THE UNMAKING
1904—St. Louis
Even as he came back to himself, Harte still felt like he was flying apart. He was haunted by the memory of the woman giving way to nothingness, could still feel the woman’s panic and her dread and frustration at being bested. At being unmade. In a flash of understanding, he felt her longing and fury. An eternity of being trapped within the pages of the Book, waiting and planning and growing more and more angry.
The power inside of him had a name.
Seshat. A demon who would destroy the world to take her revenge.
She had lived and walked and tried to take magic for herself, had tried to keep it from the world. She had been stopped. She had been destroyed . . . except that she hadn’t. A part of her had lived on in the very essence of the words she’d inscribed using her own blood. That part of her, the only part left after the rest had been destroyed with the stones, had waited in the pages of the Book, weak and broken and angry—so angry. But now it was ready—she was ready—to be reborn. To rip the world apart in retribution.
Harte was shaking with residual pain and trembling from the anger seething within him. Even as he surfaced from the vision, the shadows of a different time still hung around him, a haze through which his own world lay. He felt the dull smack of a hand across his cheek, and the shadows began to melt until only reality was left.
“What the hell, Harte?” Esta asked, and though her voice sounded angry, he was vaguely aware that there was a very different emotion in her whiskey-colored eyes. Fear.
He didn’t want her to be afraid. Without thinking, he raised his head and pressed his lips against hers, but she didn’t kiss him back. Instead she jerked away, with a look of absolute horror on her face. Her movement set the floor swaying.
Not the floor . . .
They were still in the boat, on the fake Nile in the heart of a fake Cairo, and they were supposed to be stealing a necklace. Behind him, he heard the oarsman make a shocked and disapproving sound. And Esta’s still dressed like a boy.
“We need to go,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Now. Before he calls someone.”
Harte wasn’t sure if he could stand, but there wasn’t really a choice. Using the railing to steady himself as he disembarked, he forced his legs to move, even as his head pounded dully and his vision was still wavering.
“We need to call this off,” he told Esta as they joined the stream of other riders moving toward the exit. His legs felt unsteady beneath him as they started down the silvery path toward the chamber.
“It’s too late for that. And we’re too close,” she hissed. “What is wrong with you, anyway?”
“I think it’s more of a who than a what,” he said, remembering the heat and the pain and the feeling of himself bursting apart. And the betrayal. The ache of it was still so real, so palpable, it had left him reeling.
She cut him a frustrated look. “You are going to explain to me what that was back there—if we manage to get out of here, that is. For right now you are going to pull yourself together. You have the packet, right?” she asked.
He patted his coat and felt the final smoke packet beneath his hand. “Yeah . . .”
They were already nearing the end of the silver path, where it opened into the larger chamber. All that was left to do was set off this final packet and use the smoke as a way to clear the room of other people and as a cover to escape with the necklace. It wasn’t elegant, but it was workable.
But something wasn’t right. Unlike the previous days, when the crowd in the room was five or six people deep to take a look at the necklace, the chamber was empty except for the handful of other riders who had disembarked with them. There were so few people that they had a clear view to where the glass cabinet stood, holding the Djinni’s Star.
“No . . .” Esta’s voice came to him the same instant Harte saw it. “It can’t be gone,” she said, walking toward the clearly empty display case in the center of the room.
The power inside of him lurched, and for a moment Harte felt as though the entire world was spinning on, very far away from her, and he was stuck, unable to reach it. The necklace was gone.
“It can’t be—” he started, but on the far end of the room, a pair of Jefferson Guardsmen were watching the two of them. The other people had continued on through the chamber, because there wasn’t anything to see or draw their attention, so the Guardsmen had noticed Esta and Harte’s hesitation. But it was already too late. The Guardsmen traded glances, and one touched the gold medallion pinned to his lapel.
“It’s a trap,” he whispered, and the tone of his voice was enough to have her eyes going wide with understanding. “Come on.”
They ran for the exit, but Guardsmen were already moving as well. Ahead of them, the door to the Pike was a bright beacon, urging them onward, but even as they closed the distance, Harte heard the metallic scraping of the gate starting to close. The exit was only a few feet away, but they would never make it. Already, the bars were descending over the door, and he could feel the cold warning of corrupted magic, a power that felt too much like the Brink.
The power inside of him churned as it realized they would be trapped, and Harte stumbled from the intensity of its anger—her anger. But Esta was there, catching him before he could fall. All at once, the room went silent and the bars paused. He turned to her and could see the concentration on Esta’s face. Around them, the dust swirled in the air and the light slanted toward them from the Pike, calling to them, urging them to run. Faster. The power inside of him—Seshat—roared in triumph and pushed toward the surface, pressing at the already weak barriers he’d tried to keep up between her and the world.
In an instant, he saw what she saw, understood what she understood—the terrible power that was the beating heart of magic, the threat of chaos overtaking the world.
Magic lived in the spaces between all things, but if it ever escaped, it could destroy the very bonds that held the world together. In that instant he could see it, the dark emptiness that lived in the spaces—the same emptiness he’d seen in the woman’s eyes when she’d been consumed by it . . . The emptiness that had bled out of Esta’s eyes like a horrible nightmare of what was to come. It stretched and grew, tearing apart the pieces of the world. It wasn’t just destruction. It was an unmaking.
His new understanding was sharp and vivid and so real. If Seshat took Esta, if she used Esta’s power, she could destroy the world. He could see it—the world dissolving into nothing—but the clarity didn’t last for long. The moment they slipped through the gates, Esta released his hand and the world spun back into motion.
Outside the exhibit, the sun was blindingly bright and the Pike was in chaos, just as they’d planned it to be, but the Guardsmen from inside the exhibit were on their heels. Even before the two from inside could get out of the building, others were coming, pushing through the crowd to rush toward Cairo. Harte’s head was still pounding and his legs felt as though they would give way with every step, but he grabbed Esta’s hand, not caring how it might look, and pulled her onward.
The power inside of him surged toward her, but Harte didn’t bother to shove it back down. All his strength was focused on pulling Esta through the frantic crowd and escaping from the Guard. He found the passageway that led back into the rest of the Exposition, just as they’d planned, and as soon as they were free from the confusion of the Pike, they ran.