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For six months, I had courted war, taunted it. This was not what I wanted. Not this bloodshed, this wild terror. I covered my head as another plane dived toward the quay, lit by its own path of destruction.

This is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted—

Blood soaked the snow nearby. I looked up to see corpses strewn across the street. Jaw blown off. Chunks of flesh. Like the carrières, but with warm, soft bodies. My mind locked it all out. Yet everywhere I turned, there were more horrors to rip open each stitch I used to seal it all away. I was six. I was stumbling over bodies and through lakes of blood. I was twenty and in hell and there was no escape. My past and present selves were side by side.

One hand in the snow. Trembling in my elbow, pressure in my wrist.Get up.I planted my boot on the ground.Get up.

Somehow, I kept going. I ran and ran until I retched on the scorched air. I skirted craters, stepped on bodies, veered away from cracked and teetering buildings. I imagined the deep wounds in the citadel, missiles shattering the delicate walls of the carrières. Paris could swallow itself whole.

I stumbled past Rue Gît-le-Cœur. And then I was almost there. I was closing in on that hall of stained-glass windows, where I had left part of myself. Left him to his fate. Yes, I could see its spire, not yet fallen. The golden cord trembled. I felt it. A gasping laugh escaped me. Hewasthere. We would find each other. We could get out of here together.

I want you with me. That is all I know.

Faster. Over the bridge, onto the Île de la Citadelle. The Grande Salle was on fire. A woman was on her knees in front of it, fists buried in the snow. Her scream went on and on. I kept running, half blinded by dust.

Paige?

Arcturus—

From the east, where the sun would rise, a windstorm. A whistle. The telltale vibration in my bones. I looked up, past the flaming buildings and the smoke, to the spire. I heard him—either in my head or through the cord—call my name. I heard it like he was beside me. And with the last of my sense, one clear thought:stop, you have to stop. I was too close.

And then the purest, brightest, most beautiful gold, as if the sun had opened its eye and looked straight into me. And I knew it was the last light, and the æther had come to take me back into its arms.

****

I woke to snow on the backs of my fingers. My cheek was numb against wet stone.

Not just snow. Ash. Gray, flaking ash.

When I coughed, crushing pain followed. A sludge of memories, too thick to parse. I was lying on my side, half buried under shards of wood and glass, and the sky above was scarred with black. The sirens had waned, replaced by a dead silence I had thought impossible in a citadel. No blue tone. No unbroken breath of traffic.

Silence.

A heavy bar of iron lay across my leg. With a tiny groan, I pulled free, shifted onto my front, and sucked in a burning lungful of smoke. I crawled along pitifully on my stomach. My clothes and hair were thick with ash, bleached pale as bone. I tried to push myself onto my elbows, but my arms trembled too much. I kept going until I almost collapsed onto soft warmth.

A woman. Eyes dull beneath heavy lids, blood drying in her hair, a shroud of ashes. Slowly, with a leaden head, I looked up to see more corpses, as gray as me, littered all the way down the street. One man was missing most of his right arm; he lay in red snow near the ruins of the Forteresse de Justice. I looked at it. At the first place a missile had hit.

At the smoking remains of the chapel with stained-glass windows, the last place I had seen Arcturus. That glass now glinted from the snow and ash, fractured into millions of pieces. Splinters of a rainbow in the gray.

“No.” I reached for the golden cord, but it seemed to slip between my fingers. “No—”

In the ruins, nothing stirred. Surely even Rephaite bone would have yielded to that weight.

My sob of denial set off a coughing fit. Smoke cooked the back of my throat. I stared with hot eyes at the place that had been his prison, the dark hall that had shone with colors. Elsewhere in the citadel, I realized, the sirens were still calling. I mustered all the breath I had left and screamed along with them, until I folded on myself and my voice burned to nothing.

I have resented my gift, for it does not let me forget. I could not forget the room where I was scarred. Our fingers twined.Yet neither can I forget this room.

“Paige!”

My hands curled into fists. Someone was beside me, someone I knew. A pair of buckled shoes, black against the slush. Hair less gray than mine.

“You’re alive.” Cordier blew out fog. “The only one here, by the looks of it. A stroke of luck for both of us.” Small hands took me by the shoulders. “Paige, get up. Stand up. We have to go.”

But my chest was heaving. I was awake in the ruins of everything, and suddenly I was racked by sobs, so hard and wrenching that I made no sound at all. Heat bathed my cheeks. Every memory was a knife in my core. Keeping one hand pressed to my back, Cordier swore under her breath and reached into her coat. In the bloody light of sunrise, her shadow fell across me.

“I’m sorry, Paige. I have to do this,” she said, her voice almost tender. And no longer French. “It’s for your own good. I promise. Everything that happens next is for good.”

Before I could stop her, she clamped a cloth over my nose and mouth. It smelled of white flowers. It smelled of oblivion. I tried to resist, to push her away, to stop myself inhaling—I tried, I did—but I was back on the waterboard, icy cold and wet and smothered, all my fight was gone.

War was coming. The Devil was twofold. It was standing over me, holding my chains, and I could not remember why I had ever thought I could escape it. I closed my eyes.

And I breathed in.