware, the breath rushing out of her in an audible “Oooof!”

  Outside the wards.

  No, he did not.

  Before I can think it through, the man’s blood is on my knuckles, and he staggers back with a hand cupped protectively over his wrecked nose. I shake out my fist to soothe the ache radiating up my arm and give him my best glare to convince him there’s more where that came from, rather than the only sad punch I can manage. The weaver next to us shoves the guy the rest of the way out of the circle and summons up a burning stream of firaz from the stores in her bag, twirling it threateningly between three fingers.

  “Back off unless you want a bomb shoved up your ass,” she snarls, standing shoulder to shoulder with me.

  “Two bombs,” Ania adds as she struggles to get the shaking ground and her feet to cooperate. “You wanna explode from both ends?”

  “Let’s do it,” the weaver says with a feral grin, one that Ania matches as she takes her place back in the circle.

  Damn. Ania has clearly just met her long-lost sister, and together they are fierce.

  As I brace Ania through another particularly rough tremor, the man falls on his ass, blood pouring over his fingers, and one of the officers finally intervenes.

  “How’s your supply doing?” I ask Ania as another techwitch steps back from the circle, run dry.

  “Fine, unless this quake goes on much longer,” she replies. “I filled up between the exam and our job.”

  Of course she did. She can afford it.

  “Crack forming!” someone shouts behind me, and I whirl around in ho
rror. The ground hasn’t given way yet, but spiderweb lines dance underfoot—slim and deadly promises. Three weavers break off from the main circle and push their way through the crowd, working together on a single spell to knit the broken earth. Worse than the cracks, though, is the view beyond the circle: the Cliffs. The spells protecting it pulse once, twice . . . and fail.

  The building goes dark.

  Remi and Jaesin are defenseless.

  “No!” I shout as the first of the bricks topple from the roof, smashing to the ground in a cloud of dust. I push past a young family clinging together and break away from the circle, the muscles in my legs burning as they struggle to compensate for the bucking ground. This is a long one—when will it end?

  “Diz, wait!” I hear from behind me, just as an officer yells, “Back inside the wards!” I put on speed and leap over a mess of shattered glass and twisted metal. You’d think everything that could break would have already done it, but there’s always something ready to give way, something on its last gasp of life. Every earthquake chips away a little more. It’s only a matter of time before it takes down the Cliffs too.

  Maybe only a matter of seconds.

  I subvocalize a command to my deck and bring up a voice call, an obnoxious ringtone punctuating every second they don’t answer.

  “Pick up, damn it, where the hell are you?” I shout at Remi’s photo, hovering in the corner of my vision.

  It doesn’t help. They don’t answer.

  I pull up Jaesin’s comm code instead, but a yank on the back of my shirt collar drags me to a stop by the throat. I gasp, choke, and stumble back into Ania, just as the ground gives one more groaning shudder . . . and splits open in front of me.

  The fissure starts about fifty feet away, a single glowing wound in the street that leaks the barest spark of beautiful, benign-looking maz. Then . . . CRACK! Its jagged mouth splits open, grows longer, longer, racing toward me, spilling raw maz into the air. My breath comes fast, too fast, and my head swims.

  Stars, not again. After surviving this long, am I really going to die like my parents, surrounded by glowing poison and—