Ever since then, she had been dreaming, not of the Dark One, but of the Resurrectionist. They weren’t nightmares, though—just a playback of their brief conversation, over and over, the same thing every time. You aren’t being fair. You and your friends come to kill me and I’m not allowed to fight back?
She had been tasked with studying the deaths of the other Chosen Ones summoned from other worlds. Despite Nero’s promise to be more forthcoming, however, he and Aelia were still protective of the little information they had, dishing it out in small morsels. It was like having only a few pieces to a puzzle, and none of them fit together. All of them gave her questions that Nero and Aelia refused to answer.
Sloane didn’t like it. Moreover, she didn’t trust it.
This world, your world, they destroy themselves. All worlds do. They don’t need me, the Resurrectionist had said. He hadn’t seemed like the Dark One. Not a parallel version of him or the man himself.
Another piece she couldn’t fit anywhere.
Sloane stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked out over the water. She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know if the Resurrectionist was the Dark One under the siphons and the dramatic cloak or if the Resurrectionist was causing the Drains or how many Chosen Ones had died doing exactly what she was about to do.
So she needed to find out.
She started walking again.
Standing in the alley between the Old Main Post Office and the building next to it—the Chicago Central Carrier Annex; she had looked it up—Sloane found the window she had jumped out of when she’d escaped from the Resurrectionist. It didn’t look high now, weeks later. But it was too high for her to climb without any assistance.
She wrapped a scarf around her face so only her eyes were uncovered and checked her hood to make sure it was secure. Her cloak looked too fine to belong to one of the Resurrectionist’s tattered army, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. She rounded the edge of the building in search of an entrance.
Just off Harrison Street was a metal door with a push handle. The handle had a lock built into it—Good, she thought. Not a deadbolt. Sloane hunted along the ground for something to use as a hammer. She had to go back into the alley, but she finally found a large hunk of concrete so wide she could hardly get her hand around it. It would have to do.
Holding the concrete in both hands, she slammed it against the handle of the door. The door shuddered, and Sloane hit the handle again, and again, and again. Flecks of concrete broke off the hunk she held, and she gouged deep scratches into the metal door. Sloane kept hitting the handle until it broke off and dangled from the door by its inner mechanisms.
She forced the door open and walked into what appeared to be an old loading bay. Dilapidated equipment filled the space, all of it rusted and covered in a thick layer of dust. There were conveyor belts and chutes, rotten pallets and ladders, bins large enough to hold a grown man that rolled on busted wheels.
Sloane tried to affect the loping, shuffling gait she had seen from the undead man and woman who had first brought her here. She had gone in through the back, but the Resurrectionist’s army might still be lurking somewhere nearby. She found the inner door of the loading bay and stepped into a worn hallway with a warped floor. Broken planks of wood had burst through the maroon carpet, and chunks of wall and ceiling were piled in her path. She stepped around them like she was playing hot lava with Cameron in their living room—everything that wasn’t maroon carpet was lava.
As she walked, she tried to map out the building in her mind. She turned a corner and slipped into the emergency stairwell. So far, everything was quiet. She climbed two flights of stairs to get to the level where she had broken the window and jumped. Her ankle was still weak from that day, but the siphon had done its work, speeding the healing of her bones.
Soon she arrived at the threshold of the dilapidated office where she had found the mattress and siphon parts. The Resurrectionist’s living space, or so it appeared. She was still confused by the floral sheets that covered the mattress. They seemed comically out