The news from CCM was a jumble. Lattimer’s death had thrown the Consort into chaos—and the fact he’d killed an Original had given the Free Walkers’ claims credibility. The Walkers were listening, and more importantly, asking questions. The Major Consort was stepping in, but even their presence couldn’t gloss over the cracks in the Consort’s facade.
I didn’t doubt Prescott and her team were planning how best to shatter that facade completely, but we hadn’t heard from them. I wondered if we would—if they still believed Simon was their weapon, or if they could start a revolution without him.
I simply wanted to say good-bye.
We were sitting in a distant Echo of my attic bedroom, on a burnt-orange velvet couch someone should have sent to the dump, and instead had stashed up here amid cobwebs and cardboard boxes.
“Do you think the Free Walkers will win?” I asked.
“I think the Consort is going to have to change,” she said. “If you upload that video, there’s no going back.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “What will you do?”
She nibbled a thumbnail, considering. “They’ll have to rebuild. I could be good at that.”
“You want a seat on the Consort?”
“If we even have one after this, maybe.” I made a face, and she shrugged. “I’m not like you, Del. You see rules as something to be broken. I want to make better rules. I can’t do that by taking off.”
I bristled. “You think I’m bailing?”
“No. But we can’t all be the leader of the rebel forces. I’ll do what I can to help, with the Major Consort, with the fallout. But I want to do it my way.”
“I wish Rose were here,” I said, fingering the pendant Simon had returned to me. “I always thought I’d bring her home.”
“We’ve got answers, at least. That’s better than questions.”
Was it? I couldn’t help thinking that answers were an end. It was the questions—the asking and the searching—that made me feel most alive.
Addie gestured toward the pivot humming across the room. “Go on,” she said. “Simon’s waiting for us.”
I approached the rift slowly, my good hand outstretched. My broken finger had been wrapped and splinted. We wouldn’t know how much movement or sensation I’d lost until the splint came off, but this path was easy to follow.
I pushed my way into the Key World, into my quiet, dim bedroom. Light streamed through the octagonal window, highlighting the disarray the Consort had left behind after they’d searched for leads while hunting me. But there was a faint trace of dust on the music stand, and the musty smell of a closed-off room.
My entrance stirred the air, dust motes dancing in the shaft of light, my origami garlands—the few the Consort hadn’t torn down—swaying gently. I went up on tiptoe to grab one, coiling the string around my hands and tucking it in my backpack.
There wasn’t much I wanted to bring with me—some of my favorite sweaters and jeans, the sheet music I’d written with Simon, Rose’s violin. I trailed a finger over the intricately carved music stand. Addie would take care of it. I might even come back someday, and the idea pleased me. I could come back, and I’d be different, and my place here would be different too. A song in a new key, a variation on a theme, a second movement. This was an ending, in the same way the horizon was both the end of the earth and the beginning of the sky.
Violin case in hand, I took the steep, narrow stairs to the first floor, past the music room with its jumble of silenced instruments, and down the hall to the kitchen, stopping before they saw me.
They sat at the kitchen island, the same one Addie and I had done homework at, and argued over, and rolled out cookies on for our entire lives. But it was swept clean now, empty of everything except teacups and their hands, loosely clasped. My mom dabbed at her eyes, as if pushing tears back inside, and gave a shuddering sigh. My father rubbed a thumb over her knuckles.
“They’ll find her,” he said softly. “They’ll let us know as soon as they find her.”
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “Where would she go? She knows how much trouble Del’s in; she knows how it would look to disappear.”
Addie. They were worried about Addie, which meant they thought I was still locked away at CCM.