AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My gut clenched, my usual deny-repress-ignore method for dealing with uncomfortable facts suddenly not working so great. I looked up and down the corridor at the faces, young and old, hard and soft. They had won the Circle’s enmity, but so had I. If Richardson had had his way, I’d be in one of these cells, too. They were no different from me, except that they were about to die. Condemned because I’d made a stupid mistake.
Chapter Nine
Green light from inside one of the cells dyed my hands an eerie, ill color. I pressed them tight until they ached, staring around at dozens of faces. The temptation to finally use my power was almost overwhelming. I’d been thinking about it, had it in the back of my mind ever since I saw that burnt, dead landscape, the milling group of shell-shocked mages, the empty space where MAGIC should have been. Because Marlowe was wrong—I could do this.
I just didn’t know if I should.
“Cassie, the mouth of the nearest escape tunnel is ten minutes from here, and it is a further ten beyond that to safety,” Marlowe said. “Time is not our ally.”
I felt a hysterical laugh building in my throat but tamped it back down. “Yeah, well, that’s the question of the day, isn’t it?”
A small frown creased his forehead. “Cassie—”
“I need a minute, Marlowe.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know yet!”
This was one of those times when I really lusted after that nonexistent training. In the last month, I’d sort of come to terms with the fact that I was time’s janitor, there to clean up the messes left by other people’s attempts to play god. That wasn’t what had been keeping me up nights. This was. The idea that, sooner or later, I was going to run across a situation where the person wanting to change time would be me.
I could go back, make sure I missed that meeting, prevent all of this so easily. There would be no destruction of MAGIC, no loss of life. . . . It seemed almost too easy. And that was what scared me. I’d changed one small thing before and almost killed Mircea. What would changing something this big do? I didn’t know, and that terrified me.
Agnes had said not to mess about with time, that it almost always caused more problems than it solved. But she’d also said that the reason the Pythia was a clairvoyant was because we could look into the future and see the outcome of our actions. She’d said to trust my gift. But that was just it—I’d never trusted it.
My whole life, it had shown me nothing but bad news, had been a source of nightmares instead of daydreams. One of the few things I’d liked about becoming Pythia was the fact that my visions had tapered off. Instead of one every two or three days, weeks had passed with nothing. And now I suddenly found myself in a situation in which lives depended on that despised gift.
I really hoped Agnes had been right.
“I’m going to try something,” I told Marlowe. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“You’ve already had a minute.”
“And now I’m taking another one!”
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I could practically feel the disapproval coming off him in waves, but he didn’t say anything. And after a few seconds, I calmed down enough to make the attempt. Only I wasn’t sure how.
I’d struggled with my talent all my life, but mostly to repress it. Only rarely had I deliberately tried to see things, and most of those efforts had been failures. And now I was asking the impossible, to see a potential future in place of the real one. I didn’t really expect it to work.
But it did.
I picked my way over blackened rubble to the entrance of Dante’s—or what was left of it. The buildings had been bisected by a line of destruction, cracked open like a broken tooth. A wash of dirt had collected in the carved letters over the main doors, which now opened onto nothing.
Only part of one tower remained, ruined rooms cut open and exposed to the elements. Water-stained, faded furniture leaked over the sides and a few tattered curtains still shifted in the breeze. The rest was a blackened shell, with only a faux stalagmite sticking up here and there, like burnt and wrinkled fingers pointing at the sky.
I crawled through a door half obscured by rubble to a floor knee-deep in windblown debris. It had been part of the lobby, although it was only possible to tell by the location and overall shape. The bridge was gone, as was the Styx, the reservation desk and the employees’ dressing rooms. The lobby bar was still there, a jumble of overturned tables, broken bottles and a slanting drift of sand from two missing windows. It was also home to a chattering colony of rats. I quickly backed out again.
I sat down abruptly in the shadow of the remaining tower, sen
ding up a little cloud of dust. The sun was glaringly hot through the missing roof, and it was the only shade available. But it came at a price.
Every time I looked up, I saw some new horror: a human rib cage, yellowed with age, housing a family of foxes; random bones, several with teeth marks on them where some long-dead animal had feasted; and a crumpled Dante’s uniform behind the desiccated remains of a potted palm. Where once there had been constant life and bustling activity, there was suddenly only dust and decay, everything brown and withered and so very still.
The vision shattered, the dead world spinning backward at a dizzying pace. I looked up to see Marlowe kneeling beside me. I was on the floor, although I couldn’t remember how I got there. “What is it?” he asked urgently. “What did you see?”
“I’m not sure.”
Agnes had been partially right—my power was trying to tell me something. I just didn’t know what. MAGIC had been destroyed, not Dante’s. And even if the breach had taken place in Vegas, a major casino wouldn’t just have been left there like that, with no signs of attempted repair or even demolition. None of this made any sense.
