tremble, blood rising to choke her. He pulled her closer, until the whole length of her body rested against his. The kisses became slower and softer. She could feel the ugly power of the blood magic fading from around him. Finally it was him she was kissing, not the anger and pain that had possessed him. But almost as soon as she realized this, he pushed her back gently and let his forehead rest against hers.
“No, don’t stop,” she said, her body flushed from crown to toe. “I mean … you don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.” He rolled to the side and climbed to his feet. He fumbled with the bandages hanging around his wrists, wrapping them tight. “I most certainly do.”
“Mr. Stanton …”
“Come on,” he said, not looking at her. “We have to go.”
They struck out on a dusty frontage that soon veered from the tracks to cut arrow-straight through vast swaths of farmland—freshly plowed fields that showed the roots of turned-under winter cover crops. They walked in silence as the day grew hotter, the sun beating against their backs, the whirring shrieks of cicadas saturating the heavy air.
Emily hung back, walking well behind Stanton, staring fixedly into the clouds of dust that rose from her heavy boots with every step.
She was not sure what exactly had happened.
A Manipulator and strange sinister magic and … She touched a hand to her cheek. There were streaks of dried blood there, where his long fingers had touched her face.
No, she wasn’t sure exactly what had happened at all.
Or why she felt safer with her hands on the revolvers she’d taken from Rose. They weighted her pockets and swayed against her legs. She kept stroking the hammers with her thumbs.
When they came to a crossroads where the road split off into four cardinal directions, Stanton stood squinting up at the signpost for a long time. If there had been signs on it at one point, they had long since been torn down.
“Cynic Mirror,” he said. “Sini Mira.”
“What?” Emily said.
“Your mother. You said she was looking for the Cynic Mirror. In Russian, sin means ‘son.’ Mir translates as ‘earth.’ Apply the plural possessive declension and you have ‘Earth’s Sons’—or as Grimaldi called them, the Sons of the Earth. The Cynic Mirror is not a thing … it’s a group.”
“You’ve heard of them?” Emily said.
“Yes.” His tone made it sound as if he wished he hadn’t. “They’re a society of Russian scientists. Eradicationists.”
“Eradicationists?”
“Eradicationists believe that the practice of magic should be stopped, but none of them agree on how that should be accomplished. The Scharfians, as you’ve discovered, advocate burning. The Sini Mira, on the other hand, believe that advancements in science will ultimately replace every advantage magic currently affords us. Their researchers are said to be working on a chemical method that will destroy the human body’s ability to channel magic. It is said that all their experiments on human subjects have been fatal.”
Emily absorbed this silently.
We must get to the Sini Mira. That’s what her mother had really said that cold night in Lost Pine … but why would her mother have been going to Eradicationists?
“I’m supposed to go to them,” Emily whispered. That’s what Komé had said, that’s what she’d seen in her dream.
“Ridiculous.” Stanton turned east, began walking. “Your mother said that twenty years ago. I’m sure whatever business she might have had with them is long since passed.”
But it wasn’t just her mother’s words that she was thinking of. Emily opened her mouth to tell Stanton about the strange dream she’d had on the train, what Komé had shown her, what she had said … but she drew the words back on a breath and pressed her lips together tightly.
She had trusted Stanton completely. His dismissive certainty had always made it easy to do so—hard to do otherwise, in fact. But self-sure as he was, even Dreadnought Stanton could be compromised. He could be brutalized, his mind taken hostage, his will bent or even broken …
The more he knew, the more danger he was in.
She looked up at his back. At the blood crusting on his palms.
And the more she knew about him …
She did not allow herself to complete the thought. Instead, she stopped suddenly, brow wrinkling, dust swirling up in front of her.
“I can’t just follow you anymore,” she said, the knowledge and the regret of it attacking her simultaneously. “I have to find a different way.”
Stanton stopped, but did not turn. He stood staring down the