The glint was a thread of silver—no, just something that looked like silver. The Needle.
Startled by the sight of it, she stopped swimming and drew herself upright. Her head hit something hard and grainy—a chunk of concrete. She put her palm against it and turned so it was beneath her. Just beyond the concrete was a twisted piece of metal. It took shape when she came closer—it was huge, broader across than her wingspan, and disappearing into the metal that surrounded it.
It was the top of a P.
It was one of the overlarge letters that had been on Trump Tower before the destructive magic that ended the Dark One’s life had leveled the building. She had dived among this rubble that had sunk to the bottom of the river, searching for any sign of the Dark One’s body. And now it was above her. Below her.
Sloane looked down—up—at the plants that were, impossibly, growing toward the rubble. There was debris hidden among the stems: soda cans, glass bottles, a warped hubcap, a fragment of metal with the Abraxas logo on it. That was Genetrix.
And below—above—her, the remnants of the tower they had destroyed while killing the Dark One.
Between them, afloat but somehow immovable, was the Needle.
As ever, Sloane was drawn by its magnetism, the tingling cold that washed over her body at the thought of it. She felt like she could have just swum over and pinched it between her fingers. It wanted her. She knew it. And she wanted it too. But when she reached for it, her hand missed it, like she had misjudged the distance. When she tried again, the same thing happened, her fingers glancing off to the right.
Odd.
She was about to try a third time when she saw something else. It was a pale, quick thing, like a fish without the glimmer of scales. As it turned, it took the shape of a man: hair floating away from his head, softened by the water; clothes dark; shoes with hard leather soles. Terror clutched at her chest.
The Dark One.
It was a memory. A hallucination. It had to be. She was just running out of air and it was messing with her mind. She needed to go back.
Instead, she swam forward, thrashing through the water with as much energy as she could muster, froglike, hands outstretched. She saw the gnarl of scars on the back of her right hand, where the Needle had been, and kicked harder, trying to catch the shoe. She saw the shadow ahead of her, and the glow of magic that surrounded it. Sloane screamed into the water, which tasted like weeds and mildew.
The shadow was shrinking, and the rubble had gone away, as had the Needle and the river plants. She swam harder, legs and arms burning—
And broke through the surface of the river, Esther’s and Matt’s faces right above her.
“I think—” She coughed, reaching for the hands they extended to her. She yanked the cloth down from her face, spat up some water, and began again. “I think the Dark One—our Dark One—is still alive.”
“He can’t be.” Esther shook her head.
They were still on the riverbank. Aelia had dried Sloane off with a working, and she was now pulling her pants back on, her arms and legs trembling from exertion.
“We never found a body,” Sloane said.
“You dove in the river,” Esther said. “You found his button, part of his jacket—there was so much rubble—”
“We wanted him to be dead, so we convinced ourselves he was!” Sloane said.
“Then why didn’t he come back to finish us off? It’s not like we were so scary he had to run to another dimension to get away from us!” Esther’s gestures were wide and frantic; she almost struck Matt in the face before he stepped away from her.
Neither he nor Aelia had spoken yet; they seemed content to watch as Sloane and Esther argued.
“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “Maybe whatever he was doing on Earth, he’d finished. Maybe he got tired of playing with us and wanted to find some new toys. I’m not a fucked-up supervillain; I don’t know the logic!”
“But you know the logic of trippy underwater hallucinations?” Esther said. “You see him swimming away, and suddenly you’re convinced he’s alive, and we should just trust you on that?”
“When has my gut ever failed us when it comes to the Dark One?” Sloane demanded. “I said he would fall for our trap, and he