agreed with her that it would be helpful, and I knew you wouldn’t want to come, so—”
“No, you knew that if you told me about it before you left, I would argue with you,” Matt said, scowling. “You don’t just get to go behind my back because you know I disagree with you! Have I ever done that to either of you?”
“Well, maybe if you ever wanted to do anything—”
“Sloane, shut up!” Esther snapped. “Stop being such a fucking child.”
Heat rushed into Sloane’s face. Esther pinched her nose as if forcing tension away. Sloane kept forgetting how tired Esther had looked when she dragged herself out of the river. Nothing was waiting for Sloane back on Earth except familiarity and an apartment she needed to move out of. But waiting for Esther was a dying parent. Every moment they spent here was, for her, a moment too long.
“You make a fair point,” Esther said to Matt. “Right, Sloane?”
“You don’t have to pressure her into agreeing with you,” Matt said.
“She’s not,” Sloane forced herself to say. “It is a fair point. Sorry.”
Esther sighed with obvious relief and kicked off one of her shoes so it landed somewhere in the bedroom she had claimed. The other one soon joined it, and she stood in flat feet, her pink lipstick faded everywhere but the outline of her mouth, her eye makeup smeared under her lower lashes. The Essy of Insta! fame was gone.
“Okay,” Matt said. “Well, how was he?”
“A dick,” Sloane said.
“He was not a dick,” Esther said. “He was a mailman with a dead wife. No interest in government work or magic.”
“So he wasn’t like Bert.” Matt looked triumphant. “I told Esther earlier, just because someone’s got the same genes as their parallel counterpart—”
“He was a lot like Bert, actually.” Sloane crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “He was listening to Neil Young. He had all these books on magical objects of legend. He talked like Bert, teared up like Bert; he had fucking gnomes in his front yard. He was Bert, but the spread of magic derailed him.”
“How could the spread of magic derail him? Bert was fascinated by magic,” Matt said. “He would have loved for it to become widespread.”
“No, Bert was fascinated by mystery,” Sloane said. “He liked knowing things that no one else knew and finding out that myths were real, so once magic became this known quantity that you could control with tech and frequencies, he lost interest.” She stared at her shoes, covered in dust and dirt and puddle water. “He was similar enough that I lost it a little,” she said. “He was similar enough that I think it’s possible—maybe even likely—that the Resurrectionist could be the alternate version of the Dark One.”
“Our Dark One was just making use of magic that most of Earth didn’t believe existed,” Matt said. “I guess it makes sense that in a world where magic is widely known to exist, he would delve deeper into what was possible—like bring an army back from the dead.”
Sloane nodded.
“I mean, if a normal person knew how to bring someone back from death, they wouldn’t build a freaking army. They would bring back loved ones, family, friends,” Esther said.
Sloane thought of Cameron at the community swimming pool, teaching her how to backflip into the water. There were so many things she hadn’t said to him. Things she could say if she figured out how to raise the dead.
Esther’s voice sounded strained as she continued, as if she was thinking of her own father, lost to the Dark One, and her mother, who wouldn’t be around much longer: “But the Dark One wasn’t—isn’t normal.”
“The good news—well, the slightly better than horrible news,” Sloane said, “is that we do know the Dark One a little. So we’re not facing a completely unknown enemy here. Like you said the other day, Matt—we’ve done this before.”
It was a better apology than the earlier one, in a way; it acknowledged that he had been right to find hope in the idea that they had experienced this already. She was remembering, only it didn’t feel like memory, not really. It felt like becoming something she had already been. A pared-down Sloane, whittled to her essential elements. A clenched jaw and a clear head and a single purpose: the end of the Dark One.
“I know you hate the siphons, Slo, but you have to keep working on it,” Matt said. “We all do. That’s the next step for