imagined herself at the center of a Drain, her vision obscured by a wall of swirling debris. The dust marked the path of the air, tight around her shoulders, and flecks of rock, bits of flesh, fragments of bone, embraced her. Her hair whipped around her face, found its way into her mouth, and still her magic beckoned for more. More.
More.
She focused on Nero, her hand outstretched. It was the one with the Needle, the one with the web of scars from when she had turned animal, biting at her own flesh to free herself from a trap. And if desire was what fueled magic, then in this case, all she wanted was Nero’s life, every minute of it. His eyes bulged, and he brought his hands up to his throat—or he would have if he hadn’t at that moment risen into the air, held high above the river.
She was in the monument, the light of dead names glowing around her, and—
She was sitting with Albie at the bar, the line of empty shot glasses in front of them, and—
She was walking along the road barefoot, a piece of glass buried in her heel, and—
She was standing on Genetrix’s river walk.
She wanted all the things the Dark One had taken. She screamed, the sound scraping out her insides, hollowing her out even further, and she filled herself with his life. The losses he had heaped up like chips at a casino. The magic he had hoarded from the worlds he had walked, possibly hundreds of them, so many he had forgotten their names.
She devoured him.
Nero’s body ripped apart all at once, hovering eviscerated over the city, guts tumbling loose and dangling, heart still pulsing, attached to the threads of his blood vessels and veins. She saw a tangle of white nerves and the strict lines of his bones, and blood was everywhere, spattering. Perhaps he was screaming, and perhaps he wasn’t, couldn’t anymore, with his teeth pulled out of his skull and his tongue adrift on the wind.
And then she was on fire with magic, as she had been in Nero’s memory, diving headfirst into the sun. Disassembling into a cloud of flesh and blood that could not scream. There was no exertion of will, just an extraction of want, as water crashed down from above, the thin membrane between the worlds breaking.
Water rushed over the river walk, flooding the terraces with their trees, swallowing the cars that drove on Wacker and the pedestrians on the bridge. Sloane rose, or perhaps she fell.
She fell down through the water again, up into the rubble of the tower they had destroyed, and slammed—
—impossibly—
—into the ground next to the Ten Years Monument, where they had sprinkled Albie’s ashes.
44
SOMEWHERE NEARBY, a car alarm was going off. But it was muffled; Sloane felt like someone had packed her ears with dense cotton. She brought a hand up to touch one, found a sticky—but clear—ear canal.
There were more alarms now. A chorus, all bleating at different intervals; a few security systems chanting about intruders, and sirens coming from all directions. Sloane blinked up at the clouds. It seemed strange that she should be looking up at clear sky, though she wasn’t sure what else she had expected to see.
She probed her head and neck with both hands for signs of injury and then, finding none, sat up. One ear was ringing, and everything in front of her tipped and spun. Which only made it look more unreal.
In one direction was the river and the Dark One monument that stood beside it, a modest bronze block with a gap of an entrance. And in the other was the undulating steel face of Genetrix’s Warner Tower, looming over the skyline. Across the street from her was half of 300 North Wabash, a simple black structure of steel and glass. On its eastern face, its innards were exposed, as if the building had been sliced like a block of cheese. Sloane watched as half a couch, cut clean through the center of a cushion, tipped back and plummeted twenty stories to the pavement.
Sloane’s mind had gone blank. Her body ached down to her fingernails. She tested her legs, found them shaky but mobile. The others, something whispered in her head. Find the others.
She crawled on all fours over the concrete for a moment, then lurched to her feet and stumbled toward the river. She felt like she was drunk. She saw a dark head surface and ran toward the