Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,61

the ceiling just in front of the stacks, in clear view of every single person who walks through the door: The Professor Aric Silva Memorial Archives.

Not so much of a memorial, I guess.

Holy. Shit.

I triple-check the dates on the letters, but they haven’t changed. The most recent one is from two weeks ago.

I’ll bet anything this is from THE Professor Silva. Remi’s ultimate hero. Dude literally developed the tech that scrubs contamination from maz for MMC, basically saved the world in the middle of the worst maz crisis ever, and he’s not dead.

We need him.

I run out into the main part of the space, pulse pounding in my ears. Remi is going to flip.

“Remi, stars, you won’t believe—”

“Diz, I have to tell you some—”

We nearly collide in the middle of the room, both clutching papers to our chests.

“Remi, you’ll wanna hear this first—”

“Diz, this is huge, I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”

I shut my mouth and take a step back, looking up from the papers for the first time. Remi is deathly pale, their eyes wide and frightened. Whatever it is must be bad.

“You go first,” I say. “Are you okay?”

They shake their head, biting their lip, their eyes squeezed shut.

“I found a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Silva from eight years ago, right before he died. It was ordered to be deleted, so there’s no digital record of it. But the archivist had a printed copy hidden behind the service desk. They were studying maz-15.” They pause for breath, then finally meet my eyes. “Dizzy, they proved conclusively that maz-15 is what makes people ill. Maz-15 isn’t new—it’s the spellplague. And their research was censored by MMC.”

Oh shit.

“Maz-15 is the contaminant that was released underground after the first big earthquake ten years ago,” they continue, flipping through the papers in their hands. “It’s attracted to other maz and binds to it, kind of like magnaz, so it just . . . got into everything. They still couldn’t figure out how exactly it acts on the human body except that it enters through the maz receptors, but—”

They break off and tip their head back, a few tears leaking from the corners of their eyes.

“His doctoral student got ill and died from the spellplague. Because of his research.”

My stomach lurches, and I take a step back away from Remi. Their eyes flash with hurt, but they just shake their head.

“I was so excited, Diz,” they say. Their grip tightens on the bound manuscript. “When you told me there was a new type of maz, I thought, how lucky that I get to live in a time when there’s a discovery like this! I can’t wait to get my hands on it and study it myself.”

They laugh bitterly, and it’s like a knife in my gut. I put Remi directly in contact with the cause of their illness. I took that job, I made everyone do it. After what the spellplague did to them, to my family, I turned around and made everything worse.

I can’t talk about this.

“So, wait,” I say, trying to salvage the situation, managing to sound almost normal. “What do you mean, they censored the research?”

Remi sighs. “Like I said, they wiped it from the records, but also, just look at the timing. This was right before Professor Silva was declared missing, then dead. And now there’s us. We discover maz-15, and we’re immediately targets for an attempted murder.”

I shake my head. “What I don’t understand is why they don’t want this public. Shouldn’t they want everyone to know that maz-15 causes the plague? The more people who know the cause, the more people can work on a cure, right? The scariest thing about the plague has always been the unknown factor. Where it came from, what exactly it was, you know?”

Remi shrugs. “I mean, I kind of get why, if it was eight years ago. Even two years after the plague, everyone was too terrified to even walk into a room with sunnaz-enhanced lights. If it had gotten out that the plague was caused by a new type of maz, I’m not sure anyone would want to touch maz ever again. Bad for their booming post-plague business, once they got it rolling. You know how I feel about MMC, but even I can see the logic there. But why keep it up after all this time? After they started to filter and sell clean maz, proved it was safe?”

A horrible image plants itself in