Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,51

triggering. If not, figure out which valve it’s at, trigger the new pressure regulator box they installed, set the pressure . . . to 400 percent. At that pressure, all the maz in the pipe would come gushing out from the tap point, right in our faces.

That was what happened, exactly what happened. The pressure spiked for no reason at all, and venting the other points only helped briefly. That was the surge Remi caught, held, protected us all from, right before the explosion. It was designed to trigger an overload as soon as someone tapped the pipe. And the makeup of the maz in this particular pipe was 60 percent firaz. With that amount of pressure behind the raw maz, it would have ignited in a flash. We would have been killed instantly.

It was designed to kill us instantly.

The only reason we survived was because they didn’t count on Remi, who is far more skilled and powerful than their size or age would suggest.

Someone wants us dead. Us specifically.

Because we were sent here, to the only known source of maz-15. If I hadn’t taken that job, that awful too-good-to-be-true final job, we wouldn’t have been tapping this exact pipe, in exactly the right area to be caught in this trap.

This whole thing was a setup.

My brain whirls into high gear, suddenly a thousand times lighter and flying a mile a minute. I download a complete dump of all the data to my deck, then share the relevant code with Davon.

“You see what I see?” I ask as I yank my cables free. When I look up, his expression is dark.

“Someone broke in and installed that device specifically to target you all,” he says.

“Specifically to kill us,” I correct. “Thousands of units of firaz to the face isn’t all that conducive to living.”

He checks the code again and his mouth presses into a hard line.

Yes, someone actually tried to kill us. They probably sent the guy who offered us the job to find me, made sure we’d be coming back to this spot. Those bastards.

They could have killed my friends. Remi, Ania, and Jaesin, they almost killed them.

But why?

“I have to get back to the others,” I say, shoving my deck in my pocket. “They have to know.”

Davon shakes his head slowly as I push past him to get at the pressure regulator—the evidence—with my screwdriver.

“Whoa, whoa, can we slow down for a second?” he asks. “Let’s stop and think.”

I pause with my cables half coiled to stuff back in my pocket and look up. “What’s there to think about?”

He sighs, looks to the ceiling for a moment, then comes forward and puts both hands on my shoulders again, the way my mom used to when she had something serious to say.

“I think you need to leave that unit right where it is.” I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off with a gesture. “Hear me out. Right now, it’s a critical piece of evidence that proves you weren’t responsible for the disaster at the station. If you remove it, then when the MMC crews come to investigate, they won’t find anything to exonerate you. I just . . .”

He pulls me into his chest like he did earlier in the night, but this time it makes my skin itch. I’m vibrating with the need to move, to run, to do something.

“Someone tried to kill you, Dizzy,” he continues, voice strangled. “And you did something really illegal. You’re in a bad position, maybe even more than you realize. This city is just looking for reasons to put orphans like us in custody so they can serve us with mandatory work orders, force us into the factories or into sanitation or whatever. A court could ban you from touching a deck again for years, Diz.”

It’s like a hook in my gut, tugging me open and spilling me out over the filthy sewer ground. I can’t go without my deck. Coding is complicated, immersive, powerful . . . distracting. It’s what I’m good at. It’s everything.

But my friends . . . they’re everything too. If they aren’t already gone.

I have to get back to them.

I shake my head and shove the cables in my pocket, but step away from the auxiliary pressure unit. “Fine. I’ll leave the box, but I at least have to let my friends know. I can’t let them carry this around, thinking they killed all those people. And they need to know that someone’s after