Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,5

little more than normal, and I can’t stop thinking I’m gonna pull on that thread so hard I’ll blow my own hand off.”

“Nah, I’ll take care of that. If it’s not the sensor, it’s the extruder, and both are easy enough to fix. Should be no problem to finish it before we go out tonight.”

Out to one of Ania’s fancy clubs, where we’ve been begging her to take us for ages, for night one of seven. The beginning of the end. My stomach sours.

Then the ground . . . shivers.

Ania and I stop dead. Wait, absolutely still.

Another tremble, longer. Definitely not imagined. Our eyes meet as the ground shifts under our feet, harder this time, a threat.

A promise.

Another earthquake.

We run.

Two

IT’S THE FOURTH EARTHQUAKE THIS month, and honestly, I’m done.

Ania and I book it toward the nearest bit of open greenspace, a park at the corner of the block that’s the sole splash of natural color among the city’s shivering, flexing high-rises. The trees were cleared away years ago—too much of a hazard in a quake—leaving nothing but a wide open area. Sirens wail in the distance, and high overhead, the aircar and RidePod traffic drifts to a halt. Mostly. Emergencies have a way of bringing out the worst in some people.

An aircar with the loud lime-green markings of Kyrkarta City Law peels off from the roof-height emergency lanes and dives, sliding to a stop near the park with a high-pitched whine of protest from its ground brakes. I groan. Didn’t I just leave these jerks behind?

People pour from the surrounding buildings and streets, running in blatant defiance of every public safety advisory, because humanity sucks. Two officers climb out of the aircar, a techwitch and a spellweaver, judging by their rank patches. The tall, dark-haired one weaves a quick amplification spell, then presses the glowing tangle of threads to their throat.

“Please proceed calmly to the ward zone,” the low voice booms, echoing off the surrounding buildings. “If your building is reinforced, stay indoors and leave the ward zone open for others.”

Hah. Right. People are assholes, as the officers quickly discover when a shoving match breaks out between two men at a bottleneck between parked vehicles. They dive in to separate the instigators as another threatening rumble vibrates through the soles of my boots. I look toward home, my gaze magnetically drawn to the grimy window of my top-floor apartment.

At the end of the street, the hastily erected buildings that make up the Cliffs pulse with a deep reddish glow as their structural reinforcement spells activate. The sheer, featureless walls they’re named for flare bright for a single second, then immediately begin to fade as they burn through what little energy is left in the spells. The buildings were cobbled together from whatever crappy materials were on hand after the spellplague, sloppy constructions of wood and brick built without the aid of maz in the days when anti-maz paranoia was at its height. They won’t last much longer.

But two of my closest friends are in one of those buildings, in the tiny flat we share, making us food and getting ready to go out tonight. The fading red spells burn a permanent warning onto my eyelids.

I can’t help them. I can’t do anything at all.

“Diz!” Ania shouts, seizing my arm. “They’ll be fine, they know what to do. Come on!”

I wrench my gaze away from the blocky towers, so out of place among the unyielding steel buildings around them, and give in to Ania’s pull.

We reach the greenspace ahead of the crowds and head straight for the warded area in the center, large enough to hold maybe two hundred people. It’s marked off by small solar-powered lights that light up orange to guide people to safety. Ania and I set up at the outer edge, where she crouches down and touches one hand to a glowing line etched into the ground. The edge of the ward circle. A twitch of her fingers, a complicated movement, and she draws away with a threadbare piece of the woven spell, hanging from the tip of her finger like a ragged spiderweb. It casts a sickly sort of gray-blue pall over her skin as her eyes scan the pattern, no doubt identifying weaknesses and formulating a plan to reinforce it. Shielding and warding spells are her jam.

“I really hope your ware holds up,” I murmur under my breath, needing to say it but not wanting to distract her. She shakes her head.

“It’s only the magnaz