at this, but my little five-foot-four ass is all she has right now. At least she smells good, like expensive sweet perfume and freshly cast maz. The people around us stumble and slam together like an accidental mosh pit, stinking of fear and trampled dirt instead. Gross.
As always, it’s only a matter of time before things turn ugly. As the wards’ protective circle fills to capacity, people start shoving, crawling between legs, bordering on violent in their attempts to get inside. One man, his eyes unnaturally bright and sharp, gets right up in Ania’s face and grabs her by the shoulder.
“Don’t you dare touch her!” I snap in the man’s face as he tries to yank her out of the circle.
“She can weave her own wards, she doesn’t need to be inside,” he snarls, and shoves her hard. She rolls and hits the ground on her back, hand held aloft to protect her ware, the breath rushing out of her in an audible “Oooof!”
Outside the wards.
No, he did not.
Before I can think it through, the man’s blood is on my knuckles, and he staggers back with a hand cupped protectively over his wrecked nose. I shake out my fist to soothe the ache radiating up my arm and give him my best glare to convince him there’s more where that came from, rather than the only sad punch I can manage. The weaver next to us shoves the guy the rest of the way out of the circle and summons up a burning stream of firaz from the stores in her bag, twirling it threateningly between three fingers.
“Back off unless you want a bomb shoved up your ass,” she snarls, standing shoulder to shoulder with me.
“Two bombs,” Ania adds as she struggles to get the shaking ground and her feet to cooperate. “You wanna explode from both ends?”
“Let’s do it,” the weaver says with a feral grin, one that Ania matches as she takes her place back in the circle.
Damn. Ania has clearly just met her long-lost sister, and together they are fierce.
As I brace Ania through another particularly rough tremor, the man falls on his ass, blood pouring over his fingers, and one of the officers finally intervenes.
“How’s your supply doing?” I ask Ania as another techwitch steps back from the circle, run dry.
“Fine, unless this quake goes on much longer,” she replies. “I filled up between the exam and our job.”
Of course she did. She can afford it.
“Crack forming!” someone shouts behind me, and I whirl around in horror. The ground hasn’t given way yet, but spiderweb lines dance underfoot—slim and deadly promises. Three weavers break off from the main circle and push their way through the crowd, working together on a single spell to knit the broken earth. Worse than the cracks, though, is the view beyond the circle: the Cliffs. The spells protecting it pulse once, twice . . . and fail.
The building goes dark.
Remi and Jaesin are defenseless.
“No!” I shout as the first of the bricks topple from the roof, smashing to the ground in a cloud of dust. I push past a young family clinging together and break away from the circle, the muscles in my legs burning as they struggle to compensate for the bucking ground. This is a long one—when will it end?
“Diz, wait!” I hear from behind me, just as an officer yells, “Back inside the wards!” I put on speed and leap over a mess of shattered glass and twisted metal. You’d think everything that could break would have already done it, but there’s always something ready to give way, something on its last gasp of life. Every earthquake chips away a little more. It’s only a matter of time before it takes down the Cliffs too.
Maybe only a matter of seconds.
I subvocalize a command to my deck and bring up a voice call, an obnoxious ringtone punctuating every second they don’t answer.
“Pick up, damn it, where the hell are you?” I shout at Remi’s photo, hovering in the corner of my vision.
It doesn’t help. They don’t answer.
I pull up Jaesin’s comm code instead, but a yank on the back of my shirt collar drags me to a stop by the throat. I gasp, choke, and stumble back into Ania, just as the ground gives one more groaning shudder . . . and splits open in front of me.
The fissure starts about fifty feet away, a single glowing wound in the street that leaks the barest spark of beautiful, benign-looking