Page 36

“Finally,” Abe said, throwing up his hands. “Someone’s talking sense.”

Cela glared at her brother, but Jianyu was still issuing orders.

“You especially have to go, Cela.”

His words felt like a slap. A betrayal. “No,” she said, ready to fight him every bit as much as she’d fought her brother on this point. “The patrol isn’t looking for me,” she told him.

“What patrol?” His brows creased.

“The one in the next building,” Abel explained. “They’re looking for Mageus that sound an awful lot like you and Viola here.”

Jianyu let out a soft string of words she couldn’t understand. “He works faster than I expected.” He looked up at her. “You need to leave the city.”

She started to argue, but Jianyu stepped forward and took her hands. “There is no time for argument,” he said, gripping her fingers even more tightly. “You must leave. You must get outside of the Brink, where Nibsy Lorcan cannot touch you. And you must take the silver discs with you.”

MERCURY IGNITES

1983—City Hall Station

The air was still warm, thick with the magic that had just exploded through the station. The artifacts were still glowing with their eerie luminescence, and Harte still felt the presence of a boundary around him, trapping him within the circle that Esta had drawn on the ground. Beneath Harte, Esta wasn’t moving. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

“Come on,” he pleaded, jostling her softly. “Please, Esta. I can’t—” His voice broke, and he swallowed hard against the horror rising in his throat. “Please. You have to wake up. You have to.”

Because I can’t do this without you.

But Esta didn’t respond. She remained quiet and still, her body limp in his arms.

He lied. Those had been her final words to him, and she’d said them as though she couldn’t believe they were true. Who had lied? Nibsy?

Of course Nibsy Lorcan would have lied. Why would she have thought otherwise?

Careful not to touch the Book beneath her, Harte maneuvered Esta to cradle her head on his lap, then brushed her hair back from her too-pale face. Still, she didn’t stir. Her skin had gone a sickly gray, and her lips looked pale and bloodless. Her eyes were open, but their amber irises gazed unseeing at the dark skylights above.

He couldn’t lose her. Not like this. He’d never even told her—

Esta blinked then and took a small, shuddering breath, and relief nearly knocked Harte over. He could tell she wasn’t aware of him. He wasn’t sure whether she could see or focus on anything at all. But if he leaned down, he could now feel the faintest whisper of breath coming from her mouth.

She was alive, and it was enough. It was everything. Esta was alive, and Seshat was trapped back in the Book, and Harte would do anything to make sure Esta kept breathing.

Suddenly there were footsteps coming from the corridor at the back of the station, and suddenly a group of men flooded out of the tunnel, surrounding the circle on the floor and the two of them inside it. They weren’t police—at least Harte didn’t think they were. Dressed in boxy coats with white sashes, the men wore a familiar silver medallion on their lapel. They looked like a version of the Jefferson Guard, but there was something off about them. It wasn’t only the strange cut of their coats. It was their eyes—every single one of them had nothing but endless darkness where their eyes should have been. Pupils and whites together had been obscured, and in their place was a familiar, fathomless black.

“Thoth,” Harte whispered, understanding suddenly without understanding anything at all. Seshat had said he was everywhere, but Harte hadn’t believed her.

The men’s mouths curved up in eerie synchronicity. “Yes,” they all said, their voices chanting in unison, but it wasn’t human voices that came from their mouths.

Harte had heard that voice before, in visions and in dreams. He still didn’t understand how this could be, but he knew that Seshat had been right. Her anger and rage and especially her terror made horrible sense now. Esta might have killed Jack back in Chicago, but she hadn’t managed to destroy Thoth. He’d escaped somehow, and now he was here, within these men. Years in the future. Controlling them as he’d once controlled Jack.

What did Esta do?

“She freed me,” the men said, addressing Harte’s unspoken thought in that singular, inhuman voice. “She unleashed me. Made me more than even I dreamed of being.” The men laughed in eerie unison, a dark, mirthless scraping sound.

“No,” he said, not willing to believe she had sacrificed so much for this.

“She’s a mere child,” the voices said, echoing through the cavernous chamber. “She never had the power to defeat me. But she released me, allowed me to become infinite. And now it seems she has helped me further. She has made it possible for me to take what is and was always destined to be mine.” Together, all the men moving as one, they stepped toward the Book.

“No.” The word was nothing more than a husk of breath, but the relief Harte felt at the sound of Esta speaking threatened to overwhelm him. She looked up at him then, and though her golden eyes were now rimmed in blood, he knew she wasn’t gone—not completely. She could see him.

Suddenly, Harte felt another blast of magic. Power poured from the Ars Arcana, and because it was still connected to the circle and to Esta herself, it began to lift her from his arms as it coursed through her. As he held on to her, energy poured from her eyes and mouth, flooding the station with a magic more intense than anything Harte had ever felt before. He was trying to keep hold of her, but he could feel the heat of the magic vibrating through her. The sheer immensity of it.