in a goddamn living nightmare,” she said. “Albie is dead, Ines is a universe away, the Dark One is still alive, and this world is stuffed with magic we don’t know how to wield!”
“I’d say you know something about how to wield it,” Matt said coolly. “How else could you have blown up the Dome last night? Pipe bomb?”
Sloane didn’t answer. She didn’t know how.
“You think Slo is the one who attacked the Dome?” Esther said. “Matt—”
“He’s right.” Sloane kept her eyes steady on Matt’s as she spoke. “I did it. I dug up Koschei’s Needle and destroyed the magic prototype.”
“Fuck, Slo,” Esther said. “I thought the Needle was destroyed years ago.”
“It wasn’t,” Sloane said. “I just didn’t want ARIS to have it.”
“But you thought it was fine if you had it?” Matt said. “Because you’re more trustworthy than ARIS?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I am.”
“You probably killed people, you know that?” Matt said. “Janitors, security staff.”
Sloane looked down at the raised scar tissue on the back of her hand, the jagged lines caused by her crooked teeth. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” She lifted her head.
“What?” Matt said.
“Why do you think I gnawed the Needle out of my own hand?” Sloane brandished the back of her hand at Matt like it was a weapon. “Because all the other people who were with me on the Deep Dive mission to get it are dead. I killed every last one of them.” She was tense, her shoulders up by her ears. Bracing herself for impact, she thought. “ARIS wouldn’t remove the Needle even when I begged them to,” she said. “So I did it myself.”
She remembered the x-ray of her hand taken after the Deep Dive incident. The bones, stark white against the black background, grayish in places where they weren’t as dense. And then right in the middle, the thick Needle, tapering to a sharp point.
It’s really stuck in there, the doctor had said. Like it thinks it belongs or something.
Sloane had gone her entire life never getting what she wanted. No one had ever even asked her what she wanted. She didn’t make any Christmas lists or birthday requests, that was a given—but there were also no signed field-trip forms, no clubs or sports or musical instruments, no lunch money—hell, no food in the kitchen half the time, especially after Cameron joined the fight against the Dark One. As far as her mom knew, Sloane had no desires beyond physical necessities. And sometimes she wasn’t even allowed to want those.
So when it came to getting the Needle out, she had decided that this one time, she would get what she wanted for herself, even if she had to do it with her teeth.
“That was for your own safety,” Matt said. “ARIS didn’t know how the Needle would react—”
Sloane laughed. “ARIS never gave a shit about our safety as long as at least one of us survived to fulfill the fucking prophecy. They made me keep the Needle because it served their purposes. That’s all.”
Matt’s eyebrows knit together like they always did when he pitied someone. She hated it.
“And now here we are again,” she said, “another wall of flesh between the people in charge and the Dark One. So how are we going to survive this time?”
Neither of the others answered. Esther seemed unwilling to even look at her. Sloane thought of the bloodstained waves crashing around the ARIS boat, now empty. Thought of how she had hauled herself back onto the deck and padded on flippered feet to the controls to activate the distress signal, tasting copper on her tongue.
She thought of the sting of water hitting her shins as she did a cannonball off the diving board. Cameron waiting for her at the edge of the pool.
And the taste of river water, the pale glint of the Dark One’s cheek in the moonlight, before he disappeared.
Sloane opened the door and was about to leave when Matt spoke again.
“We’ll find a way,” he said.
“Yeah,” she replied, and she walked out.
Sloane wasn’t surprised when Matt followed her into the hallway.
Their first kiss had happened something like this. After the fall of the Dark One, he had asked her out a few times. Each time, she had refused. They were friends, she said. She didn’t think of him that way.
But it had just been an excuse, because she had no longer known how she thought of him. The image of him when she first met him—all elbows and knees—had vanished, and the