Infinity Reaper

by Adam Silvera

  Right now I stand no chance of escaping this labyrinth—four towers with multiple levels, armed guards, and traps galore.

  I turn to the Senator to give him his answer, and the fading Crowned Dreamer is reflecting off his glasses. I have no idea what went down tonight with the immortality ritual. I hope Emil was able to find his brother and get away with the phoenix; I hope he didn’t die for that bird. If I’m ever going to have a chance to see him again, I have to be as calculating and patient as Luna has been her entire life.

  I have to become a pawn who takes down the king. To outsmart the man who fools the world without a single shifter’s muscle.

  “I’ll work for you,” I say.

  “Smart choice, Eduardo,” the Senator says with a quick that-settles-it clap.

  “I was really looking forward to making a game out of your imprisonment,” Bishop says. “But we’ll make do.”

  “Let’s go home, then,” the Senator says.

  Home. That cold manor stopped being my home before the Blackout. It’s a cage of a different kind. But if I can bide my time and wait for the Senator to leave a crack in the door, I can slip out and never look back.

  Hopefully I can escape before helping the Senator become the President.

  Three

  Death’s Hold

  MARIBELLE

  Months ago—I can’t remember, four months, maybe five—there was a celestial on a street corner advertising her ability to see into the past and future. I’m not normally this desperate, but I was willing to try anything to uncover the truth behind my parents’ deaths. Atlas had warned me to not get my hopes up; I should’ve trusted his instincts more. Mama always said I had a tendency to get lost in my foggy mind and someone clear-headed like Atlas could be good for me. The celestial and her crystal ball were useless, but all this time later I finally have my answer: June, the specter with ghost blood, possessed my mother and framed her for the Blackout so the country would lose faith in the Spell Walkers.

  Then June possessed me and made me kill Atlas.

  I needed space from everyone, so I’m up on the sky deck of the Aldebaran Center, legs dangling over the edge, fourteen stories high, and the Crowned Dreamer’s starlight prickles my skin one last time before completely fading into the night. It’s done. Luna’s last shot of becoming immortal. I wouldn’t say no to crates of star-touched wine and boxes of blaze cake as a thank-you for the miracles Brighton and I worked tonight.

  I did come away with one gift. The oblivion dagger twirling between my fingers is beautiful. Not because of its look, stars no. The rare dagger looks like rotted bone and carries the dark gray stains of all the ghosts that have been slain by it—most recently Luna’s parents. The dagger is deceptively heavy too, heavy like the celestial’s crystal ball, which I had hurled across her velvet-decked room once I realized her reading was a hoax, some side hustle to make money. The oblivion dagger is beautiful because it’s the weapon I’ll be able to use to end June forever.

  I’m exhausted—beat down, bone tired, sore muscles. The last time I rested was when I collapsed onto Atlas’s corpse hours ago in the museum, immediately after my new powers revealed themselves to me and everyone around me in a ring of fire. But I can’t sleep without Atlas tonight. This feeling reminds me of those dark lonely nights after the Blackout, when I forced everyone away, even my then–best friend, Iris, who was grieving her own parents too. But then Atlas became a light. Some afternoons I needed him to help me out of bed. Other times I was strong enough to do it myself. Right now the idea of crawling into any bed without him terrifies me.

  The cold wind blows back my dark hair. I wish Papa was around to braid it for me like he did when I was growing up. But he’s not.

  Death has a hold on me, taking everyone I love.

  Mama, Papa. Atlas. Simone, Konrad.

  It didn’t have to be this way. If I’d known that the founders of the Spell Walkers were actually my birth parents, I would’ve understood that my power to glide was only a hint of what I’m capable of after inheriting Bautista de León’s phoenix abilities. I would’ve known that the strong instincts that kept me alive in combat were more of a sixth sense, an extension of Sera Córdova’s danger-detecting visions. I could’ve strengthened my powers and kept Mama and Papa at home before they left to try and save the world. Before they set our movement back by years.

  I could’ve used my power to keep Atlas alive.

  While we’re waiting to see what the deal is with Emil, and if Brighton is coming back with me after so we can track down the Blood Casters together, I should pick up Atlas’s car, which I left a couple blocks away from the Alpha Church of New Life. I don’t have a sheath yet for the oblivion dagger, and it’s too thick to fit into my boot, so I conceal it back inside the padded pocket of my power-proof vest.

  I reenter the building through a pyramid-shaped door, and a pair of practitioners watch me cautiously, as if I might blow up the facility the way they believe my mother blew up the conservatory. These practitioners are on the younger side, maybe a few years older than me, so maybe they weren’t paying attention eight years ago when the Spell Walkers helped out a dozen Gleam Cares by raising millions for high-tech upgrades. People paid for photo shoots with my parents and Iris’s parents. And Iris and I felt like royalty when donors were requesting personal greetings and birthday wishes for the children in their lives. But the most money came from people who wanted to know what it felt like to fly—and not just fly, but fly with then-beloved Spell Walkers. Why go skydiving when the Luceros could take you flying around your neighborhood for a few minutes?

  Things weren’t perfect then, and they’ll never be perfect, but I would kill for those times.

  I will kill for those times.

  I round the corner, and someone is sobbing. Prudencia is sitting on the floor, crying into her hands. Emil must be dead. I know he has a good heart, but it only seems fair. If Emil hadn’t released June when we finally had a hold on her in the Apollo Arena, then Atlas would be alive right now.

  “Did Emil die?” I ask.

  Prudencia can barely get any words out, and she doesn’t bother wiping any tears from her glossy brown eyes. “I don’t know. The practitioners are working on him already, but Brighton . . . he’s unconscious too, and they have a team trying to save him.”

  From what I understand, Brighton and Emil are the closest people in her life. Prudencia’s parents were killed too, and now she’s also on the edge of losing everyone she loves. She only got involved in this war because she wanted to see this through with her best friends. Will she stay with the Spell Walkers if they die, or go back to her celestial-hating aunt? I don’t know.

  “There’s still hope,” I say. It’s true—I don’t waste my breath on empty words. “Specters have been known to faint early in their journeys—after consuming elixirs, when their powers first surface. Their bodies have to adjust. And the Reaper’s Blood is a whole other level. I’m sure Brighton will pull through.”

  “Brighton isn’t supposed to be a specter,” Prudencia says.

  Well, no one is supposed to be a specter. Myself included. But Emil’s ambitions to create the power-binding potion Bautista and Sera were working on before they died feels like an impossible task. It may not be easy to get an experienced alchemist to turn someone into a specter, but that task isn’t as daunting as reverting every specter back into an ordinary person. That star has long fallen out of sight, as the old proverb goes.

  “Brighton made his choice,” I say.

  “And you chose to help him, which makes me want to send you flying through the wall . . . but I also know Brighton. Even if you didn’t help him, he would’ve shown up. If anything, you kept him alive.” Prudencia stares straight ahead at the opposite wall, which has a calming poster of celestials running on water. I can’t imagine it’s having any positive effect on her right now. “What was his reasoning for drinking the Reaper’s Blood?” she asks.

  When Brighton first presented his
plan, I could see through what some people, even Prudencia, probably mistake as charm. “He said he had to be the one to drink it. He said it would be too risky for me since we don’t know enough about the blood type of someone who inherited both celestial and specter properties.”

  “Oh yeah, like he didn’t have his own risks. Like how his own father didn’t survive having hydra essence in him, or how Luna prepared this elixir with blood from her parents’ ghosts, or how it was all untested and he knew all of this, but he did it anyway!”

  She’s hyperventilating, and it reminds me of the many days following the deaths of my parents, when I would cry and scream so hard that Atlas and Iris and the others couldn’t even understand what I was trying to say.

  “He’s going to die,” Prudencia says.

  “Maybe. Gleamcrafters are not promised the luxury of time. You should’ve understood that already from losing your parents.”

  She stands. “What are you talking about?”

  “I never kept secrets from Atlas. You had your reasons for not telling Brighton you’re a celestial, I get it. But how do you think he felt when you trusted Iris, an absolute stranger, with your big secret before you trusted him?”

  “I never wanted to be exploited by him. Look at the way he was using Emil to boost his own status and fame. And Brighton and I are different than you and Atlas.”

  “I was open with the person I love and you weren’t.”

  Prudencia rolls her eyes. “You don’t know me.”

  “You went on missions involving dangerous people, knowing that you may even have to expose your telekinesis, to keep Brighton alive.”

  “And keep Emil alive!” She’s shaking. This anger would be useful against the Blood Casters if she ever wanted to get serious.

  “Can you honestly say that you would’ve gone on all these missions where you knew that Emil was being protected by Spell Walkers if Brighton wasn’t there?”

  Prudencia takes a deep breath. There are words on the tip of her tongue, but she keeps them to herself and walks away. Hiding from her truth seems to be her signature.

  If Wesley hadn’t pulled me away from June, I would invite him to go with me to pick up Atlas’s car. But I’m pissed, so I head down the stairs to avoid him and Iris, and once I’m outside, I jump into the air and glide through the shadows of the night with the wind in my ears.

  It doesn’t take too long to arrive at the church. I’m careful because there is still one enforcer tank parked out front, with an ambulance truck and police cars nearby. The body bags with dead acolytes should be brought out soon enough. Police officers are taking statements and I wonder if the eyewitnesses are exaggerating details about what happened like so many have in the past.

  I unlock Atlas’s car, but before I make my way back to Aldebaran for updates on Brighton, I open the storage compartment and pull out the wine bottle that’s holding Atlas’s ashes. I cremated him myself with the power that manifested after his death; I’ll die before I let a poet get their hands on that story.

  I’m not an expert on ghosts. It’s not an enemy force we’ve crossed swords with before, and I grew up knowing just the obvious details, like how ghosts can only appear under night skies and how they only wander the world if they were violently murdered. But I learned something valuable because of Luna’s ritual. An alchemist proficient in necromancy can summon a wandering ghost; they just need something of the person from when they were alive and the presence of the person who killed them. It doesn’t seem cosmically fair to the ghosts, but if there’s one bright side to June possessing me when she shot Atlas in the heart with a spell, it’s that I should count as his killer too.

  But first I’ll kill June and avenge him.

  I press Atlas’s ashes against my heart, daydreaming of the night when I get to summon his ghost and peacefully send him off into the stars.

  Four

  Nightmare

  EMIL

  My brother is a nightmare.

  The streets are crowded with enforcers casting spells into the night as their tanks blaze in gold fire. Brighton has flown higher than every building around him, and he freezes in the air, admiring his chaos. He has three heads with eyes as dark as black holes, and streams of phoenix fire are flowing from the palms of his six hands. I fly into the air to tackle him, to get him to stop, but he’s untouchable. I go through him like he’s made of air. I float in front of his face, begging him to stop, and there’s nothing but cruel laughter echoing from all three of his heads. The city is his to destroy. Finally, when I’m brave enough to stop my brother and conjure fire of my own, Brighton unleashes an inferno toward me and—

  I snap awake, groaning and panting.

  My brother was a nightmare. That’s all. It was all a nightmare. Brighton wouldn’t ever go dark like that. It’s all in my head.

  I remember pieces of conversation, of an argument between Brighton and Prudencia, but neither of them are with me now. I’m alone in a room with bright white walls and lights that hurt my eyes, so I shift to the see-through ceiling and stare out into the night sky. I don’t know what time it is, or even what day it is, but I don’t see the Crowned Dreamer or its glow stretched across the darkness. Not even a single star in sight. This constellation is rare and won’t return to the sky until I’m an old man, assuming I get to live that long. Maybe my next life will see it, or the one after that, or however many lives I get to have before someone gets me good with an infinity-ender.

  This bed I’m in is too firm, and I’m hot, so I remove the sheet and realize I’m shirtless. There’s dried blood around my stomach from where Luna stabbed me. The wound is closed, but it looks odd, like discolored, stretched-out skin; someone’s healed me. But I don’t think it was Eva. Eva’s power seals all open wounds in ways that you have to look twice to tell that work was even done in the first place. She also absorbs all the pain, and I still feel this dull pounding and sharp twinges. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that someone kept me alive. I’m just appreciating how good we have it with a powerful healer like Eva on our side.

  Surrounding the gash are the scars from when Ness sliced me to trick Luna and the Blood Casters into believing he was still loyal to their gang. I don’t think these will ever fully heal. But Ness did this to save my life, and even when he finally had the chance to run away into anonymity, he returned to Nova when we were under attack to save me again. Then he got taken captive by enforcers, and I doubt he escaped. He’s probably dead somewhere, even though I’m not worth dying for.

  There’s a gentle knock at the door. I look up to see a short practitioner with freckles dotting her face and curly red hair flowing over the shoulders of her midnight-blue cloak. Her electric-green eyes widen when she sees me staring back at her. “Emil Rey,” she says with a hint of motherly pride. “I’m Dr. Bowes. It’s an honor to have been part of the team that—that—that, uh, that worked on you.” Her cheeks are flushed and she’s shaking her head as if she wants to leave the room and come back in to restart this entire interaction.

  “Hi, thanks . . .” These first words aren’t much, but they’re rough against my throat.

  “Relax,” Dr. Bowes says as she hands me a cup of water, and I drink from the metal straw.

  She asks me a series of questions, and I answer everything in as few words as possible: I rate the pain seven out of ten; I’d like the lights dimmed; I’m starving and vegan; I’m exhausted. She dims the lights and puts in a request for someone to prepare a meal for me. I bring the blanket over my chest again. The last time my scrawny body was exposed was when Ness was washing the cuts he inflicted on me, and he did all of that with his eyes closed because he knows I’m struggling with how I look, even with everything else I got going on. I can tell Dr. Bowes senses my discomfort because she helps me into some patient-wear—mustard yellow with black stars—and that’s one less thing on my mind.

  “Emil, the authorities are going to need a report on what happened tonight,” Dr. Bowes says as she pulls up
a chair.

  “The Blood Casters,” I say.

  She nods. “Iris mentioned this while we were treating her too. I understand she’s been in touch with your mother and has advised her to keep her distance for the time being.” Makes sense, but I know that can’t be easy on Ma. “I have to thank you for your service to this country, Emil. It takes a brave soul to fight this fight. I don’t think I’d have it in me, even with your powers. I grew up watching Bautista and his Spell Walkers charge into combat. That was back when they were welcomed heroes—celebrities too, of course.” Dr. Bowes smiles wistfully before pressing her hand against her heart. “I cried for weeks after he died, and it was years before I took down his posters.”

  The way she’s looking at me makes me question whether she knows that Bautista is my past life. But that’s impossible. The public doesn’t know that reincarnation is real, since even specters with phoenix blood like me aren’t resurrected as the same person. The way she’s going on about Bautista so admirably makes me think she’d be chill if I let her in on the secret, but it’s my original life as Keon Máximo, the alchemist who turned himself into the first specter, that I want to keep close to the chest. The only person I told who isn’t directly involved in this war between the Spell Walkers and the Blood Casters is my former boss at the museum, Kirk Bennett. Then he betrayed me for his own research and fame.

  I play it cool about Bautista. “He was a hero.”

  “As are you. My son is so proud of me for helping a Spell Walker. You probably hear this a lot, but he’s your biggest fan. We’ve been working on his costume for Halloween. He’s going as you.”

  The blood that didn’t spill out of me back in the garden rushes straight to my face. There were a couple years where Brighton and I dressed up as the Spell Walkers for Halloween. He had to be Bautista, of course, because of that alpha, big-brother bone in him, and I chose to be Lestor Lucero because I thought he was cute, I can’t even lie. But look at us now. Brighton’s fantasies got the best of him tonight and he drank Reaper’s Blood so he could fit in with the Spell Walkers. I’m Bautista’s real-life scion. These lives were never costumes, but Dr. Bowes’s son is going to dress up as me, even though I might be dead before Halloween. And what then? Will her son mourn me the same way she grieved Bautista? He doesn’t know me, and she didn’t know him. This cycle of worship and grief needs to come to an end.