Chapter Twenty-two: Empathy of the Lost/Hollow

 

Pressure pushed down on me and my cuff disintegrated as soon as the paint touched it. The paint was seemingly attached to me everywhere—like an animal stuck in a tar pit—leeching my magic so I couldn't use it.

“Struggling will just pull the magic from you faster. A small gift from one Origin Mage to another, though your predecessor had no idea the Pull would be used for this.”

I could barely feel my friends, and I could hear none of their words. The connections were still there, but growing hazier, and I grasped onto them as the pull grew stronger.

Kaine smiled and his shadows lashed through the air, searching for weaknesses in my cloak and shields, and tearing apart both.

“I will kill Verisetti for the time I spent as his prisoner,” Kaine said pleasantly as he worked. “But do you know the unintended consequence of combining with him for those months?” Kaine smiled. “Your shield set. The keys to all that he has created are now mine.”

And through the pull, I felt my shields stripped from me, taking with them all the protections that I had relied upon forever. All except for the last shield—the last one he flipped into an amplifier. An amplifier and detonator.

“Verisetti embedded them in your very marrow. They will regrow, but how long will it take? One day, two? Far too long, I think, for you. You can't even control yourself with them.”

He let me go, as abruptly as he had caught me, and my magic, raw and scraped and empty, started to slowly fill, but it was pulling the magic around me inside instead of regenerating my own. Kaine's gaze was taunting, daring me to use it.

I carefully touched the shield that was doing the equivalent of a First Layer countdown, only there was no countdown number attached, just a trigger—me.

I looked at the paint in the air around me and it rippled, but didn't part. And even though I could see points where I might break through it, something in me said I shouldn't. Axer had trained me far better than to just lash out without thinking through the variables. And something that was a mixture of a male and female voice said, Not yet. Not without incomprehensible loss.

I had always had my shields and my own untainted magic to rely on, but something within me that I had yet to identify was slowly eating it away.

“Come on, Origin Mage. Let's see your great powers now. My bet is on you taking out at least two layers. Enton set the seals up to obliterate each town they are in when destroyed by a regular hand. By you? Well, let's see what you do.”

I carefully looked around me while I stored his words, letting them percolate into a pattern in the back of my mind. It looked like I was still in the Basement, and yet I could see nothing of the boys, Marsgrove, Stuart, the Baileys, or the others.

“This is a painted layer all its own.” I could see the world-building elements. Could see the care that had been taken at first, then hastily finished by a less gifted hand. “Do you live here?”

“An in between, courtesy of your predecessor. And I live everywhere,” Kaine said, slithering to the side, watching me carefully.

The jar tucked in my cloak shuddered with fear. I swallowed and held still, taking in more data, trying to act unconcerned.

The Basement was replicated around us—only small changes modifying the view in any way. But Mussolgranz was the only person in view—hazily in view, attached to Table One. I didn't know what it meant that only he could still be seen.

Kaine followed my gaze. “Ah, my lovely master, caught in the crossfire. We can't have that.” He flicked his fingers and Mussolgranz flipped, still attached to the table, into our reality.

Kaine could do simple Origin Magic. My hands curled into fists to keep them still.

Mussolgranz flexed his arms and magic and the straps fell away. He looked at me dispassionately—a sterile scientist without feeling—and then paint rose from the floor, slithering up his body and reforming Mussolgranz into a form I knew far better.

“Take care of our guests, Archelon,” Stavros said, painfully clenching his teeth, furiously cold gaze fastening on me. “Release the beasts and destroy the facility, if necessary.”

Kaine flicked his wrist and the side of the room morphed into a long hall. He strode down the hall, the wall reforming behind him.

But not before I saw the swirl of it. The paint. A manipulation I knew. There would be other corridors, too, corridors I could take. I touched the flipped ward on me.

No! Not yet, not yet, millions lost, the scared voices said.

I swallowed. “We meet again, and yet not, Prestige Stavros,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. It was absurd that in all of this, it was a good thing that this was a Stavros facsimile, for I wasn't ready. With a bomb attached to my chest, it would have been Raphael's perfect scenario. But I couldn't afford the fallout. I started looking at the edges of the painted world, the hidden divots and thin valleys, looking for an escape without using magic. “Once more, a puppeteer from afar. You said when next we met, it would be face-to-face, and yet, here you are once more.”

He bared his teeth. “You've made a liar of me time and again. I don't much like it, Miss Crown. I am a man of my word. But that isn't to say I can't do you some damage for all that you've caused me.”

His hand whipped through the air, catching paint like it was frozen rain and throwing it at me. I automatically lifted my cloak, but with none of the protections that usually kept me functional, the paint shot through it and my shirt, sizzling as it splashed against my skin. I stumbled with the pain, contorting to try and get away.

Paint came again, and this time my body automatically reacted to the threat and raised an external shield. Paint rippled around me and there was a crackling boom in the distance. I could hear people scream—I could see a flicker of the boys and some horror swooping down—then silence and emptiness. I dropped the shield and stumbled backward.

“Why are you stopping?” Stavros said derisively. He flung another hand along a line of putrid green, and I dropped to the ground, but half of the splatter caught me anyway, sending electric shocks through me.

A cadaver consuming a body from afar, but he was powerful, and he was turning Origin Magic against me.

“You don't think I stole Kinsky's life and soul from him without taking the keys to the empire of his mind at the same time?”

My body went rigid under the next blast, but the painted world shuddered, and for a moment, I could see figures fighting around me, in the world on the other side. Axer had used an orb of my magic. I felt the echo of the pulsation as it exploded.

Wait, wait, the voices said.

Yes, okay. I could deal with pain. It took a moment, but I pushed myself roughly to my knees.

“I’m not sure if I’m displeased or impressed that you are this resilient,” Stavros said. “It has cost me, and that forfeiture will cost you. You are in my kingdom now, Miss Crown.”

There was another blast. Another orb. Stavros bared his teeth, pacing angrily as he looked at the shimmer vibrating around us. “All that I've built, and you think...you have the gall...”

Pain lanced through me again.

“You stupid girl. It was almost a good plan, too. If I wasn't completely prepared for such an eventuality. Such a loss.”

I wiped the blood from my mouth and felt grim satisfaction as another orb vibrated the world around us. I couldn't feel Axer, who was probably trying to bridge my powers and connect, nor Constantine, who was probably having a complete cow. But I knew the magic was mine. Could identify the vibrations of it.

I pushed myself to my knees. “Quite a collection you had going, too, Prestige Stavros.”

He smiled tightly. “It isn't gone yet, despite the loss of your little ferals.”

“You are why there hasn't been a feral at Excelsine in so long.” My breath issued harshly from my nose as I rose. “You take the strongest ones as soon as they come online. There haven't been enough to populate.”

He smiled. “Is this a banal attempt at distraction? Waiting for your friends to save you? Well, as it happens, I also require a few minutes, and I do love to see the rage and realization of the unfairness of the world as it appears, and it always does.”

He tweaked something in the paint and I felt the motion like he had reached in and was pulling my veins apart. A steady tug, like I was being drawn and quartered from inside. “No, there have been no loose ferals strong enough for an institution like Excelsine, radical mage haven that it’s become. And it was easy to spin and sate the public after dear Rafi used ferals for his own means in Salietrex. Which is why when I heard about a feral at Excelsine, I knew.”

I swallowed. It wasn't anything I hadn't known. I'd been marked from the first. Even Will, who had accepted me immediately, had known there was something sketchy about why there were no other ferals at Excelsine, even if he hadn't been able to verbalize why.

“It used to be that we'd add a single mage to the menagerie every month or two—the menagerie your little band is trying to ruin. But with your arrival in our world and the magic you so liberally spread, that timetable could be increased tenfold. Ah, look at you,” he mused. “Trying so desperately not to attack me in anger. Afraid that your merry little band would pay for it? You'd be right.”

I laughed, trying to relieve my rage and fear. “How did you decide who to keep alive?”

Why wasn't Christian in one of those cells?

“The instructions were always to take a feral and leave a replacement in its place. However, if something happened...” He shrugged. “There are always more eggs. Worrying about a broken egg is senseless.”

“My brother was one of those broken eggs.”

“And now he is dead. Move on.”

Words in response were all choking me, the fury collecting inside the expanding bottle of my chest. “What do you want, with all of this? What is Genesis Omega to you?”

He smiled. “Why, I want the same as you, Miss Crown. I want to set the Third Layer to rights. I want to get our society back on track. Wars, terrorism, pestilence—”

“Half of those ills are from you.”

“Yes.” There was a smile underneath the fury still visible on his face. “We all play our parts. Some of us are simply assigned the wrong character to play.”

“You think yourself the hero?”

“Oh, no, I am decidedly the villain of this piece. But it doesn't matter what you or I think. It matters what the mages of the future think. History will remember me in a polarizing, yet magnificent way. What sort of hero will I be looked upon, that I had the strength to undertake this task? They will view my actions and see a person who was willing to make the decisions that others could or would not make. Like you. You can't even sacrifice your least pawn.”

“And you seek to sacrifice everyone. A monster.”

“Not all. Many. And a monster I will be. But time leaches emotion from decisions. Makes results far more black-and-white.” He smiled. “The way that I already view it. I could always see what was wrong with society. It was easy to see. I wondered why others couldn't, then I realized that their minds were far too small and their abilities far too weak.”

“Like the non-magicals? You want to cull them, too?”

He moved, and I moved again, keeping Table One between us, as if that would help me.

He smiled. “The non-magicals are weak and dying. They kill the planet around them. But they have enviable technological minds, constrained as they are by physics, and every so often they produce magical children. Magical children who often have great powers. Why? What is it about these late blooming mages? What does it mean for our society if we take them out of play? I'm a scientist, at heart. I needed the data.”

“So, the ferals—you were taking them, testing on them to see if you could sacrifice the entire layer?” I felt another orb erupt. Time...

“The entire layer? Dear me, no. You, dear child, are both the means to the end and the stopper in all of this. You are the prime example of why we need their stock, the cattle of their herds, no matter what the other data says. The outliers. You, a child raised in the non-magical world by non-magical parents. Your powers exceed so many others. If I were to eliminate the non-magical world, I lose the ability to find more of you.”

“Just have to cull some of them, then?” I sneered.

“The weak. Mages, non-magicals, and magical beings—all the weak must be removed. They sap our resources, our magic, our time and energy. Gone.” He wiped a hand. “The ones who prey on society. The poor, the indigent, the anemic, the stupid. It should appeal to you, really. For one who values intelligence and initiative in others—a self-starter, I think you First Layer types say—your new lower intelligence class will be all those of the middle. The entire structure will be strengthened. Like the way you are remaking the Third Layer—an otherwise brilliant strategy. Removing the decaying, decrepit parts, then strengthening all that remains. All those people who will never accept you, I can make them go away. You can help decide who goes.”

“I'm not causing mass genocide.”

“Are you not? What of the creatures you will uproot?”

“I'm making provisions for them.”

“Cages? Pens?”

I smiled tightly. “That's the gift of being an Origin Mage. I can remake worlds within worlds for them.”

“Without magic.”

“Or maybe just with a different kind.”

He narrowed his eyes. I felt a curl of victory, but turned the conversation quickly. “Those you deem weak give strength to those you deem strong. In the emotions that you disdain. Compassion, aid, community. Part of the human mindset involves developing tools to help those who are sick or disabled.”

“But that's to my point.” He leaned forward as if we were in concordance, but he couldn't hide the coolness in his gaze. “You cull the lowest denominator, and the tools developed become those that help the middle—tools that are more exceptional and thrust society on an even faster path.”

“You deem yourself a philanthropist then?” I asked coldly.

“I deem myself the monster that will do what is needed,” he replied in kind. “And history will hate and secretly celebrate me for it.”

“I will not celebrate you.”

“We’ll see. I have nearly everything I need for Phase One. I need just one more thing.”

“Phase One—the loss of a million, just to see what happens?” I said bitterly.

He smiled and rotated a multi-colored sphere in his palm. “I know what will happen. A million to set the stage. To see the forces clamber. What million is chosen? Why, you could have a say in that. Come willingly, and I will let you choose the first set. Even spare your friends should they fall within.”

He held up his hand and instead of the device I was expecting, there was a giant cloud of magic, swirling and roiling. It was an oddly chaotic element for a man so precise.

My mind connected the points of chaos. I could see it—the roiling magic, the genocide, the decay of humanity. I could see how Stavros could do it, if he put pressure on just the right points of the layer system, which always hovered in the air around me now, even without my regular magic streaming within.

“So, is this the end of your villain monologue? Showing me your magic, telling me whatnot of your grand plan before I destroy you?”

“Oh no, dear. This was me giving your brain an exact run down of what is going to happen so that you can understand and draw the mental schematics I require of it.” The whisper of magic fell over me again.

I took a step back, but the magic followed, sponging around my mind. I threw the last piece of the puzzle away before it formed.

He smiled and took a leisurely step around the table toward me, hand outstretched as my body arced backward. “Now you are perceiving the way of things.”

I gritted my teeth and backed up another step. He was like Raphael, who always said he wanted me to “learn” before he used me.

“No, not like my dear servant at all,” Stavros said. “I could have forced the knowledge within you from the start. I would simply do this.”

He twisted his hand. Knowledge appeared in front of me in a cloud of magic. And like a sign in English appearing in front of me, my brain automatically read what it saw. The cloud of magic changed from one block to another. Some of the outside information slipped by, but the bulk in the middle pulled together. That was how I was supposed to tie two ports together? I had thought—

And that was how rocks became rivers? That made sense.

My brain followed the path of the images and diagrams.

“Dear Sergei's mind was like yours. All Origin Mages think along similar deductive and inductive lines. It is their outside parameters—their emotions and experiences—that color their paths.” He tilted his head. “It's so hard to recreate the manipulations of Origin Mages. I've been quite starved since he managed to kill himself.”

Stavros needed my support. He needed me to give him the key to how my mind worked. Constantine had needed it to use my magic. He had pulled it from me with the leech, true, but I'd had to form it, and I'd only formed it out of curiosity. I could control my curiosity.

In this situation of life and death, literal life and death for billions of people, I could extinguish my curiosity.

“So, it's to be parasitical?” I asked, preparing myself. I'd known since I'd become a commodity, that this would be the end of the road if I was captured by the Department. “You worming in and taking control?”

“Crude tools. Who needs a leech?” he said, smiling that infuriatingly small smile. He lifted his hands and the entire atmosphere changed. Then he pulled.

I bowed forward, and my mouth opened, as if the emotions pulling out of me were corporeal.

“No, Miss Crown. I can simply remove the parts of you that possess moral quandaries. Or...unnatural ties.”

My connection threads started to dim. Horror overtook me, then that too started to dim.

He smiled. “I can remove the horror and fear. And the love. Remove all that is your natural empathy. I misunderstood the depth of Sergei's grief, then consumed him as he died. A mistake I didn’t fully realize until later. For I inherited part of his mind, but not the span to do the magic. I can visualize what I want, but I cannot make it happen.”

He swirled out a pattern and I could see the broken pieces immediately—all the areas that needed to be fixed for his plan to work. I said nothing, but he smiled anyway.

“I know you know how to fix it. And I won’t make that same mistake with you. I loathe the emotions that come with the connection he left behind. I have no desire to feel your teenage love, devotion, and angst. I need all that is you, but in pieces that can be manipulated around the whole. A jar here, a jar there. A conduit throughout. I simply have to remove the more useless parts of you that threaten the whole.”

“No.”

He smiled and sucked out my fury, directing it into a box inside his cloud. “Anger serves me as well as any other emotion. I care not which I take in what order.” He pulled with his hand and a large chunk of fear abruptly broke away from me—and along with it, some of my magic. The cocktail pulled forth and flew into the cloud, pulsing the entire mass and making the color darken.

He closed his eyes. “You are like five of the strongest of them.”

“Go to hell,” I said, holding on to what I had left—dulled emotions I wanted to keep, dirty feelings and all. The ones that made me me.

He circled his wrist and pulled again. I groaned, heaving forward onto my hands and knees on the floor, a cocktail of emotions pulled from me in one long wisp, dulling everything left behind.

“Everyone worries about Bridges,” he said. “Rightly so, of course, especially after Alexander Dare's little demonstration at Crelussa—and I will be utilizing such abilities when he comes to rescue you. Two bridges together, why the amplification will be amazing. But it was the reason I couldn’t afford to go after Itlantes like I wanted. Those initial terrified rumors about Bridges, why, I spread those myself.” He smiled.

“You're a Bridge,” I gasped before the last bit of fear was pulled from me.

His smile didn't change. “If you want to be pedantic, I'm a Bridge of a very specific type.” He directed the cloud to his chest and the magic absorbed inside him. He inhaled, flexing the magic outward in a bubbled, painted wave. “The more accurate description would be to call me a Hollow.”

I caught my breath enough to say, “What is a Hollow?” Not even my bracelet had information on them.

“Both Bridge and Empath.”

I stared at the painted floor swirling around me, then up at him. “I don’t believe you.”

He smiled. “Yes, I erased such information long ago, but who would believe it anyway? That’s the most interesting part of the ability. Cognitively, it doesn’t mean I have to care, I must understand. And I always understand.”

“So, what,” I said, rolling lethargically out of reach of his next pull while accessing passive information from my bracelet—the bracelet that held both the spirit of Christian and the enduring friendship of Will. I clasped the fleeting feeling, burying it deep. “You understand why people do what they do—you can even facilitate a response from them—”

“With precision.” He smiled.

“—but you don't have any of the side effects of caring?”

“It's called cognitive empathy. But without all the nasty affective part that causes great men to be average.”

He swirled through the paint and I groaned as another bit of love fled from me, causing another connection to dim.

“It makes me a decidedly excellent leader.”

“And yet, not necessarily a great human,” I spit. He took half that anger, too.

“In just a few minutes, I'll have enough of your emotion for you to willingly walk out of here and right into the lovely place I have set up for you.”

“Never.” I tried to hide the connections I had left, the strongest of them, covering them. Stavros simply lifted the feelings beneath, and one by one they started to die.

“Better to just let it happen, my dear. Easier. You won't care about your comrades soon anyway. Their love will seem like a burden to you.”

“I'll never leave them.”

He smiled. “Oh, you will.”

The connection to Neph went gray. Worse, I suddenly felt nothing as I looked at it. I knew that this wasn't right, but there was nothing to connect me to an emotion.

I looked at the threads to Olivia, which were struggling to hold.

“Did you do this to Helen Price too?”

“Ah, dear Helen needed little work. Some people are simply built to hold the burden of greater things.”

I tried to keep hold as the threads to Olivia vibrated—a hair from breaking. “You won't get me to work like this,” I said, my voice scratched, like I'd been screaming. “My emotions are part of my creativity.”

“Oh, indeed, that's why I have them. I'll feed a little emotion back into you, when needed. It's how people work best. Small motivations to do what is needed, then I'll kill those and find new ones. A lovely cycle.”

He pulled again, and I arched up, watching the rest—the last—of my feelings disappear into his hand.

“And now...you will follow me.”

“You lie. I know this, objectively.”

“Do I? Do I lie?”

I tilted my head. Had he? Or had I assumed as such because I had felt repulsed or angry or terrified? What did those words even mean? I think I had known.

“Open the door,” he said.

I'd never make it out. It was a sterile thought. I'd never make it out as me.

Who was I?

“There will be so many interesting things to explore, Miss Crown. You might even find the key behind it.”

I looked at the door. Patterns swirled, making no sense.

“How do I open it?”

He smiled.

An influx of something fell over me. Magic—my own returned to me, but different. I looked at my hands, at the grayed-out connections that were rapidly decaying. One broke and fell.

Without sense or color, I had no notion of who it had been connected to. My memories said I would have cared at one time. I shrugged. No matter. It was cleansed now.

Would the world objectively be better with a cleansing? With an infusion of people who were better able to take care of it?

“Open the door.”

With the influx of magic to my mind, the pattern on the door revealed itself as something logical.

I walked toward it, disregarding Enton Stavros's smile. I had no use of it or his regard. I only felt compelled toward an answer—the answer I would find behind the door.

Physical pain stopped me before I reached it. A sharp, physical pain in my midsection that radiated through my limbs and froze my feet. I examined the cause—it was a reaction to an embedded magic that was not my own, but that was hooked into something that was sluggishly regenerating at my core.

I needed to be elsewhere, and it was stopping me from that goal. I examined it further.

A vow. A simple thing. I remembered that the person who held the vow both lied and told the truth. I remembered him without the emotion that dull memory said had once colored our interactions. I looked at the vow, trying to reason out how to move past it.

It was a simple thing. Even more so because all the parameters were easily met.

There was a table, a table I cared nothing for, and as long as that was the case, I was to destroy it. Magic had made it so.

So be it. I raised my hand.

“What are you—”

I paid no attention to the voice. I had a vow that demanded to be met.

Without fanfare, I let the magic fly. Watched as the paint around it swirled and exploded. I tilted my head as the table broke, then shattered, and suddenly there were people and creatures everywhere—mass chaos and a brutal battle—and I was amid it all, while the world cracked in pieces around me. A shot of magic broke my arm, a dragon's razor-sharp tail opened my midsection, a spell shattered my leg.

“Stupid, stupid girl,” Enton Stavros said from one of the cracks.

“You've said that before,” I said dully, sliding to the floor. My head hit the ground and a grayed connection flared the tiniest bit gold, attached to something that was growing faster now within me. There was a sense of bone-deep relief through the connection that I couldn't share.

Never again, never again, never again. Never there, Raphael said.

No.

An animal with jagged teeth fell in front of me.

Stavros still has other means. Do not underestimate him, Butterfly.

Yes. There was nothing else to the answer, though. No fear or determination.

Something that looked like a dragon mixed with a tiger started to charge, gaze on someone behind me. It was going to run me down in the process. Magic, rough and raw, was mine again, leaking into the air around me, but I just watched as the beast charged. I had no further goal. No desire.

Magic shot from someone behind me, then the dragon tiger surged and fell.

“Ren.” Constantine hunched over me. Flashes of light illuminated the air around him. Blood ran down his face and there was a singed quality to the skin around his neck. He was warm. He had my cheeks in his hands and his hands were warm, thumbs rubbing circles into my skin.

“Ren.” I felt my left foot twist under the force of another stray spell. He frantically pulled a shield around us and magic seared over the split skin of my midsection. “Where are your shields? Where did you go? Why can't I feel you?”

I put my hand over his. “You are warm.” I touched my elbow in the arm that no longer worked. “This was you.”

There was a look on his face that I tried to objectively parse through the haze of disconnected reality—shock, anguish, terror, rage. I watched a myriad of expressions pass over his features. The pain of them seemed worse than that of my broken bones. Why would someone seek feelings?

His forehead pressed against mine, as if he could no longer bare to see whatever was showing in my eyes.

I could feel him pushing at the connection that had once existed, battering against it, trying to reform it. But his feelings battered against the decay like a bulldozer against old concrete—there was nothing to build, only more to destroy.

“Roald, you wanted proof about Prestige Stavros's abilities.”

People were moving, fighting, recording. I stared at the ceiling.

“What proof,” Stavros said, and a crack of thunderous magic split the room. A sickly mixture of Kinsky's, Kaine's, and mine roiled through the room.

There was a scream and the battle sounds grew louder.

“Constantine, dammit, move,” Stuart Leandred said harshly, grabbing his son's shoulder. “She's been hollowed. There's nothing you can do right now.”

“Oh,” Constantine said implacably, darkness coiling around him as his fingers slipped from my skin. “I think that's quite false.”

He turned without looking at me again, cloak flaring out behind him, but Stuart grabbed his arm while still holding defensive spells in front of them both. “If he can do it to her, he'll flip you, too.”

“She loves easily,” he said, shaking him off. “I, do not.”

Constantine held out a hand behind him as he strode forward, and I could feel magic pulling from me in great waves, bridged from a source that required the minimalist of connections to work. With Axer's magic illuminating the air beneath Constantine's palms, my damaged magic traveled up and along his knuckles and wrist like liquid fire.

I turned my head, gaze pulled along with my magic.

From inside his splitting reality, Stavros was moving like painted smoke, killing the soldiers that had appeared during the time I was gone. Marsgrove was trying to destroy him systematically. But it was a phantom effort, for the reality of the world Stavros was within was not within Marsgrove's grasp.

Axer was hunched next to Marsgrove—his peril obvious as Constantine channeled the bulk of his magic—barely holding back Kaine and a fleet of snapping monsters while keeping a shield in front of Marsgrove and two others. Kaine got a shot in, but Axer just took the hit and didn't pull his magic back to him.

Stavros turned to painted mist and a killing beam aimed by Marsgrove went right through him. He came back into view, his eyes solely focused on the magic trailing from Constantine. “Dear boy, you play with forces far beyond your abilities.”

“You poisoned Verisetti,” Constantine said, stalking forward like a wraith of vengeance. “I will always hold him responsible for Salietrex, but you are responsible for making him. You will take nothing else from me,” he said, before unleashing the full force of the hell he was dragging behind him like a whip.

Stavros's mist cracked into physical shards that hung suspended in irreality.

“I will make you, and all you hold dear, pay for this, boy,” Stavros spit. “You will find that you don’t know the definition of pain.”

Constantine pulled the whip around and flicked it at the next shard, then the one after.

Shard after shard burst as Stavros flipped from piece to piece and Constantine destroyed each one.

Axer's magic rode beneath Constantine's like a wave, turning the crest of it to shatter each piece in turn like a great serpent slithering and striking after a fleeing rat.

The symbol winked in one of the shards. I reached a finger toward it. “The paintings,” I murmured. The pattern slotted easily into place.

“I already have what I need. And you, girl, what are you going to do when all who you love, die?” He said as the painted cracked and splintered, making four, then ten, then twenty pieces of him, swirling broken in shards. “When they are before you, being pulled apart? I will allow you to care again, during those last gasps of breath. And you will give me what I seek.”

“No.”

“So it begins.”

Constantine hit the piece containing the symbol with the last shot.

Axer whipped out Constantine's newest ribbon—one that I had been working with him to make into a storage space—and like in Crelussa with the bomb and my storage paper, it wrapped around the shards at the last second, and a muffled boom burst the ribbon into a hundred bits of fluff.

There was silence for an extended moment. “That was my prototype,” Constantine said, breathing harshly.

“It works,” Axer said.

And then the battle was back in motion, but this time with a fervor that was all push, push, push from the boys' side as Axer grabbed magic from every person they downed and pooled the growing mass between them.

If it had seemed like the boys were good at fighting together before, they were nearly seamless now. The creatures went down, Department grunts crumpled, and even Kaine, flinging Origin Magic—both mine and Kinsky's—wasn't slowing them down as they backed him into a corner.

Constantine pulled a vial from his coat. I knew what was in it. He had been making a concoction to take down Kaine since our first visit to Corpus Sun. Doubling down after the infections on campus. And tripling it after Stavros overwhelmed me on campus.

But Axer grabbed his arm before he could throw it. I could see them struggle, even if I felt nothing over it.

Kaine slipped through a crack in the floor.

Constantine balled up his fist, collapsed the magic and vial into the pocket of his cloak, then blew up Table Two with a guttural scream.

“We can't convert on it yet. You will get a chance to use it,” Axer murmured too low for anyone to hear. I didn't know why I could hear it, but the echo of it seemed to be coming through the gold connection.

“I will,” Constantine said viciously.

“You let him go?” One of the officials that had come with Marsgrove yelled at Constantine in disbelief. “You are exactly what they say you—”

Axer shot him in the chest. The man dropped to the floor. The other officials stepped backward.

Constantine stared at the downed man, chest heaving. “That could have been therapeutic for me.”

“Thinking about how you will make Kaine scream in unending terror will have to do. Come on.”

Both looked like they'd been through a war, but they were already healing extraordinarily fast, sharing magic back and forth—the pool of stolen magic still trailing behind them. I felt the combination of it descend on me, too, fixing my broken bones and damaged internals.

But when it touched anything other than physical ailments in me, the magic hit a wall. Constantine lifted me, trying to grow connections where they no longer existed.

He closed his eyes, his forehead touching mine again. “I can't... We need somewhere we can fix this.”

“Her shields are gone,” Marsgrove said. “And I know them well. They will take days, weeks, to heal without connection or magic. And her magic is...muddied.”

“Time,” Axer said grimly.

“There is no time,” Marsgrove said. “Look around us. The end has begun. Stavros won't wait for her to heal. He knows it will take days. He'll be moving in the next forty-eight hours.”

“He knows he's going to win,” I murmured, remembering.

Axer's perfect mouth formed a smile ripe with bloodlust.

“Where?” Constantine was touching my face again, but he was looking at Axer, ignoring everyone else arguing around us.

Stuart stepped forward. “We have facilities—”

“No,” Axer cut him off, gaze still connected to Constantine's. “Even now, they come.” The hunters—both Department and bounty. He looked down at me. “Ren, I need you to come back.”

Someone snorted in the background. “Gone bloody loony. Lock the lot of them up, we should. Did you see—”

I heard a body crash against something and fall. Axer crouched down next to me and pressed a hand over my heart. He looked at something above my head, then back at me. “Ren, I need you to come back.”

I tilted my head to look at him fully. “I haven't lef—”

Guard Rock flipped over my face and stabbed me in the jugular.

A thousand things happened at the same time—people started shouting, Marsgrove started clearing the area around us, and Constantine scrabbled to hold me down as I knifed forward in anguish with every emotion rushing back in a painful waterfall of clogged feeling—and painted blood.

Hands scrabbled for me, healing the mortal wound immediately, and I grabbed two of them. I could barely stand the crippling intensity of their emotions. “He took my knowledge. I solved it. Most of it. We don't have time for the plan.”

“Shhh, I know, we'll figure it out, just—”

Guard Rock hopped over our clasped hands, jabbed his stick into a hole in my cloak, slid it through my spilt blood, then vaulted from my chest before anyone could grab him. He slid lightning fast in a painted circle around the three of us, pencil tip dragging a circumference in the paint.

“What the ever-loving f—?”

But Guard Rock's circle completed before Constantine's question, and Guard Rock hopped inside.

I saw Bellacia and Roald, Stuart and Marsgrove, Julian Dare, and all the mages they had brought with them, and all the ones still trapped inside their cages. And behind them, with my vision freed, I saw what Stavros would do to the facility. I held out a hand, turned, and flipped the entire Basement into the bright sunlight of Gliar Peit, erecting a figure eight dome to surround both sites, holding it in stasis, but the magic was slimy, muddy. Thirty minutes, Bella, Marsgrove, I sent, then pressed the storage paper containing Vincent Godfrey Jr. and his men into Marsgrove's hands, along with the activation spell. Godfrey has tales of who hired him. I'm certain you will be able to pry those out. Free them, free the others, and grab what you can.

Guard Rock stabbed the tip of his pencil into the circle and flipped us into another world.