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“So was opening the window in the first place,” Thomil said—a coaxing demon, drawing her into the fury of those gray eyes.

“So, why stop there? Go on, Highmage Freynan. Fire up that superior Tiranish brain of yours and line up the Forbidden Coordinates on your impeccable mental map of the Otherrealm. I know you can. Line them up and tell me I’m wrong. ”

Sciona’s lip trembled. She wished that, for just this moment, she could be a soft and pious woman of Tiran.

She wished that her logical mechanisms could slow and succumb to the emotional need for safety.

She wished she could look away from Thomil, close her eyes to what she was never supposed to know. But she couldn’t.

Unbidden, her mind cracked open to the unthinkable.

She cast the numbers on a grid and mapped them out—the full range of places where siphoning was encouraged and the one area where it was forbidden: a circle, placed like Tiran in the middle of the wide and wild Kwen, good siphoning in the south where the climate was more hospitable than in the frozen north, better siphoning still in the spots where Highmage Jurowyn had recorded lush forests, a receding siphoning zone in the winter during which northern areas supported less life…

“No…” Her voice trembled like a reed in the wind, about to break. “H-how could… That can’t be.” She blinked back tears. “Tiran—the archmages, the founding mages—would never build all this at the cost of human life. It doesn’t make sense.”

Thomil laughed. He actually laughed at her tears—a rough, angry sound with no mirth in it. “Have you no knowledge of the way your city works? This makes more sense than any formula you’ve ever taught me.”

“I know exactly how this city works!” Sciona protested. “I’ve been in the labs that—”

“This city eats Kwen alive! It draws us in, breaks our bodies in its gears, and spits us out when it can’t wring any more labor out of us. Literally. Do you know what barrier guards do with Kwen who can’t work?”

“I will not hear this!” Sciona’s fists had clenched at her sides. “You have no right to speak this way about the city that gave you a home! You spiteful, ungrateful—”

“Ungrateful?” Thomil growled low in his throat.

“All the gods, Highmage! For once, pull your head out of your runes and numbers, and think about the reality the rest of us live in! Kwen are only allowed in this city so long as we provide a cheap source of labor. Our presence here isn’t charity, it’s conditional, and it is brutal.

You Tiranish don’t care when your bridges fall on us, when your chemicals poison us, when your malfunctioning factory equipment grabs us and grinds us into meat.

Why shouldn’t your magic also treat us like meat—like bounty —to be slaughtered and consumed? ”

“This from a savage!” Sciona threw back because she was out of things to throw. “From a land of cannibals!”

“My people are not cannibals,” Thomil returned through bared teeth, not helping his case.

“And there were no cannibals at all in the Kwen before Blight—before you —destroyed all our sources of food! How can you not see how this all fits together? I thought you were committed to truth— genuinely committed to it. I didn’t realize you were as blind and stupid as the rest of Tiran. ”

That was when Sciona slapped him.

She had never slapped anyone before. It hurt . Stinging her palm and sending a lance of pain through every bone in her hand. The shock momentarily immobilized her, and she was unprepared for the retaliation.

In a terrifying breath, Thomil surged forward, and she was certain he was going to hit her back. She stumbled over her own boots, her hand flying to the cylinder at her belt. Thomil’s eyes tracked the hand, malevolent in their coldness.

“You’re that committed to your god of greed?” he said. “Go on, then. Serve him. Destroy me.”

“Thomil!” Sciona gasped as he drove her back against the wall, and she knew she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the stomach to physically detonate the conduit against his chest. Not this close. “I didn’t—”

“During the crossing, I watched my entire tribe turn to blood on the snow.” Thomil wasn’t looking at her anymore, even as he glared her in the face.

He was looking past her at a memory she couldn’t see, something that made his gray eyes silver with tears.

“I wonder what they died for.” His voice had dropped to a whisper.

“So you could warm your tea? Or power a cute little cylinder to keep yourself safe walking the streets among all those dirty cannibal

Kwen?”

Tears spilled down Sciona’s cheeks as her hand clenched impotently on her cylinder. Out of defenses, she doubled down on her last and strongest ally. Because no one could refute God. Least of all a Blighted heathen.

“Your people died because they deserved it.” Yes, that was why. That was why, Sciona assured herself, even as the tears wouldn’t stop. This was all God’s Will. Thomil just couldn’t see it because he wasn’t worthy. “You brought this on yourselves.”

Some last autumn in Thomil’s expression froze over.

“Then, what are you waiting for?” His rough hand wrapped around hers and yanked it to his body so that her knuckles ground into the hard plane of his chest and detonating the cylinder would blow a hole in his heart. “Be a real Tiranish mage. Kill me. Now that I’m no longer of use to you.”

Sciona couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. The only real thing in the world was the beating of Thomil’s heart against her knuckles. Hard and frenetic, despite all the ice in his eyes.

“You’re the worst kind of murderer, I think,” he said, and she felt the terrible words vibrate against her knuckles.

“The kind who won’t even acknowledge her crime.

You’ve never worshipped a god of truth.” As roughly as he had pulled her hand to his chest, he shoved it away. Disgusted. “You worship a delusion.”

Without his hand on hers—rage binding them together—Sciona was suddenly adrift in the dark, frantic. When Thomil turned to leave, inexplicable panic took over.

“Wait!” She clutched at his sleeve, realizing that she couldn’t bear for him to walk away.

She didn’t care if he struck her. She didn’t care if he put those hunter’s hands around her neck and throttled the life from her body. For once, the last thing she wanted was to be alone with her knowledge. But Thomil was stronger than she was. He tore from her grasp.

And she was alone on the landing. In total collapse.

Sciona had imagined this moment since she was old enough to know what a mage was.

Standing in the light of truth, having discovered something no mage had before.

How had this dream of so many years turned so suddenly into a nightmare?

God, it was just a nightmare, wasn’t it?

One of her many anxiety dreams? It had to be.

She had fallen asleep in the library while combing her fiftieth source on Stravos, and this was her mind playing a terrible joke on her. That was all. That was all.

Sciona shut her eyes tight and forced them open again, pinched a fold of her skin until it turned white, put a fist to her mouth, and sank her teeth into a knuckle.

She didn’t wake. She just bled onto the white sleeve of her blouse, trapped in the confines of this utterly unacceptable reality.

The world spun. But there was no way to alleviate this feeling of all-drowning panic. No way except the one.

Thomil had to be wrong.

About God, about Blight, about her .

And she had to prove it.

Snatching up her skirts, she sprinted back to her office, heedless of the blood dribbling from her hand.

“Why all the screaming, Freynan?” Renthorn mocked as she raced past him. “Had a falling out with your Blighted assistant? I bet—”

Sciona closed the door in his face and locked it.

“Wow! Touchy, touchy!” she barely heard him say on the other side. “Someone’s time of the month, is it?”

Dragging her spare spellograph off its shelf, Sciona heaved it onto a desktop and wrote up an action spell for fire.

Her hands were shaking, dripping blood on the keys, but that didn’t slow her spellwork.

It had never been so important in all her life that she finish a spell and see it activated.

She mapped to a familiar spot, a well-known sourcing pool at the far edge of the common coordinates, where sourcers like Sciona often siphoned for energy and alchemists often siphoned for salt.

If Thomil’s insane assertions were correct, this location would be far off in the Kwen, perhaps even beyond it.

The mapping spell flared to life, and Sciona gasped.

People told stories of the ocean bounding the Southern Kwen—of blue saltwater vaster than any land—but those stories were older than Tiran itself.

Some even claimed that they were myths. Since the Blight’s first ravages, no cartographer had ever made it that far outside Tiran and back.

Not even Jurowyn. But here it was! Ocean .

Impossibly blue, frothing white where it kissed the land, then withdrew, then kissed again.

Human figures moved like ants along the shoreline, leaving footprints that lasted only until the next wave washed the sand to a gleaming mirror behind them.

Eagerly, Sciona punched additional numbers into the spellograph to bring her closer.

The milling humans seemed to have gathered to look for something in the wave-polished sand.

Shells , Sciona realized, leaning forward.

Each person had a basket over one arm containing iridescent black shells.

Perhaps as some kind of currency? Or crafting material?

Or perhaps for the flesh of the strange creatures that lived inside—like the poor sometimes ate the snails from Tiran’s channels.

These people were dressed unlike any humans Sciona had ever seen. At first, she thought they had black cloth wrapped around their heads, but when she pulled in closer, she realized that it was hair. Their hair was black. Not Tiranish brown nor Kwen copper, but dark as ink.

Sciona mapped in closer still on a young woman who had paused in the shallows, kneeling to scrape through the sand.

Her bare arms were a warm bronze the color of Thomil’s hair.

When the shell-gatherer glanced skyward at a passing bird, her eyes seemed to lack an iris…

or perhaps the iris was just the same inkwell black as her pupils.

Wonder filled Sciona with hope and the light of God. Before the Freynan Mirror, she was sure that the God who had created this ocean and this sunlit sand could only be good. The magic that enabled Sciona to behold all these wonders could only be good.

Thomil would see.

She hit the siphoning key.

Because a God great enough to spin these wonders would never allow His mages to take human life. Bushes, maybe. Animals, maybe. Not humans. Never—

The girl’s hand lit bright white like paper caught in a candle flame. She started, spilling shells. Then threw her head back, black eyes wide and mouth open in soundless agony as her arm began to come apart.

“No!” Sciona screamed as the last of her world collapsed. “No! NO! NO!”

She scrambled to abort the spell, grabbing a pen from beside the spellograph and slashing a line through the paper.

The pen sizzled and split in her hand, burning skin, but it didn’t stop the siphoning.

The white light had spun all the way up the black-haired girl’s arm to ignite her chest. Grabbing hold of the spellpaper itself, Sciona tore it from the machine.

The mid-spell disruption caused an explosion, which knocked both Sciona and the spellograph to the floor.

The siphoning had ceased, but the mapping coil had not deactivated.

When Sciona uncurled onto her hands and knees, the foreign girl lay before her in that circle of copper, half unraveled, twitching as she struggled to breathe.

The shells she had been collecting were scattered around her, and the crystal ocean shallows had gone pink with her blood.

Her right arm was gone but for a fleshless humerus hanging by a few sinews from her shoulder and swaying hideously with the lapping water.

Sciona reached for the girl, tears streaming from her eyes.

Her victim was still alive. Through her stripped white ribs, Sciona could see her lungs moving, heaving to sustain her.

Other people had rushed to her side. Her family, perhaps?

Her friends? An old woman cradled the girl’s head, weeping, screaming without sound.

A younger child clutched her remaining hand.

But what could they do? What could they do except hold her as the water gently washed her blood and muscle tissue out to sea?

Whatever this girl’s life had been, it was over, traded for a flash of fire here in Sciona’s lab a thousand miles away.

“I’m sorry!” Sciona sobbed. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

She had never felt as powerless as she did before that mapping coil, watching those bright black eyes go dead.