broken Albie’s body. This was the man who had tested Sloane’s heart.
It’s a simple choice, my dear.
“Sloane!”
She was barefoot, in the Dark One’s house. He had taken her boots.
She had to find something heavy or something sharp. She saw a rock the size of her fist, a crumpled soda can. And in the planter, in the median, an old metal rod, the kind used for street signs. She picked it up. It was flaky, rusty in her palm. Two feet long. She would need to be closer. She would need to swing hard, at his head—just to stun him, so she could escape—
She couldn’t breathe. He was coming toward her, his steps confident. Hand raised, as if in greeting. Head cocked like a bird’s.
She was barefoot, in the Dark One’s house, and Albie was screaming.
“Sloane!”
Sloane screamed and charged, drawing the metal rod back like a baseball player with a bat. She swung, putting the full weight of her body behind it, and waited for the crack, the feeling of metal connecting with metal—
But all she heard was a low, tinny note coming from the Resurrectionist’s facemask. He flicked his fingers as if dismissing her, and the rod burst into a cloud that covered her palms with silver dust. Then his hand was lifting, closing into a fist—she remembered Kyros telling her the Resurrectionist’s favored method of execution, collapsed lungs that wouldn’t reinflate—
Something heavy hit her from the side, sending her headfirst into the median. She saw dirt between her palms and used the momentum to propel herself over the planter and into the street on the other side of the barrier. Before diving into an alley, she looked over her shoulder. Kyros had taken her place in the street, his siphon hand held out and the air rippling in front of him as he let out a sharp, high whistle. But the Resurrectionist hissed through his mask, batted the barrier aside, and clenched a hand into a fist.
Kyros choked. And fell.
“Es—es!” Sloane tried to scream, but her throat felt like it was coated with sand. Esther was in the street, bent over Kyros’s body.
Sloane turned back with a strangled scream, but the Resurrectionist was already walking away from Kyros and Esther and toward her.
If there was one thing she had learned from her day of captivity, it was that when it came to the Dark One, she was the only bait he wouldn’t fail to take. And it seemed to be the same with the Resurrectionist.
She forced one foot back, then the other. Stepping backward over abandoned high heels. A briefcase that had fallen open, its papers spilling all over the street. A half-eaten hot dog covered in relish, still in its wrapper. She stepped back faster, making sure the Resurrectionist was still moving toward her and away from Esther and Kyros—
Kyros, who was probably dead—
She took another step back and ran into something solid. Sloane turned and saw—a person. But the greenish skin had peeled away from its jaw, revealing a white streak of bone and the clench of teeth. Sloane watched a tongue work between them as the thing licked its pale, purplish lips.
Not a person.
“Is this the one?” A raspy, metallic voice.
“Yes.” The answer came from a distance with the same tinny sound as the note the Resurrectionist had emitted to turn steel into dust.
The dead thing moved fast, forcing a white cloth against Sloane’s nose and mouth. She struggled against the inhumanly strong grip, but only for a moment. Then she passed out.
Chicago Post
CHOSEN ONE: STILL ALIVE?
by Alexander Marshall
CHICAGO, MARCH 3: are we doomed? reads a sign propped against the City Hall building. A “Chosen Truther”—a member of a movement demanding transparency from the Department of Magical Oversight in Chicago regarding the Chosen One—has stopped for a cigarette. Chosen Truthers have been protesting outside Cordus Center since Tuesday. Why? Because they think the Chosen One is dead.
The nation celebrated the day Cordus announced it had found the Chosen One, destined to save humankind. But ever since the massacre of the Army of Flickering three years ago, the Chosen One has remained under lock and key. Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are starting to speculate.
“What if he’s dead?” asks Eleanor Green, mother of two from the Chicago suburb of Deer Grove. She’s the founder of the Chosen Truth movement, though she reminds me several times that she’s not the first one to want proof of the Chosen One’s life. “What if he died in the massacre