The quake came—and it didn’t come gently. It tore away the last of my magic, leaving me weak. Mortal. Beside me, Nero groaned in pain, my loss magnified by his own. I could feel his anguish, like a hammer had slammed down on him, shattering him. A tear slid from my eye. And at that moment, I realized that I wasn’t just carrying his burden; he was carrying mine. He felt everything that I did, and it hurt him.

So I bottled up my thoughts, my pain, everything.

“So that’s what it takes for you to reel in your thoughts,” Nero joked, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

We looked up at the sky of spiders. His psychic magic gone, he waved his hand to create a lightning whip. The most powerful Legion soldiers didn’t even need a weapon. They could form one out of pure magic.

“Wait,” I said as he prepared to strike out at the monsters. “I have a better idea. Right now the spiders are on tons of buildings.” I pointed at the ugly concrete building in front of us. “But if we could lure them all to one place…”

“We could get them all at once,” he finished for me.

“Exactly. Once they are all on that building, you need to electrocute the whole thing.”

He looked at the building, then at me. “You are not drawing them to that building. You will get electrocuted too.”

“I’m tough. I’ll be ok.”

“No,” he said stubbornly. “I’m not using you as bait.”

“I have no magic, no supernatural strength. I can’t take down even one of them. I can only be bait. That’s the only way I can help.”

He stepped in front of me. “I will take care of them myself. I have enough magic left for that.”

“You probably do. But these aren’t the first monsters we’ve faced here, and they won’t be the last. If you burn out now, you won’t have enough magic left later. This is a marathon, Nero.” A sick, deadly marathon orchestrated by the gods. “You have to pace yourself.” I set my hand on his arm. “We can do this. Together. You have to trust me. This isn’t the time for prim and proper fighting. To survive this, you’re going to have to fight a little dirty.”

When Nero opened his mouth to protest, I grabbed a handful of sand from the ground and threw it in his face. Then, not looking back, I ran toward the building.

“That wasn’t funny, Pandora,” he called out between coughs.

I kept running. My lungs burned, my feet felt like lead—and I was hardly moving at all. I’d sure taken my supernatural speed for granted.

“Come and get me!” I screamed at the spiders as loudly as I could.

Their heads all turned toward me, frozen for a moment in time. Their red eyes shone like hundreds of little lights. I slashed my knife across my arm and flicked it, sprinkling the sand with my blood. The spiders unfroze and stampeded toward me.

I ran into the building and slammed the door shut behind me. The walls shook and trembled. The spiders were crashing their hard, armored bodies against the building. They tore at the windows, the door, the holes in the walls—anything to get inside. Bits of glass, concrete, and brick rained down on me. Noxious green smoke, smelling of burning metal and acid, rose from the webs they splatted against the building. The noise of it all was awful, simply wretched. It sounded like a metal workshop, a power saw, and a horror house—punctuated with the sound of someone’s head hitting a gym mat over and over again. The spiders were almost inside. Parts of their legs had already broken through the walls.

Ribbons of purple lightning blasted across the building, shooting up level by level. The magic covered every wall, spilled through every window. The stink of burning flesh overwhelmed the blend of metal and acid. Spiders dropped dead to the ground like black rain.

I ran for the exit, grabbing a wooden board from the ground. I slammed the board against the door, but the spiders’ web had sealed it shut. I kept hammering the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

I tossed the useless board aside. There was a broken window nearby. I sprinted toward it and jumped through. I landed hard on a dead spider on the other side, slipping over its sleek body.

I peeled my face off the dirt. Nero stood over me, the last remnants of lightning fading from his hands. He shook off the magic, then extended his hand to help me up. He looked from the damaged building, to the piles of dead giant spiders.

Then he looked at me and said, “Don’t you ever do that again.”

I smirked at him. “I told you it would work.”

A dead spider fell off the roof of the building. Nero picked me up and swept me out of the way. Had he moved a second later, the monster’s corpse would have crushed me.

“Bringer of Chaos.” He tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.

I grinned at him. “Admit it. Your life was boring before me. You’d always yearned for a healthy dose of chaos in your life.”

Nero fell to his knees, his face contorted with pain. Through our bond, I could feel his magic fading.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’ve lost my ability to shift.”

I wiped black spider blood from my sleeve. “That’s ok. We can practice Shifter’s Shadow later.”

As soon as I said it, I realized how stupid it was. I shouldn’t have been worrying about my training for the fifth level right now, when we were in a fight for our lives. I didn’t even have magic right now. Ronan’s potion hadn’t just taken out my magic; it had muddled my mind. I guess that was kind of the point of the trials: to strip us of everything and set us loose in this fallen city.

Nero set his hand on my arm. “Come on. The power building is just next door.”

I followed him inside. The building looked mostly intact. Old, but mostly intact. There wasn’t even much rust, certainly not as much as you’d expect to find after two centuries of neglect. Several of the nearby buildings were nothing but rust. The laws of nature were way out of whack here.

We stepped into darkness. Nero pulled out a Witch Lantern, a potion-powered lamp. The golden light shone out like a star, illuminating the tall, open hallway. As we followed the path, I could have sworn I saw things moving in the shadows. Maybe I was imagining things, but I didn’t think so. This city had been overrun by monsters. They were everywhere. That didn’t mean whatever was watching us right now would attack. There were all kinds of monsters, including timid ones.

“Here we are,” Nero said as we reached a cylinder the size of a barn.

I wondered how they’d gotten it into the building.

“I’m going to see what we’re dealing with.” He lifted the lamp up to the Magitech generator.

As he looked it over, I kept an eye out for beasties. A few minutes later, he stepped around the generator, his expression masked.

“Is this the point where you tell me you have good news and bad news?” I quipped.

“There’s a small amount of magic left in the generator,” he told me.

“That was the good news?”

“There is no good news, Pandora. We have a much bigger problem. The magic in the generators has been corrupted by the monsters’ wild magic. And the city’s barrier isn’t broken. It’s perfectly intact. In fact, it’s still connected to the continent’s barrier system.”

“And that’s bad?”

“The corrupted magic is bleeding through that connection, into the larger grid. The city’s generator is very slowly infecting all the others. The barriers that protect the cities of humanity from the plains of monsters are breaking down. If we don’t fix the problem and purge the wild magic, every barrier on the continent will come down, opening the door for monsters to flood the cities.”

6 Magical Machinations

I stood beside the barn-sized Magitech power generator, counting the dust bunnies on the floor. There were some brick bunnies and glass bunnies too. If I got lucky, none of them would spontaneously come to life. Stranger things had been known to happen on the plains of monsters.