I grabbed the sheets from the Bucket first. The towers might have a warning system or anti-tampering device. If I went for the towers first and triggered an alarm, I’d never have the time to ward my bedsheet.

  Warding is a precision skill. The smaller the ward, the less power you need to conjure, and the less risk of shattering it. At the Academy, I heard a story about a master conjurer who warded each facet of a diamond he gave his husband.

  Likely it wasn’t true. Diamond is too rigid to ward well. It tends to crack when the ward is imbued. Also, the smaller the ward, the larger the risk of creating a flaw in the design that will shatter the ward when it’s imbued. Everything is a balance.

  My sheet was large, a square of pale cream cotton, two-and-a-half meters to a side. I got a copper ink pen from my work table. The copper nanoparticles were embedded in a clear UV-sensitive biopolymer that became conductive when it hardened. The result was a somewhat heat-defusing string of conducting material.

  I fixed two corners of the sheet to my bed, and had Hao stand on the other side, stretching it out. Then I drew my wards by hand, sharp edges, hard angles, lines and curls, everything.

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  Not a single pair of compasses, straight edge, or curve template to be had. My professors at the Academy would have been appalled. They would also have been dead, if they’d been through what I’d survived since torching the Hall and running away.

  Warding the sheet took close to an hour. My mind kept slipping into a state of numbing fog. I was on my second day without sleep, edging into my third. I got another bottle of triple strength tea and drained it in three long pulls. It didn’t help much.

  Finally, I conjured the force necessary to imbue the ward. It was a slow pull, drawing from the planet, the air, the void, a cold tingling in my mind. My ward shimmered into life, greens and blues chasing themselves over the lines before fading into the polymer. It was like watching a river absorb a duochrome rainbow.

  “Wow,” Hao breathed.

  “You’ve never seen a warding before?” I asked, incredulous. She’d come from a fairly large world. Then I remembered that most worlds were backwater, including the large ones.

  “Not up close,” Hao admitted. “I’ve seen vids, though.”

  “Not like in the vids?” I said.

  “Not even close.”

  I rolled up the sheet, wrapping it around my middle and strapping it down with a spare belt.

  “Let’s go see if the hacking is anything like in the vids,” I said.

  Hao laughed at that.

  On my way out, I grabbed two extra power packs for my Hurmer. I had a feeling I’d be needing them soon.