Spellhacker

by M. K. England

  Ania drags me aside as the crack advances and, with the most intense focus I’ve ever seen from her, draws a sharp shielding ward around us. She dumps huge amounts of expensive nullaz, the maz nullifier, into the air and street around us, going for quantity over quality as the deadly maz from the fissure lashes against her hastily erected barrier. She mutters formulas and patterns to herself as she opens a second stream of terraz, its earthy scent and grounding power infusing the pavement under our feet. A trickle of bright golden magnaz kicks the mix into high gear, raw power to strengthen the whole thing. A ham-fisted technique, but—

  Wait.

  My gaze flies to the ware on her right hand. The flow of magnaz comes out in fits and starts, like she mentioned earlier, and gets worse with every passing second.

  “Ania, you’re gonna break it!” I shout over the wail of more approaching sirens. The magnaz gives a worrying sputter, a flare of golden light.

  “Yeah, well, you seem hell-bent on breaking yourself, and Remi and Jaesin aren’t here, so someone has to save you from your own death wish.”

  “But that flow is—”

  “—a lot harder to manage with you shouting in my ear. Shut. UP.”

  I shut up. How the tables have turned. The shield flickers with the golden light of the magnaz as Ania holds the whole thing in place through sheer force of will. Sweat glitters on the bridge of her nose as she stands her ground, unfazed even when a van comes plummeting from the airborne traffic lanes for a hard landing mere feet away from us. Bodies in Maz Management Corporation uniforms spill out, wrapped from head to toe in faintly shimmering layers of nullaz and hauling portable maz containment equipment onto the road.

  The earthquake, being the petty bitch that it is, gives one last lurching kick that sends the crew tripping over their own equipment.

  Then it slows . . . and stops.

  The city is silent for a long moment as, all around, people hold their breath and look to one another with the heavy and unspoken question: Is it over? For real?

  The answer comes moments later as the all-clear siren blares, and all the weavers and witches in sight let their wards fall.

  “Finally,” Ania grinds out, letting her own barrier fall too. The MMC workers tending to the fissure barely spare us a glance through the flickering haze of their containment field.

  “Come on,” I say, dragging Ania by the wrist, my bloody hand still aching from the punch. Her half-hearted protests are nothing but background noise as the Cliffs take up my whole field of view, consuming all scents, all sounds.

  The Cliffs are composed of seven towering buildings, and Remi, Jaesin, and I live in building three, right along the roadside. The dumping ground for the city’s plague orphans. Home shit home. The front door is partially blocked by a newly fallen chunk of stone railing that was part of the roof until ten minutes ago, but I slip through the narrow opening and into the mess of people and debris on the first floor.

  The acrid scent of too many bodies in a building with terrible plumbing mixes with the burnt tang of dead structural maz in the air. Everyone’s doors are thrown open as they mill about in the halls. The more altruistic among them check on neighbors and ask about injuries, while others dig through the rubble for usable bits to scavenge. Shana, a girl I sometimes go dancing with, dabs at a bleeding cut on her roommate’s forehead, oblivious as the vultures circle her open apartment door, scouting for any valuables in view. The few weavers who could afford some small amount of maz had apparently set up a warding circle in the front common area and are now demanding money from everyone who availed themselves of their services. If the markup is a little high, well, they just saved everyone’s lives, didn’t they?

  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 ag
ain, 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.

  “Damn it, Remi,” he shouts, though the effect is ruined by his laughter. He wipes a bit of sauce off his cheek and licks it off his finger, raises an eyebrow in pleased surprise, and goes back to stirring.

  I catch Ania’s gaze and roll my eyes, then beckon her over to my little corner of the flat, flicking on the salvaged lamp mounted to the wall above my desk. Light floods over the workspace, a natural daylight sort of wash that keeps my eyes from going all crossed while I stare at extremely tiny screws and wires. A plain brown shipping box with my name on the top teeters on the one empty corner of the desk. I allow a tiny smile at the return address, letting an unusual warmth fill my chest for just a moment. Davon’s graduation present. Remi, Jaesin, and I can never afford to give each other gifts, but ever since Davon aged out of the orphan care system and got a real job, he’s never missed an occasion. I leave it for the moment. If I’m going to get Ania’s ware fixed before we go out, I need to get started. My tools are everywhere, but my fingers find the correct screwdriver and a set of fine needle-nose pliers with barely a glance.

  “Take off your ware and put your hand on the work top,” I order, then slip a pair of magnifying glasses on, settling them on top of my head. A faint snort comes from across the room, but I hold up a finger to Remi without looking over.

  “Not a word.”

  I click on the magnifier’s built-in light and accept Ania’s wrist cuff with a ginger touch, then sync my deck with her fingertip implants. I know this tech inside and out—I built it, after all—so I know exactly how delicate it can be. Not that Ania ever treats it that way. I set it on the tabletop, pull the magnifiers over my eyes, and lean in to focus on the minuscule screws holding the cuff’s access panel in place. The precise work makes my punching hand ache, but complaining about it will only draw a lecture from Jaesin about how to throw a proper punch. Again.

  Across the room, there’s a sudden rush of sizzling, a pained yelp, then water dribbling in the sink. Ania’s low chuckle signals an impending fight.

  “You planning to poison us tonight, Jaesin?” she asks, though she always scolds me for saying the same thing.

  Jaesin growls. “Don’t tempt me. I don’t see you over here trying to cook. Doesn’t your family have a chef?”

  Ania must be tired of us taking shots at her over her family’s money, but she never shows it, just accepts them gracefully. Which is even more maddening, to be honest. I tune out their bickering and zone into the job at hand. Access panel off. Drain what little is left in the maz chambers into catch jars, manually trigger the extruders seated inside the tips of Ania’s fingers. Watch the diagnostics spill across my vision via my contact lenses.

  Ania falls silent above me, her not-flirting with Jaesin apparently finished. They’re the weirdest exes of all time. When I peek up at her, though, I find her looking back at me from the corner of her eye, hesitant. I know that look.

  “Diz,” she murmurs, quiet enough to be concealed by Jaesin’s clanging. “Why don’t we all stay in to watch a movie or something tonight instead of going out?”

  I speak without hesitation. “I think you should give Remi the choice and go with whatever they say. You can’t just dictate what you think is best for them. I guarantee, you try to tell them what they can and can’t do one more time, you’ll have a hot ball of firaz in your face. Burn those pretty eyebrows right off.”

  Ania unconsciously lifts her free hand to smooth over one perfectly plucked brow, frowning. “I know. But we just got back from a job, and we have other things we wanted to do this week. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

  She isn’t getting it. I need her to really hear me, so I wipe the smirk off my face, set down my tools, and blink away the text on my contacts so I can meet her eyes uninhibited.

  “Look, it’s their decision. They’ll appreciate having the option, I think, but if they say they feel up to going out, you have to leave it at that.” I flick my gaze over to Remi, whose shirt is slowly losing the war with gravity, revealing a strip of pale stomach. I look quickly away. “Is this just your way of getting out of taking us to Nova again? You ashamed to be seen with your broke-ass plague-orphan charity cases?”

  Ania huffs. “I’m not going to let you pick a fight. Besides, what if it’s closed for earthquake damage? That wouldn’t be my fault.”

  I bring up a quick search and hit their net site, then share the view with Ania.

  “Open for business. Any other excuses?”

  She pouts in silence for a long moment, so I blink the deck display back onto my lenses and analyze the diagnostics from her ware. The first two maz extruders are fine, the ones that handled the terraz and linkaz she used during the quake. She’s apparently been playing with fire recently, because she has firaz loaded in the third position. It’s a bit uneven, but barely so; she probably hasn’t even noticed. An easy fix. Her usual position-four obscuraz
is fine, but sure enough, in the final spot, the magnaz extruder fires in fits and starts, the computer sometimes simulating a strong flow and sometimes the barest gossamer thread. It’s all gummed up, probably hasn’t been cleaned properly in months. No wonder Ania’s having trouble weaving with it on the fly. I click my tongue at her the way my mother used to do to me.

  “Honestly, princess, you are the most high-maintenance slob I’ve ever met.”

  “Hey!”

  Too easy sometimes. I pour a shallow dish of a gentle scouring chem and guide Ania’s fingertips into the solution with easy pressure, then turn my attention back to the lines of code.

  “Don’t move. Gotta flush out the blockage, and it’s gonna take a few minutes. I’m gonna tweak the programming in your cuff a bit so if the extruders start to clog again, it’ll trigger a message to get you to bring it over for maintenance so it doesn’t get this bad again.”

  I level a look at her. “Do not. Let it get. This bad. Again. Rebuilding this thing from scratch would take longer than you have the patience for.”

  “Thanks, Diz. You’re the best,” she says, leaning down to give me a peck on the forehead. I swat her away.

  “Thank me by taking better care of your ware.”

  And by not leaving.

  My gaze drifts back to Davon’s gift, perched on the corner of my desk. Nothing for me to do while the chems work their magic on Ania’s ware, so I pull it into my lap and snag my knife to slice at the tape. With a furtive glance at Ania, I swivel my chair slightly away and pull the box flaps barely open, just enough to peek inside. To my complete horror, my lip wobbles when I see the contents. He’s included some of his standard practical gifts—a new multitemp soldering iron, some assorted computer components, socks—but nestled in the bottom is something wrapped in delicate tissue paper. Written on the tape that holds it together are three short words in Davon’s terrible handwriting: I’ll never forget.

  My fingers brush over the paper, hesitant, heart in my throat. Whatever it is, it won’t be easy. I take a deep steadying breath through my nose and slip my finger under the tape, tugging gently, tearing the tiniest bit of paper possible along with it. I fold back the delicate tissue and smooth it away from the gift, biting my lip hard to keep control.