“Sandry, come on,” Briar said. “Don’t go to bits. We got to think of something fast. There’s aftershocks, y’know. At least get out from under Daja.”
“Where are you?” Sandry asked with a sniff. “I can’t see any—”
She screamed when Briar touched her arm. The rasp of shifting dirt filled the air. “You got to calm down!” he whispered. “We’re in tight and we need all our wits!”
“‘Stead of the half one you got, thief-boy?” drawled Daja.
To her surprise, Tris chuckled.
Sandry gripped Briar’s hands. As he pulled, she wriggled out from under the Trader. With a sigh, Daja began to kneel—and felt the coal at her back shift. Quickly she pressed herself against it once more.
A hand touched her rib cage. “What’s the matter?” demanded Briar. “Why don’t you sit?”
“The ceiling moved when I tried to.”
Sandry began to sob. A small hand plastered itself over her mouth. “What is the matter with you?” Tris demanded softly, her own voice shaking. As panicked as she was, she couldn’t stand to hear Sandry in terror. “You faced down Crane and bullies and a crowd of truly vexed merchants, so I know you’re not a coward.”
“It’s too hard to explain,” whispered Sandry when Tris took her hand away.
“This is stupid!” Briar snapped. “We’re supposed to have magic, and look at us! I don’t know anything that can help. What use to be a mage if that happens?”
Daja half-remembered something. “Hush,” she ordered, “I need to think.”
“We’re in trouble,” croaked Sandry, and giggled. Little Bear licked her face.
No one moved. All around them sounds went through the ground: shifting earth, cracking stone. Briar listened hard for the rumble of an aftershock, though what he could do if one came was anybody’s guess.
“I don’t see how even a strong girl like you can hold up rock,” Tris said at last, wiping her face in her skirt. “Your magic might be helping.”
“Hold it—remember what Niko said?” asked Briar. “Think of objects and the workings we know, and open up—let what we know shape the magic, if we don’t have the right spells.”
“Wait a minute,” replied Daja. “Let me see what I can find.”
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and coughed. Briar slid under her, bracing her legs and belly with his own back. Daja was able to relax against him, without their roof moving. “Thanks,” she croaked when she could breathe again.
Swallowing, she took a slow, deep breath. Letting it out, she forced other thoughts from her mind. Never mind that she was hardly comfortable, never mind her nose was filled with dust, never mind the ache in her wrists and ankles. Breathe in, and in, and in….
Safety, she thought, drifting in silence. I’d like to be safe for a moment, for now. Protected. Shielded—
As clearly as if she stood in her room, she could see the suraku, her survival box. There was the mark of Third Ship Kisubo, stamped in its leather-covered sides. There were the straps that held it together; inside lay the copper lining that kept its contents safe.
Safe, she thought, and opened to her magic. Make us safe.
Power rolled away from her, growing to include the others, spreading around the hollow, taking the shape that meant safety to Daja Kisubo. That power told her what was around them: layers of stone, coal, and metal ore, and the bright flecks that were star-stone pieces. Her power flowed into those things, grain by grain, stone by stone, shaping itself as a box. It was solid, and yet it wasn’t, a magical suraku. Reaching its limit, three feet beyond them in every direction, her magic wriggled like a cat making a dent in a favorite pillow. It settled and firmed. The bond between Daja and the thing she had just made broke. They were separate, she and the living suraku.
“I think we’re all right for now,” she whispered. “I—I’m pretty sure I did something, but … don’t start asking what I did, merchant girl, because I can’t explain. We’re protected for now. I think.”
Tris reached with her own senses and found the magical barrier. “Will it let me find an air vent?” she asked, worried. Her throat felt dry and clogged. “If we don’t get air here soon, we’ll be in deep trouble.”
“We are anyway,” Briar pointed out.
Daja remembered the way the magic had passed through stone and metal. “I think it will,” she said. “I’m pretty sure, anyway. Try it.” To her magic, silently, she added, Please?
There was a crack between the stones in Tris’s corner. Putting her hands flat on either side of it, she drew in a deep, deep breath and let it go. Outside the magical box that enclosed them, small land-waves rippled—not tremors, but the movement of badly stacked dirt and stones. They needed to move and resettle. Nothing was balanced in this ground; it could all shift at any moment. Tris shuddered as she explored. The land-waves’ power was different from the restlessness of the tide when she tried to halt it, but it was the same. She had to do something quick, before those waves built the power to break through Daja’s spell.
Breathing in, she called them to a clogged break in the earth and shooed them gently ahead. The crack widened as the land-waves rolled through, shifting dirt and stone to either side.
Sandry whimpered as their coal roof groaned.
“Daja?” whispered Briar. “That sounds creepy. Can’t your magic stop it?”