bridge, where there was a set of stairs leading down to the water. In front of her, a boxy Genetrix taxi collided with a sleek BMW. The drivers both got out and started yelling at each other, one of them waving a siphon on his left hand that looked like a metal glove.
She sprinted down the steps and slid to her knees at the river’s edge, where she had seen the man in the water. Mox spluttered, shoving his hair away from his face, and Sloane threw her arms around him, half plunging into the river, her hips flat against the concrete.
“Your ear is bleeding,” he said.
“Perforated eardrum,” she said.
He crushed his mouth against hers, graceless. She tasted river water and dust from the monument site and blood. He was alive.
She heard coughing and tore herself from Mox to see Esther a few yards away, braced on the edge of the river on her elbows, hacking up water. Sloane stumbled over and pulled Esther out of the water by her arms.
“Essy,” she said. Esther coughed into Sloane’s shoulder, clutched at her shirt. “Where’s Matt?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know,” Esther said.
Over Esther’s shoulder, Sloane saw Ziva dragging something out of the river. Water poured out of the hole in her jaw as she heaved Matt onto the shore. He coughed and rolled onto his side.
Esther said weakly, “The Dark One, is he . . .”
“Dead?” Sloane said. There were spots of his blood on her sleeve. “Yeah. He’s dead.”
They walked across the bridge in a pack. Sloane led the way, and Ziva and Mox loped behind. Matt was leaning on Esther for support, the pain from his crushed hand having finally hit him.
They passed people huddled next to the railing, looking confused. One of them was a teenager wearing ripped jeans and Converse sneakers; no siphon. Up ahead, Sloane spotted the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, a squat stone pod of a building that stood where Wacker split in two. The building that Sloane vaguely remembered being behind it, though, was gone, replaced by an Unrealist structure that peeled apart like a banana at the top, sending offices in all different directions, arching over the street.
They turned right on Wacker, ignoring the screams that were now coming from everywhere and the alarms that drowned them out.
“We have to find Ines,” Esther said from behind her. “And my mom.”
“The phones,” Sloane said. “They probably won’t work.”
There were power lines in the street. Wires severed by buildings, by gas-burning streetlights.
“Then I’ll drive to California,” Esther said.
“First, find Ines,” Sloane said. “You two can go together.” She didn’t add if she’s alive because she refused to acknowledge the possibility that she wasn’t. “Go to Mexico on the way back, if you can, maybe. And I’ll . . .” She trailed off before she could say that she would look for her mother, because she suddenly felt sure there was no way her mother was still alive. Though why she was so convinced, she couldn’t have said.
When she saw the Camel—not the Thompson Center—ahead of them, she almost fell to her knees with relief. They would need the collective magical knowledge the Camel offered if they were going to survive whatever was happening.
Her ears were ringing as they passed through the front doors of the Cordus Center and wove through the lobby, which was full of confused Genetrixae people yelling at one another over the din. A security alarm was going off, and it was hard to think of anything beyond the blaring. Soldiers from the Army of Flickering were here and there, shouting for everyone to calm down.
Esther and Sloane both watched, quiet. Sloane swallowed her rising hysteria. “What happened?” she said, her voice breaking. “Is this Earth or Genetrix?”
Esther looked around at the chaos in the Camel lobby. “A little of both, I think.”
The first sign that Ines might be alive was that her apartment building was still standing.
It hadn’t been a given. Esther, Matt, and Sloane had walked along the lakefront path to get here, leaving Mox and Ziva to locate the rest of the Resurrectionist’s army, and they had turned on Wilson Avenue to walk through Uptown, where the peace of the waterfront had given way to madness. Some buildings were split down the middle, with half a living room exposed to the street or a bathroom sink hanging over the edge of a divided floor, about to tumble to the ground. They passed a kitchen floor that