Sahara Knax let out one last howl, a starling shriek that tore the air as she collapsed within the burning logs.
“Our work is unfinished—the well remains open!” Gilead boomed. “Lethewood must have initiated another chanter.”
All these months, we’ve been easing the magic out. Astrid might have been speaking in his ear. But Teo is right—we can yank the tooth.
“Do things the hard way, not the easy way?”
Are you kidding? A laugh—not the sly, teasing laugh of the unreal, just an ordinary Astrid chuckle. What part of the last six months has been easy?
“What do we do?”
Think about warmth, Astrid Lethewood said.
“Heat up the vitagua? How much?”
Warmth, she repeated. Not heat, not cold. Bathwater, sun on your skin, lying under a comforter in the wintertime. Affection and kindess.
“Warmth,” Will murmured. The knot of volunteers tightened around him.
The Fyreman began to mutter something, a low cantation that spread through the encircling wall of his fellows. One word, repeated over and over.
“Was that hut?” Pike asked.
“Hut like in football?”
Forget them, Will, Astrid said. Think about warmth.
“It’s huff,” Katarina gasped. “As in huff and puff and burn your house down.”
Smoke roiled from the witch-burners. Eyes watering, Will met Gilead’s flame-red gaze. Huff, huff, huff.
Okay, he agreed. Warmth.
Curling up on the couch with the kids to watch old cartoons, waiting on cooling mugs of cocoa. Ellie dozing with a stuffed elephant tucked under each arm …
That’s it, Astrid said. Here comes the Small …
“Huff! Huff! Huff!” The air clogging, unbreathable. Everyone about to suffocate …
“Huff, puff,” Will said. “And boom.”
A world unfurled beneath him.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
ASTRID HAD BEEN IN a dozen places at once when the Alchemites made their move.
She had been in a hammock behind an abandoned garden cottage in Northern England, waiting for a dying ringer to slip away. She was climbing in the canopy of the forest, watching the Fyremen and chatting with Katarina about vitagua sequestration and contamination levels. The tiny ringer in Africa was roaming the desert, contaminating whatever it touched. She was with Pike in the hotel lobby, with Jupiter and Aquino in the Octagon.
Astrid Prime was in the shelter, making chantments for the Lifeguards and the poor troublesome Alchemites.
“Astrid,” Pike had said, “the Unreal’s claiming their deadline has elapsed.”
Deadline, she thought. Such an ugly word. There was nothing to do but go plead with Teo for a few more hours.
She touched the scarf, her magical disguise. I decide to go in person, she thought. I have a ringer stashed at Pucker Hill, but Teo’s offended by the use of the mice. He’ll kill it, and if I send another copy of myself across the plaza, all those Alchemites will start screaming Filthwitch.…
Mark would have a fit. There was a tinge of unease in the thought; this was risky. “Olive, how’s the body count looking?”
“Death toll’s dropping substantially,” Olive reported. “Sketches are coloring in Faster than we can post them on the Big Picture.”
“Any significant changes?”
Euphemisms, the grumbles chortled, but Olive understood. “You’re still in Limbo. Sorry.”
“Sahara?”
“Her too.”
When I burn, she burns, she thought. “Thank you, Olive.”
Have a little faith, kid.
She stepped into the bathing grotto, dipping her hands into the hot pool. She splashed water onto her face, tugged a comb through her curls. She put on a clean, pressed-looking pair of jeans and a new red shirt. She fluffed the pillows on her bed, pulled the blanket straight.
There was nothing left to tidy. She owned nothing else.
She stared into the mirror for a second more before putting on the scarf. Her features changed, and she took Bramblegate up to the plaza.
As she arrived, her head began to ring.
All the Astrids frowned, as one. “Something’s wrong,” she said, to Pike and Jupiter and the plaza and the songbirds in England.
Then she was swooning—that was the only word for it.
And I must be unconscious, she thought, because she, they, all of her were icing over, leaving her to peer at the world through blue filmy eyes, to listen with the slush-clogged ears of rats and mice.
She strained to take in as much as she could. There was so much going on: Alchemites in the plaza, Fyremen burning a path into town, Igme fleeing with a golden key. Sahara, home at last, mutated and deranged. All of her gone but for that insatiable need for worship. Magic had devoured her friend whole, taken her as it had taken Jacks and Mark and Dad.
And you, a grumble said.
Yes, Astrid replied. It’s almost that time.
She felt a last pang of fear. In its wake came sadness: she hadn’t broken the curse, hadn’t cured Pop, hadn’t released the Roused. So much unfinished …
It’ll be okay. Was that her own voice, mouthing hollow reassurances from the future?
No, Bun, really, it will.
Daddy?
Happy After’s just up ahead. Believe a little longer.
Could she do that? Maybe. Yes, she thought. A little longer.
A vague stir of consciousness: they’d brought her around. She was hanging by her heels, staring into a once-beloved face. “Hello, Sahara.”
And then we argue, don’t we?
She saw, in a flash, that she had to break Sahara’s grip on the Alchemites. They wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t save anyone, if they stayed with Sahara to the end. They’d be slaughtered.
Get this one last thing done … tease her, undermine her. Plant that seed of doubt.
Juanita was staring at her, incredulous. Don’t provoke her, she seemed to be pleading.
Too late, said the grumbles.
Sahara whirled. Dancing? There was a sticky burst of heat and Astrid realized she was bleeding. She tried to draw vitagua to her throat, close up the wound …
Let it bleed, Astrid thought, and then … black edges, black hedges, blacking out. Not by poison, not by fire, not some sacrificial ringer. Sorry, Will, that’s how it goes.
Exanguination, she told an earlier version of herself. There’s an ugly word.
She sank into the cold.
That’s it, she thought, I’m trapped in the glacier. All that work, and I’ve ended up with the Roused. If Will lets the well close, we’re here forever. Was this the end? Was she trapped in the ice, left with the taste of having screwed up?
No. The Happy After will come.
Her confusion lifted. Eleven pairs of eyes opened.
She was with Pike. She was in England, in Africa. All the unreal was wound within her belly, yearning to get loose, to spring forth. All she needed was heat.
Warmth, she thought.
Nothing.
Heat!
We can’t do it now, Bundle, we’re dead, the grumbles said, and it was her own voice, and Dad’s, and Eliza’s, and her granny Almore’s too, all the Indigo Springs chanters telling her what she’d always known.
She needed warmth. Needed a well wizard. She needed Will.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“BOOM,” WILL FOREST WHISPERED.
For a second there was no reaction. A tremor underfoot, maybe, nothing to distract the stamping Fyremen who’d encircled the plaza, nothing to keep them from suffocating everyone caught in their human cordon.
Warmth.
He could feel, rather than see, the first blue fronds of magical steam as they rushed from the Chimney. A blue plume unfurled from the ravine, sprouting skyward, staining the sky like squid ink.
Gilead saw it first. His fire-lit face tipped upward, and Will saw fear and exultation in equal measure. The Fyreman reached into his coat, pro
ducing a stoppered vial.…
More, Astrid said. Quick, before he ignites the well.
Warmth. He clung to that memory of his children. Reading to them both in bed on sleepy winter nights …
Wind lifted his hair, and there was a bite of grit in its caress. The cloud of choking smoke blew off the edges of the plaza. Clothing flapped. Everyone staggered, save for Juanita Corazón. She grabbed two nearby volunteers, supporting them against the gale. Moving into the crowd, she got the prisoners and Alchemites to link arms.
Making a human chain, pushing them toward the gate, Will realized. Could it break through the line of Fyremen?
Not your problem, Astrid told him. Her voice seemed clearer in the magic-drenched air.
Right. Warmth, affection. He sensed Jacks Glade, smoldering amid the bergs and drifts of vitagua. “More, Jacks.”
Gilead’s flask blew out of his hand; he crawled after it. His followers were picking themselves off the ground. Volunteers and a few Alchemites pushed toward the columns. The line of Fyremen blocking their escape was getting ragged.
The oversized trees groaned as the wind continued to rise. Wind stripped every leaf, every twig. The branches that hadn’t burned were ground to dust by debris howling in from the unreal. The edge of the ravine was crumbling.
Will felt the ground give beneath him, but he did not fall. He was borne aloft on a geyser of lukewarm vitagua, rising to the epicenter of the gale. Below him, the Chimney yawned, disgorging a profoundly contaminated Everett Lethewood. Patience followed, chasing him into the storm.
Roused were rushing in now, sprinting over a bridge to attack the Fyremen in the plaza.
Olive Glade clung to a pillar at the edge of the glowside, shouting instructions to the human chain of escaping Alchemites and volunteers as they got away: trying to save lives, even now.
Juanita, meanwhile, had turned her attention to the wounded, to anyone who couldn’t run away. She struggled to turn an oak bench that had fallen across …
Passion, Will saw, it was Passion. Juanita extended her hand, offering to help her up. Passion slapped at her, crawling instead to the pyre where Sahara and Astrid’s bodies lay smoldering.
Will felt a future—Ellie in his arms, the warmth of her …
… warmth …
… her head pressed to his chest. He remembered the first time he’d held his son, the sense that the whole universe was burning through his eyes as he looked in wonder at Carson’s face, this miracle made of, by, for him and Caro …
Passion screamed at her fleeing sisters, trying to draw them into the brawl developing between the Roused and the Fyremen. Gilead had recovered his potion, and had lit it, like a Molotov cocktail, trying to get a bead on—
On me, Will thought—which makes sense, doen’t it? I’m the well wizard now, the last well wizard …
Try putting that on a business card, son, someone said, laughing. Albert Lethewood?
Astrid was right. Gilead wasn’t his problem. Will let his memories drift forward to a camping trip, years from now, Carson grown, the three of them in sleeping bags, deep within the alchemized forest. Astrid talking about dogwood.
But Astrid’s gone, he thought. Just another vitagua ghost.
Dead, Will. Not gone.
“Astrid?”
Here. She was within the cloud bank, rising upward to the troposphere. Condensing as she rose, she was raining into lakes, streams, extending foggy toes into fields. She would spread herself around the globe, avoiding fires, avoiding the seas.
Not dead. She had survived somehow; they had thought the ringers would present her enemies with alternative targets, but they hadn’t been decoys at all. Backups, he thought, with a strange laugh. She was okay. She was fine.
“Abracadabra,” he murmured.
Below, Passion crawled to the pyre, to her goddess. She stretched across a fallen log, laying her hands on Sahara’s bloodied face.
She licked her fingers.
Gone mad, Will thought, but Passion’s face changed, and she cried out with Sahara’s voice. Whirling birds threw themselves out of the storm, alchemized starlings, shrieking as they made for Gilead.
The flask in the Fyreman’s hand erupted into flame, burning the birds to ash. Passion kept calling them down as her body withered, drawing every last calorie, every dram of vitality.
Then Fyremen swarmed over her, silencing her for good.
More?
It was Jacks Glade asking.
Will looked down, seeking Juanita. It seemed she had rescued everyone she could. The Roused and Fyremen were still fighting, but the volunteers and Alchemites were gone, into the glow. It seemed distant. How much time had passed?
Will held himself in check, imagined pulling the reins of a runaway carriage, counting a hundred precious seconds. Just a little grace period, he thought, that’s all this has ever been about. Calm between storms. I hope we made good use of it.
Juanita found one last unconscious woman, hauling her bodily to the exit. Bramblegate itself was falling.…
More? That same query.
“The more, the merrier, Jacks,” Will replied. “Melt it all.”
A puff of steam heralded the destruction of everything around him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
EVERETT BURKE, HYPEROBSERVANT MAILMAN, was digging in an open grave with his hands. Whose grave it was he didn’t know, though surely he had already deduced that.
Wet clumps of flesh at the ends of his arms pounded at the bricks blocking his path. A bracelet of glass and burning chemicals cauterized the blood as it flowed from his right arm; the left bled freely.
The passage he’d made was big enough for a child to pass through, and small animals—birds, lizards, and bugs—were sprinting over him, busting out at long last.
Far away, he could hear a woman pleading: “You’ve got your crack between worlds, you sadist—finish the job yourself. Let him stop—”
“No.”
Romantic rivals, the Everett Burke voice noted. Teo has a motive to let our hero die.
“Hush,” he murmured. “The girl loves me, that’s settled.”
A breeze ruffled his beard.
“Wind’s rising,” he called. The others kept arguing. Beyond them, the Roused were dancing, beating their war drums.
Wind meant a flow of vitagua out of the unreal. It meant the turbine at Pucker Hill would be turning again. It meant letrico and food and water.
Not this wind, said a voice. This one flattens everything.
He was knee deep in liquid magic now. Above him, the murdered boy, Jacks, was getting brighter. Had anybody noticed?
“Nuh-ah-ah, folks…”
The brick wall crumbled. Ev pitched into a hole, then rose, falling up the Indigo Springs ravine. He threw out an arm, catching himself on Teo’s awful bridge of bones. Getting his feet under him again, he half ran, half stumbled out of the chasm, into the midst of …
Of hell, he wanted to say, but that was too florid, even for an old-fashioned pulp hero like Burke. He was caught in a windstorm that had blown away everything between town and what was left of the old train station. The Roused who’d preceded him were brawling with Fyremen. People fled, as best they could, toward the glow, the way out.
A plume of blue mist curled upward from the ravine, growing sky high, shining like sunlight through the ocean. Around it, the ground crumbled, forming an expanding crater.
Everett’s heart slammed. Was that Petey? Wind batted him down when he tried to rise.
“Ev!” Patience, running flat out, shot over the lip of the ravine. “Ev, are you all right?”
The girl loves me. “We’re in trouble.”
“Oh, you think?”
Animal howls, behind them. Twenty, fifty, a hundred Roused raced out of the widening Chimney, crossing the bone bridge. Predators now: bears, wolves, lions, eagles.
Teoquan was with them. He scanned the chaos with satisfaction, the expression of a man who’s achieved his life’s ambiti
on. Then one of his warriors, a panther, swiped at the phosphorus-bright form of a Fyreman … and burned to ash with a howl and a stench of burnt meat.
Teo’s smile widened. “Stay out of trouble, lovebirds.” Strolling up to the glowing figure, he opened his mouth, letting out a low hum.
Ev felt a pinch in his chest.
The Fyreman blew out, collapsing as definitively as a china doll getting hit by a truck.
“Ev, we have to get out of here.”
He forced himself to concentrate. “Patience, do you have any chantments?” It came out cha-aan-ant-ments.
“No.” She shook her head. “If we can cross the plaza—”
“People need help,” he said.
“Look at us, Ev Lethewood—we need help.”
It was true. His bloodied fingers were stiff and clubby, with thick, splintered nails. Hooves? “I gotta-ah find…”
Who? Who did he need to find?
“Come on,” Patience said. Clinging to each other, they could just move against the wind. They staggered to the edge of the plaza, skirting a pile of garbage—medical stuff, it turned out: crutches, bandages, scrubs. Rubble, from the hospital—
“Wait!”
A movement within the pile caught his attention. He pushed aside a gurney and found a girl, Alchemite from her dress. Her leg was broken.
“Here.” Patience fished a wheelchair from the debris.
The girl struggled as they loaded her into the thing. “They burned Sahara,” she said dully. She had a chantment with her, one of Astrid’s first, an aluminum rake that wove fruit baskets.
Ev bent to face her. “What about Petey?”
“Astrid Lethewood,” Patience corrected.
“I think … I think the Goddess lied,” she said.
“She’s in shock, Ev.” They managed to get the chair rolling, leaning hard and bumping toward a relatively unbroken stretch of marble floor. They struggled on, bent against the wind, with its aromas of burning plastic and heated flowers.
“Over here!” Patience shouted. Ev raised his head, hopeful, but she was waving at a stranger, someone he distantly recognized … from TV, he remembered; she was one of Sahara’s jailers. She strode across the plaza, a chunk of letrico in her fist, ignoring the smoke and flying debris. She was helping people reach the glow, he realized, getting them through the wind to the columns.
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