haven’t killed me yet,” Sloane replied. “That doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth about Nero.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s Sibyl.”
“Sibyl?”
“The prophet. The one who made Genetrix’s doomsday prophecy.” He sat again, across from her. He was so different now than he had been when she knew him only as Mox. He had been charming and levelheaded then—no sign of the chaos beneath. She wondered how he had managed it, even for a few minutes at a time. He didn’t seem capable of it now.
“She knows who I am,” he said. “She knows who Nero is. And she can tell you how the end will come.”
“Where is she?”
“A haven city. Where no magic can touch her. She hates it, the way it feels. Hates the way I feel too. But she’ll bear it for an hour or two if I ask her to.” He scratched the back of his neck, nails raking red lines into his pale skin. “St. Louis. Does your world have a St. Louis?”
Sloane nodded.
“I can take you,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. “But no . . . path of destruction, okay? No killing. We keep it quiet.”
“I’ll never apologize for defending my life,” he said, his dark eyes finding hers with that focus that made Sloane feel like she was under a blowtorch.
“I’ll never ask you to,” she said.
He gave her a peculiar look, like he had never heard such a thing before.
EXCERPT FROM
The Mammoth Treasury of Unrealist Poetry, Volume 4
A Message to Haven Cities After the Installation of Magical Dampeners
by Fake and Bake
HAVEN CITIES
We fix you in our gaze of judgment
our gaze, a gaze
a walking stick
a steering wheel
WE FIX YOU IN OUR GAZE OF JUDGMENT
haven’t you heard, haven’t you
that it is illegal to swallow a person’s magic
and burp up mediocrity?
you and your siphon dampener, your ball gag, your pacifier, your duct tape across the lips of your hostage citizens
WE FIX YOU
we cannot fix you
we fix ourselves
floating castles
paper fireflies
frozen flames
we make the impossible possible
and full of possibilities
DAMPEN US???
no, we dampen you
33
SLOANE WOKE the next morning with a start, then slid her hand underneath her pillow for the pair of scissors she had put there before falling asleep. She knew that scissors wouldn’t do her any good against either ridiculously powerful sorcerers or walking corpses—as Mox had pointed out when he saw her take them—but she hated to be without tools.
Ziva was crouched at her bedside. Her bulging eyes swiveled to the scissors, and she let out a huff that might have been a laugh.
“A humdrum girl in a magical world,” Ziva wheezed. “What are you going to do, trim my fingernails?”
“Underestimating my resourcefulness didn’t work out so great for you last time,” Sloane said. “Remember?”
Ziva sat back on her heels with another huff.
“The consul told me to give you these,” she said, and she thrust a stack of clothes at Sloane. They looked like Mox’s, which meant the pants would be long enough, at least. “And to tell you there’s soap in his bathroom if you want to try to shower with a jug of water. Your train is set to leave in two hours.”
“The consul?” Sloane said.
Ziva cocked her head. “Did you think we called him the Resurrectionist?”
“I thought maybe you called him by his name.”
Ziva made a derisive noise, not through her nose but with the suck of her tongue against her teeth. In order to stand she had to move one of her legs with both hands and then shake out the other knee so it, too, straightened. Sloane wondered if the Resurrectionist’s army had to oil their joints, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.
Sloane walked to Mox’s room—and bathroom—with the clothes tucked under her arm. Last night she had carried a stack of blankets far away from the space where the army was housed to a corner near the stairwell, so she could make a quick exit if necessary. It had taken her a long time to fall asleep—not just because of the strange surroundings or the buzz of all that Mox had told her in the back of her mind, but also because of the guilt over abandoning Matt and Esther in the middle of a mission, without explanation. She had disappointed them in so many ways since they came to Genetrix. She wouldn’t have blamed them if they never spoke to her again after this.
But the lure of the truth had been too strong. If reading the FOIA documents had convinced her of anything, it was that she had