Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
I draw out a containment ward, turn it once between my fingers and flick it across the floor. It skids over the stone and cracks against Mother’s designer heel.
Her fingers tighten around the sphere.
Too slow.
The ward blooms around them in a flare of lilac.
I kept it for moments that could tip either way—protection or restraint. I didn’t have it when I took my beating in that alley. I tucked it into my coat immediately afterwards and have carried it ever since.
This past week has taught me never to save anything for a rainy day when the storm has already broken.
My parents stand inside the ward, my mother incandescent with rage. Dimly, I notice that she has put the sphere away, sensible enough to know a weapon will rebound from a containment ward.
“Let me out, you horrible girl.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Vivian walks to the edge and prods the barrier. It spits a shower of purple sparks. “Good ward,” she says approvingly. “I wish I’d thought of it. Shame it doesn’t shut her up.”
“Vivian, how dare you! I’m your—”
“Mother, shut up,” Vivian snarls.
“You ungrateful wretch—”
I ignore her ranting and turn to Cáel. “Is he all right?”
“He’ll be fine.” He helps the fallen man to his feet with one hand braced beneath the man’s arm.
I glance at the hidden door my parents used. For the guard’s sake, I hope there is a lift beyond it; those stairs were brutal.
I turn from my parents and head towards the helix.
“What are you doing?” Mother demands.
“Fixing this.”
“Fixing… You can see it?”
“Yes, Mother. I can.”
“That’s impossible. That’s—”
Realisation dawns. Whatever her faults, stupidity is not among them. Her morals have always been the problem.
“You’re a bloody witch,” she hisses.
I clap once, slowly.
Behind me, Vivian gasps. She missed my earlier conversation with Cáel. “You’re a witch?”
I nod. I am not quite ready to say it aloud. Up here in the Immortal Zone, with returning magic flooding the air, the truth is undeniable, and I have something to prove.
To my mother. To my father.
And, ultimately, to myself.
I crouch beside Mina. “Love you, baby girl.” I scratch behind her ears. “Go with Cáel. Look after him.”
She whines, picking up my mood, overwhelmed by the chamber’s magic, her gaze shifting between the helix and me.
“Go,” I repeat with a flick of my fingers.
The command comes out sharper than I intend, but she obeys. Tail low, she pads to Cáel’s side.
“No,” he protests. “Elenora—”
“This is where it was always leading,” I tell him. “I know what I’m doing.”
I speak with enough conviction to almost believe it.
In truth, I haven’t a clue what I am doing. But with magic of this nature, training is not always the deciding factor. Sometimes it is natural talent, nerve and the willingness to begin.
The warded lining of my coat will muffle the contact, so I shrug it off and kick it clear of the swirling magic. I want nothing in its pockets to interfere.
Vivian stands rigid beside the containment ward. My mother has stopped shouting. Her gaze burns between my shoulder blades.
Mina whimpers from Cáel’s side, low and distressed.
I step into the helix.
Strands of my hair lift in the charged air while black runes glide across my unshielded skin.
The power is almost unbearable. It burns along my veins, heating my blood from the inside out, and my head throbs in time with my heartbeat—each pulse a wave of pressure that threatens to swamp everything else.
I can feel my body protest.
Dying. I am coming apart.
So I stop trying to hold the magic and let it run through me instead.
This force is cleaner than the corrupted anchor repair—ancient, undiluted, never meant to become what it has.
I let it in.
The magic seeps into my skin—warm and immediate, like something returning home. Runes curl around my fingers like smoke, and all at once, the connection deepens.
I close my eyes and let myself feel.
The centre of the network is no longer the Spire.
It is me.
All my sigils glow silver.
A living map unfurls through the air around me—not across my arm this time, but everywhere, the full scale of it.
The Districts radiate outward in every direction, forming a complete chart of everything the rune network has taken and held and warped across fourteen hundred years of accumulation and distortion.
I know what to do, almost as though the runes themselves are instructing me—ancient and patient and ready, after all this time, to be undone.
I start with the rogue magic beyond our borders. The threads that have crept across into neighbouring cities, infecting people who have nothing to do with any of this. I reach for it and drag it back to the nearest anchor, sealing it away.
It comes willingly. Every bit of it.
I work the borders carefully, pulling and redirecting until nothing is leaking.
I turn to the anchor furthest from the Ink District. My magic has fed the network around Ink the longest, so I leave that section until last. Outside in. It is the only way that makes sense.
I begin to unthread the network.
The process should take weeks. Days, at the very least. Inside the helix, time does something strange—it thins, becomes silver and unmeasured, no longer running in minutes but in knots undone.
The magic spins around me while my fingers trace each connection and every knot where the network has bound itself to the world. I undo each one carefully, gently, one line at a time, as Thea does with Thread magic.
I keep my focus.
I wait—between each District—for a cascade, for feedback, for the network to fight back.
It does not.
Then the idea arrives: quiet, simple and enormous.
For fourteen hundred years, the network has siphoned magic from the people of the Districts.
I am unpicking it.
Maybe—just maybe—I can give it back.
There is no plan for this, and it may well go wrong. But I know I cannot contain this power. I suffered a brain bleed when I linked to the repair anchor, and my heart stopped when I crossed the border. Yet this feels different. Right in a way those attempts never did.
Let me return it.
For one impossible breath, I think of the man in the alley. Too late for him, but not for everyone like him. Not if I can help it.
I channel the loosened magic into the map, into the Districts, into the people.
Instantly, I know it is working.
I do not know how. I simply know.
One by one, I unthread the network and unwind the spell. I strip runes from streets, buildings and even the air, and in my wake, I restore what was taken.
I cannot do it slowly. I lack the skill to trickle power back over months or years. Those who had almost nothing may receive only a little; the strong will regain what was always theirs.
Elyrion may notice within days. Perhaps a week. The new government, whoever that turns out to be, will have to manage the aftermath.
I must trust that. But freedom will not be tidy.
District by district.
Careful. Methodical.
The Bone District.
At once, something tugs at me: a powerful magic user whose gift flares as the network releases its grip. I have felt echoes of this elsewhere, but here it is unmistakable.
They are astonishingly strong.
Somewhere beyond the spell, Thea says my name once, sharply, then falls silent. I cannot answer. I am too far inside the work now, hands full of a city’s stolen magic.
Then the Ink District.
It does not come away.
Everywhere else, the knots gave under my fingers like wet string. Here they are welded. Half a lifetime of my own magic wound through these streets, so long and so tightly that the network and I have grown into one another, and neither of us can find the join.
I pull.
The Ink District pulls back, and it pulls with my own strength, which is the worst thing I have ever felt.
This is what Thea meant. Not a link. Interwoven.
Something warm runs from my nose and over my mouth. A long way above me, somebody is shouting my name.
So I stop pulling.
If it will not be unpicked, it must be persuaded, and I have only the one argument.
It is mine. Not theirs. It was never theirs. They cut it out of a sixteen-year-old girl and buried it under a district full of people who have been dying ever since, and I have come to collect.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
The knots do not loosen.
They let go.
When the magic finally returns to the Ink District, the helix around me fades from black to smoky grey, then to the palest ash.
The Immortal Zone.
I can’t strip away the power keeping it aloft; the platform would crash. But I can sever its link to the Districts and anchor it elsewhere.
The Immortals have hoarded stolen magic for generations: not living magic or life force, but reserves packed into old spells, vaults and preservation charms. It is in the very air that they breathe, and it has a distinctive resonance. I find it easily.
And claim it.
I know precisely what I am doing. I am standing in a chamber beneath their city, taking magic from people who have not agreed to give it, because I have decided the reason is good enough.
Somebody stood in a room like this one when I was sixteen and thought the same thing.
The difference is that I am not cutting it out of anybody’s body, and I am not doing it to a child, and I will say aloud afterwards that I did it.
That will have to be difference enough.
I take it anyway.
I shield Cáel, Vivian, Thea and every foreign national. Their power is not mine to touch.
Then I gather the rest.
I pour it into a single rune within the wisps of remaining magic: one bright white star, burning cleanly against the fading darkness.
It will support the Zone for a very long time.
At last, I call home the fragments of my own magic, scattered throughout the network since the day it was stripped from me.
Only when they return do I understand how depleted I have been.
I feel alive.
Genuinely, completely alive.
One task remains: the government marks, the final link to the rune network that does not belong to me.
I step back, my breath ragged.
“We can see it,” Vivian whispers. She points to the glowing rune.
“Good,” I say, almost laughing. “That is what’s holding everything together.”
Cáel looks as though he has aged five years, and guilt twists through me.
“I need your help,” I say.
He moves at once and draws me into a brief, tight embrace. The familiar heat of him enfolds me, along with the scent of cedar and crushed mint.
“I’m sorry I frightened you.”
“It’s fine,” he answers, though his tone promises a reckoning later. “What do you need?”
“Healing and Thea’s Thread magic.” I extend my wrists. “These marks are the last connection to the network. If we don’t remove them, the magic I’ve reclaimed will have nowhere stable to settle.”
I hold his gaze. “It may blow us all up,” I add.