Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Kit
The SI’s executive floor had some serious swank, but it could’ve been transplanted from the C-suite level of any neighboring skyscraper. The same could not be said for this floor.
Though the entire SI building appeared to be clad in windows from the outside, the fourteenth floor’s perimeter walls were glass-free.
Instead, they were covered in long digital screens that extended from waist height up to the concrete-and-steel ceiling, but whatever information they might have displayed had been replaced by a red “alert” notice that blinked in ominous synchrony across every monitor.
That, combined with the glow of the workstation computers, was the only real light on the whole floor.
Adding to the surreal effect, directly ahead of us was a freestanding, ten-foot-tall sheet of aluminum that might have resembled a partition wall if it hadn’t been covered in Arcana engravings.
Across the minuscule magical markings, different runes glowed with amber light like constellations in the night sky.
As I stared, a handful of runes went dark while others lit up for no discernible reason.
“This way,” Darius said, heading to the right.
Leaving the mysterious star chart, I followed him, Zylas, Robin, and Lienna between workstations. Maps of the mundane sort, rolling carts of file folders, whiteboards filled with scrawled lists, and other evidence of paper-pushing humdrum were scattered throughout the floor.
And so were more Arcana oddities: a crystal orb the size of a beach ball sat in the middle of a table, surrounded by devices resembling audio mixers; a cross between a spyglass and a telescope was pointed at a blank wall, the runes running down its length gleaming unnaturally; next to a command station that looked like it could land a rocket on the moon was a rack taller than me holding about five hundred bronze coins of varying degrees of shininess that, as far as I could tell in the flashing red emergency lights, had no markings on them whatsoever.
“What is all this?” I asked, extending my stride to catch up to Darius.
He took another right, his head on a swivel. “This is the Operations Center, where the SI’s top analysts plan and coordinate their most dangerous and classified operations. Access is strictly limited.”
Unless you had a demon to bust down the door, apparently.
I focused on my clairsentience, but there were no minds nearby and nothing unexpected hit my radar—well, nothing new; I’d been sensing the weirdness that was Zylas’s mind since the rooftop, like a psychic jalapeno spicing up my gray matter.
We sped past workstations and offices, which had more obvious signs of interrupted tasks than the executive level—papers strewn across desks, chairs askew, half-empty coffee mugs, a few laptops sitting open.
On a large table, those odd bronze coins had been scattered across a map of Eastern Europe, with some knocked onto the floor where they glowed in soft pastel shades.
An open door revealed hundreds of small potion bottles of every conceivable color on narrow shelves, plus several metal tables laden with laboratory equipment.
A yellow sign beside the entrance read, “Warning: Alchemical Decoding – PPE Required.”
These analysts must’ve evacuated in a hurry—they hadn’t even shut the door to their hyper-hazardous brewery behind them.
Darius made another right turn, putting us on the other side of the building’s central core to the stairwell and elevators.
A railing enclosed a rectangular void that revealed a glimpse of the floor below—the archive level.
We faced wide, descending, polished concrete steps, and across from us was a second identical set.
Both connected to the same landing halfway down to create a T-shaped set of stairs that could be accessed from opposite sides.
Nerves fired along my spine. There were no additional security measures I could see. Were we supposed to waltz right down those steps and knock on the archive door?
Darius halted at the top, glanced at the stairs, then turned to face the dark, abandoned floor. “Zylas and Lienna, find or make us a way into the archive. Robin, Kit, we’ll keep watch.”
His division of labor made sense—Zylas for his door-demoing firepower and Lienna for her abjuration skills. But my eyeballs weren’t going to see anything Darius and Robin couldn’t spot, and my clairsentience would work just as well from the floor below.
“I’ll check out the door security too,” I told Darius. “Just in case there are any nasty surprises.”
His gray eyes flicked across mine, his gaze questioning. He nodded.
I joined Lienna and Zylas, and together we descended the stairs.
The concrete walls of the landing were empty, lacking art, signage, or even mild discoloration.
A freight elevator with a security panel was tucked almost out of sight in the back corner, but my attention was fixated on the biggest, meanest, most impenetrable door we’d yet encountered.
It was large enough to drive a truck through and covered in engraved runes.
Metal walls and a plate in the floor protected the room from attacks to the surrounding structure.
What appeared to be brass or bronze formed a crisscrossing pattern over the steel door, and in the center, a porthole-shaped compartment held a faintly glowing rose-colored liquid.
Like the other doors, it was covered in protective Arcana, and not one but three security slots waited for some sort of artifact to be inserted.
It was the final boss of the world’s shittiest door-based video game.
“You’re up, Zee,” I said. “Knock ’em dead.”
As the demon stalked toward the steel monstrosity, Lienna shifted closer to me. “There’s even more abjuration on this one.”
Not a good sign.
Zylas lifted both hands. A crimson array full of spiky demonic runes blinked into existence, spanning the door—and purple light shimmered across the steel, erasing Zylas’s magic.
Definitely not a good sign.
“Ch,” the demon grunted. He recast his glowing array across the door, and again, the abjuration spell erased it before he could trigger the big boom.
In the back of my mind, I counted the seconds as they passed. Our odds of a successful smash-and-grab operation dropped with every minute we spent in the building.
Zylas took two steps back. This time, his demonic spell formed just in front of his palms, five feet in diameter and alight with menacing runes.
Magic rippled up his arms and over his shoulders, glowing through his clothes, and his red eyes blazed so brightly I could see them through his sunglasses.
The temperature plunged toward freezing, and the electric sting of his power prickled across my skin.
He aimed his spell at the door like a magical cannon ready to fire.
Lienna backed into the corner by the freight elevator, pulling me with her. We clamped our hands over our ears.
The demon unleashed his spell. The blast shook the building like the impact of a wrecking ball, the concussion shoving me into Lienna. A rush of dust and ice-cold air billowed toward the floor above.
Ears ringing, I stepped out of the corner.
Zylas stood amidst a slowly settling cloud of dust. The concrete floor around him was webbed with cracks and chips, but the archive door was unblemished, without so much as a scratch marring its surface.
The only change was the rose-tinted liquid in the porthole-like cavity, which was glowing faintly.
Shit.
“I was afraid of something like this,” Lienna muttered, hastening toward the door and scanning the etched markings. “This is going to be a problem.”
“You okay?” I asked Zylas, moving to his side. He was breathing hard again.
“I am fine,” he growled.
I arched my eyebrows, though he couldn’t see them through my balaclava. “Can you do that again?”
He didn’t immediately answer. “Once more.”
From her spot in front of the indestructo-door, Lienna shook her head. “There are so many layers of abjuration magic here. I don’t even know where to begin.”
I pulled my ski mask up onto my head like a toque so I could breathe. Darius better have a Plan B for getting into the archive. Demonically chilled air cooled the sweat on my face as I looked up at the fourteenth-floor gallery and opened my mouth to call our intrepid leader down here.
Zylas clamped a gloved hand over my mouth, pulling me backward with inexorable strength. My arms flailed for balance as he held me in a half-headlock.
“Quiet,” he hissed.
Pulse racing, I refocused my clairsentience, but I still only sensed Darius and Robin above us—but their minds were bright with tense alertness that hadn’t been there moments before.
“Kasht!” Zylas snarled—and then he released me and streaked up the stairs in a blur of speed.
I was still catching my balance when something exploded with almost as much force as the demon’s spell, the floor quaking and blue-tinged light blazing across the void in the fourteenth floor overhead.
We were out of time.
Lienna gripped my elbow. Her eyes, burning feverishly through the holes in her ski mask, met mine. “It’ll take me way too long to break that abjuration spellwork. You need to get through the door.”
My stomach dropped. “But—”
“You can do it.” She withdrew her Rubik’s cube from her satchel as another blast like an RPG sent the remnants of a computer monitor or two tumbling down to our level. “I’ll help the others.”
I pulled her to me in a nanosecond-long hug. “Be careful.”
“You too.” She dashed up the steps as crimson magic blazed from somewhere above, and something made a horrendous crashing noise.
Urgency swam like minnows under the surface of my skin as I faced the archive and ran through my limited options.
A demon couldn’t break down this door. An abjuration sorceress couldn’t break through this door. Even an archmythic-caliber fireball wouldn’t be enough against a slab of solid steel.
As I stared down the behemoth boss barrier, my mind leaped to the tenuous solution it always did when faced with an impossible problem: if reality wasn’t cooperating, why not warp it? Turn the archive door into sugar glass or a mountain of butterscotch pudding.
Of course, the last time I deliberately warped reality, it had completely drained my magical fuel tank, and all I’d done was plasticize a measly pair of handcuffs.
I would barely make a dent in the ten tons of steel between me and the documents we needed before my empty light blinked on.
It would take a legion of Kits to break through.
Or one Bodil.
That was the key to unlocking this damn door. I needed to power up a reality warp, and it was some kind of sick cosmic joke that elevating my magic to that Viking Queen stratum was the only archmythic ability I had yet to crack.
A thunderous detonation shook the building, and if not for the multi-hued flare of magical light shining across the ceiling two stories overhead, I might have assumed the enemy was firing actual grenade launchers at my friends.
My other archmythic abilities had come easily—even accidentally—because they were just extensions of my psycho warping.
If I targeted a mind to give it a Diet Blackout boop, I just had to dig a little deeper for telepathy or clairaudience or clairsentience.
If I created an illusory fireball or an object floating in the air, it only took an extra degree of focus to make it real.
But I couldn’t warp a planet-sized generator of undiluted power into myself.
A high-pitched scream was instantly drowned out by a blast and a percussive crash, but my clairsentience told me both Lienna and Robin were still alive and kicking. My hands clenched into fists, and I had to command myself to stay where I was. Leaving without Griva’s documents wasn’t an option.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I felt for the power the fae had used—that unsettling white noise that vibrated through the earth.
The power that had swirled all around Kade before he threw an entire kitchen at me.
But as with most of my other attempts, the background thrum was overwhelmed by the jumble of minds in the building and beyond.
My eyes popped open. I blinked twice, then closed them again. All those minds. They were like little blobs of light. Of warmth.
Of energy.
Could it be that simple?
Just create a warp and make it real.
I imagined those minds as batteries, each one immersed in the energy that surrounded all of us, that blossomed from the dirt this tower was built on, that infiltrated the oxygen we breathed.
A soft thrum coalesced in my senses. I visualized it sweeping toward me in a spiral, connecting me to all those minds and, through them, to the earth.
That background thrum—the unsettling white noise—crackled through the soles of my feet, up my spine, and into the base of my skull. It ignited every nerve in my body and flooded the warm spot in my brain where my power lived until it glowed like a neutron star, incandescent and unlimited.
My awareness cranked up to a thousand. I could feel the space between my heartbeats, the hair on my arms rising like an audience giving a standing ovation, the air slowing as it entered my lungs.
For the first time since New York, I felt at home in my body. The burgeoning abilities that had felt so clumsy, like overly complex weapons, were now extensions of my very organs, as natural as taking a breath or summoning the face of a loved one in my mind’s eye.
It was power.
The bountiful, comfortable, unstoppable power of an archmythic.
I opened my eyes. The archive door waited. I focused on the steel and visualized the metal shimmering, the texture blurring until it rippled like vapor. It wasn’t a door anymore. It wasn’t the big bad final boss. No, it was a hologram. An illusion.
A warp.
Smiling, I stepped right through the steel and into the archive beyond.