Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,79
with pent-up frustration. Remi just looks sad. Unsurprised. They’ve always hated MMC, so I guess it isn’t much of a stretch for them to believe the worst. That the company would literally commit murder to cover up something that devastated not just our city, but the world. That killed our parents. They tried to have us killed too, after all. What else are they capable of? My whole body goes hot, then cold, shivering.
The professor scrolls through the document until he comes across a cutaway diagram of the planet, the same six-layered image we’ve all seen at school.
“Crust, outer mantle, inner mantle, outer core, inner core, and here.” He traces a finger along the narrowest section, a thin, bright green layer between the outer and inner mantle. “The Maz Sea, where the planet converts heat and pressure energy into the fourteen previously known strains of maz. Twenty years ago or so, before you all were born, a little company called Maz Management Corporation began drilling deeper than anyone ever had, all the way down to the Maz Sea, to create greater flow and access to high levels of the freshest, most potent maz. Their idea was that if the drilling worked, we would be able to build new cities around drilled maz wells, rather than being restricted to constructing settlements around natural maz points like geysers, canyons, the caves here, and so on. It was a decent idea, though some of us were opposed. We were concerned that too many of these human-made wells might result in more maz being used than the planet could produce. It turns out that was the least of our problems.”
My fingernails dig into my thigh as I force myself to breathe, breathe. I can already see where this is going.
“MMC managed to drill deeper and deeper, advancing drilling technology in the process and making good money off of it. When they finally reached the Maz Sea, it was . . . amazing. We knew of its existence through subsurface imaging, but had never interacted with it. It was the most important discovery of the century. I felt honored to be alive for it.”
I glance over at Remi, who has their eyes closed, breathing steadily as the vitaz mist swirls around inside their mask. They said almost the same thing about maz-15. It was a marvel, a fabulous opportunity, a gift to be able to study it. How bitter real life is in comparison—and the professor isn’t even done.
“The maz they harvested was incredibly potent, half again as effective as the stuff that made its way to the surface naturally. After a few months of observation, when it appeared that the planet naturally reestablished an equilibrium by adapting its maz production, the MMC engineers got curious. They wanted to drill even deeper. See what else they could find.”
“And they found maz-15,” Remi says, quiet.
“They did,” the professor says, with the air of a man leading a funeral service. “They pierced the inner mantle, and out poured this new, powerful form of maz with incredible properties the likes of which we’d never seen before. But it killed the drill operators who discovered it on contact. And there was no one to spread the word. No warning.”
Parents there. Parents gone. No warning. None at all.
“Thousands, then millions of people died before we put together that it was this new strain of maz that was killing them, but by then the entire Maz Sea was contaminated. Kyrkarta got it the worst, obviously, being the site of the original rift. Huge amounts of maz-15 spilled out of station twenty-nine and the fissures in the bridges district. The currents of the Maz Sea carried the contamination far and wide, though, so that even Wisst City, on the opposite side of the planet, was affected, albeit to a lesser degree at first. Soon maz-15 made its way to the surface across the whole planet.”
Ania shakes her head, face twisted in horror. “I can’t believe they would just . . . let this happen.”
Can’t she, though? After everything else we’ve seen from MMC, after they tried to kill us to hide this secret, is it really so surprising they’d take things so far?
“Why is maz-15 so deadly? What is it that makes it so different from other maz?” Remi asks, their voice muffled by the treatment mask.
The professor sets down the deck interface with shaking hands, his eyes haunted. “This is maz that planetside life was never intended to touch. My colleagues