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“You don’t have to,” Maggie told her with a resigned sigh. “But it’s not like we have anywhere to go.”
Esta knew instinctively that the moment in front of her was delicate. Maggie was right there, ripe for the con, but any lie she told could be too easily unraveled. If she truly wanted Maggie on her side—if she wanted to keep her there—Esta knew she had to give Maggie something true.
Too bad the truth was a secret she often kept even from herself.
Esta studied the yellowed lace covering the windows for a long stretch of seconds, considering where she should start.
“I told you about what we did in New York—how we broke into Khafre Hall and stole the artifacts—but I didn’t tell you about before that.” She paused, gathering her courage. It felt monumental to reveal so much, even if she had a strategic reason for doing it. “Before I was the Devil’s Thief, I was just a thief,” she began, her voice shaking more than she’d expected. “It’s what I was raised to be—nothing more and nothing less—and I was fine with my situation because I believed in the person I was following. In fact, I never questioned him. If he was hard on me, I dismissed it as his right.” Esta shrugged, remembering the times Professor Lachlan had berated her for her impulsiveness, the small failures that he never let her forget. “After all, he’d raised me. I was willing to lie, steal, and betray whoever he asked me to, all because I wanted to prove myself worthy of the life he’d given me.”
“That’s completely understandable,” Maggie said softly. “I didn’t know my mother. Ruth was the only family I ever really had, and I understood exactly what she’d sacrificed to raise me. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t leave after what she did to Jericho. That, and what she was working toward seemed bigger than my own petty concerns.”
Esta turned back to Maggie and wondered for the first time if maybe she wasn’t as alone in this as she’d suspected. “It was the same for me,” she admitted. “I wanted to earn my place, but maybe even more, I wanted the dream he offered,” she told Maggie, meeting her eyes now. “He told me that I could help him destroy the Brink—that together we could save the old magic. I was so committed to that cause, I didn’t see the truth.” Esta took a breath before she forced herself to go on. “I found out eventually that the dream I’d committed myself to wasn’t even possible. All his talk of bringing down the Brink and saving magic? It was a lie. He’d only ever wanted power for himself. And in the end, a lot of people got hurt because I realized that too late.” Dakari and Dolph, and so many others she’d betrayed.
“The Antistasi’s cause isn’t a lie, Esta,” Maggie said as ardently as a true believer. “I have to believe that making the world safe for those like us is possible.”
“I hope you’re right,” Esta said honestly. “I want that every bit as much as you do. But I hope your commitment to that cause doesn’t blind you to the danger Cordelia might pose.” She held Maggie’s gaze. “Or to the Antistasi’s faults.”
Maggie frowned, considering Esta carefully, and Esta couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She wondered if she’d gone too far.
“This person you’re talking about—the one you were following,” Maggie ventured. “It’s Harte, isn’t it?”
At first Esta didn’t realize what Maggie had just said. But then understanding struck fast and hard. “What did you call him?” The words seemed stuck in her throat.
Maggie hadn’t said “Ben,” the name Harte had given the Antistasi in St. Louis. She’d said “Harte,” which meant that she knew.
“Were you ever going to tell us who Ben really was?” Maggie asked, her expression unreadable.
Maggie’s mouth was still moving, but suddenly Esta could no longer hear her. All of the sound in the room drained away. At first it felt like shock, but when Esta shook her head, trying to dislodge the silence, it didn’t work.
Then Esta’s vision flickered.
The world around her began fuzzing in and out of focus, and again it reminded her of the picture on one of those old TVs, and she understood instantly that this was more than simple panic. Whatever had happened to her before was happening again.
But so much worse.
Maggie must have already realized that something was wrong. She was moving across the space between them, holding out her hand to Esta. She hadn’t taken more than three steps before Esta’s vision flickered again, and then Maggie was gone.
The room looked suddenly different. It was the same apartment, but a family was gathered around a table eating together. Another flicker and she saw an empty room. Then a room with three men playing cards. Then Maggie. And then Esta could see everything at once, the different versions of the room layered one on top of another, superimposed. It felt like all of the possible realities were vying for prominence.
Esta felt the seconds sliding around her, slithering across her skin like the serpent from her dream. The scar on her wrist was burning as she tried to grasp hold of the present, where Maggie was still trying to reach her, but reality blurred and flickered, and then time opened its fanged jaws and swallowed her whole.
GONE
1904—San Francisco
In the moment before sleep gave way to waking, when the world was still obscured by the haze of dreams and the shadows of night, Harte Darrigan thought he was back on his couch in New York. At first he thought it was still weeks before, when he’d been forced to sleep in his parlor because Esta had taken over his bed. Before everything came rushing back to him, he could imagine her there, sleeping a few feet away behind his closed bedroom door, her scent on his sheets in the home he had made for himself from nothing more than determination and a dream for something more.
Then Harte felt a sharp, burning itch on his leg, and when he went to reach for it, he found that he couldn’t. His arms had been pinned behind his back and secured at his wrists. He opened his eyes, not to his apartment, but to darkness as the scent of dust and dampness burned away the rest of the dream. All the events of the past few weeks and days and hours came rushing back in a dizzying, horrible flood.
The headpiece. His father. Esta. She would be waiting for him.
The thought of her had Harte sitting up with a sudden lurch that made his head spin again. His ears were ringing, and his stomach flipped at the movement, but he swallowed down any nausea. He wouldn’t be sick. He wouldn’t.
How long has it been?
Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, Harte saw he was in some kind of cellar. Across the way, a door was fitted so poorly that light came in around the edges and kept the room from being pitch-black. It was cold like a cellar too, and Harte started to shiver.
As he waited for the room to stop spinning, he used the toe of one foot to rub the back of his ankle, trying to satisfy the aching itch that had woken him. The spot was tender to the touch, and he felt more pain than satisfaction when he scratched it. He tried not to think about the vermin that had been crawling all over him while he’d been unconscious, but he’d spent enough time sleeping on the streets or in flea-infested boardinghouses to know when he’d been bitten by something. Even though it hurt, he couldn’t stop himself from scratching, but at least the pain of the bite was distracting him a little from the more persistent ache throbbing through his head.
