THE CHOICE
1902—New Jersey
Esta had stopped worrying about the ache from the gun shoved against her lower back the moment she saw Harte take the Book from his coat and hold it out to Jack like an offering.
“No!” she screamed as Harte launched the Book into the air.
It felt like everything happened all at once: The moment the Book was airborne, Jack loosened his hold on her and leaped for it. In almost the same moment, Harte lunged toward her and took hold of Esta’s wrist, urging, “Now!”
With a sudden flash of realization, she understood what Harte had intended all along, and with a speed and sureness that came from a combination of instinct and years of training, she drew on her own affinity and pulled time slow . . . just as the Book fell into Jack’s outstretched hand.
Esta nearly crumpled in relief as the station around them went eerily silent—steam from the nearby engine hung in the air, an immovable cloud of vapor and dust that cloaked the figures trapped within it, and the people on the platform froze around them. Jack, too, had gone still mid-leap, his face fixed in a wild-eyed look of frenzy, while his fingertips had just barely grasped the small leather volume that was the root of all their problems.
Her affinity felt wobbly, unsure, but it was still there.
Almost immediately, she was being crushed to Harte’s chest and surrounded by the familiar scent of him as he wrapped his arms around her.
“Thank god you understood.” His breath was warm as he tucked his face into her neck, and she could feel him shaking.
His words barely registered. She hardly noticed the warmth of his body, strong and solid, because every ounce of her concentration was now on the shaky hold she had on the seconds around her.
Without releasing his grip on her, Harte pulled back and searched her face. There was a question in his gray eyes that she couldn’t quite discern, and for a moment she thought she saw the flash of strange colors in his irises.
“Are you okay?” he asked finally.
“I’ve been better,” she told him, shrugging off his concern with an instinct that years of training under the stern hand of Professor Lachlan had impressed upon her.
In truth, her legs felt like jelly, and the place where the gun had prodded her—just above her right kidney—still ached from the pressure. She’d have a bruise there later, but she would gladly take the bruise over the bullet that would have certainly been deadly.
All around her, the material net of time seemed to waver and vibrate . . . or maybe that was her own magic. Her power was there, but it felt slippery and too volatile, and she was concentrating harder than she usually had to. The more she focused on not losing hold of time, the more she felt a pain building behind her temples.
Part of her wanted to lean into Harte. He hadn’t betrayed her or left her behind, and with the ache in her head and the shaky hold that she had on her affinity, she felt like she needed to take whatever comfort and strength she could from the sureness of his body.
But she’d no sooner had the thought than she dismissed it. That kind of need was nothing more than weakness. Instead, she drew on her own strength and took a step back, until the two of them were connected only by Harte’s gentle grip on her. It was just enough of a connection to keep him linked to her, so he wasn’t frozen like the rest of the station around them, and it was enough distance that some of the unsettling yearning she’d felt a heartbeat before eased. But with each second that passed, the struggle with her affinity only worsened.
“We should go,” she told him.
Harte studied her a moment longer, his mouth turned down into a thoughtful frown that gave her the strangest urge to kiss him, if only to watch how his expression changed. If only to erase the memory of Jack. But she wouldn’t act on her desire, not while her lips still felt fouled by the memory of Jack’s punishing, whiskey-laced assault.
Together they approached Jack, who was suspended in the net of time. Harte reached up and easily took the Book from Jack’s fingertips, then tucked it into his own coat again. “Ready?”
Jack was still suspended mid-lunge, his arm outstretched and reaching for something that was no longer there. His eyes, though—they burned with a hatred that made Esta hesitate, even as her grasp on time was slipping.
“We can’t just leave him here,” Esta told Harte, struggling to maintain her hold on the seconds. “He knows you’re alive now. He knows you have the Book. When we disappear, he’ll guess what we are.”
Harte glanced at her, suddenly wary.
“He could tell the Order you’re still alive or come after us himself.” The pounding behind her temples had increased, and the periphery of her vision began to waver. She felt a darkness beginning to creep into the edges of her sight that mirrored the darkness of her thoughts, and she reached to pry the gun from Jack’s hand. “As long as he’s alive, he’s a danger to us.”
“We can’t just kill him,” Harte said, and his tone scraped against her nerves.
“He would have killed me.” She looked down at the pistol she was now holding. Focusing on the weapon, she could almost ignore the way the blackness was teasing at the edges of her vision, growing to match the hate she felt building inside of her as she weighed the gun’s solid body in her hands.
She hadn’t only been trained to fight with her fists and with knives. A gun wasn’t her first choice, but she knew how to use one. She also knew what it meant that the hammer was cocked and ready to fire, so she understood how close she’d come to having a bullet tear through her kidneys and guts—an irreparable wound that would have led to a painful death, especially in this time.
“He wasn’t going to let either one of us go,” she told Harte.
Harte took her by the wrist gently, as though to stop her, but then he paused. His eyes swirled with the strange colors as they had before, and she felt the beginnings of the same creeping energy that had climbed up her arm when they’d crossed the bridge. She thought he was about to agree, but then he blinked and his eyes cleared as he took the gun from her and eased the hammer back down.
His voice was tight when he finally spoke. “We’re not like him, Esta.”
“Aren’t we?” she asked, thinking of all the people they had both been willing to betray in the weeks before to get the Book—to get what they wanted. She thought, too, of all the people who were innocent but who would suffer because of what she had done, because of the choices she had made. She could end this. She could stop Jack, if nothing else.
At the edges of her vision, the blackness was still growing, bleeding into the silent, still world. She wouldn’t be able to hold on to her grasp of time much longer. “If we leave him here, how many more are going to die?”
“If you kill him in cold blood, it will change you,” Harte told her firmly. “He isn’t worth the price.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked, even as the blackness continued to grow. There was something strangely compelling about it, terrifying as it was. “Because I’m not.”
She looked again at Jack. It was true that this puppy of a man wasn’t the cause of her pain. He hadn’t been the one to manipulate her, to murder her family, to strip away everything she thought she was until only the raw wound of a girl was left behind. But he certainly wasn’t innocent.
There was so much evil in the world, so much more to come in the future. It might be worth it to trade her soul for a way to stop even a little of it. True, she could walk away and leave Jack here, alive and well—and able to hurt others. Or she could start here, now. She could become the vengeance that burned so hot in the pit of her stomach.
She started to reach for the gun, but Harte held it away from her.
“I am sure,” he said as he ejected the revolving cylinder, emptied the bullets onto the ground, and placed the gun into Jack’s coat pocket.
“Harte—” she started to argue.
“My soul, however, is already plenty stained,” he interrupted, drawing back his fist.
The instant Harte’s knuckles met Jack’s face, the sickening crunch of bone echoed through the silent platform. Her affinity had already felt strained and uncertain with the darkness bleeding into her vision, and the moment Harte’s fist made contact, Esta’s already wavering affinity was disrupted by the connection between Harte and Jack. Jolted by the addition of another body to the circuit of magic between them, Esta’s focus wavered and she lost her grip on time.
The world slammed back into motion at once. All around them the roar of the platform returned. Harte turned to look at her, confused about her failure, but she didn’t have the words to explain it—or the time.
Behind Harte, Jack’s head snapped back as the world around them lurched into motion, but he didn’t go down.
“Come on!” Esta urged, tugging Harte along. She glanced back to see Jack, swaying on his feet as he dabbed at his bloodied nose and blinked in confusion. He was stunned, but he wouldn’t be for long. “We need to get to a train.”
“What happened?” Harte asked. “Why did you let go?”
“I didn’t—” she started to say, but she didn’t know how to begin describing the blackness she saw or the emptiness she felt. “Not now,” she said, tugging him onward even as she struggled to find the threads of time, to focus enough to pull them slow.
Together they ran, pushing their way through the concerned crowd of people, dodging unaware travelers and carts of luggage as they sprinted toward their only chance at escape.
“I didn’t get the tickets,” she told him, lifting her skirts to keep up with his long strides.
“It doesn’t matter.” His hand gripped hers more securely as they ran. “We’ll figure it out. We just need to get on a train. Any train at this point.”
“Platform seven,” she insisted, thinking of the stone waiting in Chicago. “We need to get to platform seven.”
When they reached the platform, the shrill cry of a whistle split through the rustling commotion of the station. Esta looked over her shoulder to see Jack not far behind them, followed by a station officer. The train was already starting slowly down the track. A plume of its smoke canopied the platform with a heavy cloud of coal and sulfur as the steam hissed from the engines and the train began to pick up its pace.
“Go!” Harte shouted when her steps faltered. Ahead of them, two more policemen were racing toward them, their batons already raised as they shouted for people to get out of the way. He toppled a pile of luggage to create a roadblock for the people following them. But it wouldn’t hold them for long. “We need more time,” he told her, pulling her around an older man.
Her affinity felt more unsteady than ever, and her magic felt like something separate from her, untouchable. Her heart was pumping, her head was pounding, and time felt like the ragged ends of a scarf that had just been taken out of her reach by the breeze.
“I can’t,” she told him.
She saw the confusion in his eyes when he looked back at her, but Harte didn’t hesitate. Running alongside the already-moving train, he reached the back of one of the cars and pulled her forward, boosting her onto the platform as he jogged alongside the train. He reached for the handle and was about to step up beside her when Esta saw Jack.
“Watch out!” Esta told him, but the warning came too late.
Before Harte could lift himself onto the train, Jack had him by the wrist, yanking him back.
“Harte!” Esta was already preparing to jump from the train when Harte shouted at her not to.
All around them, people had stopped to watch. The entire platform had taken on a strange, hushed atmosphere that had nothing to do with Esta’s affinity and everything to do with the curiosity of the other travelers.
Harte jerked away from Jack, pulling his arm out of the coat to get free. Off-balance from losing his grip on Harte, Jack fell back, holding on to the coat. A moment later, Harte had boosted himself up into the train.
“Come on,” he said, leading her toward the front of the nearly empty car. “We can’t stay here—” he started. But before they could even reach the middle of the car, a station officer had come through the doorway. The moment he saw Harte and Esta, he drew out his billystick and blocked the entrance. The few passengers sitting in the car looked up, curious about what was happening.
Harte stepped in front of her, backing her toward the rear exit slightly. They’d had only a minute to catch their breath when the door of the car opened behind him. Esta turned to see Jack blocking their other means of escape.
“Get us out of this, Esta,” Harte murmured as he kept his attention on both ends of the car and the approaching attackers.
“There’s nowhere for you to go, Darrigan,” Jack said, a satisfied smile sliding across his face.
“He’s right, son. Put your hands up and get to your knees, and we can do this easy,” the officer said from the front of the car.
They were trapped. Even if she could manage to pull time to a stop, there was nowhere to go—no way to escape.
Except one.
Esta had never tried to slip through time like that before—not in a moving vehicle. Time was connected to place, which meant she could only slip through if that place existed in the time she wanted to reach. But they didn’t need to go very far—a day or two, maybe as much as a week—just long enough to be on a different version of this train, away from this danger.
She put all her effort, all her energy into focusing on the seconds around her. Ignoring the pounding in her temples, she drew deeper on her affinity than she ever had before. The stone on her arm, Ishtar’s Key, grew uncomfortably warm as Esta focused on the spaces between the seconds and began reaching for the layered moments that make up the reality of a place. She riffled through those moments, hunting desperately to find what she was looking for.
Around them the train began to rattle, vibrating along the track violently enough to have the policeman grabbing at the back of a seat to stay on his feet.
“What’s happening?” Harte asked.
But Esta didn’t hear anything other than the roaring in her ears, searching and searching until she could see nothing but the multiplicity of moments stacked up around her, solid and real as the present one.
Usually, sifting through time was like riffling through the pages of a book, searching for some word, some detail to key into the right date and time. Usually, she had time to focus and sort through the layers to the precise point she wanted, to a safe point. But with the train picking up speed and the heat from the connection between her and Harte tugging at her attention, time itself felt loose and unmoored. Instead of finding a safe place, she found huge gaps where the train they were riding on didn’t exist.
To find the same train, in the same place . . . at a different time . . .
She focused everything she had, everything she was, pushing against the impossibility of it. Ishtar’s Key grew warmer and warmer, until it was nearly burning against her arm. And then, there. She saw a flash of possibility.
Even though it felt as though the world was collapsing in on them and the floor was falling out from under them, she didn’t stop to be sure. Esta grabbed Harte’s hand and dragged them both forward through time.