The Dark One of Genetrix will be hidden, but not secret, with a thirst that will never be slaked. Their Equal is the hope of Genetrix, born marred by magic and mastered by a power previously unknown to us.
Twice will Equals greet each other anew, and the fate of the worlds is in their hands.
TOP SECRET
From the Journal of Nero Dalche, Councilor of Cordus:
Essentially, in order to cross into another universe, one must simplify one’s understanding of what such an act entails. The magnitude of moving from one world to another is too much for the human brain, no matter how advanced, to handle; they will therefore not be able to summon the appropriate level of desire, as defined by Solowell in The Manifestation of Impossible Wants. However, if we simplify it so that anyone may understand it, we may be able to shuttle people of any intellectual capacity across universes.
The comparison that I have chosen is one of basic hospitality. A person’s universe is her home. The permeable barrier between the universes is her front door. If a polite guest wishes to enter a house, he knocks on the front door, and the person within the house opens it to let him in. It is the same with universes: you must reach out with your magic to “knock,” and someone dwelling in that universe must “open the door.”
What makes this more complicated, of course, is that time behaves differently across universes. You may think you are knocking on a Wednesday at the reasonable hour of ten o’clock in the morning; however, in that universe, you may actually be knocking at the stroke of midnight or twenty years later, when the owner of the house is long dead.
30
A COLD WIND FOUND its way under the hood of Sloane’s cloak, making her shiver. It was hours past sunset, and she stood at the border of Wacker Drive and the most recent Drain site, her last checkpoint before she got in position.
Even Esther had eventually come around to Matt’s way of thinking. You’ve been acting so strong since we got here, Esther had said to her, quietly, the night of the incident. Obviously your real feelings have to come out somewhere, right? It’s your brain’s way of telling you that you’re repressing something.
She had almost made Sloane believe it. Regardless of what else she had seen underwater, she had gone to a place where the universes touched. Earth and Genetrix were connected; Nero hadn’t lied about that. Which meant they still had to help Genetrix to help Earth. And they had already brought down one maniacal mass murderer. They would use the same strategy to do it again.
That meant her job was to lure the Resurrectionist into the open. She would walk along Congress Parkway until it passed beneath the Old Main Post Office, where he and his army had their lair. She would have to go alone, but the Army of Flickering would follow her after she had made contact.
She had done this before. She had gone alone to the Irv Kupcinet Bridge to be bait for the Dark One on Earth. She knew too well the feeling of numbness that took over. If not for seeing the toes of her boots digging into the rubble, she might not have known that she was still on the ground. But she kept moving now, just as she had before.
She knew the path through the destruction of the Drain site. City officials had spent the last two months clearing it, but it was still a mess of broken bricks and cracked boards and bodies retrieved from basements. People of all walks of life picked their way through the wreckage, looking for the bodies of lost loved ones. Sloane wished that she could tell them not to bother. Their loved ones were likely in pieces; Drain victims almost always were.
The cloak she wore was one of Aelia’s, heavy and dark. Flakes of snow from a late-spring cold front drifted through the light cast by emergency lamps, melting as soon as they touched the ground. Sloane’s fingers were frozen even though they were clutching the folds of the cloak. She had insisted on wearing her own clothes beneath it—her Albie-funeral blacks, the ones she had worn when she first surfaced on Genetrix.
She reached the other end of the Drain site, her boots coated in dust. She walked a block west, then started to cross the same bridge she had hobbled over with a broken ankle,