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“What’s that even supposed to mean?” Logan asked, his face screwed up in confusion.
“It means I want to give you the choice, but I don’t have the patience to wait forever.” He’d lost too much time already.
Logan considered him. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll help you find your friend, but when Esta arrives, you’re going to convince her to help me.”
“I’ll do my best,” Harte said, clapping Logan on the shoulder. “But if you know Esta at all, you’d already know there’s no convincing her of anything.”
Logan exhaled. “Yeah. I know.” He glanced at Harte. “I take it I’m looking for the Chinese guy?”
“Jianyu,” Harte corrected. “He has a name.”
Logan lifted his hands again. “Sorry.”
Harte glared in warning. “You should be able to find him if you track the bronze mirrors he carries.”
“I know,” Logan said. “But I’m not some kind of oracle. I’m more like a metal detector. I need to get close enough for a read to find someone. And Jianyu could be anywhere in this city.”
“Maybe,” Harte agreed. “But I know a couple of places where we can start.”
An hour later, they parked the wagon they’d borrowed from the New York Age at the edge of the warehouses that lined the dockyards. They’d already driven by Jack’s town house near Washington Square without any luck.
“Well?” Harte asked, but he already knew the answer from the way Logan’s expression had gone tight.
“The mirrors are here somewhere,” Logan told him. Apparently, he was smart enough not to lie.
Across the street from where they were parked, the warehouses blocked the view of the water, but Harte could feel the Brink in the distance, waiting. He’d been down to this area near the docks before, but that was months ago, and in the gloom of the early evening, the low-slung structures all looked the same. He wasn’t sure which one had been Jack’s.
“You’re coming with me,” Harte said, hopping down and securing the horse to a nearby hitch.
The day had already been cold, but now that the sun had gone down, the temperature had dropped even further. The chill in the air made Harte wish he’d thought to bring a coat. A gust of wind came in off the river and brought with it another brush of icy energy. A warning and a promise of what the Brink would do to any who crossed it.
Esta could change that. The thought rose sudden and unwanted. Harte tried to push it aside but found that he couldn’t. Esta could change it. She had the Book and the artifacts, and she had an affinity for Aether. Esta believed she could do the ritual and use Seshat as the sacrifice to complete it. She believed that being willing to give up everything would be enough to let her live, but Harte wasn’t so sure. He’d seen that other version of her perform the same ritual. And I watched her die.
He refused to watch her die again.
But standing so close to the shore, he wondered if it was his choice to make, even if he could find a way to stop her. It had been easy enough to forget about how terrible it was to live there, trapped in the city, once he’d been beyond it. But now that he was there, close enough to the Brink that he felt the edges of fear creep along his skin, he wondered if he had any right to doom countless others for his own selfish happiness.
Maybe he had to trust her. Maybe he had to let her try.
“Are we doing this or what?” Logan asked, rubbing his arms and looking every bit as uneasy as Harte felt.
“Yeah,” he said, mentally shaking himself free of the direction his thoughts had taken. “Let’s go.”
Logan grabbed him by the sleeve and nodded in the opposite direction from the way Harte had turned. “It’s this way.”
THE MYSTERIUM
The Flatiron Building
Jack Grew bristled with impatience as he sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Order’s headquarters high above Madison Square Park. Two floors above, the new Mysterium stood empty, as powerless as the feeble old goats who had summoned him like a dog to heel. The city glittered below, waiting for its future to unfold—a future he was determined to take for his own.
Soon, he promised himself. The Book echoed the sentiment by pulsing twice softly in the breast pocket where it rested against his heart. He heard the whispered encouragement rise within him. Soon he’d show them the dog had teeth.
It was all a game to the Inner Circle. The summons. The waiting. But they had entered a game board they did not truly understand, and they were playing a match they had no hope to win.
When the doors finally opened behind him, Jack turned from the window, putting the city to his back. He arranged his face in an expression of bland curiosity as the High Princept entered.
“Sir,” he said with a small deferential nod.
