sagged over an alley, dropping tiles when the wind blew. A ladder was braced against the side of the three-flat, and a man was climbing into one of the windows of his second-floor apartment while his small daughter stood on the ground and shouted instructions. “The bear with the missing ear!” she cried out. Her eyes were full of tears. “Do you see him?”
Farther down the street, Sloane saw another one of those broken buildings, but with an arm and a leg hanging from one of the split floorboards of a third-story apartment. She tried not to look at it.
Across the street from Ines and Albie’s building, where there had once been a dark pub, was a Genetrix park with a colorful statue standing in the middle of a small pond. Magical lights danced just under the surface of the water, unaffected by the collision of worlds.
“What is it?” Esther said. Sloane had been staring at the park for a long time.
“That shitty pub that gave Ines food poisoning is gone,” Sloane said.
“You hated that place,” Matt said, and not quite like he was reminding her; more like it was a revelation.
“Yeah.” Sloane frowned.
“Ines,” Esther said. “Remember?” She tugged Sloane by the elbow. “Come on, guys.”
The buzzer was broken, so Sloane forced her way through the front door—the lock had never been entirely secure—and climbed the stairs to Ines and Albie’s apartment. Now that they were here, she couldn’t bear the thought that Ines wasn’t in the apartment. Esther had to drag her up the last few steps. She pounded on the apartment door. “Ines! Ines, it’s Essy, open up!”
Sloane braced herself for silence. But she heard footsteps right away, and Ines’s low voice as she fumbled with the locks. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she was saying over and over again, wiggling the door back and forth in its frame. The door opened, and Ines was standing in front of them in her bare feet and a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms, her eyes red and her hair tangled. She smelled like weed and sweat and coffee.
“Where the fuck have you guys been?” Ines demanded.
They all fell together like a house of cards, just barely holding each other upright.
45
THAT NIGHT, Sloane woke to a nightmare in which Albie’s corpse climbed out of the river and shambled toward her. He croaked his condemnation for what she had done, for killing Nero, for destroying the better part of two worlds.
She woke breathless and shaking. A candle flickered in the center of the kitchen table. Esther sat with a bottle of water on one of the stools, staring into the flame.
“Esther,” Sloane said, clutching a pillow to her chest. “I think . . . I think I figured something out.”
Esther rested her cheek on top of the water bottle and looked at Sloane. Her eyes were soft with grief and tight with worry.
“Your mom’s alive,” Sloane said. She clutched the pillow harder, her heart pounding. “She must be, because I love her, and all the things that survived the collision, they’re all the things I loved in both worlds.” She choked. “My magic turned Nero’s death into whatever this is, this fucking Frankenstein’s monster world, so it’s made up of all the things I wanted, and—”
Esther got up and walked over to the couch. She sat next to Sloane so their shoulders were touching.
“Some of the things I want,” Sloane whispered. “Are . . . not good. No one should get to make their own world—”
“I know, Slo.”
Sloane shoved her face into the pillow she held and tried not to scream.
Matt stepped out of Albie’s room, where he had evidently been standing, hidden by shadow. He rustled in the kitchen cabinets for a few minutes while Sloane tried to get her grip on the pillow to loosen, then walked over to them, holding out a little yellow pill.
Sloane swallowed it.
The safe house was quiet. Someone had torn down most of the boards covering the windows, so sunlight filtered in through a layer of dust. Sloane passed the blankets wadded up by the door—her old bed—and the roomful of soldiers, sitting together on the floor, playing cards, repairing siphons, and, in the case of one group, drumming on old pots with their bony fingertips.
She went to the storeroom to look for Mox and found him sitting at the little table across from Ziva. Their hands were clasped, his big, warm palm all but encompassing her wasted knuckles.