Entire minutes passed. And then Loren whispered onto the ashy breeze, “I can fix it.”
“Loren,” Darien croaked. “Sweetheart—”
“I can fix it,” she said again, the words so quiet they were a challenge even for him to make out. “I can take it back.”
He made to say something else, but Loren took the solar pendant into her hands. When she looked up at him, her eyes were bright and wild with determination, her nostrils flaring with the frantic breaths she drew.
“Hold me close when the hour is dire, wish upon the Liar,”she said. “It’s talking about the God of Time, Darien. It’s talking about Tempus the Liar.” Her chest heaved. “The Widow told me my father bought me a wish.” She shook the amulet, and it jingled softly in her white-knuckled grasp.“Thisis my wish. My gift.”
Loren reached up to grab him by the wrist, and she pulled him down, so he was kneeling on the sundial beside her. She shuffled closer to Darien and lifted the long chain so that it was around both of their necks. When she saw the uncertainty in his eyes, she whispered, “You’re just going to have to trust me.” She took his hands into hers and splayed his fingers upon the sundial, as she did with her own.
Tempus’s sundial.
Clumps of ash had settled upon her hair and lashes. When she spoke again, every word was a quavering whisper.
“Tempus the Liar, hear me now.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “Hear my plea. In this dire hour, I wish—Ipray—upon the Liar. I, Liliana Sophronia, daughter of the Magnum Opus, ask that you take it back. Let me have the wish my father bought me—and let this city be healed.”
Several minutes passed. Darien barely breathed the whole time Loren sat there, hands cupped before her, eyes squeezed shut.
A white flame slipped through her chest—from her heart. It filled up the solar pendant she wore around her neck—not a simple piece of jewelry but a conduit, Darien realized. And then it spread to every inch of the sundial, lighting the marble up like a beacon. The gold pointer gleamed so brightly that Darien could barely see.
As soon as that glow dimmed enough for him to look, Darien glanced around at the rubble strewn about the Avenue of the Scarlet Star, and his jaw fell slack as he felt the wind shift directions, saw the ash that was falling from the sky suddenly floating back up. Palm tree fronds that had scraped by a moment ago now returned in the opposite direction, and the sun began to shift, moving toward a past sunrise.
Time was moving backwards. Darien and Loren were frozen where they were, kneeling upon the sundial, but everything around them was moving. Loren was glowing as brightly as the sundial, her features awash in every shade of the rainbow, her skin luminescent with color.
Their surroundings shifted until they found themselves in Randal’s lair.
Darien saw himself—saw himself and the other Devils—standing before the replica of the Arcanum Well in the moments when they’d realized it couldn’t be destroyed. In the moments when they’d realized they had failed.
Darien had no words as Loren rose to her feet, unhooking the necklace from over his head. He remained kneeling as she walked up to the Well replica, past the frozen figures of his family and himself, stuck in the past, in a moment that was lasting a lifetime.
As Loren stood before the Well replica, she began to speak in a low, metallic tone—in a language he’d never heard before. She seemed to be speaking to…to someone.
Tempus the Liar, perhaps.
Loren’s eyes turned full white, like when Darien’s shifted to black with the Sight, and her aura shot out of her and up, forming a wall of light around the Well.
A shield, Darien realized. A shield for when the Well exploded. Stopping it from exploding wasn’t possible, but Loren seemed to have discovered how to save this city, how to save all of them.
With Tempus’s help, she had not only reversed time, but was giving this city a second chance. Giving the people in it the chance to live again.
Darien had no words as Loren opened her arms as though they were wings—like a rainbow phoenix.
Darien threw up a hand to shield his eyes as the wall her aura had built shone like a molten rainbow, bright as the Scarlet Star itself, encircling the Well and towering far and wide.
He still felt it when the Arcanum Well exploded—when time began to move again. It lurched forward, picking up where it had left off, leading them straight to their destruction again. Only this time, there was no destruction—no blast that would destroy the city they loved so dearly.
By the time Darien was able to see again, he blinked. And blinked again, his face draining of color.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
For the first time in his life, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
—
The entire city had been rebuilt with the reversal of time. Put back together again, as though it had never crumbled to begin with. The Avenue of the Scarlet Star was the same as he remembered it, the cars lining the curb no longer burning skeletons, the streetlights at the end of it glowing a steady green, eagerly awaiting traffic to direct. They’d been teleported back to the avenue—back to the sundial of Tempus the Liar.
And all around the avenue, there were people. Living,breathingpeople. Picking themselves up off the ground that was no longer strewn with debris, shaking their heads as if in a daze; poking their unmarked faces out of repaired shop windows and doors; staggering down the avenue as though sleepwalking, clearly trying to remember what had happened.
