“Then break it,” she hissed through her teeth.

And Lazlo didn’t say anything. He just held Sarai close and, anguished, shook his head.

Ruby met eyes with Sparrow across the room. Her sister was pale and frantic, and gave her a hurry up gesture. Ruby turned to Less Ellen and said...

It was ridiculous. She knew how it sounded—as though she were unhinged from reality. “Ellens,” she said, “might we have some tea?”

They stared at her, their dread momentarily overwhelmed by surprise. “Tea?” repeated Great Ellen.

Ruby licked her lips and tried her best to be the picture of clueless nonchalance. “What?” she said, defensive. “Am I not allowed to be thirsty?” Her hearts hammered. There was sweat in the small of her back. “Tea’s never a bad idea. You’ve said so yourself often enough.”

“Well, you’ve just disproved the adage,” said Great Ellen, while Less Ellen gasped out, “Oh!”

It wasn’t to do with tea, that gasp. One glance, and Ruby saw: Sarai was gone. Lazlo was left holding air.

Too late, she thought, wild. Too late. But she still had to try. What else could she do? “I’ll make it myself,” she told the Ellens, and shoved between them through the door.

. . .

Sarai was anchored, and then she wasn’t. She had substance, and then she didn’t. The fragile filament that connected her soul to the world all at once fell slack.

To Lazlo, it was sathaz all over again: His arms were empty, curved around nothing. Where Sarai had been, so sweet and smooth, he now held nothing but air. He reached out as though he could find her, but she wasn’t invisible. She was gone. “No!” A gasp, a terrible echo of the word that had torn through his thoughts. He spun toward Minya, wild-eyed.

“I hope you said your good-byes!” she screamed. Her voice was shrill, her face empurpled. If any could have felt her music then, “jagged” wouldn’t have begun to cover it. This was all Lazlo’s fault, as she saw it. He was making her do it, and she wanted him punished.

“Bring her back!” he gasped out.

“You bring her back! You know what you have to do!”

Lazlo didn’t hear the pleading in her voice. The horrific NO! was still carving its hurricane path through his mind, driving out all else. Where had it come from? The others were screaming, crying, and Sarai wasn’t there.

She just wasn’t there.

Minya was still astride Rasalas. She scrambled to a stand, feeling the metal shift beneath her. She tried to leap back to the table, but the beast twisted, and a clawed metal paw flashed up and grabbed her out of the air. It tossed her to the floor. Lazlo loomed above her. He seized her with his own hands, clenching her rags in his fists. He lifted her up in front of him, her toes dangling, and looked her right in the eyes.

All around them, her army shifted. You could see her will flow into them, rippling them like wind over grass. Row after row, the ghosts raised up their knives, their meat hooks and mallets, gleaming-edged and fresh-sharpened. Even the Ellens held weapons. Their eyes went wide with horror as their own hands lifted, cocked back, released.

Knives flew. Someone screamed.

Lazlo didn’t shift his gaze from Minya, whom he still held off the floor. Mesarthium responded, whiplash-fast. For every flung weapon, a ripple of metal disengaged from the walls to intercept it. It looked like magnetism. It looked like magic. All around the room there was a shink shink shink as silver metal met blue and clattered to the floor.

One blade hit the wall. Instead of bouncing off, it embedded there and stayed. All the others, too: The floor drew them down till only their handles protruded. It happened in seconds. Minya’s ghosts were disarmed—of ordinary weapons, anyway. At once, their fingernails and teeth lengthened and sharpened into claws and fangs.

Lazlo didn’t see. His eyes were locked on Minya’s. “Listen to me,” he said, savage. He wouldn’t have known his own voice. “There’s something you’ve failed to consider. Sarai is the only thing keeping you safe. Gods help you, if you let her soul go. There will be nothing to stop me from ending you.”

The space after his words was heavy with gasped breaths and a low, steady rumble up Rasalas’s throat. Minya and Lazlo stared at each other: rage against rage, will against will.

Minya, in some deep place, was grasping at the chance that Lazlo’s threat offered. It was true, what he said. She might hold Sarai’s soul in the balance, but she also held her own, because the minute she made good on her threat, she would lose her only leverage—and lose Sarai, too.

Here was a reason to back down, and her hearts cried out to take it, but...she couldn’t. Minya’s will was a blade forged by the screams of two dozen dying children—forged by screams and tempered in blood, like a red-hot sword plunged hissing into water. Back was not a direction she was able to go. If she conceded now, she would have nothing, and be no one. If they didn’t believe that she would do it— that she would end Sarai—what reason would they have to ever listen to her again? She would lose not just this game, but every one that came after. Lazlo had to concede. She just couldn’t. She bared her little teeth in a grimace. He’d told her himself that he wasn’t a killer. She’d just have to trust him on that. “Do your worst, brother,” she snarled, and saw in an instant that he already had.

This was Lazlo’s worst. He could hold her up like a doll, her rags bunched in his fists, but he couldn’t hurt her. His eyes lost their rage, the muscles around them going slack with surprise, which quickly turned to distress. He could hide nothing. His eyes revealed all. He didn’t have it in him to hurt anyone.

The thought of Ruza flashed through his mind—his Tizerkane friend who’d despaired of ever making him a warrior. Well, he’d be disgusted now to see this little girl shrug and push at his hands until he dropped her to her feet.

“There’s only one way to save her,” she said, stepping back onto her chair and up onto the table so her eyes were level with his.

Lazlo felt like he was drowning. Minya saw right through him. Where was Sarai? Could she still be saved? Please, he thought. It felt like prayer, but who was there to pray to? The seraphim might have been real, once upon a time, but that didn’t mean they were listening.

In that moment, Lazlo felt sure: In all the great and star-bedecked universe, nothing at all was listening.

And then, in the blank, gasping gnaw of his panic, he caught sight of the Ellens in the doorway. The two weren’t stoic like the rest of the ghosts, frozen stiff but for wild, rolling eyes. Their hands were clasped as though pleading; their faces wore all the desperation he felt. As he made eye contact with Great Ellen, she actually said, “Please.”

A small, sharp thought pricked him like a thorn: Was it possible... could it be that some part of Minya wanted him to stop her? How, though?

She won’t give up, Sarai had said earlier. She never does. I don’t think she can.

Minya couldn’t give up. It was how she was made, and the Carnage had made her. Giving up meant dying. It meant small bodies in red puddles.

He was grasping at straws. His thoughts leapt around. He felt as though his soul were straining away from his body, trying to get to Sarai, to hold her in the ether so she wouldn’t be alone. But he couldn’t reach her. Only Minya could, if he could find a way to let her.

“I’ll bring him here,” he blurted. “Eril-Fane. I’ll bring him here.”

Minya’s look grew sharp. She said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

Lazlo licked his lips. She was listening. She wants to be persuaded. He didn’t know if it was true, but if it wasn’t, there was no hope. “I’ll bring him to you.” He said it to buy time, to get Sarai out of danger and think of another way. It didn’t mean he would really do it. But maybe he would, if there was no other way. He was sick with it. Was he this kind of hero, who would sacrifice one soul for another?

“Do it,” said Minya.

A wave of her hand, and Sarai’s shape was returned to the air. What started as a silhouette slowly filled in to reveal her, eyes rolled back to whites, lips parted in a silent scream. For minutes she had wavered on the edge of unmaking, and felt the cold all through her. Now she collapsed. Lazlo rushed to her. They all did, save Minya. She stood right where she was, a tiny, dirty goddess, and no one noticed the way her hands moved, fingers rubbing over her palms as though they were slick with sweat and little hands kept slipping from her grasp.

As though she might lose everything, all that she had left.

And then Ruby was there with a tray. It clattered as she carried it. Cups sloshed when she set it down on the table. Her voice was neutral, the desperation so slight that only Sparrow perceived it. She asked, “Would anyone like tea?”

Tea.

It was absurd. What was it she had thought out in the garden earlier? That waiting for Minya’s wrath to descend was like a tea break from the end of the world? Well, here was literal tea. No one else could have gotten away with so totally tone-deaf a gesture, but Ruby was always blurting things out, heedless of what was going on around her. Still, Feral stared at her as though she’d grown another head. Lazlo didn’t even hear. He was holding a shivering Sarai, and murmuring to her, “I’ve got you.”

As for Minya, she saw the proffered cup from the corner of her eye. She took it without question. Her thoughts had come unstrung. She was at the edge of unmaking, where she’d almost sent Sarai. They were all I could carry ran through her mind, no matter how fierce she looked. “Bring me the Godslayer,” she said, to drown out the words in her head.

Lazlo’s jaw clenched. He faced Minya.

She held up her teacup in a toast. “To revenge,” she said in a voice like glass, and then she tipped up her cup and drank.

Ruby watched her. Sparrow watched her. Both girls held their breath. They couldn’t be sure. It was all hope and what if, but one didn’t inhabit the chamber of the goddess of oblivion without, at least once, sampling the potion in the little green glass bottle she’d kept on her bedside table.