I’m sure he wasn’t there. I’m sure he’s fine. He usually works on the other side of town. Nothing to worry about.
Jaesin and Remi are completely radio silent the entire time, which is worrying, but not entirely surprising. If I let my mind wander for so much as a second, it starts replaying that moment on the bridge, the maz, Remi, my reaction to their touch, everything it brought up. We’ve had so many almosts over the years we’ve known each other, but I’ll bet anything that moment on the rooftop last night was the last one. I’ve finally closed the door on that possibility forever.
Maybe it’s for the best.
They probably both hate me now. Doesn’t stop me from worrying, though. We’ll see them soon, anyway. I know this city the way I know computers, and that’s saying something. Though we hit detour after detour, I get us closer and closer with every turn. We’re nearly home. Nearly safe.
(Nearly somewhere I can close myself off and sit in a dark room for a few hours and breathe, breathe, breathe. . . .)
We round the final corner to the block dominated by the Cliffs, and I’m already dreaming of the dinner Jaesin will make (dumplings, he always makes dumplings when he’s stressed). My delicious thoughts are interrupted, though, when I’m yanked back into an alcove next to the twenty-four-hour beauty salon and a hand clamps down over my mouth. I thrash and struggle for a second, until Jaesin’s voice hisses in my ear, “Chill the hell out, Diz!”
I chill the hell out. As soon as I stop struggling, he lets me go, and I see Remi do the same with Ania.
“What the hell?” Ania hisses, backing away to get a little personal space. “Why aren’t you at the flat?”
“Look for yourself,” Remi says. “But be sneaky about it, you know?”
Ania scoots to the edge of the alcove and leans her head out just a little bit, then jerks back.
“Why are the police crawling all over your apartment building? How could they have IDed us that quickly?”
My stomach drops through the floor. No. No, no, NO, we love that flat. We busted our asses to get reassigned there two years ago, and for us to get run out of there is our worst nightmare. All my gear is there, and Remi’s maz stash, and Jaesin’s cookware that he saved for months to buy at the thrift store. They’ll confiscate everything. They’ll never let us go back. Because if there are cops there, then we were obviously seen leaving the park, so they know we caused the rupture, so they’re out to arrest us, and—
The cops interrupt my spiral by hauling one of the guys from the fourth floor out with his hands cuffed. Benny, I think? He’s cursing his face off, his face gone completely red and splotchy. I can’t catch the specifics, but in between the swearing I hear something about drugs theft. Several plainclothes officers enter the building as soon as he’s gone, carrying large cases of equipment. Obviously settling in for a nice, long session of evidence collection. Just not in our apartment.
I blow out a long breath. “Okay. So maybe they aren’t on to us specifically, but we still can’t go home with the cops crawling all over the place.”
Jaesin nods. “We have to assume we were seen and our faces are going to be painted across every newsfeed and signscreen in town eventually. Where can we go to lie low for a while and figure out what to do next?”
I turn to Ania with a raised eyebrow. “Any chance your parents want some criminal houseguests?”
All the blood drains from her face.
“Oh god, my parents.” She covers her eyes and shakes her head. “If the cops ID us, do you think they’ll tell my parents even though I’m eighteen? They’re gonna kill me, I’m gonna lose my spot at the university—”
A faint buzz sounds, and Ania’s eyes go wide as she focuses on something in her lenses. She pulls her deck from her back pocket and flips the screen around to show us the notification: 1 new message from Mom. She looks about ready to throw up. I take a step back.
“What does it say?” Remi asks.
Ania takes a deep breath, and her throat moves as she subvocalizes the command to open the message on her lenses. She reads it aloud.
“‘Hi, sweetie, please pick up some cassava on your way home. Not sure where you’re at today, but avoid the western routes near the edge of town. Some kind of maz leak over there today, and we’ve had several new cases of spellsickness at the hospital. It’s all over the news, some big hunt going on for four fugitives. Be careful. See you tonight, love you.’”
I firmly block out the bit about spellsickness and focus on the rest. “You think she’s playing it casual to try to get you to come home?”
Ania snorts. “My mom couldn’t be sneaky if she tried. She honestly has no idea. My house might be an option after all.”
“Give me a minute to check the news. We should know what people are saying about all this,” I say, and call up a new search on my lenses. I can feel Remi’s eyes on me, cold and expectant. “Kyrkarta, news only, last three hours . . . Hey, apparently Seph’s Appliances down in the Crater is having a scratch-and-dent sale because of the earthquake, and Councilman Blake got caught with his pants down again. Shocking.”
“Focus, Diz,” Jaesin growls, and I wave him off.
“I’ve got it, I just had to sift through all the crap first. Here. ‘The disaster is thought to have been triggered by an illegal maz-siphoning operation. Kyrkarta City Law has begun a search for four suspects, whose names and faces have not yet been released so as not to compromise the ongoing investigation. Up-to-date information can be found on the Law’s net site, along with a form for submitting your tips. The death toll has not been confirmed at this time, but emergency responders on-site say the number will be in the hundreds. Meanwhile, Maz Management has stepped in to contain the disaster and lend a hand to the community in a gesture reminiscent of the early days of the spellplague, with volunteer efforts . . .’”
Death toll.
My throat closes up, cutting off the last of my words. My memories of the hack play again and again, a constant spiral in the back of my mind. Where did I go wrong? I swear I did everything right, but I must have screwed up somehow, I must have.
Ania doesn’t notice my sudden mental departure. She just sighs in relief. “Okay, so they haven’t named any of us yet. If we can sneak you all in, I should be able to hide you for a while. At least, long enough for us to figure out what to do next. I have my own room in the basement, and my parents rarely come down there anymore.”
“And you’ve never taken your scrub friends home to meet Mommy and Daddy,” I can’t help but add. “So they won’t recognize us even if they do eventually show our faces on the news. Good. We have a plan, then.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait up,” Ania says. “We still have to get you all to my house without being seen, then get you inside. It might be . . . you know . . .”
She hesitates, and all the mixed-up, messed-up, roiling anger and everything inside me comes out in a fearsome glare.
“I’m going to kindly assume you were going to say that it’s not smart for us to walk around showing our faces openly, not that our broke-ass selves will stick out like sunnaz in a shit storm in your neighborhood.”
Ania winces and turns her back to the road to hide the faint glow of her maz as she begins to weave.
“Let’s just use some concealment spells, okay?”
I take the offered spell wordlessly and crumple it over my head, watching the faint purple-black sparks drift to the ground like embers of burning paper.
I wish there was such a thing as a concealment spell for your own thoughts. I have it together for now, but the threads are fraying, the awfulness lying just below the surface, watching. Waiting.
Death toll, they said.
The barest crack in the surface is all it will take.
Ten
WHEN ANIA SAID HER ROOM was in the basement, she should have said “rooms.” And when she said basement, she should have said “luxury apartment suite that happens to be on an underground level and yet still manages to be just as
nice as the rest of the house that we weren’t allowed a tour of.” I’ve known her for six years and this is the first time I’ve seen any of it.
The walls are painted a cool, relaxing blue, the same color as the water maz Ania’s family is named for. The bel Wataza family crest is framed on the wall, next to a string-woven tapestry of their home city back on the Small Continent, near where my dad grew up. The room holds two sleek, modern couches in clean white, accented with a brighter, more vivid blue, with end tables sporting carved sculptures and drink coasters. Gauzy curtains hang over the windows, and light fixtures adorn nearly every wall and surface. It’s so bright I never would have guessed it’s mostly underground. The front room is bigger than our entire flat.
I’m not bitter. Really.
“So, what are we not allowed to touch and where are we allowed to sleep?” I sneer, then mentally slap myself. Everyone is stressed. This isn’t the time to harass Ania about her fanciness.
Ania takes it in stride, though, as always. “I think it would be best to stay out of this main sitting room—”
“Sitting room?” I say before I can help myself, then cover my mouth and gesture for her to go on.
“Since this is where the staircase from the first floor leads, this is the first thing my parents see if they decide to come down,” she finishes. “There’s a gaming room back here, a guest bedroom, my bedroom, and a kitchenette. You can survive down here without being seen for quite a while, I think.”
I let that sink in for a moment. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, knowing Ania has been living in such spacious luxury the whole time we’ve known each other, while the rest of us shared one bedroom in an apartment in the orphan district. Not that I want any of it. It feels weird, like I’m going to break something or get it dirty if I touch it. I’ve always known, of course, but there’s a difference between knowing and seeing.
I knew the second she walked into the tech shop where I worked six years ago, with her fancy babysitter. I was newly twelve, barely able to work two hours a day by law. The babysitter looked around with her nose in the air, obviously appalled at the cramped quarters, dust, grease, solder fumes, and whatever else. Ania, though, looked around at everything with wide eyes, her expensive training hardware clipped around her wrist and her curls bouncing as she scrambled from one display to another. Her clothes were new and clean, her steps light, the heels of her fancy boots pinging like falling coins across the shop floor.
Twelve-year-old me was enchanted, and immediately wanted to show off. “Are you here to have your ware fixed? I’m the best there is, promise.”
The babysitter cleared her throat delicately. “This shop was recommended to us by a friend of the family, but I see she must have been mistaken. Come, Ania, we won’t be letting a child fix your techwitchery hardware.”
She said “techwitchery hardware” like she’d read the term once in a textbook long ago, the verbal equivalent of holding dirty laundry pinched between two fingers as far from your face as possible. The shop owner, Mr. Ailiano, gave a big belly laugh. “Oh, your friend didn’t steer you wrong, and Dizzy there won’t be doing the fixing, though she is certainly smart as a whip and will probably be better than me before much longer. I’d be happy to take a look at your ware and give you an estimate, free of charge. Let me see, girl. I’ll give it right back, promise.”
Ania removed her ware with gentle grace and placed it in the man’s hand without seeking the approval of her babysitter first. In fact, when she turned around, she had a bit of a smirk on her face. She rolled her eyes and jerked a thumb back at her nanny.
“Ugh,” she mouthed, and I had to cover my face with both hands to hide my giggles. It was the first time I’d laughed all week, and though I normally hated rich people, I found I couldn’t stop myself from chatting with Ania. Before she and her nanny left with her expertly fixed ware, Ania had slipped me a comm code and mimed typing. Message me.
And I did. And we’ve been friends ever since, even through my nasty comments and bloody knuckles, even through Ania’s acceptance into a fancy private school while I was stuck at Kyrkarta Polytechnic, a zombie drone in front of a computer terminal in a classroom with three hundred other kids. Even through Ania’s discovery of my little side hobbies: crawling through locked and abandoned buildings, hacking the accounts of public officials for fun, and stealing maz for Remi to use in their weaving.
We’ve stuck together. A fancy bedroom (even bedrooms, plural) shouldn’t change that. And yet, I feel it more intensely than I ever have before. Ania lives here. Here. And as she leads us into the next room and removes her shoes to place them delicately on a hand-carved shoe rack, a new thought occurs to me. She probably brings her school friends here.
My gaze flits across the room: gaming systems with multiplayer games, a holodeck board game system, more couches that look too pristine to sit my lowly ass on . . . and framed photos of Ania sitting in this very room with two other well-dressed, perfectly styled people our age, wearing the uniform of her private school.
Yep, that stings. But nowhere near as bad as the photo of Ania and a lean, blonde girl in winged eyeliner, wearing matching university sweatshirts and holding up their acceptance letters.
Ania is going off to university with this girl. She’s leaving me in the dust, alone, but she’ll be anything but alone.
She’s my best friend, but I’m apparently not hers.
And why should I be? I’m the girl who gets in fights. I’m the girl who can’t have an emotion without wanting to punch a wall. I’m the girl who screwed up our last job so badly that I killed people.
While I’m having my private meltdown, Jaesin and Remi remove their shoes and set up shop in front of Ania’s wall array, which holds an enormous screen with curved sides. Remi sinks to the couch and scrolls through the collection of games with an open mouth and unblinking eyes, arms limp with exhaustion.
“Oh, you are so going down,” they say to Jaesin, who snatches up one of the wireless controllers and syncs it to his deck and lenses.
“Please. I played this game all the time back at the home and you know it. I dominated in our intrahouse league.”
“That was years ago, and I’ve been playing the deck version for months. You’re gonna eat it so hard.” Their words are strong, but only their eyes and the tips of their fingers move. They’ve gone into full energy conservation mode.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from lashing out. We all have our own way of dealing with things, and they apparently need a distraction more than they need to know how we managed to screw up and kill people. Those two are like bickering siblings on the best of days. Put a video game between them, and we’ll be lucky if they don’t bring the cops down on us from all the shouting, no matter how tired Remi is. Speaking of which . . .
“Aren’t your parents going to be able to hear us down here?” I ask, finally meeting Ania’s gaze.
“It’s pretty soundproof. We should be okay if we can keep those two under control,” she says with a sharp side-eye at Remi and Jaesin. “This isn’t a long-term solution, though. We need to talk about what we’re going to do. Even if the news cycle dies down and they stop actively looking for us, you won’t be able to get a job or an apartment in this city, and you won’t be able to show your face out on the streets.”
I sit down hard on the couch and put my head between my knees. “Damn, Ania, just lay it all out there, why don’t you?”
She winces. “Sorry, but it’s all true. I know it’s a lot, but the longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to get out of this mess.”
The noise escalates as Jaesin and Remi get deeper into their game, shoving each other’s avatars off moving platforms and dashing for the same powerups. Ania looks to the ceiling and shakes her head, then stomps over to them.
“You’re going to get us caught the second my parents get home! Should I just call them and tell them you’re here? Do I need to take the video game away from you like a babysitter?”
>
Jaesin and Remi both duck their heads with sheepish looks. Remi pushes their controller away and hits the power button.
“Yeah, you probably should take it away, actually,” they say, the picture of innocence . . . until they lower their voice and mutter to Jaesin, “This isn’t over.”
How are the two of them so . . . uncaring? Are they just that good at blocking out the awfulness? If so, they should teach me, because I obviously can’t handle it.
Ania sits on the plush couch, her face shadowed with concern. I flop down beside her and throw one of the fancy cushions at Jaesin, way harder than I mean to.
“Okay, can we be serious for a second?” I say. “A bunch of people just died because of us and we should care. The cops are out to get us, the media will be all over us the second they release our info, and the guy we were doing this job for is probably gonna be pissed because, unless one of you thought to grab it, we don’t have his maz.”
I pause for a minute to swallow against the constriction in my throat. “I don’t know what happened. This is such a mess. Nothing like this has ever happened to us, and it’s just . . .”
Somewhere above us, a muffled thump echoes, followed by what are unmistakably footsteps.
Ania glances to the corner of her vision where her lenses show the time. “My parents are home. I’m serious, though, they never come down here. They never even speak to me unless spoken to.”
Her expression grows pinched, and she changes the subject.
“I guess first thing we should do is try to get in contact with the guy who gave us the job. Return his money, tell him the deal’s off. We can’t have him after us, too.”
Spellhacker Page 10