A wall of fire roared up in front of me, thirty feet long and ten feet wide, dazzlingly bright. It was just barely far enough away that I’d have enough time to stop. I took a breath, clamped down on the animal instinct to shy away, and ran straight into the flames.

The heat rose—and stopped rising. Flames licked hungrily at my skin, but the heat was drawn away, sinking into the stone at my neck. It lasted only a second, and then I was through and into the bushes. The fire-hunger stone was pulsing with heat and magic, but I was alive and unburned. My eyes were swimming with white-purple spots and my night vision was gone, but my divination still worked and I picked out a path over the broken ground, ducking and swaying out of the way of the branches. From behind me I heard a shout and felt the wall of fire vanish. I kept running, coming out of the bushes to swerve into a copse of trees. I knew that I was slightly faster than the two mages behind me. I also knew that if I kept going, they’d inevitably catch me. Mages have a lot of ways to track people.

And so instead of continuing to run, I ducked behind a tree, reached into my pack, and pulled out my hole card.

Most people don’t really get how defences work. Every culture has a version of the Achilles myth, where someone’s immune to every form of harm except getting shot in the heel, or hit with a dart of mistletoe, or having their hair cut off, or being stabbed in the left butt-cheek with a tuning fork while balancing one-legged on an aardvark, or something similarly stupid. In every single story, some dick goes out of their way to make sure all these ridiculous conditions are satisfied, and the supposedly invulnerable guy dies as a result. If you ask most people what the moral of the story is, they’ll say, “No one’s invincible,” or “Everyone has a fatal flaw.”

In my opinion, the real moral of those stories is: if you have some special ability that protects you, make damn sure people don’t find out about it.

My reactive armour is really useful. Only problem: Haken had already gotten a look at it. He knew what it could do, and he’d already have figured out exactly how much extra power it would take to blast through it. Which was why, for this mission, I hadn’t taken my armour at all. Instead I’d taken something that Haken didn’t know about. The loose bundle I drew from my pack was soft cloth, coloured a neutral grey, long enough to fall to my ankles and with a hood to shield the head. I pulled the mist cloak around my shoulders, stepped back into the shadows, and held still.

My mist cloak was made for me by Arachne, and it’s very good at what it does. When wrapped around a wearer, it functions as adaptive camouflage, changing its colour to blend with whatever’s behind it—it’s not invisibility, but if you keep still and stay in the shadows it’s pretty close. More importantly, it blocks magical senses. Most magic types have some way of finding people who are trying to hide from them, and mist cloaks cause you to drop right off their radar. It’s very, very useful, and it’s saved my life more times than I can count.