any indication that the message I’d sent through Doughnut World Simon had worked.
But the light was dim, and my heart was heavy, and all I could see in his gaze was sympathy.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I was drawing.” He hefted the sketchbook. “I lost the light, so I left. Came back when I heard the gate. What’s wrong?”
“Who said anything was wrong?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “People don’t hang out in cemeteries unless something’s wrong.”
“You do.”
“My mom’s here. Can’t get much more wrong. Who are you grieving, Delancey Sullivan?”
My head snapped up, and I wondered if one of my wishes had been granted. “Whole worlds.”
He bent and removed another leaf that had scudded across Amelia’s grave, then took my hand and led me to the stone wall. “Tell me.”
I boosted myself onto the rough-hewn ledge, pleased when he sat close enough that our sides pressed together, shoulder to knee. He touched the scratch on my cheek, his artist’s fingers featherlight, eyebrows drawing together.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I assured him.
“What does?”
“I did something horrible.” As small talk went, it sucked. But his mother’s death had stripped this Simon clean of small talk. He didn’t waste time on insignificance, or false consolation.
“Can you undo it?”
I had a fleeting, fanciful image of reweaving the threads I’d cut, but Walking wasn’t time travel. The world I’d cleaved was gone, as impossible to recover as a tear in the sea. “I’m too late. I thought it was the right thing, but it wasn’t. And now I have all this blood on my hands, and no clue how to live with it.”
He smiled, a wry, tired hitch along one side of his mouth. “You’re not going to tell me what you did?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Figures.” He looked out over the graveyard, the deepening twilight turning the headstones blue-black, the lights at the entrance casting ineffective circles on the ground. “I guess if you can’t make it right, you make it so it can’t happen again.”
Which is what the Free Walkers were doing. But Ms. Powell had said cauterizations held back energy that strengthened the Key World. The cut site was left weaker. Without the Key World, the entire multiverse would destabilize, strings disrupting each other until there was nothing left. Were the Free Walkers—with the best of intentions—destroying the very thing I was sworn to protect?
But who protected the Echoes? Walkers believed in obedience, diligence, and sacrifice—but how much sacrifice was too much? “Do you believe in necessary evils?”
He squinted. “Fooling people into thinking evil is necessary seems pretty evil. Not sure about the necessary part.”
“What about the greater good?”
“Depends on whose version of good we’re talking about. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, aren’t they?”
“Not me.”
He slipped an arm around my shoulders. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew.” My fingers on threads that split and sheared and unmade a world. “But I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what I was told!” I chose the words with care. “The people I . . . work for. They told us we were doing a service, we were helping people. And instead . . . it was exactly the opposite. They’ve been lying to me my whole life.”
Fury broke through my shock and horror. No wonder the Consort wanted to eradicate the Free Walkers. The Consort held sway over the Walkers by telling us we were heroes, telling us what we wanted to believe. If we thought otherwise, they’d lose control of us, and of the multiverse. An unwelcome truth is the most effective weapon of all.
“You can’t give a kid a box of matches and not expect them to burn down the house,” he said. He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, hand lingering along my jaw. I closed my eyes and savored the sensation, though it wasn’t my Simon. His fingers smelled of turpentine and pencil lead, but the touch was so familiar, even if the sound was wrong. I pressed my cheek into his palm and drew strength from it, the first bit I’d had in days.
“I have to make it right.”
I hadn’t known, but now I did. If I sat by and let the cleavings continue, I was as evil as the Consort.
“We’ll fix it,” he murmured, fingers weaving through my hair. “And then we’ll be good.”
We’ll fix this, and we’ll be good. My message to Doughnut Simon, echoing back across the multiverse to me.