Sarai remembered what his gift was—that terrible, soul-scouring scream—and tensed, but he made no sound.

He couldn’t, of course. She saw that that was the point. The serpent’s mouth was crushing his chest. He could barely breathe, let alone draw enough air to scream.

“They must have tried to help Lazlo,” Sarai whispered, and she was so glad. She’d hated believing they’d been betrayed by their own kind.

“They’d better,” Minya said, grim. “To take the side of Korako’s blood over their own? I would be very disappointed.”

Sarai experienced a flutter of sympathy for the three of them, to be torn between loyalties to Nova and Minya, two terrifying forces of nature. The scenario in the gallery suggested they’d chosen sides.

It also suggested that they’d been effortlessly thwarted, and didn’t stand a chance against Nova.

Did anyone?

She was asleep, or more like passed out, which could be counted a distinct advantage on the part of those crouched in the archway, but for one thing: Wraith.

The bird was perched on the back of Nova’s chair, huge and white and very much awake, watching them with its gleaming dark eyes.

Eril-Fane had told them the truth about Wraith, and it was so strange to think that all these years, the ghostly white bird had been...what, exactly? Not Korako, but some shred of her, some echo? Did the bird even have a consciousness, or was it just acting out a set of old patterns, old hopes, without comprehension?

Sarai wondered if the bird was naught but a dying wish, flying endless spirals, just waiting and watching for an avenue to open that would allow it to fulfill its purpose. Had it been, all this time, just trying to get to Nova? Would it act to protect her?

She had to assume it would. “What do we do?” she breathed.

“Kill her,” Minya said, but she didn’t say it with relish the way she might have before, and Sarai saw that her hands were fists, her fingers moving over the slickness of blood on her hands.

Sarai had to admit that was the obvious answer. And yet, through no love loss for the woman who had wreaked such havoc, nearly cost Sarai her own soul, and trapped Lazlo like that, it still felt wrong. She hoped that killing would always feel wrong. “I don’t think Wraith will let us near her,” she ventured.

“We don’t have to be near her,” said Minya, gesturing to Tzara, who held a bow at the ready. “Are you good with that?”

Tzara’s affronted look said that yes, she was.

“Would she die instantaneously?” asked Feral. “Because if she takes even a few seconds, we could all end up in snakes’ mouths like him.” He gestured to Werran, and they all noticed that he seemed to be gesturing to them.

His free arm, which had been hanging limp and bloody, was now making a frantic beckoning gesture. Sarai, exchanging a quick look with the others, said, “I’ll go. You all stay here.”

With a look at Wraith, she took her first tentative step. Immediately the bird deepened its protective hunch over Nova, its wings fanning out at its sides. Sarai froze.

She gave up walking, and simply floated, venturing very slowly into the room. When Wraith just watched her, she continued, slow and steady. It was so hard to see Lazlo frozen in that agonizing pose. She wanted to pop the shimmering time loop like a soap bubble and pull the cage apart with her hands. What a power was Nova’s, to be able to do that and more.

Wraith followed her with its eyes, but made no further move as Sarai, with ghosts’ grace, approached Werran.

Up close, she could hear the wheeze of quick, shallow breaths as he struggled to draw enough air into his compressed lungs to keep himself alive. There was desperation in his eyes as though he was fighting a losing battle. Sarai’s hands fluttered uselessly toward him with the urge to help him, but there was nothing she could do. He was wedged deep in the broad metal mouth, the serpent’s fangs curved and interlocked around him. The serpent, at least, was inanimate, no more than a statue. Sarai didn’t think she could have stood it if it was watching her with its slit-pupil eyes.

Werran was trying to say something to her, but he couldn’t do much more than shape sounds with his lips. He had so little breath to work with he could barely whisper. Sarai leaned close and made out the words “...don’t...kill her...”

She was chastened. Planning to kill somebody was what Minya did, and she hated the feel of it in her mind. “I don’t want to,” she whispered back, defensive. “But if she wakes up, we’re all finished. If she were dead, Lazlo would get his gift back and free you from this thing.”

With urgent impatience, he shook his head. “. . . loop...” It took him a few wheezes to be able to form the next whispered words. “...only...she...can break...”

It took a moment for Sarai to understand what he was telling her. “Are you saying that if she dies, they’ll be trapped like that? But...their gifts will go back to them. Rook...”

But Werran was shaking his head. “... loop...” was all he could say.

Sarai turned to watch the loop play out another iteration. Kiska’s fist clenched. Her head lowered. She was thrown backward. Rook caught her, raised his arm. He was trying to use his magic and failing. And as long as he was caught in the loop, he would keep on failing, just like Eril-Fane and Azareen had kept on dying. These were the seconds that were preserved. And all the while, Lazlo was motionless, powerless, cramped in his cage. Would he stay that way forever? Or would he die slowly of dehydration, starvation, while Sarai was just steps away, unable to reach him? Either thought was unbearable.

“What can we do?” she asked, helpless.

Werran’s desperate eyes told her that he could suggest no plan. All he managed in his airless whisper was, “...help.”

Chapter 59

A Game that Kill Could Not Win

Help.

Werran might have been trying to plead “Help me,” or even “Help us,” and run out of breath, but it was the single word that rang in Sarai’s head.

Help. Help. Help.

It seemed to take up position opposite kill, as though they were facing queens on a quell board. This was a game that kill could not win—or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning. If they killed Nova, they were sentencing Lazlo, Kiska, and Rook to either eternity in the loop or to dying in it, while Werran would suffocate in the serpent’s jaws. The rest of them would be alive, trapped in this terrible sky instead of Weep’s, and here they would stay until Sparrow could grow enough ulola flowers to refill the silk sleighs’ pontoons with lifting gas, and then what? Go back to Weep? Make some sort of life? Leave the seraph here, leave Lazlo here, alive or dead in that shimmering bubble for strangers to find some day in the future?

It was, all of it, unthinkable. There had to be another way.

Sarai went back to the others, still clustered in the archway. She told them what she’d learned and let it sink in. In their stricken silence, she felt her own desolation deepen. Perhaps she’d hoped that someone else would see a way out that she wasn’t seeing.

Calixte ventured, “Maybe she won’t kill us when she wakes up?”

But Calixte hadn’t been in the citadel to see Nova in action, and judging by the scene in the gallery, she had not become more tolerant since then. Besides, “maybe she won’t kill us” is very thin ice to skate on. There had to be something they could do.

Help. Help. Help.

Werran’s word was still ringing in Sarai’s mind. Help. All her life, Sarai had been a prisoner and a secret, and she had wondered what her fate would be. Would the humans find her and kill her, or would she remain a secret prisoner forever? Then Eril-Fane and his delegation had returned to Weep and changed everything. It had become a certainty: The humans would discover the godspawn, and they would kill them—unless Minya and her army killed the humans instead. It was only a question of who would die, and who would get to clean up the blood and keep living.

And then Sarai had met Lazlo—in his mind, in his dreams—and once again, everything changed. This dreamer-librarian from a far-off land had taught her to hope for a different life—one without any killing at all. In his mind, ugly things were made beautiful, and that went for the future, too.

But now he was trapped, and Sarai realized she’d been relying on him to make it all come true. His gift—power over mesarthium— had meant their liberation and their strength, but it wouldn’t help them now.

What would help them? Who would save them?

A panicked thrum was building in her blood—illusory blood, illusory thrum, but still real, as she was still real—and Sarai scanned the hopeless scene again: the monstrous half-formed serpent crushing a man to slow death in its jaws; the shimmering bubble too pretty for a prison; the huge white bird guarding the sleeping goddess.

Nova looked so small and exhausted, slumped over and limp, and Sarai couldn’t help but remember the terrible anguish she’d seen in her eyes, and worse: her brief, brilliant joy, when, for an instant, she believed she’d found her sister.

She heard herself say, “Maybe I can do something.”

Everyone looked at her. Minya spoke first. “What can you do?” she asked, and some of her old scorn clung to her words, but not much, thought Sarai. Not like before.

“She’s asleep,” said Sarai. “I...I could go into her dreams.”

“And do what?” Minya queried.

“I don’t know. Help her?”

“Help her?” Minya stared. They all did. “Help her?” she repeated, her shift in emphasis eloquent. “After what she’s done?”

Sarai was at a loss. “That’s grief,” she said of the scene in the gallery. She knew that Lazlo would have understood. “You don’t have to feel sorry for her, but killing her won’t solve our problems, and maybe the only way we’re going to get through this is if we can help her.”

Minya was studying Sarai, contemplative. “You can’t save everyone, Sarai. You know that, don’t you?”