of their ratty blue hoodie, pulled something out, and pressed it into my hands. Their palms gently cupped mine as together we held what looked like a mottled egg the color of melting chocolate-chip ice cream. As Jaesin knelt beside us, the egg rocked once, twice, then split open to reveal . . . a tiny golden puppy?
But puppies didn’t hatch from eggs. And they didn’t come in brilliant glowing shades of silver and gold, though it felt real enough as its tiny paws scrabbled at my arm, climbing as high as it could before it started licking me furiously. When I finally realized what it was, I froze, nearly bolted, but the two of them soothed me, drew gentle fingers over the puppy’s floppy ears and scratched its fuzzy golden belly. Eventually I relaxed enough that we all made a big triangle with our legs for the puppy to run around in, making it do tricks and play fetch. By the time the maz lost its energy and the puppy crumbled away, I was sad to see it go.
I climbed down off that roof and went home with Jaesin and Remi that night, and we threw our blankets and pillows on the floor between two of our beds and slept in a pile of limbs and snoring. I’ve never totally lost my fear of maz, but I guess I absorbed the fact that Remi and maz were a package deal and I had to get used to it. And I did, well enough to be around Remi and their little maz creatures, at least. Eventually I figured out that I could work with maz too—to contain it, control it. Make it safer. I started to work on ware, then build my own. Maz gloves, drones, stable storage vials, everything I could think of. I was good at it. If Remi and Jaesin had given up on me back then, I might never have found my talent.
Surely we can’t be broken forever when we have history like that, right?
A sudden “Ha!” of triumph breaks through my melancholy just in time for me to catch Ania and Remi pulling back the edges of the fire wall, broken threads of fraying firaz drifting through the air like ash and embers. Jaesin and I race down the hill to join them, and barely a minute later we’re through to the other side, nothing between us and our goal.
Nothing except a pack of spellwoven berserker rabbits that pop into existence the second we crossed the firaz threshold.
Mother. Fucker.
The rabbits charge, their powerful legs propelling them forward like a herd of angry terriers, teeth gnashing and whiskers quivering. Professor Silva apparently has an imagination like a horror-movie version of children’s cartoons, and the end result is legitimately terrifying. Ania empties the last of her nullaz straight into the front line, the first few rabbits dissolving into a cloud of threads for the others to leap through. Jaesin punches a rabbit that dares to go for the jewels, then punts another straight at Remi, who catches the thing and uses its maz to take out another.
We push forward, Ania throwing tiny shields out as needed, Jaesin kicking and stomping like some kind of dancing murder bear, and me chucking rocks to goad the rabbits into chasing me as I leap over rocks and holes, my legs burning with the exertion.
And then there’s Remi, totally in their element, slinging spells left and right, tearing these damn rabbits down into their component parts and shoving the maz right back in the face of the next one. By their sheer ferocity alone, we fight through the final quarter mile, leaving a trail of scorch marks, dissolving maz, and despair.
By the time we reach the front door of the little house on the wasteland, we’re panting, exhausted, and scraped bloody, alive thanks only to Ania’s talent with shields and Remi’s overall awesomeness at weaving on the fly. Remi honestly seems thrilled by the whole thing, eyes shining with curiosity even as they prop themselves up against one of the porch pillars, totally wiped out.
“I mean, I could weave a rabbit like that if I had, like . . . all day? I’ve done plenty of smaller ones. But for it to just be triggered like that, and to retain its potency after being bound up in that trigger spell—”
“Shut. UP,” I say, wiping a trickle of blood from the heel of one hand. It must be from when I braced