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She twisted the tumbler again, blinking, as she tried to focus on the numbers, but her vision was doing odd things. It looked like there were two of the box, two of the lock. Two of every number. Esta willed her vision to clear. “I’ve almost got it,” she said, annoyed with the tremor in her voice.
Suddenly, the room wouldn’t hold steady. One second everything was fine, and the next second, the room had shifted, transformed, before flickering back, and Esta went still, frozen by the strangeness of what she was seeing.
North and Cordelia and Maggie were all looking at her expectantly, but then her vision flickered again, and they were gone. It felt like all the layers of time that had ever been, all the layers that might ever be, were rising up around her. Even though she’d taken the Quellant, and even though her cuff, the one that held Ishtar’s Key, was hundreds of miles away, Esta felt like she did right before she slipped through to a different time. Except now, time felt like a separate living thing. Time flexed and rose around her, pulsing with a strange energy. Unsteady. Unwieldy. And it felt hungry.
The three Antistasi were there again suddenly, and then, just as quickly, they weren’t. Esta tried to keep herself upright as the room around her shifted and changed. She was standing in an empty room—and then her vision shifted again, and the room was filled with strangers dressed in clothes from her own time—then another shift, and the room changed again as reality faded in and out, like an old TV set blinking through a bad connection. The net of time that held the world in place—the very Aether that ordered reality—seemed to contract around her. It pressed in on her. Like it wanted to devour her.
The scar on Esta’s wrist burned, and the word there felt like it had been freshly sliced into her skin. Then all at once, everything went still. The room stopped flickering, and the present moment seemed as ordinary and stable as ever.
“Well?” North demanded, apparently oblivious to what Esta had just experienced. One glance around the room told her that the others hadn’t sensed anything at all.
“I’m working on it,” Esta told him, her words sounding strangled even to herself. It took real concentration to keep her hands steady enough to move the tumbler into place, lining up the last number in the sequence that would open the lock.
What the hell was that? It had seemed like reality itself had splintered, like the seconds were trying to consume her. It had felt like time was trying to devour her whole, until she was… nothing. Esta rubbed absently at the scar on her arm as she opened the lock. The raised ridges of the Latin command ached beneath her touch.
She’d taken the Quellant. She had relinquished her affinity to protect herself—and everyone else—from Seshat, but Esta had the sense that whatever had happened wasn’t Seshat. There had been no shadows, no darkness. Whatever that was felt more like time itself had tried to pull her under—like time had tried to erase her. Like Professor Lachlan had warned it would.
But why now? What changed? Esta had assumed that as long as the Key could be returned to her younger self, all would be well. Now, with the Quellant, she might even be able to go back to where time had splintered into a new future. She could still send her younger self forward. She should be okay, as long as that was all still a possibility.
Unless something has happened to Ishtar’s Key.
The thought made Esta’s breath catch. Harte knew how important the cuff was to her. He would never willingly let anything happen to it. She knew that. But maybe he hadn’t been willing—
No. She wouldn’t let herself think about that possibility. Harte was too smart and had survived too long to get caught now. The Key couldn’t be lost. Maybe it was taking them too long to return it. Maybe time was simply running out of patience.
North clearly was. He grabbed the box from Esta when she didn’t immediately open it, and she was still too unnerved to bother with fighting him.
Maggie moved closer to him. “Well?” she asked, her voice almost trembling, as North stared at the contents of the box.
After a few frozen seconds, North tossed the box on the table so violently that the coins and papers it held threatened to escape. “It’s not here.” Then he turned on Esta. “You told us it would be here. You promised that Pickett had the dagger.”
“The dagger?” Cordelia asked, her eyes going wide. “You’re talking about the Pharaoh’s Heart.”
North was still too busy glaring at Esta to answer.
“Y’all are going after the other artifacts,” Cordelia said, excitement coloring her voice. “You’re going to make the Sundren pay.”
“No one is going to make anyone pay,” Maggie said, sounding a little taken aback. “We’re only here for the dagger. Or we were…”
Cordelia’s excitement shifted to confusion. “But why would y’all ever think Bill Pickett would have an artifact?”
“Because that’s what she told us,” North said.
“He’s a simple cowpoke,” Cordelia told North. “He ain’t even Mageus, or I would’ve already recruited him.”
“He has to have it.” Esta forced herself to ignore the trembling in her limbs and the burning of the scar as she stepped closer to look through the box herself. Harte had sent her to Denver to retrieve the dagger. If it wasn’t there, she didn’t know what she would do next. But North was right. Inside was nothing but a pile of coins and some papers with scribbled IOUs.
“It must be somewhere else, then,” Esta told them.
“You already searched Pickett’s tent,” North reminded her.
“So maybe it’s not in his tent,” Esta said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Maybe Pickett keeps the dagger on him.”
“Or maybe he never had it in the first place,” North said, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Maybe this was all a bunch of misdirection, like that crazy tale you told us on the train about ancient goddesses and the end of the world. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted her,” he told Maggie.
“The fact that my tale was so crazy should tell you that it’s true. Why would I make something like that up when I could have left you in the dust? Pickett has the knife,” Esta snapped. “I wasn’t lying about that before, and I’m not lying now. We have to go back. We have to look again.”
“You’d be nuts to go back there right now,” Cordelia said. “Artifact or not, there’ll be marshals crawling all over back there for hours. Syndicate, too.”
