She relaxed, tossing the book to the ground. She slipped off her jacket as well. “Could you please shut that?”

I reached over to close Starship Troopers, muffling the alien bugs. “Are you all right, Lena?”

“I will be.” Lena pressed a hand against the wall for balance. “She was trying to persuade me you had been turned. She wanted me to make sure you came quietly, so we could ‘help’ you.”

“Lena has a stronger mind than I expected, and I’m still figuring out these new powers,” Deb said. “If you’d given me another five minutes—”

“Tell me about Ray,” I interrupted. “The truth. Were you involved?”

“I’d never hurt Ray. I wish I knew who murdered him.” She slunk backward until she reached the glass door. “I told you, hon. We didn’t start this.”

“You’re saying we did?”

“Be careful who you trust, Isaac,” Deb said. “Gutenberg is over six hundred years old. Is he even human anymore? Does anyone really know him?”

“I know he wouldn’t destroy his own archives.” I tried to say more, but my throat constricted, and I began to cough.

“I’m sorry, Isaac.”

The book she had dropped lay on the floor. Wisps of yellow-green gas seeped from the edges of the pages. Chlorine. My shield would stop bullets, but not air. A shield that suffocated the user wasn’t terribly helpful.

Deb swatted my book away hard enough to rip the binding, and then Lena’s right hook slammed her back. The follow-up punch was hard enough to knock Deb through the door and onto the deck out back.

I staggered toward the broken door. If I could get outside . . .

The cloud thickened around me, clinging to my body. I might have admired that trick, if the gas hadn’t been burning my lungs from the inside out. Lena grabbed my arm, trying to help me outside, but that only brought her into the worst of the chlorine. I pointed to Deb’s book.

Lena grabbed it and drew back to throw.

“No!” The word grated the inside of my throat, but Lena lowered her arm. I snatched the book and squinted as gas continued to rise from the paper. I tried to hold my breath, but my lungs and throat hurt too much, and the muscles wouldn’t obey.

I wiped my eyes and glanced at the cover. This was an annotated history of World War I. I flipped the pages until I found Deb’s spell, which resembled a jagged tear down the center of the book, rimed in green frost. Pressing my hand over the rip did nothing to stop the flow.