Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews Page A

that it was a joint screwup just hurt more.
    Water under the bridge.
    “But she is stupid,” Ascanio said. “She insulted Aunt B!”
    “And for that we should rip her throat out?” I glanced at him.
    “Well, no.”
    “Suppose I did beat the snot out of her. What would it accomplish? In nature animals fight to demonstrate superiority. The more powerful you are, the better your genetic material is. Stronger animal, stronger babies, a better chance of survival for the species. Raphael already knows I’m a better fighter and he chose her over me anyway. That’s a lesson for you—when you get a chance to be happy, you take it and you treat the other person the way they deserve to be treated. Don’t take things for granted.”
    Giving advice was easy. Living by it was much harder.
    We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written:
    IM-1: Infectious Magic Area
Do Not Enter
Authorized Personnel Only
    A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read:
    Keep out, stupid.
    “We aren’t going to keep out, are we?” Ascanio asked.
    “No.”
    “Awesome.”
    We rolled by another blackened home. To the left a large blue-green shard protruded from the ground at an angle. To the right, by the metal carcass of a fire-stripped truck, another sliver, pale blue, waited to bloody someone’s ankle. The first signs of the Menagerie.
    Here and there more shards punctured the soil, and in the distance, far to the right, a jagged iceberg rose at a steep angle twenty feet high, glowing with translucent green and blue in the morning sun.
    Ascanio squinted. “What is that?”
    “Glass,” I answered.
    “Really?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where did it come from?”
    Ahead more icebergs crowded in, forming a glacier. “Some of it is from Hollowell Station. Before the Shift, Inman Yard used to be Norfolk Southern’s train yard. It was huge. Over sixty-five tracks in the bowl alone. Not only that, but CSX’s Tilford train yard was right next to it. Together they handled over a hundred trains per day. Then they built the Hollowell Station. It was supposed to be a new, super-modern terminal and most of it was glass. Guess what happened when the magic waves started hitting?”
    Ascanio grinned. “It crashed.”
    “Yes, it did. There were hills of glass everywhere. The magic waves kept causing train crashes, but the railroad hung in there. Over the next few months some railroad employees started to get the idea that the glass hills were multiplying. Nobody else paid much attention to it. Then during the second flare, creatures popped out of the glass and killed half of the railroad workers.”
    “What kind of creatures?” Raphael asked.
    “Nobody knows.”
    Flares—intense, terrible magic waves—came once every seven years. Things that were impossible during normal magic waves became reality during a flare. The flare’s magic held for three days straight and then disappeared for a long while, but its consequences were often deadly.
    “Eventually the military came back to reclaim the yard. There were roughly two hundred trains in there, and some ofthem were full of goods. The soldiers found that the glass had expanded and encased the trains. When they tried to chip it off, they were attacked by creatures. Nobody ever figured out what the creatures were, but they caused multiple casualties. Finally the MSDU gave up and cordoned off the Inman Yard with barbed wire. The glass never stopped growing. Helicopters were still flying once in a while back then, so one of the reporters looked at the place from above and dubbed it the Glass Menagerie.”
    Ahead two glass icebergs met above the road, fused into a massive arch. We passed under it and into the labyrinth of glass. Peaks of green, blue, and white towered above us, some