“Rumors only. None that I know,” Kadah said.

“Use ’em,” Cruxer ordered the squad. “Fill up now!” The squad instantly began popping the mag torches.

“Magis—I mean, Kadah, why? Why are you helping us?” Kip asked.

She looked at him curiously. “Kip, you saved my life. I was planning to suicide. I’d even picked the day. And then the White summoned me. I’ve spent the last five months trying to figure out how to thank you.”

Kip hadn’t even thought of Magister Kadah since he’d left her class—well, except to think how glad he was that he wasn’t still there.

“No time!” Cruxer said. “Thank you! But we have to go!”

“He’s right,” Kadah said. “Go! And Orholam defend you!”

They barred the door. The squad had already taken up positions on the landing, each one full to bursting with luxin.

“Breaker,” Ben-hadad said, “GBBBoDs?” He said it ‘G-bods.’

“What?” Teia said.

“Great Big Bouncy Balls of Doom,” Ben-hadad said.

“Or Green Bouncy Ball of Doom,” Kip said. “It’s less cumbersome than BGBBoDs, Big Green Bouncy Balls of Doom,” Kip said, distracted. He was already soaking up green.

Winsen was using yellow, filling himself so he could throw flashbombs, and he held it out so Kip could fill himself with that color, too. Despite Mistress Phoebe’s best efforts, Kip wasn’t nearly proficient enough at making solid yellows to draft anything instantaneously in combat, but preparing a weapon beforehand was possible.

Kip soaked up some yellow and flung his hand down, drafting, trying to make a yellow sword as he’d practiced a thousand times.

“Quickly,” Teia said. “Quickly.”

Kip fumbled, and he lost his concentration on the fine mesh point of yellow. The yellow sword broke apart near the hilt, and, unsealed, it all splashed into light.

He cursed. Why had Andross Guile sent men after them now? It was far too early. Had he betrayed Kip, or had something gone wrong?

Andross had expended so much effort making this plan that Kip didn’t think he’d try to have him killed. Maybe the Lightguards had jumped early, hoping to curry favor with Andross by killing his ‘enemy.’ Or maybe it was just another betrayal from the man who specialized in them.

Cruxer offered him a blue mag torch and a green. “Spikes and shield?” he asked.

But Kip’s eye was caught by the insignia of the Mighty: a man with hands outstretched, power radiating in circular waves from his hands. “I have a better idea.”

He drafted green from the mag torch like it was water gushing from a well. “All of you, you’re going to have to run after me as fast as you can. Pick me up. As in, right now.”

While Ben-hadad and Cruxer each got under a shoulder, Kip drafted a disk under his own feet.

“Oh no, I need a bit of orange. But those things cost a fort—”

Teia snapped open an orange mag torch. “Life and death, Breaker.”

He didn’t object. He drafted a green platform, then orange lubricant below that, then green again, starting a curve.

“Oh! I’ve heard of these!” Ben-hadad said. “The ancients called them water balls? Drafted them out of blue so they could see out. Then they’d go out on rivers and lakes—”

“Footsteps. Above and below!” Big Leo said.

One of the squad fired a blunderbuss up the stairs above them. Kip heard the clatter of a man falling to the ground. The other blunderbuss fired. Curses and swearing and screams. Kip tried to filter it out, though with the green roaring in him, he wanted to smash them, shut them up. In moments, he’d drafted the bubble. He sprayed orange around the inside of the bubble before he finally closed it. He sealed it on the inside, putting the nexus of the knot close to the surface so he would be able to get out.

He was inside a vaguely translucent green bubble. His idea was to stand, letting his feet slide on the lubricative orange so that he stayed upright. He could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to work.

“I just realized that I don’t need to be inside the ball,” Kip said. “And actually it might be a really bad idea.” But with the bubble closed, the sound was muted. They didn’t hear him.

Kip waved to Cruxer, who took it as readiness.

Cruxer and Ben-hadad heaved the ball toward the stairs.

Kip fell immediately. Orange. Slippery.

He thought he saw Cruxer try to grab the ball to stop him, but Ben-hadad, thinking this was the plan, pushed harder on the Great Green Bouncy Ball o’ Doomed Kip.

And Kip bounced. The ball rolled down the stairs, slowly at first, skipping and bouncing, and then it hit the next landing and sproinged airborne. He rolled along the outside curve of the spiraling staircase—and flew at face level into a group of ten or twelve Lightguards running up the stairs. The ball was six feet wide, and the stairs nine or ten. Kip shouldn’t have blasted into all of them, but he did.

Kip was spun around and right side up for one moment, and he saw the squad following hot behind him, slashing at the scattered, fallen Lightguards, trying not to stumble over the bodies themselves, but trying to keep the men from following them. And then Kip was knocked off his feet again on the next bounce.

He didn’t even see the next group of Lightguards, just felt the shock of collision. And now he had such speed built up that there was no way the squad would be able to keep up. He landed upside down on the next bounce, only the curvature of the ball keeping him from breaking his damn fool neck. Another collision—this one so hard that it rattled Kip’s teeth—sent the ball bouncing back the opposite direction.

Finding himself flat on his back, Kip squinted through the barely translucent ball, wondering how many Lightguards he must have killed with that collision.

None. He’d caught the edge of the recessed doorway at one of the landings. His ball, now having ricocheted back into the stairs above, was rolling slowly back toward the edge of the descending stairs once more.

Through the distortion of the green luxin, Kip saw a young face coming up the stairs from below. A Lightguard, baffled at a boy in a ball. The ugly man had a musket in hand, but he stopped. In a heartbeat, half a dozen more Lightguards joined him. They, too, stopped, bewildered.

Kip waved to them, friendly. It had worked that one time out on the river.

But none of them waved back.

Then something else occurred to him. He hadn’t made any holes in the ball. It was getting hard to breathe. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t sound friendly.

An officer joined the men. “Shoot it!” he yelled.

Kip heard that.

The men raised their muskets. Kip had stopped musket balls with green luxin, once. But that had been open luxin, with all the power of insane Will behind it. He was still flat on his back, and the luxin of the ball wasn’t thick enough to stop bullets.

Why didn’t I make it thick enough to stop bullets?

Thinking was the wrong thing to do. Thinking took time.

A roar resounded through even the walls of his ball, and Kip saw the briefest flash of Big Leo, running down the stairs faster than you can run down stairs. Big Leo lowered a shoulder and flung his massive mass into the ball.

The Ball o’ Kip shot into the Lightguards’ faces amid musket fire.