it against the wall. The passage below lights up, and at first glance I think it’s string lights lining the staircase. As we step into the narrow stairwell, though, I get a closer look at the tiny glowing balls of sunnaz in the shape of lightning bugs, adhered to the wall at regular intervals.
“They’re beautiful,” Ania says, reaching out to touch one of the tiny fireflies. It twitches away from her finger, then takes flight, settling higher up on the wall. Ania lets out a delighted laugh, eyes shining in the dim light.
“But where do you get enough maz to run all this?” Jaesin asks, ever the practical one. “There’s so little ambient maz out here, and to buy this much would be so expensive. In Kyrkarta most people can barely afford the maz to keep their houses standing.”
“Because Kyrkarta is a cesspool,” the professor says with disdain. “I’m the one who invented the scrubbing technology that separates out the maz-15 from the rest of the freely occurring maz. MMC may own that patent because it was created in their labs, but I’d love to see them try to stop me from setting up a private system in my own home. We have no competition for maz out here, and we’re barely two miles from Jattapore’s maz source, the caves down by the shore. We have all we need and more.”
The staircase dumps us into a room with a single door and nothing else. The professor presses his palm to the door, and the metal under his hand glows a faint steely blue, followed by an echoing click. The door swings open, and the room beyond flares to brilliant life.
The ceiling looks as if it’s been painted with pure sunnaz, the whole thing emitting a soft daylight glow throughout a room exactly the size of the one above our heads. Fourteen vast cylinders line the far wall, brimming with the fourteen common maz strains, more maz than Remi and Ania could go through in five years of daily use. Another smaller cylinder sits at the end of the row, glowing with eerie violet light. Maz-15. A deck screen the size of a bay window occupies another wall, displaying spell design sketches and calculations that are way over my head.
“Does this extend under the entire house?” I ask.
The professor nods. “Mimics the layout exactly. The kitchen is fully stocked with nonperishable food and enough water for a year. There’s a bedroom, a bathroom, everything we have upstairs. Once that door shuts above us, it triggers a concealment spell on the other side. Even if someone who means us harm manages to cross the wasteland and get into our home, the chances of them finding us or my work are slim.”
“Brilliant,” Remi whispers, reaching out to touch one finger to the giant cylinder of magnaz. The sheer amount of power contained within those glass walls is honestly unsettling. To me, at least. Remi looks ready to lick the glowing golden magnaz chamber.
“How long did it take you to gather this much?” they ask.
The professor strides forward and lays a hand against the cylinder of firaz, sighing. “I started collecting shortly after MMC ran me out of town. I built this place as soon as I was able, and once both levels were finished, I kicked on the extractors.” He raps a knuckle against a series of pipes that run into the ceiling next to the cylinders. “They’ve been full for the last two years. Feel free to replenish whatever you used to get out here.”
He notably does not apologize for the berserker rabbits.
Ania paces over to the deck screen to study the formulas while Remi refills their stores, but Jaesin hangs back for once, at a loss and out of his depth. I feel much the same way, honestly. The whole place positively drips with maz, more maz than any of us has seen since we were children. For Ania and Remi, it’s like something out of a fantasy. For Jaesin and me, it’s a whole vast world of power and knowledge we’ll never be part of. Our eyes meet, and for once, he doesn’t glare at me. He just shrugs, and his gaze returns to Remi, watching their attention bounce from thing to thing, bright-eyed and amazed. After a moment, though, he clears his throat and steps forward.
“Hey,” he says, voice gentle. “I know this is a lot, but we should probably do what we came here to do, right?”
Remi deflates