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Esta let herself take one more breath in the silence, one more breath before everything might explode again, and then she let go of the seconds and watched the world spin back into motion.
Immediately, Harte gasped.
“Get that Quellant in your mouth,” she told him as she reached for Everett, trying to put pressure on his wounds. “Everett… can you hear me? Can you talk?”
She sensed Harte’s struggle, sensed him shuddering from the Quellant, and knew Seshat had receded, because suddenly he was there with her.
“What the hell happened?” Harte asked.
“You were right,” she said, tapping lightly at Everett’s cheek, willing him to focus on her. Waiting for the attack that didn’t come. “It was an ambush. He’s hit. We need to get him help.”
Everett groaned. “No… have to go on.”
She ignored him. “Come on, Harte. Help me move him over so I can drive. We need to get him to a hospital or—”
“No.” Everett’s eyes were open now. “Go.”
“We are not leaving you here,” Esta said, determined to ignore the grayish pallor of his skin, the way his eyes weren’t quite focused on her. She ignored, too, the way her own hands were trembling. The way her heart felt unsteady and her throat felt tight. This couldn’t be happening, not after North. Not after all they’d learned and all that had happened. “We’re going to get you help.”
“Too late,” he said, flinching. “Have to go back… Make this right.”
Esta’s eyes were burning. She wanted to deny his request, but she couldn’t find the words because she knew he was right. They probably wouldn’t be able to find a hospital in time, and even if they did, in 1920 he likely wouldn’t make it. But in the future… “I can take you forward. We can go where there’s help.”
She took Everett’s hand as she held out her other hand to Harte. But he didn’t immediately take hold.
“Esta,” Harte said, his voice annoyingly gentle.
She bristled. “Take my hand, Harte.”
But Everett was pulling away from her. “Make a good future for us… for my parents,” he whispered, his voice barely a breath. “Go.”
His chest didn’t rise again.
“No,” she said, shaking him slightly. His blood was still on her hands, and his eyes remained unfocused, glassy.
“He’s gone, Esta.” Harte was pulling her away, or at least he was trying to. But she didn’t want to admit what had just happened, couldn’t make herself move. “We have to go before the people who were after us catch up. We have to put as much space between us and Nibsy Lorcan as we can right now. We have to leave him.”
“There’s no getting away from Nibsy,” she said dully, realizing the truth. Everett was gone, another person lost because of her actions.
But there was a way to fix this—there was a way to put everything to right.
She reached forward and closed Everett’s eyes. “Being on this side of the Brink isn’t going to keep us safe, and you know he’s not going to stop coming after us. We have to go back into the city.”
“Esta,” Harte said. “Let’s think this through.”
“I have,” she said. “It was always the plan to go back. We have to find the ring, and now we also need to get the missing piece of the Book from Nibsy. Without it, we can’t end all of this.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to walk right into another one of his traps,” Harte argued. “There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t. I’m not going to run from this, Harte.” She took his hand in hers, belatedly realizing that hers was still marked with Everett’s blood. “We’re going to make him pay.”
THE BRIDGE
1920—Brooklyn
The bridge to Brooklyn had always loomed larger than life in Harte Darrigan’s mind. It was an enormous thing, a marvel of modern engineering that was about as old as he was. When he was a boy, he’d dreamed of walking across it, a free man escaping the prison of the city. Later, its wide span and the waters below had offered an answer to the problem of the power that he’d unwittingly accepted by touching the Book. It had always represented freedom to Harte, but now he was on the other side, preparing to cross back into the city he’d worked so hard to escape.
In the distance another bridge loomed, a marvel of steel. But it seemed appropriate somehow that they were there, on the same bridge that had led them out of the city months before. Now that span of steel and stone represented nothing more and nothing less than his fate.
