Page 93 of The Devouring Time

I want to throw my arms around Adrian, but there’s no time. “We need to stop this!”

“The…the…” Dr. Dane gasps.

In the chaos, I almost miss her words. She lies in a spreading pool of blood, one hand twitching slightly, as if trying to get our attention.

Myers is dead. The man who’d gone to kneel by him rises and pulls his knife out, a look of hatred directed at Dr. Dane.

Adrian scrambles over the table, knocking aside cups. The drugged members of the Timekeepers move out of his way, their imperative to preserve their bodies from harm working in our favor. He tackles the guard as the man is bending to stab Dr. Dane, and both of them roll away across the cave floor.

I meet Dr. Dane’s eyes. “Destroy the machine…” she gasps. “It will…resonance…orb…”

Hart pushes himself onto shaking legs with the help of his cane. “Stupid woman,” he snarls. “I will not be denied, do you hear me!”

“Like hell,” Mary says, and rushes toward him.

I look around frantically. Helen is on the ground, dazed and bleeding. Dorset is fighting with the guard she bit, and Adrian is still struggling with his opponent.

At the end of the symbolic path between tables, the Swarm stands with the helmet on its head. The machine hums louder, and a strange coruscating light begins to pour out into the air around it.

“I’ll take care of Hart and his magic,” Mary yells at me. “You get rid of that machine!”

63

I glance around frantically—there, a rock large and heavy enough to damage the machine, fallen from the crack in the ceiling through which the stars shine.

Something gives in my back as I heave it up, but I can’t worry about that now. At any moment, the Swarm might come through—I’ll find myself fighting for control of my body before being swept back into the distant past. Clutching the rock, I run up the symbol-strewn path between the two tables, each step taking me deeper into the halo of light streaming around the machine.

Time goes strange. Every footfall seems to take an age of the world, and ghostly figures flicker to life around me.

One step, and Emerson is at my side, covered in mud and blood, holding his rifle with bayonet affixed. Our eyes meet, and he gives me a firm nod—we’re going over the top together, one last time.

Another step, and James is there, a book in his hands and a smile on his face.

Step: a Roman soldier and a tall, blonde woman in a long dress with an apron over it. Titus and Yrsa in their true bodies, running alongside me.

Step: an Egyptian man, black hair in a multitude of braids, dressed in a linen skirt and holding a bronze staff shaped like a serpent. Khephnes lifts his free hand to me in benediction.

Final step: a woman in a high-waisted dress, her dark hair caught back in a net. Her face is set in a look of absolute determination that I would know anywhere, at any time, in any body.

Bianca.

“The stars.” Bianca’s voice echoes from the past. “Remember them! This is when they’re going to emerge again, when they’re done with these bodies. If we can just⁠—”

The Bianca beside me—a vision, a figment of my broken mind, or something more—sweeps forward at my side, lifting her arms as I lift mine. I swear I feel the burden of the heavy stone lessen, as if she’s taking some of its weight.

Together, we bring it down as hard as we can onto the machine.

Glass bulbs shatter and strange liquids splash free from broken vials. The machine makes a terrible sound, more growl than hum, and I raise the stone again.

For an instant—just a flash—my vision doubles. The cave around me is superimposed with the ancient jungle, the ziggurats. A great light hangs in the night sky, though I can’t imagine what it could portend, other than the extinction the Swarm mean to escape.

Then the panorama fades, replaced by the room with the orb. Orb and machine overlap, reaching out to one another through time, their magic intertwined.

Letting out a scream of mingled grief and rage, I smash the rock down with every ounce of remaining strength.

Metal crumples, tubes flying loose. Arcs of purple light burst free from the orb, and the sound of a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million voices shrieking at once slams into me with almost physical force.

There’s an enormous flash of light and the smell of something burning—then I fly back, skidding across the cavern floor, the rock rolling away from my grasp.