part, too, pulling her hand out of mine and staggering a few steps back to collapse into a huddle on the ground, her hands pressed flat against her chest.
Clarita was already calling out David’s next line, her voice strained; I came in on Maya’s part after and reached out and grabbed Clarita’s hand to close the line: only three of us left now, with Angel Torres on her other side. The shield wavered for a moment like haze above a summer road, and a gigantic suckerworm the length of a decently sized truck erupted explosively out of the crowd of mals and hurled itself right towards us. It smacked onto the shield like a lamprey directly in front of my face, round Sarlacc-toothed maw full of phosphorescent teeth glazed in neon pink, all of them working to get a hold on the shield so it could start twisting itself round to drill a hole through.
The shielding spell was a conversation, so I summoned up the memories of all the ways people made clear to me that I wasn’t welcome to join theirs: cold shoulders and deliberately dropped voices. I fixed the idea in my mind as if David and Maya weren’t really gone out of it, they’d just turned away a bit so the suckerworm couldn’t hear enough of what they were saying to join in, because it wasn’t wanted and should shove off, and it helped that it hurt me to think about it; I whispered David’s next lines through my teeth and shoved more mana into the shield on a burst of anger, and the suckerworm lost its hold and slid down to the ground. Instantly seven smaller mals leapt on its back and tore it apart.
Clarita jerked her head to stare at me, but right then behind us Vinh gave a yowl of triumph and pulled himself out. We couldn’t look round, but I heard the whole repair crew performing the final chant, the first familiar thing they’d done. The mana surge that poured through them was so massive that I could feel it against my back, a crackle like static electricity, and then Vinh and Jane Goh shoved the cover back on over the machinery with a loud clang, and the repair crew were turning and grabbing our shoulders, the sign that they were ready. “Allons, allons!” Vinh was yelling, but we didn’t really need the command. Kaito was helping Maya to get up and grab on, and I started shouting like a madwoman, “Orion, get over here! Orion! Orion Lake, that means you, you tragic blob of unsteamed pudding, we’re going. Orion!” and if you think that should’ve been enough, when he was literally two feet away from me at the time, I agree with you profoundly, except it wasn’t. He didn’t even have the excuse that he was in the middle of a hard fight, because actually he had just cleared another temporary ring around himself and was just crouched and waiting.
Thank goodness there were other sane people round; Angel on Clarita’s other side bent down and grabbed a small hunk of broken marble off the ground with his free hand, and threw it at Orion with, well, quite frankly all the skill of a four-year-old, managing to hit his shoe a little bit. That was enough to get Orion to whip around instantly and blast Angel—fortunately we still had the shield up—and then his eyes widened for an instant as he realized what he’d just done, but he had to keep going around again to take out the two mals that jumped him in the opening. “Lake, you absolute spanner!” I yelled furiously, but thankfully his head didn’t empty out again that quickly; he just killed the two mals and finished turning, ran over to us and grabbed Angel’s outstretched hand, and then Wen triggered the yanker on his belt.
I’d never actually ridden a yanker spell before. If you think bungee jumping off the world’s highest cliff sounds like the best time imaginable, you’d find it a cracking time. I personally did not. I screamed shrilly the whole way as the yanker dragged us at extremely high speed through the horde of monsters, the last remnant of our shield bowling them out of our way, and all the way back up the painfully narrow maintenance shaft, banging us back and forth. I screamed even louder for the really special part when we flew out through the landing and into Todd’s