I didn't let the other man finish before I sucked the dome into my center, out through my palms, then shoved it into the ground.
The earth cracked and erupted around them, downing everyone still standing, and forcing them to use the remaining magic in their containers—the only magic they could use—to heal themselves and avoid falling into the fissures.
Power filled me. The sweet, sweet ambrosia of infinite possibility.
I called magic to me like Mike had taught me to call the wind, sifting a little of each crossed thread into the elements whirling along the thin lines of my left palm—letting them cross-ruff into a ferocious storm of elemental parts. A bridge formed, and I let threads trickle out before carefully—carefully— knitting the area back together—closing fissures, righting street lamps, and soothing active heartbeats nearby.
I flexed my right fingers and let other threads envelop the groaning, twitching Department figures around me—pinning them in place. I lifted the leaf shells and lined up the bodies, applying one tracking sticker, two, then a slightly forceful application of the third on the man who'd called the boy an abomination.
Power hovered in my hands. Paint bubbled within me. I could remake them.
The layer trembled.
I could do anything right now. I could force open their minds. Make them tell me what they knew. Make them repent for killing teenagers whose only mistake was being born open to magic.
I knew exactly who could help me do it, too. I nudged the closing cracks into a different kind of opening. A small push, and—
Shadows erupted from the ground, like a freight train of terror, blowing chunks of concrete into the sky before morphing into the most unscrupulous of the Department’s henchmen.
I swore as I pushed the remaining stickers onto the Department grunts—hoping they bled into their skin as fast as promised.
I turned to the boy who was staring at me in shock from the cave of his pavement cocoon. I lifted my hand, visualizing what I wanted while pulling the layer magic into a pyramid in my palm, then flipped it and shoved downward, pushing the pavement and the boy through the ground.
The ground vibrated around me like it always did when I used magic between layers in haste. My stomach heaved. The earth split in a deep vee. I grabbed for the edge and drew the vee into a sheer line.
“That's going to cost you, little girl,” growled the familiar voice. Kaine smiled ominously and threw down his shadowed hands. Large chunks of pavement ripped upward to hover menacingly in the air. “Destroying another town, tsk. You just made national news.”
I ducked the concrete slab he threw but the impact caused a large fault line to split the earth.
Repair, repair, repair, I ordered my magic.
A net flew toward me as I repaired the slice, and at the last moment, I rolled to the side. The net grazed me, and blood streamed down my leg.
“I’ve been waiting for weeks to play.” Kaine laughed as he threw a shadow that I barely dodged.
The static sounds of a First Layer broadcast stuttered forth from a praetorian who looked like a Dali-assembled version of his boss.
“A town that hasn't experienced an earthquake in a hundred years has just been torn apart by—”
“Miraculously, the destruction has mended itself—”
“What were we just talking about, Raymond?”
The suppression spell had taken hold.
“Too bad that the spell doesn't work on mages,” Kaine cooed. “They will all know how you rend the world. They will know how you can never be trusted. So much destruction. And all for an unknown. A feral.”
A shadow wrapped around me, and I sliced through it.
He smiled darkly. “You can't save them all. Your little pets. Do they remind you of someone—of your brother, of home? Sad little girl.”
I pulled magic, letting its power fill me, then released it in three concussive waves, pushing the shadows back, and quickly erecting a barrier. My gaze spun to the house across the street—its sad solar lights reflecting the flames shooting up the side of the house.
Rain. Rain.
A downpour began at my directive, but lightning struck the yard with a too forceful push of power, and Kaine's shadows slipped around my barrier. The neighborhood sizzled and shook dangerously. I grabbed the next lightning bolt with a slipping grip and wrapped it around me.
I had expected Second Layer reinforcements—a second wave of Department hitters, but not the praetorians. As Prestige Stavros’s personal guards and enforcers, the praetorians were banned from the non-magical world unless Stavros was physically present or during emergency events. Which meant that Stavros had politically succeeded and been granted emergency powers to capture me.
“You aren't going to last,” Kaine sing-songed as he gave chase, shooting shadows at the whirling storm cloud around me.
I stopped before I reached the park at the end of the block, raised my hand and threw concrete toward a shadow shrieking around a stop sign. I tried not to think of where I had conceived the idea. The shadow slipped through with a moment to spare, unlike the Department grunts in Ganymede Circus, who'd fallen to Raphael.
“I've lasted this long.”
The First Layer was my battleground advantage, not theirs. Power filled me again, this time with an edge of heady exultation.
Kaine's eyes narrowed, but there was something glinting beneath his expression that I couldn't read. Something akin to pleasure.
“All that magic building up within you. You aren't going to last, Origin Mage.”
I blasted away the first praetorian that swept toward me, and caught the second in a tornado of crimson swirls that coiled the metal climbing structure into a rising, misshapen cone.
No.
Kaine laughed, then Stavros’s face flipped onto that of the praetorian I held in my grip.
“You look tired. Terrorist,” Stavros said in a voice that was both dignified and world-weary—a politician dealing with an unruly populace he was feigning to protect.
“You are the one who deals in terror,” I said.
He smiled. It was an unnerving smile, but there was something barbed about this one that put me specifically on edge.
I threw out my hand and blasted his puppet to the other side of the park and pulled one of the many illegal devices I carried from my cloak. His claim wasn't totally without merit—I had taken a few pages from the terrorists' playbook in that it didn't matter what I carried or how many illegal things I did. If caught, I’d never see the light of day again, no matter what I added to my tally at this point. At least, not without having Stavros buried within my hollowed chest and riding my mind.
A shadow hit my cloak and shrieked.
The Department hadn't figured out how to penetrate my cloak yet. But they would eventually.