Page 93 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

He grins in the dusk, and even behind that grin, even behind the bomb and the whirlwind of power, there’s nerves there. Nerves he’s desperately trying not to show her.

“They’ve stopped nearly all of the wild magic from this entire area,” he says, bouncing lightly on his toes, like that’ll help theenergy. “How many Wights and spirits will flood this forest the moment we drop it?”

“Well, Alette told me of the time she dropped all the protections around her compound,” Chloe says, tightening the straps on her backpack so it lays tight against her spine, then dips down and scoops up some gravel for her pocket.

He watches with a sort of half smile.

“Apparently it was dramatic,” Chloe says, then nods back at him. “Let’s do this.”

The walkthere took less than five minutes, but they remain in silence. Chloe camouflages her jacket to fit the forest around them, keeps the orange scarf tucked into the pocket of her overalls, and Killian scans the entire way, microbursts of power into the woods, as if trying to catch someone off guard.

But the black tunnel for the railway shows no more scrutiny than the reports say it should, despite the other attacks on bases.

“Foolish,” Killian mutters, after they watch a guard make a round, completely oblivious.

“Yeah,” Chloe whispers, though the wind rustling the branches is enough to disguise her words and steps, before she nudges at a line in the forest floor.

There, barely visible to even her, is a defense ward, tied into the packed dirt around the railway. To stop bad actors, anyone who may mean them harm who’s not under their control.

The sort of basic defense that one writes into the ground. She's seen this at people’s houses, painted on the underside of welcome mats and embedded into lawns.

Easy work. No alarm attached—alarms are more difficult and would be more draining on resources—and stuff she’s made for.

She crouches amongst the dirty ice, teasing her fingers into the line of the ward, ignoring Killian’s inhale.

They trained her to take down these sort of wards when she was barely fourteen, and this one takes less than ten seconds for her to nullify.

The released power ripples through the forest around them, the needles of the evergreens trembling as if in a strong wind. Tendrils of Chloe’s hair escape from her bun, flicking around her face.

“Oh, you are good at that,” Killian murmurs appreciatively when she stands, brushing the dirty frost off her fingertips.

“What, like you couldn’t destroy that easily,” Chloe challenges, and her hand doesn’t even tingle with it.

He shrugs, one shouldered, though some of the anxiety’s eased away from his face. “Not that silently.”

They have three layers of wards before the tunnel, and that’s just the simplest.

The next one’s meant for dampening unless you carried a counter spell crafted by the rune maker, the sort of ward found in a lot of schools when children are still learning control. The teachers could have it written on the back of their badges, and the kids wouldn’t be able to blow things up.

Also good for stopping prison breaks.

It’s reinforced from the inside so that someone couldn’t break out of it from within, layers of overlapping magic that can’t be pressed out from. Meant to contain, not defend.

Chloe broke one of these when she was sixteen, on a dare.

Killian watches her as she sits, cross legged on the ground, all but looming.

“Everyone without a badge will feel this immediately,” Chloe warns, “what do we think the chances are someone will alert their guards?”

He bares his teeth at her. “Why would someone tell their captors they have more power now?”

“I dunno, to brag?” Chloe says, then focuses on the ward.

It’s written deep into the ground, many years ago, reinforced several times, but the original writing is deep beneath a few inches of pine needles and frozen dirt.

“Think of a perfect glass dome,” Chloe murmurs. “No matter how much you push out, you can’t defeat the structural integrity.”

But from the outside…

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