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Moving aside a stack of papers, she scooted across the bed to where he was sitting. She was close enough now that he could smell the flowery scent of the soap on her skin, close enough that her leg rested against his. Gently, she took his hand. “Please, Harte,” she said softly. “I need every detail. It’s important.”
He couldn’t deny her. Slowly, he forced out the words. One by one, he handed his memories over to her and described everything he could remember: the ritual of drawing the circle on the floor, how she’d sliced open her finger and pressed it to the Book while she spoke words he couldn’t understand. How he’d felt her affinity linking the stones, uniting them and using them to pull Seshat out of him.
“After that—you were still trapped inside the circle?” she asked. “Kind of like we’re trapped inside the city by the Brink.”
“And the same as Seshat was trapped when Thoth betrayed her,” Harte said, drawing the connections between the rituals, between the memories.
“But you got out.” Esta tilted her head, her brows drawing together. “Seshat couldn’t get out of the circle Thoth trapped her in, and no one can get through the Brink.”
Shame flooded through him. “I told you—I used my affinity. I forced her to give the rest of her magic over to the ritual. It drained her, and when her magic was gone, so was she.”
Esta touched his cheek, pulled his face gently to hers, and kissed him softly. “It’s okay,” she said, kissing him again. “You did what you had to do. You survived.”
He pulled away from her then, willed her to understand. “I had a choice, Esta. I didn’t have to kill her.”
“You knew she wasn’t me,” Esta said.
“I’m not sure that it matters,” he said.
She considered that. “I think it does. If you hadn’t done it, you both would have died, and that would have been terrible. Because this isn’t over, Harte. There’s so much more to do, so much more to make right. There’s still so much at risk,” she told him, and he heard the honesty in her words. “But I think what the girl did is the answer to how we fix magic. I think we need to replicate the ritual she used, but instead of putting Seshat into the Book, we need to put the beating heart of magic back into time.”
Suddenly, he understood. She was talking about giving herself to it, just as the girl had done. And for what? For a half-mad demon who would have used her and tossed her aside.
“No.” He was shaking his head. “I watched you die once already. I can’t go through that again.”
“Maybe I don’t have to die. Maybe there’s another way,” she said. “You lived with Seshat inside of you for months. Do you really think she did the original ritual intending to die?”
“No,” he admitted.
“With power willingly given, mercury ignites. Elements unite,” she read. She tapped the page thoughtfully, and then looked up at him. “Power willingly given… Maybe it isn’t a matter of living or dying. The girl in the station didn’t give her affinity, not willingly. You forced her. Maybe that made the difference. Maybe if I’m willing to give up my affinity, I can finish the ritual without giving up my life.”
She looked up at him through dark lashes. “Maybe I can fix everything, Harte. The Brink. The old magic. Everything.”
But for Harte, “maybe” wasn’t good enough. “The promise you made to Seshat was to protect me—to protect the world from her insane desire to tear it apart. But Seshat isn’t a danger anymore, Esta. Not to me, and not to the world. She’s trapped in the Book again, like she was before we disrupted the flow of history. There isn’t any reason to take that kind of a risk.”
“Harte—”
“No, Esta,” he said, refusing to listen to even one more word about the topic. “I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow what?” she asked, and from the ice in her tone, he knew he’d said the wrong thing.
But he didn’t have the strength or energy to fight her. “Please—”
“The answers are here, Harte. I know they are.”
He let out a long, exhausted breath. “Maybe they are. But what if you’re wrong? People don’t walk away from losing their magic, Esta. My mother didn’t. The girl today didn’t, either.”
“I think there’s another way,” she told him. “Seshat’s trapped in the Book now, isn’t she? We can use her power. Think about it. You used that other Esta’s affinity to give the ritual what it wanted—the magic it demanded—and you walked out of that subway station alive. What if we use Seshat the same way? She’s the one who started all of this. With the artifacts united, we can control her. We can use her affinity to complete the ritual in the Brink, and maybe we can walk away from that the same as you did?”
“How are we supposed to use the artifacts while they’re inside the Book, Esta?” His brows were creased with worry. “If we remove them in the past, we’re liable to lose them because they’ll cross with themselves.”
“There has to be a way,” she pressed. “I’ve only scraped the surface of this, Harte. With all the power Thoth collected—all the knowledge and rituals—there has to be an answer in the Book. We can’t have come this far only to stop now.”
“What if you’re wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t think I am,” she told him, far too certain for his liking.
“Are you really willing to risk everything without knowing for sure?” He moved toward her. “What about us, Esta? What about the future we could have together? Seshat isn’t a risk. She’s trapped in the Book. We don’t have to do anything. We can go back and stop Jack and just be together.”
