Helen Price stood below. She looked up and met my gaze, and another face flickered in dark amusement over hers, before she ducked into a transport and was gone.
The parcel from the Kinsky hit my hand and a series of clicks and magic clanged in succession.
And as if she was next to me, Olivia’s breath went uneven. I could feel her channeling magic hundreds of miles away, screaming, “No!’
Below, ten of the large storage vats of Awakening magic disappeared in a flush of magic. Then another twenty, then all the rest. In a blink of an eye, they were all gone.
The other Department mages disappeared—hopping on transports, heading in different directions.
“The layer will be destabilized,” Mike said, shock threading his voice. “The Department didn’t even try—”
“All Second Layer troops are withdrawing,” Will said in equal shock.
Voices were overlaying each other on the comms.
“Leaving only the terrorists in such nice, spread apart target zones,” Dagfinn said viciously. “Courser, look at this buffet. We never get such clear shots in game. 03, conserve your containers. Target colors set. Courser, you’re on that one, that one, those three, Troublemaker has five, Balance has four, Destroyer got a block of six, Traveler gets three—”
“They took the magic,” Delia said tonelessly through the sounds of the Bandits using the surveillance spells to fell the terrorists still standing.
“The code. Emergency procedures,” Mike said, shock turning to grim certainty as the last terrorist in the room dropped. “The only way the magic from the Awakenings can be relocated is through an Act of War or if the structure destabilizes beyond repair.”
“This wasn’t a trap set just for us,” Constantine said grimly, helping me up to meet Axer, who was walking toward us. Constantine looked around the devastated room filled with bodies, then up at the Awakening mages whose cages were flickering out. The layer cracked and shifted again. “This is a sacrifice.”
“I can feel their terror,” Neph said. Silent until now, her voice was numb.
“And they have it all immortalized on recorders they set up,” Olivia said, voice scarily even. “The reports and several selective bits are all over the newsfeeds already—they claim they had to take the magic to save as much of the layer as they can. They are already reporting that a cataclysmic event is about to occur, and the sanitarium will be lost as well as the stability of the Second Layer. Because of Ren. The only thing they don’t have is your magical signature, Ren. They have Leandred’s, but if they get yours… Their footage even looks like you are working in tandem with the terrorists.”
“Which begs the question—how did Godfrey Jr. get here?” Constantine walked over and kicked his dead body hard.
“Revive him for questioning,” Trick said immediately.
“There’s no time,” Dagfinn said, voice going tight. “Structural integrity of the building is declining rapidly. Seventy percent—sixty-five percent—Sixty—”
Axer whipped out a storage paper I had given him long ago. It was the paper that had once housed a dozen different terrorists. Magic shot around the room and pulled Godfrey’s body inside, along with a slew of others.
“Godfrey will remain temporarily dead in suspended animation until we need him,” Axer said grimly. The ten-minute timeframe was paused in the paper—a bit of temporal physics that I had done by accident and been hoping to recreate on a medical scale someday.
The layer cracked again, and it snapped the overwhelming patterns back into a normal view. I shoved the Kinsky parcel into my cloak.
“Can you do that to everyone in the building, Dare?” Olivia asked sharply and hopefully.
Axer looked at the over four thousand mages staring back at us. He looked at me and I shook my head, lips pressed against the horrible emotions rising in my throat. “No,” he said grimly.
The building sparked and started teetering. I could feel it shift—shift to slide down the rock, down the cliff, crumbling into the ravine. I had climbed this mountain. I knew how far the canyon lay below.
I looked at the grid of mages in their various states of Awakening—the coherent ones staring back—four thousand plus mages about to die as part of Stavros’s bigger play.
One of the mages near the bottom put her hand against the glass, gaze fiercely connected to mine.
The foundation cracked. I let my cuff fall.
“Ren, you will be blamed,” Olivia said sharply, seeing the motion through Dagfinn’s hacked surveillance.
“I know.” The building tilted.
Axer’s cuff fell next to mine. Constantine looked sharply at him. Axer raised a brow then looked deliberately at Constantine’s already bared wrist.
I closed my eyes and reached out with my magic and froze Crelussa and the Second Layer in a mile radius around Crelussa, using the knowledge I had gained from creating the bubbles in the Third Layer.
“Signature logged,” Olivia said tightly. “The stories are already being spun.”
“How long can you hold the radius?” Axer asked me, gaze switching lightning fast between weak points in the structure.
“Five minutes, maybe. Without consequences.”
Axer turned and shot off a spell so suddenly that I jerked. Two techs rose, struggling, from the floor in his remote grip.
“Please, we can help,” one of them said, flailing at the band around their throat. “We can give you more time. Fifteen minutes, at least.”
He set them down, and held his hand palm out to the side. A spell flew from Constantine to Axer’s hand and Axer twisted it before lassoing it around the techs. “You betray us, even in thought, and you—and your next closest kin—die without the ease of death that falling from this mountain would give you.”
The first tech shook her head in terror, then ran to the controls. “We don’t want the Awakening mages to die. The Department pulled the magic offsite. Why would they do that? We are dead without it.”
“They are sacrificing you,” Axer said, turning away. No longer constrained by a cuff or container, his fingers spit another spell at the floor which spread rapidly in all directions. “Revive any of the others you need. But each person you revive will be under the same death spell until we are physically gone from this site,” he finished without watching as the other tech paused in his scramble to revive two of their coworkers.
The tech revived one, but set a coma spell over the other. A good choice, as the other was one of the techs who had acted suspiciously.
“Can you flip the mountain?” Axer asked me.
“Yes, but I can’t guarantee the results.” I swallowed. Possible cataclysmic repercussions. Crelussa was full of magic. Even with the vats gone, the magic of four thousand Awakening mages and the slew of linchipin wards that survived and held the Second Layer safe equaled the combined force of multiple nuclear bombs. I couldn’t anticipate the repercussions.
There were so many pieces in play. The book had hit the reverse button for me, but this destruction wasn’t mine. It wasn’t one person’s alone—no thread that could be followed.
I shook my head. “But we can save this spot. Build it anew.”