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ELEMENTS UNITE

The fear in Jianyu’s voice had Esta turning back to look over her shoulder at the city. With every passing second, things were growing worse. Viola was right. The sunrise seemed to be adding to the energy that was already too much for the streets to contain. A thunderous rumble split the air, and she watched in horror as the bridge swayed. At the base of the long span, the part closest to the land, an enormous crack crawled across the pavement, severing them from the city and trapping them up against the Brink. But Esta didn’t trust that they’d be safe in that no-man’s-land between the city they’d come from and the line that could destroy them. She remembered what had happened when she and Harte had crossed back into the city. If the Brink lurched as it had then, everything would be over.

She turned to Harte, panicked suddenly at how quickly everything was moving. They were out of time. “Whatever happens, I need you to know—”

“Don’t,” he said, his jaw tight. The gray of his irises was a storm-tossed sea. “Not now.”

“Then when?” she asked.

His jaw tensed. “After. You can tell me whatever you have to say after.”

“Harte—” Her throat was tight, and she wanted to step into his arms, wanted nothing more than to touch him.

“I can’t walk into this without any hope at all,” he said.

She wanted to kiss him. She needed the feel of his mouth on her lips as she walked into the flames, but Seshat still waited within his skin.

Dolph took the ring from his finger and held it out to her. “I believe you’ll need this.”

Esta looked up at him, the man who had fathered the child she had once been. Despite the stripe of white in his dark hair, he wasn’t an old man—no more than five or six years older than she was herself. She knew then that if they made it through this, she would never be able to tell him who she was.

She couldn’t tell him any of it, she realized. Because if he knew about the child, she knew he would never let her go.

There was no more time for words or hesitation. They moved together as one, as though they had always known somewhere deep within the cells of their very being that this was their purpose and their fate. Viola, Jianyu, Dolph, and Harte positioned themselves in a circle with Esta and the Book of Mysteries in its center. They each held one of Newton’s Sigils, the paper-thin discs covered in mercury and inscribed with a ritual that could protect them from the Brink’s claim.

One by one they set the discs to spinning. One by one the flat bits of metal flashed, transforming themselves into orbs of light. Cold energy rose around them, and the atmosphere shifted as they suddenly connected, one to another. The bridge was unsteady beneath them, and the Brink shook, pulsing threateningly in the sky above them, but inside the circle of light there was only silence.

Harte’s eyes were on her, determined and steadfast, and suddenly everything seemed to drain away but the two of them. She did not say, I love you. She did not say that she was afraid or that she wished there had been more time. She did not say any of the things she should have. She offered none of the words she’d kept inside for so long because it had felt too dangerous to release them.

But he gave her a small nod and mouthed the words I know.

The bridge shook again, and one of the enormous stones tumbled from the tower above them.

“No!” Harte shouted when the boundary wavered. “Hold it steady. We move together, on my count…” Then he began to lead them slowly, carefully into the swirling power of the Brink.

As they walked, energy snapped around them. She could feel it threatening the boundary they had created with the sigils. Her hair lifted, stirred against her cheeks at the cold magnetic energy, and she felt her affinity lurch. Beyond the protection of the sigils, the Brink was still there—calling, demanding.

She didn’t waste any more time. She flipped open the Book, and once she had found the page she needed, she placed the Ars Arcana on the ground open-faced.

With Viola’s knife, Esta made a small, careful cut along the same scar from before, and then—hoping she was right, hoping she hadn’t just led them all to certain death—she pressed her bleeding fingertip to the open page. As her blood disappeared into the parchment, a cold power blasted up from the pages and washed over her. The Book seemed to quiver beneath her hands.

If there was only ever one Book, if it was made of a piece of pure magic—within time and beyond it all at once—it meant that the Book they’d had in 1980—the one they’d used to secure the artifacts—was also this Book. Which meant…

Carefully, she touched the page. It felt like ice and fire all at once, but the second her fingertips brushed against the parchment, she felt a burst of energy—the crackle of something like an electric shock—and her finger dipped into the page. She pressed farther, until her hand disappeared up to the wrist, and then she went farther still. She couldn’t see her hand any longer, but she could feel the substance it pushed through, cold and alive and strangely like it had felt when time tried to unmake her back in Colorado.

When she took her hand from the page, she had an ornate dagger in her hand.

With a shaking breath, she reached for the next.

The necklace and the crown, the dagger and the ring.

One by one, she put them on, tucking the dagger into her waistband so it could press against her skin. The stones immediately grew warm, as though they understood what was to come, and the Brink shuddered in response. Outside the circle of the sigils, wind began to swirl, tearing at her friends’ clothing and hair. All around them, the icy energy of the Brink pressed in on the fragile protection of the sigils’ boundary.

“Hurry,” Jianyu told her, his voice strained.

Quickly, Esta turned back to the Book and turned to the page she needed.

“To catch the serpent with the hand of the philosopher…,” she read, whispering the words to herself like a prayer. But was the serpent time? Or was magic itself?