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He never had a chance to fire. The man went down unexpectedly, crumpling like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The others turned, startled by the man’s collapse, but they didn’t have time to act. One by one they fell.
Cela didn’t have to see the look of determination and fury in Viola’s eyes to know the cause. She grabbed her arm. “You have to stop this.”
Viola only shook her off. Two more men went down.
“Tell me you’re not killing them, at least,” Cela said. It would only cause more problems.
Viola turned to her. “Tell me you don’t want me to.”
Cela couldn’t. “It won’t help.”
The final man went down, freeing the New York Age’s employees. Joshua was up first. He tossed a grateful, nervous look in their direction before turning to help Mr. Fortune up from the snow-covered ground. All around them, the crowd had already surged forward to help.
“What have you done?” Cela asked, her mind spinning with the implications of what had just happened. “They’ll know for sure now that the Age was helping Mageus.”
“They already knew,” Viola said, regret clear in her violet eyes. “They had Ruby’s dress.”
“She’s right,” Abel said softly. “That was evidence enough to prove our involvement. It’s all the excuse they needed.”
“But she didn’t need to confirm it,” Cela told him. She turned on Viola because she didn’t know where else to put her fear. “You put a target on the back of everyone at the paper, maybe everyone in this neighborhood with what you just did here!”
“You think those men cared about your friends helping us?” Viola asked darkly. “You know as well as I do that the payment they get from the Order is only an excuse. It’s permission to do what they want to do anyway. Do you think that they would have stopped at this building?” She shook her head. “This was the opening shot. Those men, small, pathetic creatures that they are, wouldn’t have stopped here. They would have continued on, terrorizing this entire neighborhood because of the license the Order’s payment gave them.”
“But what you just did will confirm to the entire city that Mageus did take Ruby.”
“Maybe so,” Viola told her. “But now those men who were forced to kneel, their families, and all these people, they will know we did not just stand by and allow others to be harmed. They will know we stand with them. That we are not their enemy, and from us they have nothing to fear.”
CIRCLE OF LIGHT
The Safe House
Esta wanted nothing more than to take five minutes alone with Harte—to make sure he was okay—but she knew they were running out of time to help Jianyu. Their reunion would have to wait. The package of papers Harte and Jianyu had reclaimed from Nibsy had so much information—about the Order and their history and the Brink—but it had taken too long to sort through it all. They started to worry that maybe the instructions for using the sigils weren’t even there. Nibsy could have ferreted them away somewhere separate.
“There,” Jianyu said. He was doubled over now, and his skin too pale and slick with sweat. He pointed to a piece of parchment that had been folded in thirds, and Esta realized that his hand was nearly completely black now. But the cord around his wrist was clearly affecting more than his arm.
Esta looked at the page Jianyu pointed to and recognized the cramped, uneven scrawl almost immediately. It looked the same as the pages that Newton had written in the Book. “This is it,” she whispered to herself and to Harte, but it took another few minutes for them to figure out what they were seeing.
The diagram on the parchment seemed to depict four discs—the sigils—connected through the Aether. “It should create a kind of force field,” she explained.
“A what?” Harte asked.
“A kind of barrier,” she said, trying to explain.
“Like the Brink?” He was frowning. “Or like the ritual circle the girl used?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, reading a note scrawled sideways in Latin. “It’s not opening the spaces the way the Brink does. It’s not doing anything with the Aether at all other than directing it around an area. Like a magical fence. It’s easy enough, except that I think it would work best with four people. The ritual would be more stable.”
“I’ll help if I can,” Ruby said.
Esta frowned down at the page. “I’m not sure if that’ll work. It looks like it takes some kind of energy to activate the sigils. I think we need people who have a connection to the old magic.”
Golde stepped forward. “He saved my boy,” she told them. “I’ll help with whatever you need.”
“It might work with two,” Esta said, considering. “You and Harte could each hold two of the sigils.”
A man stepped into the room from where he’d clearly been listening in the hallway.
“What do you want, Yonatan?” Golde asked. “Here to make trouble again? Because we don’t have time for your complaints.”
