Dark One, she was repulsed by the Needle in her flesh. She had argued with the people at ARIS when they refused to remove it; they’d said there was no way to know how it would behave if they disturbed it. So one night, with one foot in a nightmare and one foot in reality, Sloane had gnawed the Needle out of her own hand and ripped it loose with her teeth. Then, with the taste of coppery blood in her mouth, she had snapped the artifact in half—but it hadn’t been as easy as a needle snapping in a sewing machine because you hadn’t threaded it properly. It had taken every ounce of her strength, every ounce of the Needle’s own magic. She had collapsed afterward, all her energy exhausted, and woken up in a hospital, her hand bandaged, a week later.
She hadn’t touched the Needle bare-handed since then, afraid it would somehow leap back under her skin. But it seemed that, broken, it didn’t have the same power it had possessed when she had found it at the bottom of the ocean. She felt its magic like the simmer of water about to boil. It tingled and burned inside her, but the pull of it wasn’t irresistible.
Magic was not a weapon or even an amoral source of energy—it was an infection. Wherever it was, people died, places turned rotten, and the order of things was disrupted, sometimes irreparably. But there was no other weapon against the magic ARIS had developed than magic itself.
Sloane held the two pieces of the Needle up to the light from the security station. Two pinpricks of white glinted on its surface. It was like two magnets with opposite polarity—she could feel the bond that formed between the two ends and the irrepressible need to join. But she wouldn’t let them. Then what felt like fire raced down her fingers and the back of her right hand, her arm, her shoulder; it boiled in her blood and singed her spine, and she felt the tug of the Needle, knew it wanted to join with her, too, just as it wanted to mend itself.
She gritted her teeth and pushed back. The pieces of the Needle resisted, struggling toward her, and she turned them, held them like knives in the center of her fist.
Her palm felt like she had poured acid over it, but she held tight to the Needle fragments and walked toward the security station. The guard—not the same one who had been there the last time she visited but wearing the same bland uniform—called out for her to stop. She walked straight toward the gate.
What came next felt like a reflex, the same achy tickling that followed a doctor’s mallet striking the knee. She jerked the two halves of the Needle up, and the gate lifted—frame and all—high above her head. It stayed there, unwavering, as she and the guard both looked up at it. The wind shivered through the chain links, but otherwise everything was silent.
Sloane raised an eyebrow at the guard. He didn’t tell her to stop again.
The gate remained suspended even after she passed under it. When she looked over her shoulder, it was still there, hanging fifty feet above her head as if strung from the clouds.
The front entrance of the Dome met the same fate. The doors pulled effortlessly from their hinges and burst through the roof. The hole they left behind was slim and rectangular, like the cut of a knife.
The Dome ceiling was dark now, but emergency lights glowed here and there, showing the spokes of the Dome’s bicycle-wheel interior, paths to the emergency exits. A guard with a Taser stood in Sloane’s path.
“Sir, put your . . . weapon . . . down,” he said.
The Needle seemed to know that he was talking about it—Sloane winced as the burning in her palm intensified. Her voice would give her away, so she didn’t speak, just shook her head.
He held out the Taser.
She held out the broken Needle.
The Taser exploded into fine particles of black dust. A thread of light wrapped around the security guard’s hand, making him scream.
Sloane gave him a wide berth. There was no time for sympathy or wonder. She ran toward the room where she had felt the prototype. She felt it again now, pulsing, like the heart beneath the floorboards in that Edgar Allan Poe story. It called to something inside her and something inside the Needle. Magic beckoned to magic, as