It sounds so glamorous when you drop it into a conversation. What do you do? Oh, I’m a magician. People’s faces light up when you tell them, they talk about how smart you must be, how they wanted to get a degree in magic but had to settle for poli-sci or marketing, how you must have such a successful career. When you add that you’re a magician at the National Prometheus Magical Refinery, well, that’s even better. My parents are certainly proud. Every time I take them out to dinner, my dad has to mention my job to the waiter, to the table sitting next to us, to people passing on the street. It’s embarrassing, but he’s always beaming when he tells them that his son the magician works for the most important facility in the country.

Right now I don’t feel so important. Right now I feel like I’ve got a screwdriver in my neck and pins and needles in my legs. I’ve been lying on the concrete floor in the service tunnels for close to an hour and a half now, trying to reroute power to a new segment of line that I put in earlier tonight, but the only possible way to get where I needed to be was to unbolt the grate and shimmy myself under the wiring panel. My shoulders are aching from holding my flashlight in the crook of my neck, my face is grimy with dust and sweat, and I’ve burned myself twice on the soldering iron because there’s hardly any room to move. That’s my luck for being assigned to Animus, the oldest block and the top westward horn of the horseshoe that makes up the facility’s layout. It’s the original building, back when the PNMR was a spell factory some seventy or eighty years ago. When it was converted to a refinery, setting up the proper infrastructure took a fair bit of creativity, creativity that I’m currently paying the price for.

“Glamorous,” I mutter to the tangle of wires above my face. “This sure is the life.”

I tell myself that one of these days they’ll have to promote me. I’ve been here three years, after all. And sure, I might not have the same credentials as some of the people up in the control rooms, but I’m one of the youngest magicians ever hired at the PNMR, surely that counts for something. They hired me straight out of university, said they were very impressed with my dissertation and field work, said they had high expectations for my career, and yet somehow I still end up doing grunt work in the service tunnels. I wouldn’t even mind it so much if I didn’t have to work the overnight. I applied for day shift about a month ago and was promptly denied, with the excuse that there weren’t any openings for day shift, which I think is bullshit, personally.

With a sigh, I twist my wrist to check my digital watch: 22:15. It’s technically too early for a lunch break, but I’m irritable and bitter and looking to enact even a little bit of the spite I’m feeling, so I extract my arms from the wiring panel and inch my way out, flinching at the pops and cracks in my spine as I sit up and lean against the opposite wall.

Lunch is a thermos of tomato soup and a cold grilled cheese sandwich, made even less palatable by the permanent musty smell of age that all old buildings seem to have. At least it’s quiet down here. I almost always work alone, which is one of the few perks of my position. No distractions, no small talk. Sometimes I bring my walkman with me, when I’m sure no one will come check on me, but for the most part it’s just me and my thoughts and the occasional crackle from the magimeter clipped to my belt, my canary in the coal mine. We all call them soothsayers. I guess it must have started as a joke, something about how the soothsayer tells your fortune: either you’re going to live or you’re going to die. Down here there’s always a little radiation off the mesmerite feedstock contained in the main buildings, but it’s not enough to do any damage, not unless I tried to live down here for ten or fifteen years, so I don’t worry about it.

Some shifts I work up in the offices, filling out paperwork, writing reports, recording mesmerite readings, things like that. Those shifts are alright as long as I work with the right people, like Hannah or Gustavo, but Hannah’s in Bezoar and Gustavo is in Delphic, so our schedules don’t always line up. And they mostly work in the control rooms. I try not to feel insecure or jealous about it, but it’s like watching classmates graduate while you have to repeat a grade. I’m a magician at the PNMR, sure, but I’m still only the worst of the best. Gustavo keeps telling me that I should talk to the personnel director about it. I don’t know if it would do much good, but Gustavo’s usually right about… well, everything, so I should probably listen to him.

I finish most of the soup, but after just a couple of bites, I put the sandwich away, feeling slightly nauseated. Maybe it’s the gummy cheese, or maybe it’s the headache that’s started to build, but all at once I feel like I’m coming down with something. Mom would say that I’m working myself too hard, and maybe she’s right. I should see about taking a sick day this week, just in case. For now, I’m on the clock, and I can’t keep sitting here forever, as much as I might like to. I stand up and check my watch again: 22:16.

“What?” I murmur with a frown.

I know it’s been at least ten minutes since I last checked it, but there are the numbers, clear as day, and the little flashing dots between them. I shake my wrist and look once more: 22:16. I count to sixty. Nothing changes.

I’m still frowning at my watch when the ground lurches beneath my feet with a bassy boom, knocking me to my hands and knees. A second later, something comes roaring down the tunnel, and a wall of hot air bowls into me like a wrecking ball and sends me sprawling across the floor, cradling the left side of my face as I scream. My face is burning, searing, and the pain scrubs my mind temporarily blank. It’s all I can do to just lie there moaning hoarsely until finally, finally, the burning subsides enough for me to push myself to my knees. My whole body is shaking and my heart hammers so loudly in my ears that it almost drowns out the ringing. What just happened? The words run through my head over and over like a broken record. What happened? What happened? At first I think it must have been fire that burned me, but despite the heat, nothing on me is singed. I stand up dizzily and look around, and my stomach drops.

The electricity is out, the auxiliary generators not yet operating, and all around me are swirling, shimmering, glowing points of color, and there’s a sound; a ticking, crackling sound coming from the soothsayer at my hip, its needle trembling at the far end of the dial, attempting to show me a reading higher than its design allows. My canary has died. Before I have time to panic, I pull the gas mask from my tool bag, slip it over my head, and start running.

With a groaning hum, the generators kick in, illuminating the tunnel in red light as I scramble up the ladder to Animus and pull at the handle of the hatch. It doesn’t budge. I try again and again until I think I might rip my arms out of their sockets, and I realize it’s no use, they must be on automatic lockdown. It occurs to me that I might be trapped down here, but I don’t have time to think about that, so I climb back down the ladder and take off for Bezoar, sending swirls of color in my wake. The further I go, the thicker the miasma gets. There are alarms going off somewhere, but they’re far away and I don’t have time, I don’t have time. Bezoar’s door is locked too. I can only manage a staggering jog now, but I have to keep going. The alarms are getting louder. I climb the ladder. I open the door.

The iron hatch slams shut behind me and I lean my weight against it, wheezing asthmatically through the gas mask before ripping it from my face to pull raking gasps of air into my aching lungs. My soothsayer is still clicking diligently, but the numbers up here are manageable. I pant until my breath begins to come normally, then I look around, getting my bearings. The Bezoar-Centauri hall is empty and I step forward tentatively. My boots crunch on the dust and debris that coats the normally clean floors.

“Hello?” I call out. Nothing. I keep walking.

In the auxiliary generator’s weak light, everywhere looks like a photographer’s dark room, or maybe a haunted house at a carnival. The warning sirens from the next block over—so it must be Delphic—are still blaring, but they’re muted, just a lingering anxiety that fades too easily into the background. It occurs to me that they should have been triggered in this building as well. I don’t know why they weren’t. Something’s faulty. A lot of things are faulty, I remind myself, and try not to focus on the searing spot on the side of my face. I think it’s spread already; where my collar rubs my neck, the skin stings like hell. Just around the corner and at the end of the next hall is the main control room for Centauri, and in it, as in all the control rooms, is the emergency first aid kit complete with hexide tablets. A couple of those will at least give me a fighting chance until I figure out what’s going on, or, at the very least, find another person who does know. Of the one hundred seventy-six engineers, electricians, magicians, mechanics, and custodians on duty tonight, I have yet to see a single one. No one in the tunnels, no one in the hall, no one on the intercom. There should be someone, anyone. Then I round the corner and there is.

At the end of the long hall is a pale face. It’s dark down there, I can’t quite make out who it is from such a distance, but I hurry towards them anyway.

“Hey!” I cry out as I approach, waving a hand. “It’s Wolfe, from Animus. What’s happened, I can’t—”

My feet skid to a stop. I know that face, but it looks wrong. Surely that’s Ilyana Hobeck, one of Centauri’s chief mechanical engineers. Her face is surrounded by shadows, her head cast down ever so slightly, her eyes closed. Her black hair, usually pulled back in a tight, braided bun, is hanging disheveled over her brow.

“Dr. Hobeck?” I murmur, my voice cracking. “Ilyana, is—is that you?”

The face tilts up jerkily, like a marionette, and the eyes open to show a horrible blankness, dark and glassy as obsidian. She looks tired, as though I’ve just woken her from a dream and she’s forgotten where she is. This isn’t right.

“This isn’t right,” I breathe.

Ilyana’s face tilts. Then, slowly, stiffly, it begins to move. A foot slams down on the ground, then a second, a third, a fourth. Claws scrape, lungs heave, black scales hiss across the linoleum. The thing wearing Ilyana’s face comes into the red glow of the back up lights and I want to scream and scream and scream but my muscles are seized up tighter than a coil spring and all that comes out of me is a strangled wheeze. Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, nine, eight...

The massive beast draws air into itself, groaning and creaking like a bellows, then Ilyana’s mouth opens—shapeless, slack, corpselike—and a word ekes out in a deep, eerie whistle.

“Whhhulfff…”

I’m running before I even know that I can. I’ve turned a clean hundred eighty degrees and I’m sprinting back the way I came, skimming through the halls, my feet barely touching ground, sweat streaming down the side of my face. I’ve never run like this in my life, and some calm, stupid part of my brain wonders where this speed and stamina was when I tried to take up jogging last spring. The other part of my brain, the one that’s currently panicking, is coming to terms with a difficult truth. That level of magic poisoning shouldn’t be possible. There are fail-safes in place, procedures, extensive training, iron-lined walls. It’s only been maybe fifteen or twenty minutes since I felt the explosion, if that’s what it was, but Ilyana looked as though she’d been exposed for months, years!

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The pieces are coming together, but not before a sharp stitch in my side makes me stagger and fall against the wall, gasping. I sink to the ground and try to get my thoughts in order.

Here’s what I know: Around 21:30 I felt… an explosion? What else could it have been? I went through the service tunnels under Bezoar and up to the connecting hall to Centauri, emerging at approximately 21:45. I found Ilyana… or what’s left of her. I think I can safely deduce that the problem occurred in Delphic, but if Ilyana was affected so drastically, and if there was enough contamination to reach me, even as far away as Animus...

My thoughts fizzle out into incoherency with the horror of my realization: Something has gone horribly, catastrophically wrong. There’s no other explanation I can conceive of. I wonder how much raw magic has been released already? Is everyone else dead, or, like Ilyana, on their way there? Were there others down in the tunnels? What if I’m alone? What if I die here? What if—?

“Shut up,” I whisper suddenly, “Stop acting crazy.”

There must be something I’m missing. Centauri and Delphic run tests all the time, I could have missed the memo. I’m sure they have it under control, they have to, there’s a contingency plan for everything. There may have been casualties, but it has to be under control.

I press my slick palms against my eyes and take a deep, desperate breath, then I wipe the tears from my face and cry out as a shock of pain runs through my hand. I look down. There’s blood pooling in the lines of my palm, seeping from a series of thin, precise cuts, like I’d taken a razor blade to myself. With my good hand, I touch my face gingerly and feel something sharp. Several things. I trace the shape of one, and its edge nearly cuts me again. It’s curved to a gentle point, like a scale or a feather, and there are a dozen or so of varying sizes across my face and jaw. They’re growing out of me, tearing straight through the skin. I thought it was sweat running down my cheek, but now I realize my face and neck are sticky with blood.

I’m feeling lightheaded, numb, and my breath is too quick and too shallow. I can’t breathe right, I can’t feel my fingertips, I can’t make myself move, but I can’t make myself stop shaking because my body is going to tear itself apart and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, it’s happening so fast. Is this how Ilyana felt while she was still human? How long until I’m not me anymore?

I hold my breath until I think I might pass out, then I let it go with a gasp and force my lungs to do as they’re told; taking in… letting out… I just have to think, just think for a moment, Wolfe.

I’m closer now to Bezoar than to Centauri, not that I can make myself go back there anyway. The longer I stay still, the less time I have to fix things. I don’t know what there is to fix or how a low-level magician like me is going to fix it, but I have to do something, and the first step is taking some hexide. I stand up and steady myself on the wall, forgetting my bloodied hand. As I grimace and pull it away, I’m struck momentarily by the sight of the red handprint on the white wall, like a morbid callback to the earliest cave paintings, and I imagine my handprint here for a hundred years, a thousand. My trauma forgotten, yet immortalized. I tear my eyes away and start walking to Bezoar’s control room.

About halfway down the long hall, the fluorescent lights are on. There aren’t any sirens here, but the warning lights on the ceiling are spinning and flashing silently. I round the corner, my heart jumping, but there’s no monster waiting for me, just the control room with, I notice, its iron security door activated. I bang on the metal.

“Hey! Anybody here?” I yell hoarsely, “It’s Wolfe from Animus! Let me in!”

I wait, but I don’t hear an answer. I slam my fist on the door a few more times.

“Please! Somebody!”

Just as I’m about to give in to panic, a buzzer sounds, and the security door slides open with a mechanical squeal. The person behind the door is wearing a ventilator mask, but when they speak, I recognize Hannah Jeong’s voice.

“Jesus Christ, Wolfe,” she breathes. “Your face!”

I nod tiredly as she ushers me inside and leads me to a desk chair, which I fall into gratefully. The security door buzzes again and slides closed behind me, and I notice I’ve left a crooked trail of blood drops on the linoleum.

There are about twenty other people in the room, and they’ve all stopped to stare at me. I wonder what I look like now. Hannah is shaking hexide tablets into her hand from a bottle that was already sitting on the table with the first aid kit. She hands a couple to me and I swallow them dry as she cleans my hand and bandages it in gauze.

“What’s going on?” I ask. The others glance at each other.

“I was hoping you could tell us,” Hannah says. “All we know is that power levels in Delphic have flatlined, and Centauri and Ether aren’t far behind. We can’t get ahold of any of them. The soothsayer’s readings started getting a little too high so we went into lockdown.”

She points at the built in magimeter in the desk. The number it’s displaying isn’t awful, but it’s definitely not good. I sigh and bite my lip—Are my teeth sharper than they used to be? I shake the thought from my mind.

“Here’s what I know,” I say, and I relay the information I have. I can’t bring myself to go into much detail about Ilyana, but they seem to get the idea.

“An explosion,” Hannah echoes. Her voice is even and detached, but her eyes fixate on a far away point. “How is that possible?”

I shake my head. “I can’t figure it out. Not without seeing it for myself, maybe. But it was powerful enough to do this from three buildings away.”

I point at my face, still not exactly sure what I’m showing them, but from the looks they’re giving me, it can’t be good. At least the hexide is kicking in. The throbbing in my cheekbone has subsided and I don’t feel any fresh blood dripping down my neck.

“What’s been done so far?”

Hannah shrugs in a helpless sort of way. “Nothing. We took our hexide, we went into lockdown, but we’re sitting ducks.”

“What about emergency services?”

“External lines are all down.”

“What?”

“The telephone lines run next to Delphic and Ether, they must have been damaged. The only people we can reach are Animus and they’re just as clueless as we are.”

I take a deep breath and tilt my head up to the drop-tile ceiling. There’s a water stain that looks like a lopsided heart, and I focus on it until I forget its shape and it’s just a brownish blob.

“Has anybody been sent over to check it out?” I ask quietly.

Hannah pauses then says, “To Delphic?”

I nod.

“No, of course not!”

“Maybe somebody should.”

“Wolfe, if it’s as bad as you think it is, that’s a suicide mission. You know that, right?”

I feel her eyes on me, but I keep staring at the water stain. We’re both quiet for a moment, then I ask, “Does anybody have a mirror?”

The others shuffle with little shakes of their heads until one of them pulls a small powder compact from her pocket and hands it to me carefully, quickly, like she’s afraid to touch me. I open it up before I can change my mind and survey the damage.

The first change I notice is in my eyes. The right is its usual dark brown, but the left is now a bright, eerie lavender. I blink a few times, feeling off balance. Under my left eye and down my jawline, peeking through the dark smear of drying blood, are scales of what looks like iridescent glass. I tilt my head back and forth and watch the colors shift dazzlingly, purple to green, pink to gold. I hate how beautiful it is.

“I’ll go to Delphic,” I say, watching my reflection’s lips move over the beginnings of sharp fangs. I fold the compact shut and look at Hannah. “Let’s face it, I’m done for anyway, aren’t I?”

“Wolfe,” Hannah starts hoarsely. “Alex. Don’t. We’ll find a way out of this, we’ll—we’ll get you to a hospital—”

“And then what?” I snap, pushing myself out of the chair. “What can they do? Keep me bedridden while they pump hexide into me for the rest of my life?”

“There’s a chance the magic will stabilize! Don’t throw that away!”

I laugh bitterly as I turn away from her, but I don’t respond. She knows why, too; the chances of stabilization are around five-hundred thousand to one, and even then, it would only buy me eight or ten more years at best. Without meaning to, I touch my face, rubbing one of the glass scales distractedly.

“Look, Hannah. You and I both know I’m a dead man walking. The least I can do is help mitigate the damage, especially if no one else will. I don’t have to tell you the potential devastation an accident like this could cause.”

I look over my shoulder at her, and she looks like she’s going to cry. I really hope she doesn’t, because then I’ll start crying too. Instead, she pulls off her ventilator and lets it hang around her neck. Then she puts her hands up to her face and sighs into them. “Let me call Animus. I’ll run it by them.”

I sink back into the chair, resting my elbows on my knees. There’s an itching in my left arm and a smattering of blood on my sleeve that I hadn’t noticed before. More scales, I can only assume. I wonder what I’ll be by the end of all this. If they find my body afterwards, will they bury me? I imagine the funeral, my parents crying as my iron-lined casket is covered in two meters of concrete. Seems like a lot of trouble. Maybe they’ll just cremate me and put a plaque up somewhere. Or maybe I’ll die before I can even fix anything, and my mutated corpse will rot in the tunnels under Delphic without anyone knowing I’m there.

I jump when Hannah says, “Alex, they want you back at Animus.”

I hate that she’s calling me by my first name. It feels too personal, too real. This isn’t happening to Alex. Alex is supposed to be visiting his brother this weekend. Alex likes to get drunk with his friends from work and sing bad karaoke. Wolfe is the magician, the one who’s poisoned with magic, leave Alex out of it.

“Did they say anything else?” I ask.

“Dr. Sodeya wants to discuss the options with you. He said… He said for you to wear a contamination suit.”

She seems a little embarrassed about the last part, but I don’t begrudge Sodeya for the extra precaution. After all, it doesn’t escape my attention that the soothsayer’s readings spike when I get close to it.

I nod and stand, taking one of the white, plasticky suits from the locker at the back of the room. The noise of it sounds especially loud to me, but I step into it and start zipping it up. Hannah is still watching me in silence, then she helps me position the masked hood over my head and clamps it into place. Even through the visor, I can see the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

“Don’t forget,” she says so only I can hear, her voice wavering slightly. “It’s trivia night at Vasily’s tomorrow. You know we can’t win without you.”

She tries to smile, but her lips shake and it turns into more of a grimace. I put my good hand on her shoulder and give it a squeeze. I can’t say anything, because if I try to speak, I know I’ll start crying and I won’t be able to stop. I pat her shoulder once more, then I walk across the room. One of the other engineers hits the button for the door to the Animus hall. I don’t look back.