exhaustion. She didn’t know what had happened to her before she was taken to the room, while she was unconscious, and she wasn’t sure how long he had stood at her bedside watching her before touching her face to wake her. The lost time had plagued her more than she would have expected it to—the idea that her body had no memory of its own, that she could not interrogate it for the answer.
She stayed crouched there, counting each breath so she could be sure that time was passing, until her feet went numb. She was just standing up to get her blood moving again when a key turned in the lock. Sloane backed up fast, moving until she hit the boards that covered the window frame. Her chest ached. She couldn’t hear anything but the whisper of the Dark One saying her name.
The Resurrectionist stood in the doorway, the living dead woman visible just past his bulky shoulder. Nero had said that the Resurrectionist wore five siphons. He had miscounted. There was one over each of the man’s eyes, one over his nose and mouth, one on his throat; a siphon for each hand; one over an ear. Each one was plain, made of dark metal that looked like pewter.
He had a loping gait, not quite a limp, unstable and predatory. He made a flicking gesture paired with a sharp whistle, and the door slammed behind him.
They were alone.
Her vision was going dark at the edges. She felt a tingling in her chest, in her hands, the same sensation she’d had when she encountered the Needle in the sunken Sakhalin and the magical weapon in the Dome. Whoever and whatever the Resurrectionist was, he was suffused with magic.
“Ziva was the one who noticed.” His voice was distorted by the siphon and had that tinny quality she had noticed on the street when he’d whistled. He spoke as if they had been in the middle of a conversation. “All those sorcerers in their fine clothing scurrying about like rats. Something going on, clearly.” He cocked his head. “I have eyes wherever I need them. And the things the eyes said about you. No siphon. Always in the company of that hulking soldier—”
“The one you killed, you mean?” The question came out hot and fierce. She drew a harsh breath.
“No apparent knowledge of our world.” He continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Are you hyperventilating?”
“Fuck you,” Sloane said, her fingers curling into the paint and plaster.
“No magic, not even when you had no other choice,” he said. “Does that mean you can’t use it? I wonder.” He tilted his head to the other side. “But why would they summon a soldier from another dimension to kill me if she couldn’t use magic?”
The plaster bit into the skin under her fingernails. He knew. He knew where she was from, what she was meant to do—
But how?
She remembered the look in Mox’s eyes at the bar, how he had been waiting for something she hadn’t given him. I have eyes wherever I need them. Mox had been the Resurrectionist’s eyes, rescuing her from the snare, luring her to the Tankard, then asking enough questions to figure out she was in the wrong world.
Sloane cursed herself. She had been so stupid. Aelia and Nero wanted her to stay inside, stay safe, but she had been confident, cocky, a child playing at heroics. And now she would die for it.
“It would have been simple to end it, but then—the others,” the Resurrectionist said. “How many are there?”
“If you touch them,” Sloane said, launching herself off the wall, “I’ll—”
“Hit me with a pipe that turns to dust?” he said, voice turning unctuous. “You aren’t being fair. You and your friends come to kill me and I’m not allowed to fight back?”
“You’re destroying this world,” she said. “And my world. What’s fair about that?”
“Destroying the world? Me?” He laughed darkly. “I should be flattered, I suppose, that you think I can control that level of destruction while having a street fight.”
Sloane thought of his dark silhouette against the turbulent blur of the Drain. It had not ceased even for a moment as he took Kyros down and chased her.
“This world, your world, they destroy themselves. All worlds do.” He was shifty, restless, even, with the weight of siphons anchoring him. “They don’t need me.”
“Is that how you justify it?”
“How are you being compensated?” he said. “Pennies, nickels, and dimes? Power to take back with you? What?”