Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,10
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