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“But without the Thief, there wouldn’t be any Antistasi,” Cordelia said, her voice cold with the truth of the matter.

Maggie’s expression was suddenly unreadable. She was staring at Esta, as though seeing her for the first time.

“Where, exactly, would that leave us?” North asked, breaking his silence.

“I don’t know. Wherever you should have been,” Esta told him. “Not fighting a war you can’t win.”

“Maybe I’m already right where I’m supposed to be.” North took a step closer to Maggie, as if to protect her. “Maybe I don’t need you messing with that.”

“You don’t understand,” Esta told him.

“I understand enough,” he drawled. “You’re not only talking about fixing what happened with the serum in St. Louis. You’re talking about messing around with time itself. You could destroy our very lives.”

“We’ve already destroyed lives,” Esta said. “Plenty of them. Or have you forgotten the people in St. Louis who died from the serum? Have you forgotten all of the innocent people who have been caught up in the Antistasi’s actions over the last couple of years? Is your life worth so much more than any of theirs?”

None of them looked ready to concede the point, and Esta understood their reluctance. Going back meant the possibility of saving some, but there was no way to predict how many other lives might be changed—or how they might be changed. Weighing one set of lives against another was an impossible arithmetic, one Esta didn’t feel worthy to calculate.

But the Antistasi had no idea how different this version of 1904 was from the one that had once been—the one that was supposed to have been. Nothing she could say would give them a true sense of what life without the Defense Against Magic Act was like. More importantly, none of them—Esta included—could really know how different the future might still be because of what they’d done in St. Louis.

“You would risk destroying everything we worked for?” Cordelia said. “All of the progress we’ve made against the Brotherhoods? All that the Antistasi have become—you would endanger it?”

“Possibly,” Esta admitted.

“What makes you think we would let you?” North asked as he drew out a pistol and leveled it directly at her chest.

THERE’S ALWAYS A CHOICE

1904—Denver

Maggie looked at the pistol in North’s hand with a strange sense of detachment. She had known all along that Esta had been lying about who Ben—Harte—really was, even before they’d left St. Louis. She’d suspected that the two had been hiding their true motives as well, but her orders had been to bring them both to the Antistasi’s side. Maggie had worried, of course, about whether she’d been doing enough, but now she saw how tenuous her control over the situation had been all along.

“Put down the gun, Jericho,” she said, taking a slow, careful step toward him. He looked more afraid than angry, but fear could make people do things they normally wouldn’t.

“I won’t let her undo all that we have.” The pistol shook, unsteady in his hand.

“You don’t want to do this.” Maggie kept her voice soft as she took another step. “We aren’t killers.”

“You heard what she said,” Jericho told her. “She’d undo our lives if we let her.”

“It’s not going to come to that,” Maggie said gently, sidling closer. “Put the gun down, Jericho. Please.” But he didn’t respond to her request.

“Killing me won’t save you, anyway,” Esta told him. She looked drained, but her voice was steady.

“It sure might be worth a try,” Jericho said.

Esta shook her head. “You don’t understand. If you kill me now, it won’t help. You won’t get to keep this version of the present.”

“You can’t know that,” Jericho said.

“I told you about the man who raised me,” Esta said, looking to Maggie now. “But I didn’t tell you everything. The man who trained me didn’t only lie about what he wanted. He lied about everything. He killed my parents to get to me when I was a baby. I was born in 1899. But he sent me forward when I was a toddler, and I lived most of my life a hundred years from now, in the twenty-first century. I only came back to 1902 recently, a few months ago. But by coming back, I’ve changed things.”

Maggie could tell that Esta was choosing her words, still fighting against the pull of the truth serum, but the tale Esta wove for them was nothing short of astounding. If Maggie didn’t know what North was capable of with his watch, and if she didn’t have so much faith in her own truth serum, she might not have accepted a word Esta was saying. To believe that Esta came from some time far beyond their own seemed too incredible to countenance. But Maggie knew that events could be changed. She’d seen North do it more than once. She didn’t doubt her own abilities either. It hadn’t been long enough for the effects of the truth tablets to wear off, which meant that this time—no matter how impossible her story seemed—Esta wasn’t lying.

“If I don’t take Ishtar’s Key back to the girl in New York, time will unspool,” Esta explained. “The world will go back to how it was before I stole the artifacts from the Order and before the Thief destroyed the train. This version of the present won’t exist, and neither will the Antistasi—at least not as you are right now.”

North turned to Maggie, to Cordelia, like he was looking for some sign that this was another trick. “That can’t be right.”

“She can’t lie right now,” Maggie reminded him, wishing it were otherwise.