his mom was whispering to him from far away. He quickly thumbed ahead a few pages.
I called today. Luc answered the phone but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Hearing his voice made it hurt so bad. My babies. It’s too hard to think of them. Too hard to do much of anything lately.
He flipped to the last entry as his heart thundered in his chest. This was it. The day she died. His stomach rolled and he took a deep breath. He knew the details already.
Heart failure due to acute drug overdose.
But it was different reading about it in his mother’s words—like being inside her mind. The slow slur of images as she lay in a dirty alley, just steps from the ocean, bruises covering her thin arms, too tired to go any farther.
But he reread her last thought over and over.
I love you. I love you both so much. Maybe I’ll sleep for a while, and then I’ll come and see you in the morning.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring at the words, reading them over and over. Corinthe had believed in fate. She believed that everyone’s destiny was already determined. Had that been his mom’s destiny all along? To die alone, exhausted, a stranger to her family?
It wasn’t fair.
He closed the book with sudden fierceness. He put it back on the shelf, then stood, staring at it, feeling anger build and crest inside of him, coursing into his arms and fists. It was too much. He slammed his fist into the bookcase. Wood splintered and books fell at his feet, but he didn’t care. Voices, murmurs, whispers seemed to rise and then float away in the quiet. Fire burned in his stomach. He wanted to rip the library apart with his bare hands.
Some memories should go unrecorded. Maybe it was best to forget.
But almost as soon as he thought it, he had another thought: Corinthe.
Her book would be here. Had to be.
Maybe there was a way to undo it, to rewrite the end. Maybe that was why the Crossroad had brought him here, to this horrible place. But books lined the walls; there were multiple floors above him. He’d never find Corinthe’s book without a card catalog or something to point him in the right direction.
The archer!
Luc pulled it out and opened it. It began to spin slowly, and Luc ran in the direction it pointed. He followed the archer like a compass until it stopped completely. When he looked up, he saw it.
FATES AND EXECUTORS
There was a single shelf. Fates were immortal; Executors were not, but could be killed only with difficulty. But Corinthe’s book was missing.
He felt a flicker of hope. Maybe she wasn’t really dead. Maybe he was fated to bring her back, somehow. If only he could figure out how Rhys had …
He stood, stunned, struck by an idea.
Rhys. Rhys had been dying when Luc left him. That meant his book should be in the library. His life. Everything he’d done in his life. How he’d turned back time to save the woman he loved.
The secret that allowed him to use the tunnels to turn back time.
Luc again held up the archer, focusing on Rhys’s kind voice.
Luc ran through the stacks, guided by the archer’s tiny arrow. He was terrified he wouldn’t find Rhys’s book. Radicals were anomalies of the universe, created by chaos, not born in the traditional way. Would their life be chronicled among all the rest?
Then, the archer slowed to point at a far, dark corner of the library. Luc saw a small plaque that said FREE RADICALS. The stacks were shrouded in darkness, hidden away from the rest.
When he turned the corner, his steps faltered. A girl stood there, holding a book. He hadn’t considered that other people might be in the library.
She slowly closed the book and turned her head. She did not seem surprised to see him. Her hair was twisted into dreadlocks tied with canvas strips. There was a wild energy simmering just under the surface of her skin. The look in her eyes reminded him of Miranda, and he instinctively reached for the knife that was no longer there.
“Tess,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She came toward him. When she stopped, they were practically nose to nose. She looked human, but he could tell, he felt, that she wasn’t. It was like watching a really convincing movie in 3-D—you could tell it wasn’t real.
“And you are?” she said. Even her voice