or smacking the ember that had fallen on one’s clothes, was there, but he couldn’t move. He had become a cloud of dust, a loose association of particles, and he couldn’t scream.
It took its own eternity. He had used the piece of something in his heart to dig deep into the earth without lifting a finger to form a connection with purest magic. He had not merely sampled it; he had drunk from it as through a straw, drawing in as much as he could bear, and then more. The connection, having formed, could not be broken—though he was desperate for it to.
Not until the pool had drained.
When he woke, seconds later, years later, he was alone, and everything that had been alive, every weed in every field, every flower on every tree, every insect that crawled and snake that slithered and bird that flew, and every single human being that had once walked the ground, was gone.
They had destroyed their world and would have to find another.
From the Journal of Nero Dalche, Quaestor of the Council of Cordus
It is a strange thing, to bear the weight of a world. I never thought I would have so much in common with Atlas. For his mistake, for siding against the gods, he spent an eternity with the heavens on his shoulders—not the Earth, as the misconception goes—and for my mistake, for delving into the secrets of the universe, I must carry my wasted, dead planet around with me forever.
But it’s not the flowers and the animals that haunt me most, or the trees and the wonders of the deep ocean, or the children whose faces I never saw and names I never knew. There are so many of those things that they fade into abstraction. Specificity, not scope, is what makes a thing meaningful.
And so, in the end, it is the woman down the street who gave me a slice of bread with butter on it every day on my way to school because she said I was too thin, and the alley cat who wove an infinity sign around my legs when I went outside to smoke, and our upstairs neighbor who taught me how to tie a secure knot—they are the ones who haunt me.
And, of course, it is my sister, Claudia.
Sometimes I hate the Resurrectionist for the magic he possesses, for knowing how to raise the dead. I have tried.
43
THE DARK ONE had tortured Albie with both brutality and delicacy; sometimes, paradoxically, with both at once. Sloane remembered an array of polished tools: wrench, knife, needle-nose pliers. They had looked like they were new, just purchased from the hardware store.
He had wanted something from her, and he had hurt Albie to get it. She had not given it to him.
The Dark One had seemed impressed.
“He wants to die,” Sloane said, and she had almost said we—We want to die—because they had been so intertwined in his memories. A moment later she felt revulsion. Her stomach turned. She stumbled to the edge of the grass and vomited.
“What just happened?” Esther said. “What did you do to her?”
“I answered her question,” Nero replied. “You need not concern yourself with how.”
“If you wanted to die, you could have just said so,” Matt said darkly. He was hunched over, in pain, his crushed hand cradled against his chest. “Any one of us . . . would be happy to oblige.”
“No!” Sloane straightened. Her mouth tasted like acid. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Genetrix and Earth are on a collision course. He is what’s been holding them apart. Kill him, and we all die.”
She struggled for breath. He had to die. But he couldn’t die. But if they didn’t kill him, as he wanted, he might stop holding Earth and Genetrix apart and move on to another universe, another set of victims. And then they would all die anyway.
There was no way out.
Sloane looked at Mox, bowed under the siphon, his hair hanging in his face. From the beginning, Nero had wanted to shape Mox’s desire in order to shape his magic. Nero had formed him like a statue from clay.
And he had formed her too. Not over the course of years, but over the course of moments. Offering her the choice between herself and Albie. Walking into the trap she set on Irv Kupcinet Bridge. Beckoning her toward Genetrix with Albie’s voice. But he had never had to change her desires, because what she wanted and what