“Whoa, whoa,” I said, raising my hands. “Look, I appreciate this, but I don’t want you to do all this work for nothing. You know how I feel about armour—if you wear anything that’s not really heavy, an elemental mage will just blast straight through it, and if you do wear something that heavy it slows you all the way down. For someone like me the best way not to get hurt is not to be there in the first place.”

“And how well did that work in the casino?”

I scowled.

“Your life is changing, Alex,” Arachne said. “I know you’ve always preferred to rely on evasion but things are different now. More and more you’re going to find yourself facing dangers that you can’t run from or hide from.” She tapped the jacket again. “You’re going to have to take risks. This will help you survive them.”

Dubiously I lifted the material a few inches, feeling its texture. “Well, it’s light enough,” I admitted. “Is this going to do anything against a battle-mage?”

“A direct hit?” Arachne said. “No. But against area-of-effect spells or glancing blows it’ll keep you alive against something that would kill an unarmoured human.”

“Bullets?”

“Lower-powered ones should be manageable. For higher-power shots it depends on the angle of impact. The mesh will try to reshape itself to curve projectiles but there’s only so much it can do.”

“This is an imbued item, isn’t it?” I asked. Now that I was close I could sense the presence from the suit. It felt incomplete, as if it wasn’t fully grown yet, but there was definitely something there.

“Yes, and on that subject, do make sure not to wear this at the same time as your mist cloak,” Arachne said. “They both have a protective purpose, but they do so in very different ways and the variation in mindset will cause problems. Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but imbued items can be . . . possessive about their bearers.”

“It’s okay,” I said, suppressing a shiver. “I’m not going to be using my mist cloak for a while.” I could still remember the weird stretched feeling, and it frightened me. The scariest part was that I hadn’t even really noticed what was happening. If Arachne hadn’t made me take it off, I didn’t know where I would have ended up, and I absolutely did not want to look into the future to find out. “Thanks for doing this for me.”

“Don’t you remember what I told you last year?” Spiders can’t really smile, but I had the feeling that was what Arachne was doing. “After what happened with Belthas? You have my help whenever you want it, Alex.” She tilted her head. “You don’t ask for enough, you know.”