if it were up to him.

Eril-Fane and Azareen could have lived.

But Nova had no mercy. Even under the crushing avalanche of Minya’s magic, she held out for a second, then another, until the stinger cut its path, and blood painted its pattern, and the damage was done. Only then did she slash the loop so the bubble vanished and the capsule of trapped time spilled back into the flow, Eril-Fane’s and Azareen’s lives spilling with it.

As soon as it was done, she let Rook’s gift go, and felt a scintilla of relief.

The others all saw what happened. No matter how terrible the loop, as long as the warriors kept coming back to life, there had been some hope, and now it was lost. This time when they slumped over, it was final. They didn’t rise. Their blood flowed only outward, and there was just so much of it. Suheyla let out a cry and sagged against Feral, weeping. Lazlo stood with Sarai, who was frozen along with the rest of the ghosts. It was Sparrow who pelted down the walkway, heedless of danger, to try to press on the wounds as the warriors bled out.

Nova let go of Ruby’s and Feral’s gifts next, and they felt their return like missing pieces slammed back in place, and immediately called on them. Ruby kindled fireballs, and Feral clawed a thunderhead out of a far-off sky. Sarai’s gift returned, too, but it was useless as a weapon, even if she hadn’t been frozen with all the ghosts.

Nova struggled to wield Minya’s power. It was so big it was like trying to ride a wild creature that wanted to swallow her whole. She knew she couldn’t keep it, or it would annihilate her. And she couldn’t let it go, or the little girl would. The solution was simple. She’d done it countless times before, starting back at the beginning, with Zyak and Shergesh.

She managed to turn some of the ghosts toward Minya. She made them raise up their knives.

Minya’s eyes grew wide, and in a startled split second she got an inkling of the powerlessness she had inflicted on others. If stabbing were a dance, it would look like this: a score of blades flashing in flawless unison. They had her surrounded. She stood there, stunned, as they arced toward her.

Lazlo didn’t think. He just moved. He grabbed her from behind and turned away, holding her like a doll against him. His linen shirt stretched taut across his shoulders as he curled over her to shield her with his body.

To shield her with his own body.

Sarai, unable to move, watched the blades stammer to a halt mere inches from his back.

Nova almost didn’t manage to stop them. The effort used up the last of her strength the way a gasp uses up breath. She felt the rumble of thunder, saw the flash of a fireball, and knew time was up. She had to end this. Now.

. . .

Down in Weep, Thyon and Ruza, Calixte and Tzara were still out in the courtyard watching the citadel. They weren’t poring over the Thakranaxet, or eating bacon, or even bickering. They were leaning back in their chairs, staring fixedly up at the great seraph overhead. They didn’t know what was going on up there, but they knew one thing: Eril-Fane, Azareen, and Suheyla had been gone too long. And with their minds full of worlds, slashed skies, and angels’ maps, they wouldn’t be easy until they returned.

So they were all looking up, and all of them saw the seraph move. It was just a twitch of its fingers first, then its whole massive arm suddenly bent at the elbow, reached in, and tore open its own chest.

Chapter 46

Like a Man Tearing Out His Own Beating Heart

Nova wasn’t delicate. She wasn’t careful. The godsmetal thrummed all around her, alive. Earlier, the lightest skim of her will had been enough to shape it. But she was beyond all lightness now.

She wrenched open the citadel’s chest and it reached inside itself like a man tearing out his own beating heart. But it wasn’t a heart it tore out. It was people—humans, corpses, godspawn, ghosts. The huge metal hand reached in, and the metal walls and walkway turned liquid and caught them, conspiring to drag them into its cupped palm.

Nova couldn’t hold out any longer. She released Minya’s gift. The relief was tremendous.

There was a myth, back on Rieva, about Lesya Dawnbringer who held up the sky. Every day she lifted it over her head, and only at dusk could she let it fall. But at Deepsummer, the sun didn’t set for a month, and she had to hold it for all that time.

When Nova let Minya’s power go, she thought her relief had to be like Lesya’s, when night finally came and she could shrug off the sky.

She had to get rid of the girl and ghosts fast, before they could retaliate. She made the seraph’s hand close over them in a fist and ripped them out into the sky.

Sarai thought it would drop them. She was sliding over smooth metal, first one way, then the other. She tumbled in a tangle of limbs. Metal was above and below her. She heard Ruby cry out. Someone caught her hand for a brief moment and tried to hold on to it. Was it Lazlo? She couldn’t tell. They were dragged apart, fingers straining. Their motion through the air was dizzying.

Then the hand opened. It tipped. She slid. She scrabbled for purchase. It was just like her fall, and in her panic she forgot she was a ghost now and could float. But what did that matter if Minya fell? If she died, so would Sarai. If the others all died, she wouldn’t want to live. She saw Minya slipping over the edge, and tried to catch her hand. She missed.

Minya went over.

Sarai went numb. This couldn’t be happening.

Feral was next. Arms flailing, face shocked, he vanished over the side. There was nothing to hold on to. The hand had turned sideways, and was fully vertical now. The others fell, too, every one of them. For a moment, Sarai was alone on the hand. She clung out of fear, her memory of her last fall pounding in her mind. Then she let go and fell, too.

Before, it had seemed an eternity of falling before she hit and broke and died. This was no eternity. Almost at once, the ground rushed up, hard. She rolled, every joint jarring, before coming to rest with limbs splayed out, her vision blurred and spinning.

From inside the fist it had been impossible to see. The seraph had descended, knelt on the cushion of its magnetic fields, and reached down into the city. It hadn’t dropped them out of the sky, but rolled them like dice into the amphitheater in the center of Weep. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t death—Sarai hoped.

She looked around at her scattered loved ones. She saw Eril-Fane’s and Azareen’s bodies splayed out. Sparrow was between them, bleeding from a gash on her brow. Feral was crawling to Suheyla, who wasn’t moving, and Ruby was staring around wide-eyed at the empty market tents, and the tiered walls of the amphitheater surrounding them. Minya was on her hands and knees, shaking. Her head hung down. Sarai couldn’t see her face. Her ghosts were all around her.

But where was Lazlo?

Sarai whipped around, eyes darting, frantic, desperate for the sight of him. She turned a full circle, then another, trying to keep panic at bay. But she couldn’t. Panic took hold with claws.

Lazlo wasn’t here.

The enemy—the magic thief, the murderer—had kept him.

Part IV

torvagataï (tor·vah·guh·tai) noun

When an extraordinary feat is

accomplished, after time has already

run out.

Archaic; from the tragedy of Torval, the hero who performed three impossible tasks to win the hand of his love, Sahansa, only to return to find her kingdom annihilated and every last man, woman, and child slain.

Chapter 47

A Secret with a Secret

I would have chosen you, if they had let me choose.

Kora and Nova had memorized their mother’s letters—which they had cause to be glad of after Skoyë burned them—and that was the part that meant the most. I would have chosen you. They’d needed to believe they’d been loved. They hadn’t really wondered about the “they” and the “let,” or who had made Nyoka’s choice for her—or, indeed, whether she was ever free to make a choice again.

After what happened in the wasp ship, they wondered.

“What are you going to do with us?” Kora had asked Skathis after her sister’s gift exploded into chaos. She’d been cradling Nova’s inert form, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life. She’d thought surely the smith would kill them. The most she could have hoped was that he’d leave them behind—that their dream would die, but they would not. Even then, as she crouched in her torn smallclothes on the cold metal floor with her unconscious sister in her arms, it hadn’t occurred to Kora that they could be separated.

“You are no longer an us,” Skathis told her before melting open the floor under Nova so she fell—right out of Kora’s arms and out of the ship to land hard on the ground below. “No!” Kora had screamed, but the floor closed as quickly as it had opened, and Skathis told her, with icy satisfaction, “You’re mine now. Your only ‘us’ is with me.”

Kora didn’t understand then what that meant, but she would. She would come to understand it the way a bird understands its cage, or a slave her shackle. Those words would define the rest of her life, every moment of it for more than two hundred years.

You’re mine now. Your only “us” is with me.

Together with Nova, she had built a vision of the future, in which they would be soldier-wizards, never again at the mercy of men like their father. They’d had such dreams of what it would be like, imagining the academy Nyoka had described for training the gifted like themselves. It was full of powerful Mesarthim youth from all over the world—the best and the brightest. They would serve the empire together with honor, see worlds and fight battles, win treasure and know glory.

They had dreamed it all in such detail.

In fact, their dreams were stunningly close to the truth. The academy was just how their mother had described it, but Kora never saw it.

Skathis might have been recruiting for the imperial service, but he never delivered her into it. When they reached the capital, he had words with Solvay, Antal, and Ren, and, whatever he said to them, they went pale, and did not interfere when he kept Kora for himself. He made her spy for him. He was not a patient teacher. He directed her where to send her eagle, what and whom to look and listen for. Some nights he left after.