“I didn’t think it was possible,” Nero said to her, “for you to soften toward me.”
“I haven’t,” she replied.
She walked, slowly, toward him.
“Give Micah the Needle, Sloane, so he can do what he was made for,” Nero said, and he didn’t sound malicious; he sounded tired. “Or I will have to motivate you.”
She knew his version of motivation. He had tortured Albie so that she would tell him where their weapons were—where the Needle was. He knew the softest parts of her, the most vulnerable parts. He knew that, above all else, she was lonely.
Mox was hunched over, his face streaked with tears and sweat. He had been used all his life, she thought. Sloane couldn’t let him be used to end the world.
“Mox wasn’t made for this,” she said. “I was.”
“Sloane, no!” Matt screamed, and it sounded like he was shouting into a strong wind. Perhaps he was, Sloane thought. Her hair whipped across her face, obscuring her vision for a moment as Esther lunged and grabbed the throat siphon that rested a few feet in front of her. She held it against her throat with one hand, stuck a whistle in her mouth with the other, and bit down hard. Before she could make a sound, Nero waved a hand at her, hurling her to the ground.
“Not everything must be lost, you know,” Nero said to Sloane. “The energy that my death produces could be used to save something. Micah has a well of untarnished good within him, and he might want to save the world enough to preserve part of it. But you . . . you have only ever wanted destruction.”
He was right, of course. Mox had said that magic was an expression of a person’s deepest desires, which meant that when she eviscerated the crew during the Deep Dive mission, when she worked a gale instead of a magical breath in the Hall of Summons, when she blasted a crater into the side of the Dome, she had wanted it. She had never done a piece of magic that was not in service of ruining something. Somewhere inside her was a thing that wanted to take and take and take, until there was nothing left to give, just as Nero had done in his own universe, his thirst for power and magic not slaked until the well of magic under his Earth’s crust was dry.
She lifted her hand, and Nero’s body lifted high in the air. His cape snapped in the wind, pulled sideways over one shoulder, the pin up against his throat. The Needle sang inside her, sang her revenge. She dropped her hand, and Nero fell onto the pavement, his legs crumpling beneath him. Both broken, she assumed, from the snapping sound they’d made. She didn’t care.
“Something stands between Genetrix and its twin. The Dark One,” he said, and he laughed a little, grimacing with pain, “will excise it, and the worlds will be crushed together, and that will be the end of all.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m told the line between a Dark One and a Chosen One is hair-fine.”
A part of her did want destruction—but that wasn’t all of her. She wanted other things too: justice and mercy, drinks with Albie, kisses with Matt, laughter with Esther. She wanted to wake early in the morning, when the light was pale and new, and run to the lake’s edge. She wanted to sit in silence in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute and look at the Frank Lloyd Wright windows and think of Cameron. She wanted to teach Mox how to drive. She wanted to read the entire Unrealist manifesto. She wanted to watch an olive dance in a cocktail shaker.
She would just have to hope that those wants outweighed the others.
Sloane raised the hand that contained the Needle and imagined herself deep in the ocean, a teenager, and, at that time, an expert on the legends of Koschei, the man who could not die, who had hidden his soul away in a needle. The pressure of the water was all around her, and so was the fire of magic, so painful it made her thrash against its hold. But beyond the pain was something else—a hunger pang. She had written in her journal that it was like wanting something so much you would die to get it. An acknowledgment of how deeply and how desperately she did not want to be empty anymore.