surfaced coughing, her clothes heavy and her hair plastered to her face. Once she was able to take a deep breath again, she dove, kicking like a frog.
This time, there was no magical light to guide her down to the membrane between the worlds, thinner here in Chicago than in other places—she believed that there was something special about this place, yes; she could feel the way the city had attracted her even from childhood, beautiful and strange and glittering in the sun. The darkness that surrounded her was absolute and directionless. She followed only the pull of gravity, as if she were holding a thread looped through its eye.
She kicked, at first measured and strong, then frantic, clawing at the water to get down faster and faster. Her lungs burned, but it was no different than the burning in her chest, in her head. It occurred to her that this sensation of being deep underwater—the fire inside her, the pressure against her head, the tingling in every limb—was what she had always associated with magic, and maybe this was why. Maybe all her life had not been motion forward but motion around this moment, like something circling a drain.
She needed air. Sloane remembered the siphon on her hand and started to hum, choosing a pitch that sounded roughly like her memory of Aelia trapping air behind the handkerchief the first time she dove and adjusting it higher. There was no question of her desires; she wanted to breathe. She envisioned a bubble around her head, like a cartoon of an astronaut, and the water around her face shifted like an ocean current. Then its weight pulled away from her mouth and nose, and when she exhaled next, she heard its rasp, as if she were aboveground.
My first magical breath, she thought, and laughed a little.
Above her was the rubble of the tower that made up the river bottom in Earth’s Chicago, the P wedged between hunks of concrete and steel, and below her, the tangle of plants that grew from the river bottom in Genetrix’s Chicago. She was in the space between the two worlds.
She had dropped the two pieces of the Needle in the river before Albie’s funeral. She had known then that she would always be able to find the Needle if she needed to, that it spoke to her even when she ignored its voice. She stretched out her siphon hand and hummed, not thinking about the pitch, the frequency, the line that would show on the oscilloscope. She thought only about how the Needle had helped her when she needed it to break into the Dome and destroy the magical prototype, even when she had needed it to destroy the Dark One.
She needed it again.
She hovered in the channel between Earth and Genetrix without gravity pulling her in either direction. This was the closest she had ever come to feeling weightless. She thought of Albie’s voice whispering in her ear to beckon her toward Genetrix, and she whispered into the pocket of air she had created around her head. “Come on . . .” she said. “Come on!”
Something in front of her glittered, despite the absence of light. Two slim fragments took shape in front of her; they were metallic in appearance, but not any metal ARIS scientists had been familiar with. Every part of her sang with relief. She reached for them.
The first brush against the Needle pieces shocked her and made her body go rigid. For a second she was afraid that they had pricked her again, buried themselves back in her hand, but then she saw them gleaming in her palm.
She had beckoned, and they had come. The phrase the manifestation of impossible wants had never made more sense to her. It was magic.
She pinched one half of the Needle between the fingers of her left hand and the other half with her right, keeping them in separate hands as she kicked up from the ground, swimming toward the surface.
The pocket of air around her face collapsed without warning as she swam away from the space between worlds, and she kicked harder. Her legs ached when she finally saw the light from the city above her, just a spark at first, a lit match in the dark, and then a glow. And then—air, and the river’s edge. Sloane threw herself over it and collapsed to the concrete, gasping.
“Slo.” Esther’s voice greeted her. She lifted her head. Esther stood with Matt, their hands