Spellhacker

by M. K. England

  Three numbers, cast in silver metal. Two, one, five. At one point, these numbers were illuminated with sunnaz, all the better to see them at night, but that maz has long since faded away. I’d recognize them anywhere, though.

  He’d pried the house numbers from beside the front door of the house I lived in when my parents were alive. Where Davon lived right next door, my constant companion from birth. The house where . . .

  The tears rush up so fast I barely have a chance to squeeze my eyes shut before they fall. I jam the numbers and paper back into the box and take long, slow breaths in through my nose until I’ve got hold of myself again. My breathing is still ragged as I fold the flaps of the box back up and place it gingerly on the far corner of my desk, away from Ania. It’s simultaneously the best and worst gift I’ve ever received, and Davon knew just how much it would mean. I can clearly imagine mounting the numbers to the wall above my new desk, in the new apartment I’ll be able to afford with the salary of the job he’s gotten for me.

  The job I still haven’t accepted.

  My eyes cut back to Ania, who watches me cautiously but knows better than to say a word. I need to tell the crew about the job offer. I should’ve done it a week ago, but as soon as I tell them, that’ll be it. It’ll definitely be happening. I’ll be staying, they’ll be going, and the door will be permanently closed on any chance of our group sticking together.

  Unless they change their minds, an insidious voice whispers in the back of my head. Unless you tell them you’re taking the job, and they say, “Noooo, Dizzy, you have to come with us,” and you say, “I can’t, I could never leave Kyrkarta, it’s home,” and they say, “Fine, then we’re staying here with you. Remi will go to Kyrkarta University instead, and Ania too, and Jaesin will go to work for MMC with you even though it’ll make Remi mad for a bit, and everything will be fine. You’ll all get a new flat together in a better part of town, and it’ll be just like it is now. But better. Maybe Jaesin and Ania will get back together. And maybe, after a while, when you’re ready . . . maybe . . .”

  “Diz?” Ania says, her voice sharp. She’s obviously already said my name at least twice, trying to rescue me from the depths of my own head.

  “Sorry. Zoned into my lenses.” Common enough, easy to believe.

  Ania hums skeptically. “Did something happen with Davon? Is he okay? You were staring awfully hard at that package he sent.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  Her voice takes on a warning tone. “Diz. Be real.”

  Without warning, all of it bubbles up inside me, acid eating at my throat, more anger than anything else.

  “Fine,” I snap. “Fine. I’ll tell you all after dinner.”

  “Oh no,” she says. “Now you have to tell me.”

  “After dinner.” I shouldn’t have said anything. She’s pathologically incapable of waiting.

  “No, not after dinner,” she snaps, and I wince at the volume.

  “Shut up,” I hiss, and pull her fingertips from the chem wash, patting them dry with a microfiber cloth. The second I have the maz reloaded and the access panel closed, she snatches her hand back and props it on her hip.

  “Nope,” she says, “no way, you are not going to make me sit through dinner and keep my mouth shut until you decide to tell us.”

  “Tell us what?” Jaesin says as he places a giant serving bowl of something garlicky in the center of the living-room floor with a clunk, barely muffled by the cheap, paper-thin carpet. Remi slithers off the couch with as little movement as possible, their head and shoulders melting onto the creaky wood floor until the rest of their body follows. When they finally tumble upright on their knees, their cool gray eyes immediately lock onto mine.

  “Yeah, Dizzy, tell us what? Something else happen before Ania caught up with you today?” they ask, shifting their gaze to Ania. “I told you she needed a chaperone. Should have stuck with her after we left the sewers.”

  “Hey, I am perfectly responsible!” I protest, then purse my lips. “There is something I should tell you all, though.”

  The others look on expectantly.

  Turns out those breathing exercises my therapist taught me make a great stalling tactic.

  “Can’t we just sit down and have dinner first?”

  Jaesin smiles as we all grab our cushions and arrange ourselves around the bowl of . . . whatever it is. He passes me one of our mismatched thrift-store plates and nods, a bit of his straight black hair falling over his forehead, still flecked with sauce.

  “Sure, Diz. We can have dinner.”

  I sigh. Saved.

  “. . . while you talk,” he finishes, and I sag in defeat. Curse Jaesin and his dad maneuvers.

  “Can I at least know what we’re eating first?”

  “Food,” Jaesin, Remi, and Ania all chorus together, and Remi and Ania burst into giggles at Jaesin’s long-suffering expression. No one should achieve that level of dadness at age eighteen. It should be illegal.

  “Okay, fine. Fine.” I serve myself first from the bowl first, to buy a little time to arrange my thoughts. The bowl is divided into six wedges, each piled high with a different thing. I scoop some fluffy grains onto my plate first, then add crisp baby greens, cubes of spicy-smelling tofu with Jaesin’s experimental brown sauce, long threads of thin-sliced root vegetables, and drizzle a milky-white dressing over it all. It actually looks and smells legitimately delicious, and fits into Remi’s immune-support diet. Go, Jaesin.

  The others take turns making their plates to their own personal tastes, all in totally unusual silence. Great. Now the whole thing has been built up so much it’s primed to blow up into maximum awkwardness. Ania was right. I should have told them as soon as we got home and confirmed they weren’t dead, gotten it over with. Should have told them last week.

  Remi especially is going to lose it. They are militant in their hatred of Maz Management, which confuses me to no end. It seems super straightforward to me. Big earthquake, contaminated maz everywhere, spellplague. MMC cleaned up the contamination and rebuilt the city, helped create programs for all the plague orphans, but has to charge for maz to pay for the systems and people needed for such a huge project. What else were they supposed to do? It sucks, and people have had to learn to live with a lot less maz now that it’s not just freely available everywhere, but what’s the alternative? I’d think Remi, of all people, would understand.

  Well, nothing for it. Time to submit myself to the will of the people. My brain helpfully dredges up every single silently rehearsed conversation I’ve come up with over the past few weeks, but none of them are likely to play out, and certainly not the optimistic ones. There won’t be any happy-family-staying-together result here. Only one thing’s guaranteed: Remi’s gonna be pissed.

  I take a breath and forge ahead.

  “I was offered a job at MMC. In their IT department. Cybersecurity, if you can believe it. Davon got me the interview, and they called me last week.”

  Nope, never mind, forget telling them last week—I should have stuck to my original plan and told them after they’d all moved to Jattapore and I’d already taken the job. When it wouldn’t matter anymore. Judging by their expressions, I’m in for a long night of glaring.

  “MMC?” Remi finally says, their face pinched with anger. “Maz Management, Diz, really?”

  I groan. Totally called it.

  “Look,” I say, cutting off their tirade before it can begin. “Being all high and mighty won’t pay my bills once you all move to Jattapore and I have to get a new flat by myself.”

  And there it is, the giant neon elephant in the room we’ve all been silently tiptoeing around, making plans and celebrating futures but never quite acknowledging the core truth: they’re leaving, I’m staying, and this family’s days are numbered in the single digits.

  I don’t want to fight, but if they’re going to poke at me, you better believe I’m gonna fire back. “Besides, what was everyone else up to after the spellplague? It was MMC
that figured out how to stop the contamination while everyone was dying. MMC figured out what to do with all us sad little orphans. MMC did research on the earthquakes. MMC is researching a cure. Maybe I want to be part of all that.”

  “Diz,” Jaesin says warningly.

  Remi waves him off. “I’m not just some sad little spellsick orphan. I’m a spellweaver. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be cut off from something that’s like . . .” They gesture wildly at the air around them, air that once held ambient traces of maz at all times. “Like breathing, Diz. I may as well be a techwitch now. No offense, Ania. What you do is amazing, but for spellweavers it’s like walking around with earmuffs and super-thick gloves on all the time. I can’t feel it everywhere anymore. It’s . . . weird.”

  Ania wisely keeps her mouth shut. She still has her parents, and their money. She has no trouble getting whatever amount of maz she needs. For us, for Remi, we have to steal it. That’s how we got started siphoning maz from MMC’s pipes in the first place. I sigh and rub a hand over the shaved side of my head.

  “I get all that, Remi, I do. But we were ground zero for the worst plague this world has ever seen, and when the whole city was dying, MMC gave people jobs, and bought toys and books for us, and made sure we went to school. That all costs money. I’m not saying they should charge as much as they do, but I’m saying . . .”

  And there’s the anger, back again, fresh and hot. Remi is leaving anyway, so what do they care if I work for MMC?

  “You know what, I don’t have to justify myself. I need a job. I got a job offer. And I’d be damn good at it.”

  Remi scoffs and stands, leaving their half-eaten dinner on the floor.

  “Sure. Yeah. Whatever you say, Diz,” they say.

  The rest of us finish our dinner in tense silence. Maybe if Remi was staying in town I would work a little harder to keep the peace. Or maybe it’s better this way. Start cutting my ties now so it’ll suck less seven days from now. Maybe our black-market gigs are all that’s been keeping us together the past two years, and now that they’re over, we’re over. Maybe we should have drifted apart long ago.

  Once the dishes are stacked and Ania is elbows-deep in dishwater, Remi comes back out of the bedroom doing their best interpretation of Ania’s worship-me walk. My eyes nearly bug out of my head.

  “You changed!” Ania says, her gesture flinging soapy water across the room. “You look great.”

  “You looked great before,” I say, then quickly drop my gaze. We’re supposed to be fighting. Those are definitely not fighting words.

  But apparently it was the right thing to say, because a tinge of color blooms on Remi’s cheeks. “Please. We’re going to Club Nova. I’m gonna bring it.”

  Well, I guess that answers the question of what we’re doing tonight. It’ll be impossible to stay mad with them slinking around, dancing in those tight wine-purple skinny jeans and that scoop-neck shirt that’s already slipping off their shoulder.

  I roll my eyes at myself. Woe is me, swoon. Whatever will I do? However will I manage? Get it together.

  I nod decisively, get to my feet, and walk right past Remi into the single shared bedroom to pull my clothing drawer out from under my bed.

  Apparently I need to bring it too.

  Four

  WE’VE BEEN AFTER ANIA TO get us into Nova for a year. Five minutes inside, though, and I’m already seriously doubting our choice.

  There’s sunnaz everywhere, glimmering decorative accents in the darkness, though it’s the most expensive maz there is right now. Twinkling spellwoven lights cling high along the walls and hover overhead, shifting color in response to the music and falling in a glittering shower from the ceiling whenever the beat drops.

  I can’t help but hate the place a little bit. Their earthquake wards are probably in perfect shape too.

  Maybe Ania was right not to bring us before. The gross display of excess wealth, especially after today’s earthquake, gets under my skin in a big way. Remi forces me and Jaesin to listen to the morning maz update every day by blaring it so loud we can’t plead ignorance. It reports the fluctuating prices and supply of the different strains of maz, and Remi’s tactic has done its job. I’ve apparently absorbed enough of it to be righteously pissed.

  It reminds me of the parties MMC throws once a year for all the good little orphans who manage to keep their grades up. I used to go every time. Free food, right? Jaesin came with me for a few years, but eventually he started staying home with Remi, who sat out in protest. Their loss. The parties always started out as civilized affairs. Speeches, bubbly fake champagne, and elderly employees looking kindly upon us poor orphan children. Two hours and significantly less adult supervision later, though, and they looked more like this—all decorum gone right out the window.

  Beside me, a wide-eyed girl stares as someone goes tearing past with their hair on fire, screaming at the top of their lungs. I roll my eyes. Anyone who grew up in a group home or in the Cliffs has seen that illusion a hundred times. Maybe rich kids are on such a tight parental leash that they haven’t been overexposed to every prank on the planet? But some things are universal: so long as one single person falls for it, the cycle will continue.

  A techwitch from Ania’s school who recently paid me to fix his hardware is repurposing the glowing maz decor for his own means. He’s got a spellweaver buddy drawing the threads away from the wall, feeding them straight into his ware, and he spins the whole mess into some kind of rave hula hoop to accentuate his awful table dancing. The delicate tech protests his wild movements, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

  “You’re gonna break it again if you keep pushing it like that, you know!” I shout over the music. I don’t know why I bother. If he comes back to me for more repairs, it’ll only build my post-graduation noodle fund. Seeing him abuse his (gorgeous, expensive) hardware like that hurts me deep in my broke-ass soul, though.

  “What did you say was wrong this time?” Nash calls to me from his tabletop, his eyes never leaving his casting hands, completely unrepentant.

  “Accelerometer needed recalibration.” I flip the nonshaved side of my hair out of my eyes with a toss of my head and smile. The perfect picture of innocence. “Gotta quit jerking off with your ware on.”

  Nash scoffs in my general direction, swaying to the thumping beat of the music. “Well, fortunately I pay you to fix my ware, not teach me how to use it.”

  With an overdramatic flourish of his wrist, he activates the implant in his index finger again. It releases a thin, glowing strand of aeraz, which he weaves into a simple breeze pattern with exaggerated gestures like some kind of flailing, spell-casting octopus. Then, with a sharp snap of his forearm, he pulls the final thread taut and flings the spell in my direction—sending a gust of humid, sweat-scented wind straight at me, like jet-propelled dog breath to the face. The fragile strands of the spell crumble a moment later, but it’s too late for the poor bartender. The spell wasn’t that strong, but it was enough for the bottles lined up neatly on the bar to rattle, tip, and start a tragic domino effect.

  I leap back as the bottles hit the floor with a loud clink, but thankfully don’t break. A notification pops up in my lenses, letting me know that particular brand is two for one tonight, but I blink it away irritably. Thought I had ad notifications disabled. A quick glance around reveals two security guards pushing their way through the crowd, their eyes fixed on Nash . . . and me. I’m not about to be Nash’s collateral damage. I quickly scoop the bottles up off the ground and deposit them back on the bar, hold up my hands to show no harm done, then step back into the crowd.

  And bump right into Remi.

  They stumble a bit when I knock into them, but then their eyes light up, and they start babbling something about the maz effects over the bar, a complicated weave mimicking a night sky dotted with bursting stars. The light dies out as Remi visibly remembers they’re supposed to be mad at me, though. They look away, their lips pressed tight toget
her, and start to turn their back to me with a muttered “Never mind.”

  Before I can really think about it, my hand darts out and catches one of theirs.

  “I don’t want to fight,” I say in a rush. “I just . . .”

  . . . don’t want you to leave?

  I drop their hand and make a fist to keep myself from reaching out again. This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell anyone until after they were gone anyway. “I haven’t taken the job yet, okay? I can still turn it down. I’ll look for something else. Can we not spend our last week together mad at each other?”

  I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m supposed to be keeping my distance so it’ll hurt less. And I need that job. But their expression softens as they look me over, probably seeing way too much. This is a bad idea. I shouldn’t have bothered, I should have—

  But then one of our favorite songs comes on, and Remi finally meets my gaze again, their frown morphing almost against their will into a small smile. Not quite forgiveness, maybe, but a truce at least.

  I’ll take it.

  “Come on,” they say. “We gotta.”

  I let myself give a faint smile in return.

  “Yeah. We gotta.”

  It might only be one or two songs, unless they’re feeling really good tonight, but it’s a gift either way. I’m happy to accept.

  Remi drags me out to the dance floor, yanks me close by my belt loops, and then their body is against mine, moving to the beat, warm and lithe and there. My arms wrap automatically around their neck, my hips matching their rhythm on instinct. Over their shoulder, I see Ania and Jaesin pressed together, leaning in close to talk over the music as they dance.

  When I draw back just enough to see Remi’s eyes, they looked almost determined. Like there’s something right on the tip of their tongue that they just can’t quite say, but they’re daring me to guess. We’ve been here before, lived in this exact moment, stood right on the cusp and challenged each other. Back away, move closer, what’ll it be? Are you feeling brave tonight?