Next to Sloane, Matt was frowning at his phone. “I just got a news alert,” he said. “Something happened at the Dome.” He looked up at Sloane.
She stared back steadily. If he asked her, she decided, she wouldn’t lie. She was done with that. Maybe it was her fault that Matt thought she was better than she was; she had spent so much time pretending, for his sake. Maybe it was time he knew what he was really dealing with. Heat rushed into her face, and she was ready, ready for him to ask, ready to tell him—
“Well,” Ines said. “Shall we?”
She was holding the little can the crematory had given Sloane. A heavy silence fell.
“Um—before the last stand, as it were, we all talked about what we wanted if we died,” Ines said. She sniffed. “Albie said he didn’t want a big thing, just for his ashes to be scattered somewhere the Dark One had hit with the Drain. He felt like—I don’t know, he felt connected to the people who died in the same fight. It was a comfort for him, in a way, knowing that if he died, he wouldn’t be alone.”
Sloane stepped to the side so they were all in a circle: Kaitlin and Mrs. Summers, Matt and Esther, Ines and her. Ines opened the lid of the canister. Inside it were the gray ashes, and on top of them, something yellow and bright. A paper crane.
Mrs. Summers spotted it first. And started to laugh.
They all laughed, then, not because it was funny but because it wasn’t, because laughter was a full-body hiccup, wild and strange, and death was wild and strange, too.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Sloane said when silence fell again.
Kaitlin took the canister from Ines and turned west, away from Lake Michigan. She tossed the ashes in a wide arc, toward the monument. The yellow crane tumbled to the ground.
A hand in a houndstooth-patterned mitten wrapped around Sloane’s. Esther. And on her other side, a sturdy leather glove. Matt. All four of them were clasped together, with a few of the ashes dancing around their feet. Sloane’s vision went blurry with tears.
And then she heard a gentle voice. It seemed to speak right into her ear, too quiet at first for the words to be intelligible. She felt the tingle and burn that she associated with the Needle and with magic and looked around her. The others had their heads bowed, and they weren’t moving. Esther’s and Matt’s hands still held hers, the pressure steady.
“Sloane,” the voice said, and it was Albie’s. She searched for him, scanning the monument, the river, the crowd beyond the barrier, but she couldn’t see him. She felt something tugging at the back of her hand, where the scar from the Needle was.
“Let’s go,” Albie’s voice said, from in front of her now, a whisper against her cheek.
It was stupid to think he might be there, even in some small way, just because his ashes were here, just because this was a place where they had done powerful magic. But she had seen and felt and done impossible things, ripped doors free of their hinges and sent them sailing toward the clouds, watched trees hover over the ocean, burst a skyscraper like a grape. She had opened herself to wanting things that could never be hers, and she had gotten them. What was so different about this?
The Dark One had died here. Maybe Albie could be alive somewhere else.
She took one step toward the voice—
—and then regretted it, tried to step back, to go back, but it was too late. Everything had gone dark.
Part
Two
EXCERPT FROM
It’s a Magical World Out There! An Elementary-Schooler’s Guide to Magic, 7th Edition
by Agnes Dewey and Sebastian Bartlett
Did you know that the world used to be a whole lot less magical? Well, it’s true! Up until 1969, most people didn’t think magic really existed. It was just fairy-tale stuff. But in 1969, something called the Tenebris Incident (more on that in chapter 3!) happened, and magic spread all over Genetrix. People all across our planet saw some amazing—but scary!—things, like certain parts of the ocean boiling for no reason [fig. 2], glowing balls of light floating around neighborhoods [fig. 3], and whole buildings turning upside down [fig. 4]. One person even took a picture of a whale floating in the clouds [fig. 5]!
After magic spread, a lot of people also got really sick. Their bodies weren’t used to the magical energy in the air!