pushing every ounce of herself into the effort. But she knew it would mend without effort. It was eager to mend, just as it had been eager to bury itself in her flesh.
The piece of needle in her left hand was still moving, carving a line of agony down her arm and into the crook of her elbow. A bruise blossomed there as the Needle pierced a blood vessel. She bit her lip as it worked its way to her shoulder, sliced across her chest, then traveled down her arm, leaving another bruise, a twin to the first one. The pieces of the Needle united with a fierce glow, and a burning unlike anything Sloane had ever felt. She screamed, every inch of her skin now feeling raw.
Mox gaped at her, his cheeks pink with the effort of futile resistance. Sloane’s blood dripped from the punctures of the Needle fragments. She let it flow, swallowing down bile.
“Now,” Nero said, sounding frustrated, “I will have to cut it out of you.”
He started toward her, and Sloane put up a hand to stop him. She didn’t need to make a sound for the Needle to work. It expressed her purest desire, and what she craved in that moment was a second to think. A barrier formed between her and Nero, rippling as he touched it. He dug in with his own magic before focusing Mox’s too. She could feel the difference between the two, one sharp and clever, the other rough and hot.
As repulsed as she was by the foreign body now lodged in the back of her hand again, Sloane also marveled at it a little, at the thought that such a small thing could be so powerful and so beyond her comprehension. It was like the sun—even at a great distance, filtered by atmosphere, its rays were strong enough to warm the Earth. All the most powerful things she knew were also destructive unless diluted in some way.
She stared at Nero—at the Dark One—through the barrier.
“Is this what it’s always been about?” she said. “The Needle?”
She remembered that as the Dark One asked her about their weapons cache—right before forcing her to choose between herself and Albie—he had stared at her hand, at the scars there, with something like fascination. She had thought that he was fascinated by her, but as Ziva had said so plainly, there was nothing special about her, nothing powerful—except that the Needle was her weapon and no one else’s.
“What is it that you want?” she said, and her voice sounded quiet, curious.
Nero’s eyes focused on hers, and she heard a hum or a whistle, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was somewhere else.
42
Nero grabbed the metal railing, water running down his knuckles. Waiting for him at the river’s edge was Aelia, crouched, her red skirt tight around her knees. He held the pair of boots out with his other hand, and she took them from him, though she kept them away from her body as if disgusted by them.
“These, really?” Aelia said. “This was the object she poured herself into?”
“She is not sentimental, and she didn’t keep a journal, unlike the last Chosen One.” He hoisted himself up out of the water using the railing, then climbed over it, his limbs heavy from the swim between universes. “I needed something she had modified and kept close in order to summon her.”
His clothes were waterlogged. Aelia set the boots down and performed the working to dry him off, flicking her fingers at his cloak.
“You can take that mask off now,” Aelia said, cringing. “You look like a melting candle.”
He unfastened the top button of his shirt and undid the clasp holding the siphon to his chest. The working didn’t change his face, but it projected a different appearance to anyone who looked at him, even on Earth. Aelia had told him before that the projection didn’t look precisely normal, which was perhaps even more desirable for his purposes. The people of Earth were vulnerable to even the most transparent of workings, given their denial of magic’s existence.
He had amused himself by reading the latest theories: the Dark One was a government experiment gone awry; an alien invader pursuing world domination; a mad billionaire turned supervillain. The people of Earth, he had decided, read too many comic books.
He picked up the girl’s boots, and together he and Aelia set out toward the terraces of trees along the river walk. It was before sunrise, and the city was