by Beth Revis
She had been faced with an unstoppable plague that no medicine could ever cure.
She found a cure anyway.
Her whole family had been taken from her, her beloved sister dead despite all her best efforts.
She had brought her back anyway.
Nedra never had a chance. She took one anyway.
I couldn’t let rage rule me. I focused my heart with the calm determination that Nedra walked through life with. The only thing my soul knew, the only thing Wellebourne couldn’t touch, the only thing that kept me real was my love for her.
Nothing had ever stopped her. Nothing would stop me now.
SIXTY
Nedra
I COULD STILL see, flickering and pale, the golden wisp of Grey’s soul.
I still had a chance.
The thousand dead plague victim revenants turned to me. I could still see the reddish-black gore staining their hands and feet and mouths. Dirt clung to their too-soft skin, maggots squirmed inside their flesh, occasionally wiggling out of gaping wounds.
I sensed their longing to be free from this world. Go, then, I thought. When I’d severed the souls of the thirteen hanging traitors, I had not needed to be beside them. The same was true now. I swirled my ghost hand in a circle, not unlike the circle the Elder had made when he blessed the corpses. The golden threads of souls all around me snapped. They seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as they faded into the afterlife. And the lingering energy of the lives they had lived all poured into the blade. The clear crystal burned a bright gold, full of pulsing, vivid energy, more power than I had ever dreamed possible.
Before, breaking Governor Adelaide’s old crucible had nearly destroyed me. But now, the dark power from my crucible and the sheer might of the crystal knife made my body burn with their combined energy.
A house on fire.
The roar of power, thundering through my head. Something warm dribbled down my chin. I licked my lips, tasting copper. Tasting blood. My snarling, feral grin curled over my teeth. My soul was hungry.
The dead fell back into the earth, truly empty, their souls free. The crystal blade pulsed with power.
I turned to my sister.
“Wait!” Grey screamed at me, but it was not him who spoke the word. Still, my hand stayed, the crystal knife poised over my sister’s heart.
“The crystal blade is designed for a lich to regain power,” Wellebourne said through Grey. “Stab your little lover, and my soul will be strong enough to take a different body. I’ll give him back to you, and take someone else.”
Grey’s soul flared.
“You’re lying to me,” I said.
“I’m not. I’ll leave this body.”
I squinted. Grey’s soul couldn’t speak, but it was trying to communicate with me. The pulsing light burned bright, as if it were trying to warn me of Wellebourne’s lies.
I squeezed the knife in my shadow hand, black and corporeal now. Something isn’t right. Wellebourne could easily use Grey’s body to physically fight me and wrest the crystal knife from my grip. I narrowed my eyes as he watched me with a smug smile. I didn’t have time for his game, though. My first priority was Nessie, and then I’d figure out a way to save Grey.
Grey’s face twisted with cruel mockery as I turned to Nessie’s still body and poised the blade over her heart.
My hand shook. Grey’s chuckle sounded out over the decimated field of corpses. I threw all my weight behind the blade, but I could not pierce my sister’s heart. All the energy and power whirled within me, but there was something else, something stronger, that stayed my hand.
Nessie stared straight ahead.
Wellebourne moved Grey’s body closer, right beside my sister.
My grip tightened around the hilt and I put all my weight behind my arm. But it still wouldn’t move.
Power pulsed through me—starting in my heart, all the way down the black arm. No . . . it didn’t start in my heart.
It started in my crucible.
The energy that was Bennum’s soul had been staining my skin black, just like a plague victim’s. His dark soul had infected me. And now it could control me—or, at least, my shadow arm.
I did not have the power to resist him, because I had invited him inside. Hadn’t I asked for the power? Hadn’t I offered anything for it?
My body shifted, the crystal blade aiming for Grey’s heart, for Wellebourne’s soul. Not Nessie’s. I was going to kill Grey and strengthen Wellebourne enough for him to kill me, and I could not do a thing to stop it.
I looked into Grey’s eyes, and I saw nothing left of him. Just Wellebourne. Hungry. Hungry for power. For me. Cold terror washed over me as my hand, gripping the crystal knife brimming with energy, plunged down.
A force stronger than I could have imagined slammed into me, throwing my body aside. I landed with a teeth-cracking slam on the ground, amid the dead and rotting bodies of the plague victims.
“Call your dog off, girl!” Grey’s voice snarled.
Nessie stood in front of Grey’s body, passive as she always was. But when Wellebourne took a step forward, she sprang into action, blocking him, before standing empty before him again.
She always protects me.
My right hand clutched my iron crucible, finally, finally realizing the truth. I yanked the tiny iron bead off the chain, holding it in my palm. Bennum’s soul was inside my crucible. The evil inside it should have overwhelmed me, but it never had. I had spent so long agonizing over the way I’d trapped my sister’s soul inside my crucible, but that’s not what had happened at all.
Nessie’s soul had never been trapped.
She chose to leave her soul inside the crucible.
She chose to fight the darkness. For me. She fought it with her soul inside my crucible, and she was fighting it now, with her shell of a body, protecting me.
The more I learned about the darkness inside my crucible, the more convinced I’d become that Nessie was a prisoner, and that I had imprisoned her. It was that darkness that my revenants had feared. Pure, concentrated evil, at the heart of my own crucible.
And my twin sister had been wrapped up in it. She had never been its prisoner.
It had been hers.
I had never been able to look at my crucible without feeling guilt, both for Nessie’s death and her failed second life. That guilt drove deep inside me, a screw twisting into my own soul, making it impossible for me to see the truth.
It was not my fault that she had died. It was not my fault that I had lived.
It was that realization, more than anything else, that made me understand the push and pull between the darkness in my crucible and Nessie’s soul made of golden light. From the very start, Nessie’s soul had seen the darkness and blocked it out. She’d protected my revenants, my crucible, me. She’d held back the dark all by herself, sacrificing the false life I’d offered her in order to contain it.
Wellebourne was using Grey’s body to fight against Nessie, but she kept driving him back, away from me.
Giving me time.
“No,” I whispered. I knew what I had to do. My eyes grew bleary with unshed tears.
I knew what it would cost.
I had thought raising Nessie from the dead would save her. But it was only now I understood that in that moment—and every moment after—she’d never stopped trying to save me. And the only thing I could do to help her now would be to let her go.
With a shaking hand, I placed my iron crucible onto a nearby gore-splattered rock. Crouching over it, I aimed the tip of the crystal blade, charged with the energy of every wronged soul victimized by the plague, over the top of the iron bead.
Wellebourne saw me. He tried to break past Nessie, but my sister blocked him again, throwing him to the ground. He struggled up, and Nessie grabbed his ankles, dragging him back.
“I’ll kill him!” Wellebourne screamed. “You think you can stop me? I’m inside his body, little girl, I will eat his soul!”
I blinked at him. “You cannot negotiate with Death,” I said. I plunged the crystal blade into the heart of my iron crucible.
“No—” Wellebourne started to say, the word turning to a strangled scream.
Nessie’s soul was severed first. That little string of light, the only part of her she could spare to be with me while she fought the darkness inside my crucible, snapped. Her body fell gracefully, like a petal. She was truly dead now.
But not entirely gone.
Before the thread of my sister’s soul left me for the afterlife, it wrapped around me. I felt all the things she wished she could say but could not put into words.
I felt her love.
And her trust, too. She had been fighting the darkness since I’d formed my crucible.
I was ready to fight now.
I pushed the tip of the crystal blade deeper into my crucible.
Wellebourne now had no one to hold him back—Nessie’s body could no longer repulse him. He staggered up and lurched toward me, but his feet stilled. Light flashed around the darkness within his body. Grey was fighting him from within, soul against soul.
“Stop!” Wellebourne screamed. “You’ll break it!”
“That’s the point,” I said, power laced through my voice.
I drove the blade into the iron. I felt it cracking, splintering like glass, the reverberations of its destruction thundering all the way up my shadow arm, threatening to shatter my bones.
Wellebourne shouted in pure rage and lunged at me once more, but there was Grey, blocking him again.
Wellebourne’s immortality was linked to the darkness. There was a reason why he’d hidden his soul inside his mummified hand. Why he had been so smug that it had been turned into a crucible. It had taken almost two hundred years of degradation and nearly all my power to break Wellebourne’s original crucible.
I could never remove the dark from my own. It was melted into the iron, irrevocable.
I pushed harder against the crystal blade. It was designed to suck in the energy of life, of souls. It did not matter if that energy was light, like the pure love of my sister, or dark, like the evil in Wellebourne’s broken soul.
“You’ll lose everything!” Wellebourne roared. “You destroy it, you destroy all your power! It is no easy thing to crack a crucible. It will kill you, girl, it’ll consume all your power and leave you with nothing!”
I cocked my head. “I know,” I said simply. I had read the same books he had. I knew that to destroy a necromancer’s crucible, it would take everything I had.
Little lightning bolts of black crackled up my shadow arm. Pain seared through me. The crystal knife was cracking, the crucible was cracking, my shadow arm was cracking, my whole entire being was cracking apart, splintering, shattering. I tipped my head back and screamed.
But I did not let go.
Even as my shadow fingers faded into nothing, I pressed against the hilt of the crystal blade with all my strength and power. My arm evaporated, leaving nothing but the raw pink skin covered in scars. I pressed the end against the crystal blade’s hilt, not caring as the crystal finally cracked through, splintering into sharp ends. I still pressed down, blood pouring from my residual limb as the razor edges of the crystal pierced my skin and flesh.
The metal of my crucible vibrated, flaking away as if it were made of old paper.
Wellebourne screamed as my crucible—the iron bead made of my parents’ ashes and my sister’s soul and tainted with Wellebourne’s evil machinations—broke apart.
Black oozed out of the two pieces, the earth below sizzling. The darkness was gone, leaving only the broken pieces of iron. I picked the shards up with my right hand, and as soon as they touched my skin, they turned back into ash. My whole body hunched over the last remains of my parents and sister.
I always asked before I raised the dead. Always. Except when it mattered. Because I knew what the answer would be, and I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t ask Papa and Mama if they’d want to come back. I didn’t ask Nessie. I pretended I knew the answer.
I wasn’t ready to let go then, so I’d told myself I did it for her, not me. I let myself believe the lie.
I pressed the ash against my chest harder, ignoring the way it burned my skin and seared into my flesh. I chanted the rune for ending over and over again. My hair lifted, a cloud of white, as the souls of my family faded.
And—for the very last time—I felt their love. And I felt their farewell.
SIXTY-ONE
Nedra
I OPENED MY hand. Ash and dust fell out.
I felt the power draining from my body, but when I looked at Grey, I could still see the souls—Grey’s flickering golden light and Wellebourne’s dark void.
Wellebourne reached out to me, begging. Even as I watched, I could see Grey’s soul growing stronger. I’d destroyed pieces of Wellebourne—the part that made him immortal, and a part of his soul. Now he was inside a body that wasn’t his, partial and weak.
I walked over the broken bodies of the dead until I was directly across from him. When I looked into Grey’s eyes, I could still see the flickering soul of Wellebourne inside.
“I don’t want to die,” Wellebourne whispered.
I leaned in closer. “Do it anyway.”
EPILOGUE
WITH NO EMPEROR to guide the Empire, chaos ruled instead.
* * *
• • •
Many of the colonies, Lunar Island included, used the resulting turmoil to formally secede from the Empire. Civil war ravaged the mainland for a few years, and by the time a new Emperor was crowned—a distant niece of Auguste—the Empire was much smaller than it had been before.
Lunar Island, however, escaped mostly unscathed. An unimposing man who cared for the island from the sewers to the towers rose to the occasion. No one had ever looked at Hamish Hamlayton as the type of man who would rule effectively, but he was the one who stepped forward with a plan and a system and the strength of will to see it through. Under his leadership, not as governor ruling as regent of the Empire but as the rightfully elected prime minister of a free nation, Lunar Island grew to be stable and prosperous—both in the south and the north. Authentic iron rings from Lunar Island became a popular fashion thanks to their dual association with rebellion.
Grey and I saw none of it.
Grey took the money Hamish offered him as reward for services rendered, and we bought a small ship. We set sail from Blackdocks before news of the Emperor’s death reached Miraband. We went east first. The Empire could fight its battles without us.
Sometimes, I hold my hand over my chest. The black stain of Wellebourne’s soul has disappeared, but there is a scar over my heart where I clutched the pieces of my broken crucible. The edges of the scar are as ragged and uneven as the shards of iron were, but I like to trace them with my finger and remind myself that life, too, is not perfectly formed.
On the first night, I discovered the greatest gift Grey had ever given me. Hanging in the main cabin, framed in elegantly carved mahogany, was the map Papa had given me when I first left for Yūgen. I had no idea how Grey had retrieved it from my dormitory.
We’ll see the whole world, just the two of us. We’ll go to every city on the map.
We will live all the life that we can live.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WITHOUT MY MOTHER’S love, this story could not exist. Without my father’s loss, this story could not have been true. Without my husband and son, Nedra could not have found peace or hope. This work is the sum impact their love has had on my life.
My thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, and her assistant Rebecca Eskildsen, for their help as the book developed in guiding the story, and to Cecilia de la Campa and Alessand
ra Birch for helping to tell the story in different languages around the world.
Kati Gardner and Angel Giuffria both gave me keen insight into making Nedra’s character more realistic, and I would not have been able to create her as vividly without their advice.
Marissa Grossman pushed me to take Nedra and Grey off Lunar Island, and suddenly the world became much larger. Alex Sanchez suggested to me that, while the dead cannot die, they can be ripped apart, and suddenly the book contained much more blood. Both of these editors helped me to form Nedra’s story and world and make them real, and I am eternally grateful.
So many people work to make a book reach a reader’s hands. My thanks to everyone on the Razorbill and Penguin Teen teams, including Maggie Edkins for the cover design, Bridget Hartzler and Lizzie Goodell for publicity, Krista Ahlberg and Samantha Hoback for copyediting, and Felicity Vallence in marketing.
Author Emily B. Martin told me about a song by Alan Doyle called “Laying Down to Perish.” I listened to that song hundreds of times while writing this book, and if you listen to it, too, you’ll notice something familiar. My thanks to both these artists for introducing me to a new favorite. Another artistic influence lay in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, whose songs led me to the epigraph you’ll see at the beginning of the book.
I am grateful to every library, school, and bookstore that has supported me, with special love to Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, my home on the shelves.
And, finally, thank you. Without readers, books are nothing but ink and paper. You are what makes the story real. You are the fifth alchemy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Revis is the author of the New York Times bestselling Across the Universe series, the twisty contemporary novel A World Without You, and the New York Times bestselling Star Wars: Rebel Rising. Beth lives in rural North Carolina in a house full of boys--her husband, son, and two massive dogs--and she forces them all to watch reruns of Firefly and Doctor Who. Visit her at bethrevis.com and follow her @bethrevis.
