“We too have a kind of Dark One. Our name for him is the Resurrectionist.”
“Is,” Esther said. “Present tense.”
“Yes,” Aelia said. “Our Resurrectionist is still alive. Still terrorizing us. Still doing this.”
She gestured to the dark expanse before them. Sloane saw dark shapes moving ahead, darting in and out of the broken buildings. The area had the trademark pattern of a Drain site, the bits of concrete and wood and steel growing smaller the farther in you looked. At the center, everything would be fine as sand.
“This happened last year,” Aelia said. “The closest the Resurrectionist has ever gotten to our city center. They grow more powerful by the year, and they inch closer.”
“Is that they singular or plural?” Esther asked.
“Did your Dark One work alone?” Aelia’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. “There are followers; there are always followers. But the Resurrectionist’s followers are where the nickname comes from. They are the walking dead.”
Across from them was the skeleton of a house, stripped of siding and drywall. Insulation tumbled in the wind, pink and puffy as cotton candy.
“Like you, we had a Chosen One,” Aelia said. “He was valiant and a talented worker of magic. Young too. Too young, perhaps.”
“He was?” Esther asked.
“He is dead.” Aelia’s voice cracked. “He was defeated.”
It should have been obvious, Sloane thought. Even expected. If there was a universe in which she and her friends had won, of course there were universes where they had lost. Where they had died. Where they had never even existed.
“But he’s the Chosen One,” Esther said. “He can’t be dead. Are you sure you got the right one?”
“We are certain,” Aelia said curtly. “We had a prophecy. It was quite specific. And we used its magical signature to summon you here.”
“Magical signature?” Matt said at the same time Esther said, “Why did you summon us?”
Matt stepped back. Hers was the question he really wanted answered, Sloane assumed.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Sloane said bitterly, her voice trembling. “She wants us to take on her Dark One for her.”
“He isn’t my Dark One,” Aelia snapped. “And I assure you, I would not have resorted to such measures unless the situation was truly dire. I can’t allow more people to die. I can’t allow more of our world to fall into ruin.”
“Oh, well, if the situation is dire, then it’s okay to kidnap people from other dimensions,” Sloane said. Her throat felt tight with rising hysteria.
“Yeah, here I was thinking the direness quotient wasn’t high enough,” Esther added sourly.
“I assure you, it is!” Aelia said, her voice becoming almost shrill.
“I don’t think she’s very good at sarcasm,” Esther said to Sloane.
“She’s going to love us, then,” Sloane replied.
“You have to understand,” Matt said, raising his voice a little to talk over them. “We’ve already been through this, and we’re not eager to go through it again, especially for a place that doesn’t even belong to us.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.” Nero spoke from a few yards away, in the middle of the street. His fingers twisted together in front of him, metal siphon glove wrapped around flesh. “The fates of our worlds are no longer as distinct as one might hope.”
“Uh,” Matt said, “what?”
“Our worlds are connected,” Nero said. “We can see it, the connection. The use of magic has made both of our worlds unstable. The Resurrectionist preys on this instability to accomplish his destruction.”
Sloane narrowed her eyes. “How?”
“We don’t know. We don’t know anything for certain. All we know is that this”—Aelia gestured to the rubble that confronted them—“ is not something he should be able to do. It’s not something anyone was able to do until he came along.”
Sloane thought about touching the Needle for the first time, how it had turned her into an empty stomach, a black hole of wanting. How she had taken everything—everything—into herself, indiscriminate and frantic, churning water into froth and bones into particles of sand. How she had burst through the surface of the ocean, soaked with blood and roaring with power.
“No,” she said. The word came out broken. “No, it can’t be. This can’t be happening.”
“Sloane,” Matt said softly.
“We killed him,” Sloane said. “I saw him, under the water; I saw him die.”
“In one world,” Matt said. “Apparently not in every world.”
“Well, that was my world! I did my part, I fought my Dark One. I did my job!” She was crying. She hated crying. “You can stay and help if you want. But I’m not going to do it again.