“And now for you,” said Mother, stepping onto the fibron body of Nilah’s car. Of course she had spotted Nilah moving in that helmet of hers. “I think my spell didn’t completely affect you, did it? It’s so difficult with these fast-moving targets.”

Mother’s armored boots rested at the edge of Nilah’s cockpit, and mechanical, prehensile toes wrapped around the lip of the car. Nilah forced her neck to crane upward through frozen time to look at Mother’s many eyes.

“Dear lamb, I am so sorry you saw that. I hate to be so harsh,” she sighed, placing her bloody palm against Nilah’s silver helmet, “but this is for the best. Even if you got away, you’d have nowhere to run. We own everything.”

Please, please, please, dispersers… Nilah’s eyes widened. She wasn’t going to die like this. Not like Cyril. Think. Think.

“I want you to relax, my sweet. The journos are going to tell a beautiful story of your heroic crash with that fool.” She gestured to Cyril as she said this. “You’ll be remembered as the champion that could’ve been.”

Dispersers scramble spells with arcane power. They feed into the glyph until it’s over capacity. Nilah spread her magic over the car, looking for anything she could use to fire a pulse of magic: the power unit—drive shaft locked, the energy recovery system—too weak, her ejection cylinder—lockbolts unresponsive… then she remembered the Arclight Booster. She reached into it with her psychic connection, finding the arcane linkages foggy and dim. Something about the way this spell shut down movement even muddled her mechanist’s art. She latched on to the booster, knowing the effect would be unpredictable, but it was Nilah’s only chance. She tripped the magical switch to fire the system.

Nothing. Mother wrapped her steely hands around Nilah’s helmet.

“I should twist instead of smash, shouldn’t I?” whispered the old woman. “Pretty girls should have pretty corpses.”

Nilah connected the breaker again, and the slow puff of arcane plumes sighed from the Arclight. It didn’t want to start in this magical haze, but it was her only plan. She gave the switch one last snap.

The push of magical flame tore at the gray, hazy shroud over the world, pulling it away. An array of coruscating starbursts surged through the surface, and Nilah was momentarily blinded as everything returned to normal. The return of momentum flung Mother from the car, and Nilah was slammed back into her seat.

Faster and faster her car went, until Nilah wasn’t even sure the tires were touching the road. Mother’s spell twisted around the Arclight’s, intermingling, destabilizing, twisting space and time in ways Nilah never could’ve predicted. It was dangerous to mix unknown magics—and often deadly.