THE RIVER
1904—St. Louis
With the brewery in ashes, the Antistasi moved farther out the day after the fire, to a small camp on the banks of the Mississippi just south of town. Without really talking it over or deciding, Esta had gone with them. Harte had followed, but he wouldn’t even look at her. He was keeping his distance and making excuses to be anywhere that she wasn’t. Not that she completely blamed him, after the way she’d attacked him. Even now, while everyone else was trying to help the newly woken focus on their affinities, Harte was sitting on the bank of the river, his back to her and the rest.
Fine, then. He could sulk all he wanted to. When he got over himself, maybe he would realize that she’d had to at least attempt to get her cuff back. She tried not to think about what it meant that she hadn’t found it.
Had she simply missed it? Or did Ruth still have it?
But letting her thoughts wander while she tried to help the new Mageus wasn’t the safest thing to do, so she forced herself to forget about Harte’s clear disapproval and to focus on the task in front of her. Most of the people from the hospital were still processing the reality of their new lives. Born Mageus learned how to use their connection to the old magic as children, and by the time they were grown, it was second nature. But Ruth’s attack had been on adults. Learning how to focus their affinities—discovering what power they actually held—was proving to be challenging and frustrating for them.
It wasn’t much more comfortable for Esta. The whole thing reminded her of her own childhood—the days she’d spent training with Professor Lachlan. She hated him. She needed to hate him, for all the ways he’d betrayed her. But helping the newly woken, she wondered if she didn’t also owe him. He’d taught her how to find the spaces between the seconds and had coached her until she could pull them slow with hardly any effort at all. He’d given her Ishtar’s Key and the secrets of slipping through time, a fact she didn’t want to admit—even to herself. It was as he’d said—he’d made her.
Of course, she reminded herself, the man she’d known as the Professor wouldn’t have had to do any of that if the boy she’d known as Nibsy hadn’t stolen her entire life. Who would she have been if Nibsy Lorcan hadn’t killed her parents?
Shaking off the questions of the past, she tried to focus on the man in front of her. Arnie was middle-aged, with a patch of hair on each side of his head and a ragged mustache tinged yellow on the edges. He kept losing focus, and when that happened, flames would burst from his fingertips, startling him and causing him to flail about until he found the pail of water to squelch the fire. If he wasn’t fast enough—and he often wasn’t—Esta would call one of the bottlers who worked at the brewery, and who was also a healer, to help with the burns.
“Think of it as a connection,” Esta tried to explain as he soaked his hands in a bucket of water for the tenth time. “The whole world and everything in it is connected. Magic lives in the spaces between those connections. When you use your affinity, you’re pressing at the spaces—reshaping them and manipulating them.”
He frowned at her. “How does that help me with the fire? It’s just hot.”
Honestly, she didn’t know. Using her affinity, even when she was younger, had always felt intuitive, never dangerous.
“I barely blink and the flames erupt,” he complained. “There’s no spaces. It just hurts.”
“Maybe stop thinking of the fire as outside yourself?” she suggested. Fire, since it was a chemical reaction, was aligned with the inert, but time was different. It was Aether. It was everything.
“I know you,” a soft voice said from behind her.
Esta turned to see the girl from the warehouse staring at her. She looked younger now that she wasn’t wearing the stiff, high-necked gray. Her nose was smattered with freckles, and her eyes held an accusation. “No,” Esta lied, turning away from her. “You must be mistaken.”
But the girl didn’t give up. “John. Your name is John,” she insisted. “You were there that night.”
“No,” Esta said, turning back in time to see the moment the girl’s understanding clicked.
“You’re one of them, and you were there that night,” the girl said, her eyes widening. “I saw you. I talked to you.”
The day was clear and sunny, warm with the heat of summer, but suddenly, there was a burst of icy air, like a blast of winter sweeping through. The tree above them shook with the force of it, and Esta looked up to find the green faces of the leaves crawling with frost.
“You did this to us,” the girl said, stepping toward Esta. “I knew it was you. I knew it all along.”
“No,” Esta said, backing away. But she didn’t have the nerve to lie to this girl who looked so scared and broken and angry. “I just—” How could she answer the hate in the girl’s eyes? It didn’t seem enough to explain that she was just a tool. That she hadn’t intended anything, because the truth was that she had. She’d entered the warehouse that night knowing that others might be hurt. She’d chosen Harte and their mission to get the necklace over these people’s lives, and it was a choice she would make again.
At least, she thought she would.
“Greta, that’s enough.” It was Ruth, who’d come up behind the girl.
“But he’s the one—”
“I said enough. You’re one of us now,” Ruth admonished. “Calm yourself.”
The icy wind died off, replaced by the normal warmth of the day. Above, frost turned liquid dripped from the leaves, but their faces had gone brown from the cold.
“Come with me,” Ruth said to Esta.
Glad to be away from Greta and her accusations, Esta followed Ruth. “She hates us.”
“She doesn’t yet understand the gift she’s been given,” Ruth said. “She will.”
“What if she doesn’t?” Esta asked before she thought better of it.
Ruth tilted her head and gave her the sort of look that Esta imagined only a mother would be able to give. “Would you give up your own affinity?”
“No, but I was born with it,” Esta told her. “It’s who I am. Greta didn’t have any choice in the matter,” she said, thinking of Harte’s objections.
“Neither did you. Your affinity was bestowed upon you by fate, and yet you’ve come to see it as essential. In time, Greta will too. They all will,” Ruth said.
It was clear that Ruth believed what she said, and her voice was so sure, so filled with emotion, that Esta could almost believe it too. Maybe she had just been a tool, but in the end, no one had forced her to attack Lipscomb and the warehouse full of people. She could have tried to find a better way, but she hadn’t. She’d heard Lipscomb talk and she’d judged his life to be worth less than Harte’s.
Maybe his life had been worth less than Harte’s. But watching these newly woken Mageus struggle and seeing the fear in their eyes every time their affinities burst forth uncontrolled, she wasn’t sure that she’d had any right to make that decision.
Taking a deep breath, Esta shoved away her doubts. “Did you want something?”
“You’ve acquitted yourself admirably this past night,” Ruth said. “What you did for Maggie and the children during the fire, and here, with the newly woken.”
“We told you that we weren’t your enemy,” Esta pointed out, trying to keep any trace of smugness from her voice.
“Yes, well . . .” Ruth paused, her nostrils flaring slightly, as though admitting as much had been an effort. “With all that’s happened, it seems that I must count you as an ally after all,” she said, not sounding all that happy about the situation. “With the damage to the brewery and the responsibility here with the newly woken, I need your help.”
The words settled something inside of her. This is it. “What’s your plan?”
“The Society,” Ruth said. “I want to make them pay for what they’ve done to us. I want them to crawl.”
“The feeling is definitely mutual,” Esta told her. Whatever her doubts, that was one sentiment she could get behind one hundred percent.
“But crawling isn’t enough. We need to be sure that they have no recourse left,” Ruth said, glancing at Esta from the side of her eye. “The Society cannot be allowed to keep the necklace. I need a thief.”
“Then you’re in luck. Because I happen to be a damn good one.” She gave a little bow. “But I have one condition. If I help you with this, I want what you took from me. I want my cuff.”
Ruth was silent for a long moment. “If I don’t agree?”
“I’ll take it anyway,” she said. “I could take the necklace too, before you even get close to touching it. But I’d prefer to work with you. I hope that the fact that I’ve stayed this long shows you that I’d rather help you than fight you.” As she spoke, she realized that she wasn’t sure how much of what she said was a lie—and how much was the truth.
“Fine,” Ruth said, her jaw tight. “You help us destroy the Society and get me the necklace and the cuff is yours.”
But then what? Would she simply steal the necklace too and leave Ruth and the Antistasi behind, as though she hadn’t been part of this at all? Or was there a different way forward, a way where she and Harte didn’t have to fight alone? The more Ruth talked and explained the Antistasi’s plan, the more Esta wondered.