Her pants were slipping down her hips again. “We’re not about to just . . . go somewhere else. Not until we know what the hell is going on.”
Matt’s lips quirked at the corner. For a few years, while they hunted the Dark One, that was the only smile he had ever worn. But after the Dark One fell, she had seen it less and less often as he softened and relaxed, no longer responsible for any life but his own.
The return of that smile meant he was working Aelia, and Sloane was getting in the way.
You must let them play to their strengths as they let you play to yours, Bert’s voice told her from her memories. They each had a place in their small platoon, and though it grated on her now that she and Matt were engaged, Matt was the leader. He made the calls. They had to trust him or the system would break.
“I intend to tell you,” Aelia said, “but some things are better explained by seeing them for yourself.”
Esther, coming to stand beside Sloane, looked just as wary as Sloane felt. But she caught Sloane’s eye and nodded, lips pursed.
“Fine. Show us,” Sloane said.
Sloane stayed in Aelia’s shadow as they climbed the wide steps of what was, on Sloane’s Earth, the River Theater, a wide, minimalist staircase made of polished stone. Here, however, the space was arranged into terraces, like steps, but with trees growing from each flat area, giving the impression of a forest right in the middle of the city. Aelia wove around the trees, and Sloane, Matt, and Esther followed her up to street level.
The other observers fell into step behind them. Their silence unsettled Sloane, their presence behind her pricking at the back of her neck. She felt like she was being herded.
She was almost afraid to lift her head, to be confronted with the wrongness of the place. But Wacker Drive, at least, was the same street she remembered, with cars careening around the bend ahead of them, and there was the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, which looked like a grounded spaceship, standing where the two branches of Wacker separated. There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, and it wasn’t until the group of people behind her fanned out that she realized why. One of them lifted his hand and let out an inhuman trill. A wall of iridescence appeared in front of him, forming a barrier across the walkway one hundred yards from where Sloane stood.
Aelia cleared her throat. She stood beside a boxy, wine-colored limousine with chrome wheels. Aelia opened the wide back door, then pulled the center panel open from the left so she could slide inside. The blond man waited beside the car. He raised a hand, and with the sleeve falling away from his wrist, Sloane got a closer look at the apparatus he wore. It was simpler than the one Aelia had, but no less beautiful; it looked like a glove, but it was made of copper, with articulated joints. Dense organic patterns—vines of tiny leaves—were carved into each plate, and unlike a bulky gauntlet from an old set of armor, it was streamlined, clearly made to fit him and him alone.
“I can dry you off, if you like,” he said.
Sloane glanced at Esther.
“We would not have brought you here simply to harm you a moment later,” he said. “My name is Nero. Who wants to go first?”
It took a few seconds for Matt to volunteer, though he had been the one insisting that they go along with this. He stood in front of Nero, fidgeting a little. “What do I do?” he said.
“Stay still, please,” Nero replied. He held his hand up, fingers spread, palm facing Matt. He hummed a low note, and Matt’s shirt shifted, almost imperceptibly, as if hit by a breeze.
Nero hummed again, and droplets of water pulled away from Matt’s head and dangled in the air. He stared at them, dazed. Sloane looked around, just to make sure time hadn’t frozen and kept the water from falling. It would not have been the strangest thing to happen that day.
Nero hummed the same steady note as he moved his hand down to hover over Matt’s shoulders, abdomen, and then pelvis. Water tugged free from the fabric of his coat and shirt and hung suspended in the air.
When Nero finished, he hummed a different note, moving his hand in a circle. All the droplets that had been hanging in