Ekon glowered at Abbee for a moment before giving Kai a broad grin. “Kai Tannen. The last time I saw you was in the Veronna train yard, almost twenty years ago. Do you remember? You had glitter all over you.”
Kai hurried over to the fountain. He looked at Ekon’s feet and picked up the stone disk. Ekon’s image rose up off the ground as if he were hovering, and jittered as Kai turned the disk over in his hands.
Ekon looked around from his perch above their heads. “I’ve been wondering what your accommodations were like in here.” He nodded appreciatively. “Not bad, not bad. Not extravagant, but not poor either.”
Kai dropped the disk on the ground and backed up. “Where did you get an illusion anchor?”
“From our old friend Cragg Rawley, of course,” Ekon said. “Well, not from him from him, but thereabouts.”
Kai grunted. “Where is he? Where do you have him stashed away?”
“Forget it,” Ekon said. “I’m keeping you two separate.”
Abbee hadn’t thought that Cragg Rawley was real, even though he was the most wanted man in all of Akken. Everyone wanted a piece of him, all the way up to the Akken Council. Cragg was the bogeyman of all bogeymen. Passing his name in shady enterprises was instant street cred, though most people were found to have had nothing to do with the kingpin. Abbee didn’t know anyone who’d ever seen the man, and she wasn’t sure he even existed. Ekon seemed to think so.
“You tried to kill me,” Abbee said.
Ekon beamed at her. “And you survived despite significant effort on my part. Imagine my surprise when I got reports that you were in Kiva last week.” He gave her a quizzical look. “Did you buy a plain old seashell and send it to Whimsy Gallaby via a bank transfer box? What’s the significance of a seashell?”
Abbee didn’t want Ekon thinking Whimsy was somehow involved. She told him the truth. “I’ve known her for years, and I like to send her boring mementos of places I visit.”
Ekon nodded. “That tracks with what she said when I dropped by this morning.”
Abbee tensed at the idea of Ekon visiting Whimsy. “Leave her alone. She’s got nothing to do with any of this.”
“Don’t worry,” Ekon said, waving his hand. “She’s fine, she’s fine. She’s got friends in high places.”
Abbee knew who that friend was, and she also knew Whimsy didn’t care for him. Abbee didn’t either, but she felt a begrudging gratitude that Parn Trippers was the person keeping Whimsy safe from Ekon. “Why did you come out to deal with me yourself on that train? You’re an Akken councilor. You’re no common assassin.”
Ekon buffed his fingernails on his armor plates. “I agree. About the uncommon thing.”
“What are you after, Ekon?” Kai asked in a tired voice.
“I’m after whatever will drag you out of this place,” Ekon said. “It’s incredibly obnoxious to know that you’re somewhere in Akken, but no matter how hard we look, we never find you.” He looked over the gate. “That looks like Riverbend Street. River District? I can’t believe you’re in the River District. I was sure it was the North Bend. Parn will be insufferable when he finds out he won our little bet.” He cocked his head at Kai. “That means you figured out how to replicate the ward from that old house. Cragg thought you’d figured that out, but I didn’t believe him.” He frowned. “Which means he won that bet too. I’m losing all over the place today.” He looked at Kai. “We need the cipher, old man. You could die, and it’ll be lost forever. Ipsu died before we could ask. She”—Ekon gestured at Abbee—“had no idea about it when I scanned her two months ago, and … you didn’t teach it to your daughter either.”
Kai hissed, “How do you know about my—”
“About your Emma?” Ekon asked.
“You—” Kai’s face paled. “You have her. Where is she? What have you—”
“She’s fine,” Ekon said. “She’s as disagreeable as you are, though, and hasn’t been forthcoming at all about how to get in here.”
“That’s not her fault,” Kai said. “It’s been too long. She won’t know how to get back. I couldn’t replicate the ward exactly. The knowledge evaporates in a couple of days. She won’t remember, and her feet won’t either. You better not have hurt her—”
“I knew it!” Ekon exclaimed, pumping his fist. “I told Cragg that we should’ve extorted the cipher out of you. He thought the idea was rubbish. Maintained that you were a heartless bastard who’d sacrificed the mother of his own child, and it was a waste of time.” His expression brightened. “I can’t wait to tell him he was wrong.”
“You’re bluffing,” Abbee said. “If you had his daughter, you’d have used her as leverage by now.”
Ekon nodded. “Yes, well, the funny thing about meeting people for the first time is that sometimes you’ve no idea who they are.” He looked at Kai. “Or who their father is. It’s your fault we have her, by the way. It seems that you’ve been keeping some important information from her. She came to us. We’d never have known she even existed if it hadn’t been for you.”
Kai frowned and fell silent.
Abbee filled in the gap. “If you don’t know where this house is, then how did this … what did you call it … illusion anchor get in here?”
“It’s amazing what you can get on the other side of a wall if you just throw it,” Ekon said. “And know the right wall, of course.” He beamed at her. “We have you to thank for that.”
“How did you …? Did you put a trace on me?”
“I told you, that’s impossible,” Kai said. “No trace works in here.”
“You sure?” Ekon asked, a slow smirk spreading across his face.
Kai blinked. Swore. “You tagged her. I thought you had run out.”
Ekon nodded. “We did, effectively. There’s so little of it left. You have absolutely no idea how hard it was to authorize. We know it doesn’t take well on rocks, which is why I never tagged the gems Cragg uses to pay you. Why don’t you wizards write down how to make things anymore?”
“Tagged me?” Abbee echoed.
“Mindless bureaucracy for the win,” Ekon said. “It turns out that if you order surveillance of a market in Joor because you’re looking for a one-armed man, and that person dies, the network doesn’t stop watching unless you tell them to stop. Clever, by the way, going for supplies in a different city.”
“How did you know?” Kai asked.
“You wouldn’t have made the mistake,” Ekon said, “but our one-armed friend habitually visited the same shop. Ipsu is a person of interest to us, and so far as we knew, he didn’t live in Joor. We got suspicious. We’d just ordered the watchers when he went and got himself killed. I thought it ruined the whole plan, but the network kept watching anyways.” He shrugged. “I guess some people love watching for watching’s sake. Luckily, they kept watching for two months, long enough for our durable friend here to show up and ask questions.” Ekon cocked his head at Abbee. “We are, right? We’re friends now.”
“Friends don’t try to kill each other,” Abbee said.
“Maybe I have the wrong friends,” Ekon admitted. He squinted at her. “How did you survive red blades to the chest?” He looked from Abbee to Kai and back again. “Ah, you’re a wizard. Interesting.”
“What? I’m not—”
“You’re stalling,” Kai said.
“I’m not stalling,” Ekon said, affronted. “I’m catching up—”
Kai flicked his finger. The stone disk and Ekon’s image vanished with a loud bang.
“Hey,” Abbee said. “I wasn’t done with him yet. I don’t need someone like him thinking I’m a wizard.”
Kai put his hands on his hips and looked around the courtyard. Swore. He walked past Abbee toward the house. “Come with me. Hurry.”
“What for? Why?”
Kai gestured at the wall to the right of the courtyard. “Hunters are on the other side. They’re breaking in. I can’t keep them out forever. I’ve been betting on the obscurement ward to keep them at bay. It doesn’t work if they’ve got a tag pointing them in the right direction. I can’t stay here, and neither can you.” He walked back into the house. “Come. You’ll be useful where I’m going.”
“Where’s that?” Abbee asked, following him.
“Close the door behind you,” Kai said. “It’ll slow them down.”
Abbee regarded the house’s front door. It was solid, but not that solid. She closed it anyway, and when she turned around, Kai was gone. Abbee heard his boots on the stairs down to the basement. “Wait,” she called, trotting after him. “I thought you said traces don’t work in here.”
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“Magical ones don’t,” Kai said over his shoulder, “but a tag isn’t magical in nature. I don’t know how it works, not exactly, but it’s foolproof. You can’t see it, and you can’t get rid of it either.”
“Does it wear off?”
“Not for a long time. A year, at least. It’s what the hunters used after the Tower fell. It’s how they knew where all the wizards were. They’re coming. We need to go.”
“Go where?” Abbee asked in dismay. “Where can I go that’s safe from them?”
“Nowhere,” Kai said. “But I’ll help you for now, because you can help me with Cragg.”
Abbee didn’t like the sound of that. Distractions usually died first. “I thought you said that you don’t know where he is.”
“I do now. Ekon likes to talk. He told me where Cragg is.”
They reached the basement. Kai turned right and went back through the sitting room and into the hallway he’d sat in before.
Abbee followed him.
Kai saw her. “Don’t touch anything in here.”
Abbee rounded the corner and was confronted with a big room full of … things. She didn’t know what to look at first. Magical lights in the ceiling illuminated numerous tables jammed into the room, among cabinets and shelves holding several workshops’ worth of tools, mechanical parts, beakers, and books. Papers and notebooks everywhere. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the table arrangement, besides making it difficult to navigate the space.
Kai weaved through the mess, picking up random objects and stuffing them into his robes. He grabbed a strange contraption of leather, glass, and metal. It looked like a belt or maybe a glove. Abbee didn’t get a good look at it before it disappeared into a pocket. He grabbed another one and pushed it into the same pocket. Both items seemed too big, but his pocket didn’t bulge.
Against the far wall was a big wooden table with thick legs. Glittering golden liquid bubbled and gurgled in a confusing warren of glass tubes and globes. A thick blob of it sat in the biggest globe and had a blue flame underneath. An air pocket formed in the golden slop and popped with a gelatinous blorp. The air around the table shimmered when Kai got close to it.
Abbee heard a muffled thump, and the whole house shuddered. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. “What was that?”
“Hunters breaking in,” Kai said. He glanced at the ceiling. “I’d imagine they’ve used that explosive compound the university discovered a couple years ago. There’s probably a cart-sized hole in the outer wall. They’re in the courtyard. Don’t worry. We have a little while before they breach the inner shield.” He snatched a set of vials with the golden mud off the table and crammed them into his pockets.
“How do you fit so much into your robes?” Abbee asked.
“Magic, of course,” Kai said. “It’s a bit of a gamble, though. The latest iteration of the pocket design doesn’t have a hard ceiling and causes everything to overrun the buffer.”
Abbee didn’t understand. “What happens then?”
“It’s messy,” Kai said. He stopped at a mannequin wearing a metal cuirass. It had dark interlocking plates covered with runes and other strange designs. “I can’t leave this here.” He looked at Abbee and back at the mannequin. “Hmm.”
“I’m good, thanks,” Abbee said, shaking her head.
“It’s meant for Emma,” Kai warned. “You can’t keep it.”
“Like I said, I’m good. That’ll slow me down.”
“No, it won’t,” Kai said. “It has artifact chips beneath the plating.”
“I’m not … Wait, really?” Abbee moved closer. “Where did you get them?”
“Does it matter?” Kai picked up the cuirass and held it out. “Here, you can wear it over your jerkin.”
Abbee took off her coat and took the cuirass. It had no apparent weight. The outside was metal, but the inside had leather and cloth padding. The stitchwork was meticulous. Abbee pulled the cuirass over her head like a shirt and got her head and arms through the right holes. She got it situated and was about to fiddle with the side straps when she felt the straps tighten by themselves. The plating reconfigured itself around her chest, shoulders, and abdomen, until it was snug around her entire torso. Abbee drew in a deep breath to make sure she still could. Everything felt comfortable.
“That’s neat,” she observed. “If you made this for your daughter, why make it self-adjusting?”
Kai’s face reddened. He coughed. “Yes, well, when I started working on it, she was a lot younger. I … well, um—”
Abbee chuckled at his discomfort. “Wait, how do I take it off?”
“There are two tabs under your ribs,” Kai said, pointing. “Give those a yank at the same time, and the straps will loosen.”
Abbee brushed the tabs with her fingertips. She was about to test them when she noticed the mannequin appeared crushed around the torso. Kai saw her looking and waved his hand. “No, no, don’t worry. I fixed that. Earlier prototype. I had them backward. The tabs work now.”
Being suffocated by magic armor she couldn’t get off sounded painful. Abbee decided to test the tabs while she had a wizard right here, and gave them a good yank. The straps loosened. Abbee pulled off the armor and put it back on. “Are you sure the chips work?” she asked after the straps had tightened again. “I don’t feel any different.”
“There isn’t a full kit,” Kai said. “You’ve got threat detection, temperature regulation, and missile protection. The cuirass itself is warded against puncture and crush damage. It will also slow your descent from heights taller than three meters. All passive effects. You don’t have to do anything. Oh, it also has grapple protection. Movers can’t affect you.”
Abbee had felt happier and happier as Kai listed off the protections, but she felt ecstatic at that last one. Kai’s daughter was never getting this armor back if it kept movers from touching Abbee. She smiled. She could even carry blades again. Abbee wished she’d had the cuirass on her trek from Akken. It would’ve saved her from a lot of pain and suffering. “Does it work on animals?”
“What?”
“Wolves and bears. Does threat detection work on them?”
“You get into fights with bears?”
Another heavy thump shook the house. Abbee held out her hand. “I’ll need my bolt thrower back, please. And my pouches.”
Kai handed over her pouch belt but pushed the bolt thrower into one of his pockets. Abbee felt her brows go up, both at his refusal and his bravery. She wouldn’t have shoved that weapon into her own trousers. She took her pouch belt and held out her hand again. “Look, this armor is great, but I need that bolt thrower. It’s saved my life several times in the past two months. If I’ve got hunters after me, I need to defend myself.”
“No,” Kai said. “I don’t want any more of these out in the world.”
“Marin didn’t either, but she and Ilo let me keep it.”
Kai smiled. “Their judgment has always been suspect. You’ve got that armor. You don’t need the bolt thrower.” He walked away from her.
“Says the wizard who conjures destructive beams of light out of thin air,” Abbee said to his back. “If we catch up to Emma and a hunter is about to shoot her in the back, gonna be a real looker if all I can do is throw rocks.”
Kai stopped. Sighed. “Fine.” He pulled the bolt thrower out of his pocket and handed it over. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“Marin said that too.”
The wizard grunted and went back to scavenging around his workshop for useful items, while Abbee strapped the bolt thrower onto her wrist. She felt better now that she had it again. Safe. Several thumps in a row shook the house. Well, safer.
“Wait, why didn’t Emma take her armor with her when she left?”
“I hadn’t given it to her yet,” Kai said. “Ipsu was going to when she finished her training.”
“Isn’t she nineteen?” Abbee asked. “She should be done.”
“Ipsu said she wasn’t ready.”
Abbee felt a modicum of satisfaction. Ipsu had abandoned her when she was nineteen for Kai’s daughter, who apparently had turned out poorly. If Emma wasn’t ready at nineteen, there was no hope for her. She probably had lots of bad habits. “And she didn’t take it anyway?”
“It was in here, and so was I,” Kai said, “but I’d left those stupid gems out. If I hadn’t, maybe she wouldn’t have felt like she had money to leave. Maybe she’d still be here.”
Abbee remembered running away from Ipsu several times. Even when she knew he’d follow and find her, she’d still tried to get away. She hadn’t liked him much in the beginning. Or at the end. “I doubt it,” she said. “If she wanted out, she was getting out.”
Kai didn’t reply.
Abbee heard something heavy scrape across the floor in the back of the room. “What’s that?”
“Over here,” Kai called.
Abbee picked her way through the workshop. She found Kai standing next to a big wooden box. The box was about three meters long and had metal bands wrapped around its sides. “What’s this?”
“This is how we’re getting out of here.”
Abbee frowned. “In that?”
“That’s right. I’m warping us out, and we’re traveling a long ways. Where we’re going, all the receiving rooms have been sealed and filled with water. Wizards can’t warp themselves underwater, so I’ll warp this tube instead.” Kai opened the tube, swinging the lid up on internal hinges. The tube had canvas sacks and leather bags stuffed into one end and an empty pocket at the other. “I set this up when Emma was eight. It’ll be a tight fit.”
Abbee’s skin crawled at the idea of smooshing herself into that tube with Kai. “Forget it.”
The wizard shrugged. “Up to you. Staying here is a death sentence, though.”
“I’ll take my chances with the hunters,” Abbee said.
“You won’t even see them,” Kai said, shaking his head. He pointed up as another thump vibrated through the ceiling. “When they breach the shield, this house will annihilate itself and everything in it.”
“Annihilate?” Abbee asked. Even when the university suffered explosive setbacks, there was always debris lying around. Sometimes kilometers away. “I’ll survive.” She rapped on her new cuirass. “I’ve got this now.”
Kai snorted. “You’ve lived in a world without wizards for too long. Everybody has. You’ve all forgotten how completely a wizard could destroy something in the old days. Believe me when I tell you that the cuirass won’t save you. Neither will your talent. There’ll be nothing left of this place but a hole in the ground.”
Abbee was about to comment when an otherworldly keening started somewhere upstairs. It grated on her ears and made her hair stand on end.
“Time to go,” Kai said. He climbed into the pocket, pushing a leather bag out of the way with his boots. He reached over and pulled the tube’s lid up, holding it half-open. “Last chance.”
The keening rose in pitch and volume. Abbee felt an overwhelming desire to escape.
She swore and climbed into the tube. Kai grunted as she crammed herself in next to him, lying on her side and so close that his beard scratched her face. She grimaced and tried to get away, but his beard just rubbed on her skin and made her itch. She couldn’t pull her arms up to scratch, either. Abbee hated being this close to him. Hated him touching her. Hated his scent. She pushed away memories of Graywall. Pushed away the fear. Tears welled up at the overwhelming sensation of being trapped all over again, and Abbee squeezed her eyes shut. She hated feeling this way and hated Kai for making her feel it.
The wizard pulled the lid shut. It stopped a few centimeters short. The wizard twitched, and the lid pressed itself against Abbee’s elbow, hard. She was about to protest when she heard something click, followed by an explosion of agony from her shoulder. Abbee shouted in pain.
“Quit screaming in my ear,” Kai said.
Abbee couldn’t see anything in the pitch dark. “You broke my arm.”
“You’ll heal, right? Shut up so I can concentrate.”
The keening sound outside was muffled, but Abbee heard it rise in pitch. Then it cut off all at once. Abbee felt her stomach lurch. They were moving. No, they were upside down. They were upside down and moving. Something thudded into the top of the tube. The bottom. The tube moved slowly, as if something outside were pushing against it. Abbee realized they were indeed underwater.
“Well, that’s a bit better,” Kai said. “Hang on one more moment.”
Abbee hoped the wizard did whatever he was going to do in a hurry. She couldn’t heal her broken arm until she was out of the tube and straightened the limb.
A hissing and crackling sound reached her ears. Kai shifted beneath her. “Hmm, that’s different. I … What the …? Oh, those bastards.”
The crackling got louder.
“What is that?” Abbee asked.
“Pretty sure it’s lava,” Kai answered.
“Lava?” Abbee squeaked, mortified that she’d squeezed out such a sound.
“Don’t panic,” Kai told her. “This means they’ve moved the room. I can’t be sure … Okay. Okay, brace yourself.”
“For what?”
Abbee felt a squeezing all over her body. Her stomach lurched again, and bile rose in her throat. She couldn’t keep it down and vomited—into open air. She blinked and saw blue. Lots and lots of blue. Abbee looked down. She blinked. Looked again. She realized she was looking down at the top of a snowcapped mountain. It was so far away. Kai had warped her straight up into the sky.