“She got you pretty good.” She gestured at my stinging cheek. “You wanted to talk?”
I swallowed, unable to find the right words. Finally I blurted, “Powell Station is in Seattle.”
Traditionally, Walkers were named after big pivots in their hometowns. But it was always their first name, never their last. I hadn’t thought twice about Ms. Powell the orchestra teacher. Like an Original, I’d seen what I expected, not what was real—and Ms. Powell the Free Walker had used my weakness against me.
“Seemed fitting,” she said, giving her baton an experimental flick. “A Powell at Washington High.”
“It’s not your real name?”
“Real enough.” She raised her eyebrows, a mild reproof. “I’m assuming you have more important questions than my name.”
I gripped the edge of the piano bench to keep from shaking. “I saw him. One of Simon’s Echoes.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Doughnut Simon. Cute.”
“You were right. He’s not terminal.”
She inclined her head. “And?”
“How is that possible? The Consort confirmed the cleaving. Did he outrun it?”
It takes time for a world to unmake itself. When a Walker cleaves a branch, cutting the threads connecting it to the rest of the multiverse, the destruction isn’t immediate. A major, complex world could take days to fully disintegrate. I’d told Simon to run, hoping I could find a way to return and save him, but it had been a wild, foolish hope, like trying to stop a tornado with your bare hands.
Ms. Powell shifted. “Not exactly. The important thing is that he’s safe.”
Joy rushed in, heady and bright, and I leaped up. “Can I see him? Can we go right now?”
“It’s not that simple. We need a little time.”
I thumped down again, my happiness snuffed. “We? The Free Walkers, you mean. You’re the ones who got him out? How did you do it?”
“Carefully.” Before I could press for specifics, she held up her hand. “That’s all I can tell you for now. You’re going to have to trust me.”
“Trust you? You haven’t even told me your real name. You’ve been watching me all year and you never said a word.” I paused. “Mr. Samson didn’t want to retire, did he? You bribed him, or threatened him, or something.”
“Hardly. He retired and we took advantage of the situation.” Ms. Powell brushed at her cloud of wiry blond hair, impatient. “I wasn’t sent here to watch you.”
I snorted, and she peered at me through her cat-eye glasses. The lenses were Coke-bottle thick, but now I wondered if she even needed them. If anything about her was what it appeared. She’d shown up at the beginning of the school year and fit in perfectly.
Too perfectly.
Only a Walker would be able to blend in the way she did. We were experts at hiding in plain sight.
“My assignment was to monitor Simon. You were . . . a happy coincidence. A bonus.”
I blinked. Simon? I was the one who could Walk. Simon couldn’t even hear pivots. The Walkers didn’t know he existed—his father had made sure of it.
Maybe his father was the key.
“Because his dad was a Free Walker?” Was. Dead for seventeen years, captured by the Consort and executed for treason. Until a month ago, Simon had no idea.
“Gilman Bradley was a good man in an impossible situation, much like his son is now. He was captured as part of a broader attack against the Free Walkers. It’s taken us years to recover. It was imperative we not engage with Simon, for his own protection, but we’ve needed to watch him more closely as he’s aged.”
“You knew about his signal flaw?”
Everything in the Key World—people, objects, oceans—resonated at the same perfectly stable frequency. As a Half Walker, Simon’s signal was unusually loud, so he created more Echoes than most people. For reasons we couldn’t understand, his signal carried a flaw that was amplified and transmitted through the multiverse, affecting any world containing one of his Echoes, growing increasingly unstable over time. It’s why he’d cleaved himself—to silence the damaged signal and stabilize the worlds.
And the Free Walkers had known about it. We’d thought Monty was our only option; the only person we could trust, and it had backfired horribly. The familiar anger swelled and found a fresh target.
“Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you say something?”
“We didn’t realize the flaw would become such a problem; once we did, we weren’t sure we could trust you. This conversation alone is a huge risk.”
The feeling was mutual. If the Consort knew I was talking to a Free Walker, they’d