more of it than she’d ever allowed herself to deliberately gather at once. With it came the familiar feeling of abundance, undercut by the uncomfortable knowledge that she was standing right at the edge of her ability and could topple off at any moment. She squeezed her hands tight around her umbrella, clutching it to her chest as if it might anchor her.
Nevermoor stretched out for miles all around. Towards its centre she could see great pockets of light pollution from Old Town, Bohemia, and the never-sleeping industrial hubs of Bloxam and Macquarie. In the opposite direction, the darkened city rolled out like a map of the night sky, black and dotted with specks of light, streets like constellations.
‘Up with the sun where the winds are warming …’
‘Stop working so hard,’ Squall warned.
‘But you said—’
‘I said you need to gather more Wunder than you’ve ever purposefully gathered before. I didn’t say you had to force it up out of the ground like oil. You already have its attention. Look – it’s dying to please you. See?’
‘No.’
‘Pay attention,’ he said. ‘Remember: summoned Wunder shows itself to summoner and smith.’
Morrigan had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. She tried to relax them instead, and when they were almost closed, she could see it. Traces of Wundrous energy coiling through the air, swarming to her from every direction, lighting up the sky around her like the sun. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes wide again. The brightness eased.
‘You see?’ said Squall. ‘When you call some, you call all. Everything is connected.’
Morrigan held out a hand to steady herself against the balustrade.
‘Now imagine there was a map of Nevermoor,’ he continued, ‘that could show you where the greatest density of Wundrous energy was gathered at any point in time. Imagine it looked like this – like the city at night – but each of those lights represented a measure of Wunder. There would be millions, billions of specks of light everywhere you looked, but some places would be much brighter than others. Where would those places be?’
Morrigan thought for a moment. ‘The Wundrous Society.’
‘Where else?’
‘The Gobleian Library.’ He nodded for her to go on. ‘Um. Cascade Towers, Jemmity Park … The Museum of Stolen Moments?’
‘Before you demolished it, certainly,’ he said. ‘And the Lightwing Palace, the Nevermoor Opera House, the Hotel Deucalion, and so on. There are hundreds of places like these, dotted all over Nevermoor, each producing and consuming vast amounts of Wundrous energy on a constant cyclical basis. On this imaginary map of Wunder density, those places would shine brightest most of the time.
‘But at certain times of year, there are others that outshine them. Old Town, for example, every Friday night during summer.’
‘Because of the Nevermoor Bazaar?’
He nodded. ‘Courage Square on Christmas Eve. Bright, blazing beacons that cast every other Wundrous source into shadow, if only for an evening or an hour.’ He paused for a moment, gazing out at the skyline. ‘Tonight, you need to be the brightest beacon in Nevermoor. A lightning rod. This is how we will draw the Hollowpox out of hiding.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You understand the Hollowpox better than most,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a disease; it’s a monster that behaves like a disease. It feeds off Wundrous energy, and Wunimals have quite a lot of it. That is how it destroys them: it’s a parasite, invading its hosts and consuming everything that makes them Wunimals instead of unnimals. Bleeding them dry until all they are is scaffolding. When all that Wunder has been consumed, the parasite moves on to new food sources, multiplying all the time.
‘Sometimes it might sense some greater source of Wunder nearby, some living creature it doesn’t quite understand. And it can feel the immense volume of energy surrounding that creature. It wants to invade, wants to consume it, but it can’t.’ He turned to look at her directly. ‘Because you’re a Wundersmith. Wunder doesn’t just passively surround you, it actively fights for you. It will protect you viciously from external forces that wish to harm you. Such as the Hollowpox.’
‘Oh,’ said Morrigan slowly. ‘That’s why it kept happening to Wunimals around me.’ Her heart quickened as she grasped that it was probably because of her Sofia was lying in the hospital. The realisation added a sudden, crushing guilt to the sadness and worry she felt for her friend, and she pressed a hand to her chest as if to keep it all in.
Squall leaned over the