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“She must finish what we started,” Seshat told him. “I am no longer strong enough to finish this ritual, but she is. It’s the only way. Save the world, save the girl. Save the girl, save us all. If she gives her power, there is enough of me left to help keep her alive.”
“How am I supposed to believe you when I’ve seen your heart?” he accused.
The woman shrugged. Beneath their feet the bridge began to crack and crumble. The towers were starting to fall, block by block. Dolph shouted for the others to hold steady, even as he ducked from the flying debris.
“You don’t have a choice,” Seshat told him. “She knows what she had to give, and she chose it willingly. Sacrifice cannot be taken, you see. Not like those terrible stones. Sacrifice freely given is far more powerful.”
“But what does she have to give?” Harte demanded.
Seshat smiled softly. Sadly. “Only all that she is.”
“No,” Harte said, refusing. He tried to shove Seshat away, but she stilled his hand.
“Look,” she told him. “Look.” She took his hand, held it in hers, and he knew what she intended.
He sent his affinity out, into the part of Seshat that remained in this world. And he understood. There was a way to end this, to complete the ritual of the Brink. To put the beating heart of magic back into the whole.
And there was a way for Esta to live. To go on.
“She’d be a prisoner,” he said. “She’d never be able to leave the city.”
“I know of prisons,” Seshat told him. “Hers would be a palace.”
But even palaces could chafe, could constrict. Harte Darrigan knew of prisons as well. He couldn’t damn Esta to this one. “I won’t do that to her,” Harte said, refusing.
“She has already made the choice,” Seshat said. “There is no going back, and it is not for you to take this from her.”
The Brink was breaking apart. Dolph and Jianyu and Viola were using every bit of their strength to hold the boundary tight, but it didn’t matter. One side of the enormous stone tower began to crumble, and as it fell, the ground beneath his feet buckled and tilted. The entire span of the bridge moved, undulating like the waves in the river below. The span of road beneath her feet moved slowly at first, but soon became a terrifying rise and fall that signified the collapse that was coming.
Esta’s eyes fluttered open, but she didn’t see him there. Not at first. Though her mouth was moving, no sound came from her lips. But he saw what she was saying. He understood that she was still there—still alive—and she was not giving up.
The bridge was moving faster now, more violently.
“Help me,” she whispered. Her golden eyes met his, and they burned with the fire he’d seen that first night they’d met. She did not blink or look away, and he knew he could not deny her. Not this. Not anything.
Tears burning in his eyes, he took her hand. “Together,” he whispered.
Her eyes closed as though in relief, and he did not wait for them to open again before sending his affinity through her. The Brink flashed in a terrible brilliance, and he felt the Book’s power shudder through him as the world was torn in two.
POWER TO POWER’S LIKE
First, there was pain. There was the endless ache of emptying herself until she was nothing but the shell of a memory.
The world shuddered, quaked, and Esta felt the future she had seen—that nightmare of nothingness—begin to open around her. Magic flared, hot and hungry, as it pushed the spaces wide. Consumed time. Transformed the very pieces of reality into their opposite. Magic bloomed. Time came undone. And the world began to be unmade.
She saw the bridge begin to fall, the enormous stone towers collapsing in on themselves, one at a time. The great span of steel and concrete rippling like a wave. She saw her friends fighting to keep the fragile boundary intact—fighting to keep the beating heart of magic from destroying the world.
The bridge shifted and buckled, and she felt the pull of something terrifyingly familiar. Though her affinity was all but gone now—pushed into the stones and into the ritual that hungered for it—Esta felt almost like she was falling through time. There was the bridge, about to crash into the river below. There it was, whole. There was the empty river, in the time before men had ever dared to build across such a length. Just as had happened in Colorado, she felt time flicker around her. Just as when she’d lost Harte in the trip back to this time, she felt all of the possibilities of each second. The city as it was, as it could be, as it would never be again.
And then there was nothing at all. There was only the city unmade. The world forgotten.
Esta felt herself flying apart. It was a pain she’d felt before, this terror of being ripped from the very fabric of time. Time flexed and rose around her, pulsing with a strange energy. Unsteady. Unwieldy. And it felt hungry. Just as it had before, when it threatened to unmake her.
A hand snagged her wrist, and Esta’s first thought was for Harte. But it wasn’t Harte. It wasn’t any of those who stood with her that day.
“You must give the rest,” Seshat told her in a voice that sounded like chaos and light. The woman was gone, and the goddess had returned. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were bright beacons. “You must give everything. You can keep none of what you are. Power willingly given. It is the only way to sever time, the only way to save what was.”
Esta realized then that she could feel the stones—barely, but they were there. She was still tethered to them, still clinging to a thread of her own affinity. To Seshat.
