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Before Harte could do anything, Jack pressed the lever, and the large orbital arms started to move. Jack looked up, watching with a maniacal glee as the machine picked up speed. He was so engrossed with his victory that Jack didn’t notice Harte run for him until he was nearly across the stage.
Harte crashed into Jack, pummeling him as he pushed him down, and Jack fought back, laughing like a madman as he lashed out.
“It’s too late,” Jack said, taking a wild swing and nearly connecting with the side of Harte’s head. “Every maggot in this city is about to die.”
Harte drew back his fist, and when he connected with the side of Jack’s face, he gathered his affinity and pushed all of his magic toward Jack. Then he drew back his fist again. And again.
He wasn’t aware that the others had arrived or that already Viola was using her dagger to slice the Pharaoh’s Heart out of where it had been locked into the machine. He didn’t notice the arms stuttering and slowing. All he could see was the blood spurting from Jack Grew’s nose. All he could feel was the crunch of bone beneath his fist.
“Harte—” He heard Esta’s voice as though from far away.
He realized he was still punching an unconscious man. Jack’s face was a bloody mess, and his own knuckles were raw from hitting him. But he drew his arm back again.
“We can’t kill him, Harte,” Esta said softly, holding his arm so he couldn’t strike Jack again. “Not like this.”
She was right. Jack Grew might deserve to die, but Harte wouldn’t be the one to make him into a martyr.
He let Esta tug him back, but then he saw the shape of the Book outlined beneath Jack’s robes. Breathing heavily, his blood singing with adrenaline, he pushed the fabric away and opened Jack’s coat. There, secured in a specially made inner pocket, was the Ars Arcana.
Harte reached for the Book without thinking. Why should he have worried? The version of the Book that had contained Seshat was gone, burned to ash when Esta had brought it back and crossed it with itself. There shouldn’t have been any goddess in those pages. There shouldn’t have been any danger in touching this Book, here in this past. But the second his fingers touched the worn leather cover, Harte realized his mistake.
All at once, he felt a familiar ancient power flooding through him. It wasn’t like before. What had happened the first time he’d touched the Book, back in Khafre Hall, was a pale imitation of pain compared to this. Then Seshat had been too broken, too fractured to do anything more than wail. Now she attacked.
Harte screamed as Seshat breached the boundary between himself and the nothingness she threatened. He was barely able to throw up enough defenses in time to keep her from ripping him apart. The Book tumbled from his hands, falling open on the rooftop, where its pages lay open, pulsing with light.
He saw the confusion in Esta’s expression, saw that she would step toward him, and he threw up his hands to warn her off. “No,” he shouted, backing away.
“Harte?” Esta’s brows were drawn together in concern. Her golden eyes were wide with fear, but when she looked down at the Book, he knew she understood.
Within his skin, the goddess raged.
“Seshat,” he said, grimacing against another of her onslaughts.
“That isn’t possible.” Esta scooped up the Ars Arcana from where he’d dropped it. The pages seemed to riffle of their own free will, and the power within it lit the lines of her face. “She isn’t in this version of the Book, Harte.”
“Somehow she was,” he groaned, struggling to push down the goddess’s power.
Seshat was screaming, her ancient voice wailing sentences that didn’t make any sense.
Esta took another step toward him, but he threw up his hands again. “Keep her back,” he told the others. “Keep her away from me.”
Whatever Seshat may have been trying to tell him, all Harte could sense was her anger. Her hunger. She wanted. Desperately. Fury. Vengeance. Her emotions made clear what her incoherent raging could not.
“Harte, Seshat was in the Book that we lost,” Esta reminded him, as though he could have forgotten. As though that wasn’t the very reason he’d been so careless. “She can’t be in this one.”
“There’s only one Book of Mysteries,” Dolph told her. His icy eyes met Harte’s. “The Ars Arcana is unique, made exceptional by the piece of pure magic it contains.”
Esta’s expression lit, and she looked at Harte with hope in her eyes. “If that’s true, it means we might still have a chance.”
EVER ONE
Esta’s mind raced with the implications of what Dolph Saunders was telling her. She had believed that they’d lost their chance to complete the ritual and stabilize the Brink when the Book had disappeared as they’d slipped back into the past. But maybe they hadn’t. The Ars Arcana that Harte had just touched was not the Ars Arcana they had possession of… and yet Seshat had been waiting in those pages.
“The Ars Arcana isn’t some normal artifact,” Dolph explained. “Its power isn’t something that can be replicated. Its singularity is the reason it has been so revered and hunted over the centuries. There are a thousand legends, a hundred myths, but one thing is always clear: There is always and ever one Book.”
“Within time and beyond it all at once,” Esta murmured, thinking of what Seshat had told her, what she’d seen with her own eyes. “Because it not only contains a piece of magic outside of time. It is a piece of magic outside of time.” She pressed her hand to the open page, wishing it were like the Book in her dream. Wishing it would tell her what to do next.
“What does that mean?” Jianyu asked.
