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“It’s exactly that easy,” she told him, unnamed panic already creeping along her spine.
Jianyu only shook his head.
“But I’m here,” Cela argued. “There’s no one to look for any longer.”
“He made an agreement that he cannot break,” Viola said. “Not so long as that bit of dangerous magic lives on his arm.”
Cela didn’t have to ask to know the answer to her next question. There was no way Tom Lee would simply remove that bracelet of thread, not if he’d managed to trap a Mageus as powerful as Jianyu with a little bit of string.
THE CHOICE OF FATE
1983—Times Square
The throbbing in her side and arm woke Esta sometime in the deep hours of the very early morning. Still hazy with sleep, she heard the sounds of the modern city coming to her through the closed windows. The far-off honking of horns and the steady hum of traffic punctuated by the rumble of a heavy truck had been the lullaby of her childhood, the background noise of her entire life, and for a second she thought she was back in the room she’d grown up in on Orchard Street with the Professor. Her brain registered the weight of an arm thrown across her waist and the heat of the body pressed against her back. Then she remembered.
She smiled to herself in the darkness as Harte’s breath fluttered against her neck. Other than her injuries, her body felt warm and relaxed. Her skin felt alive, buzzing with the memory of how Harte had touched her. Like she was something important. Valuable. Like she was his.
Her whole life, Esta had never felt like she fit—not with the crew she’d grown up with on Orchard Street. Not with the Devil’s Own. Maybe Dakari had been different, but that hadn’t stopped her from feeling the constant need to prove herself worthy. Of respect. Of love. With the Professor, she’d always needed to earn her place, and she had. But there, with Harte, Esta felt a kind of calm that she hadn’t before. He’d seen the worst of who she was. He’d seen her at her weakest, and somehow it didn’t matter. Somehow, he was still hers.
But then he shifted behind her, moving his arm so it pressed on the bandage at her side. A sharp burst of pain shot through the injury on her torso, and she had to clench her teeth to keep from making any noise. Once the worst of the pain had passed, she gently lifted his arm and slipped out from under it.
Wrapping the discarded robe around herself, she found the bottle of aspirin and took a couple more to dull the ache. Even with the noise she’d made, Harte still hadn’t moved. He was sprawled beneath the mountain of bedcovers, his face slack with sleep. The sharpness of his cheekbones was a reminder that it hadn’t been that long ago that he’d nearly died. As if she could ever forget.
Now that she was awake, she was too restless and unsettled to fall asleep again. Rather than climbing back into the bed, she grabbed the satchel that held the Book and Nibsy’s papers, along with a package of Oreos from the minibar. She took everything into the bathroom, where she could turn on a light without waking Harte. The second she popped a cookie into her mouth, she realized how ravenous she was. And how much she’d missed junk food. The hit of sugar and hydrogenated oil tasted like a miracle. Maybe before, she would have barely thought about the ordinary, packaged snack, but after months of living in the past, the sweetness—the normality—of it felt like coming home.
She ate another as she opened the Book. The Ars Arcana was a marvel. It wasn’t a single volume, as she’d always believed. Instead, it was a collection, which made sense considering that Thoth had used it as a record of the power he’d collected over the years. There were places where new pages had been added or sheets of parchment had been pasted in.
The pages were written in every language imaginable, including some that Esta didn’t recognize. It was a record of Thoth’s many lives over the ages. Symbols and diagrams littered most of the time-worn pages, but occasionally she came across an image painted in brilliant colors that seemed to defy its age. The Book was a startling repository of ritual magic from all corners of the world. Here were spells from the Far East, others from the southernmost tip of the Americas. Some of the writing looked to be done in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Jack had somehow translated some of the unfamiliar languages, but the parts written in more modern languages were—thanks to her training—easy enough for Esta to read.
Esta stopped at the pages she’d been studying earlier, especially the one that seemed to depict the ritual Newton had tried to perform ages ago. It was the same ritual used to create the Brink, and from what Harte had described, also the one the other version of herself had used to unite the stones and force Seshat back into the Book.
On one page, the image of the Philosopher’s Hand shimmered in ink flecked with gold. The symbols above each of the fingers seemed to float within the page. The crown glinted and the star and moon almost appeared to glow. In the center of the palm, a fish sat within living flames that looked so real, she wondered how the Book didn’t burn itself from within.
She’d seen this image before. It was a fairly common symbol traded among alchemists. Those who studied the occult sciences or who practiced the type of ritual magic of the Order understood the picture of the Philosopher’s Hand as a recipe. In legend, it depicted the key to the transmutation of elements. With it, alchemists believed they could turn lead to gold or transform a simple mortal life into godlike immortality.
It was what Thoth wanted. To be infinite—and to be infinitely powerful.
You could have that power as well.
She frowned to herself, wondering where the thought had come from. She didn’t want that power. She’d never wanted that power.
Running her finger over the gilded page, Esta could feel the grooves carved into the parchment by a desperate pen. The various objects represented the classical elements, and the flames represented mercury, which could unite them. But another name for mercury was Aether. Time. She thought of what Everett had said about Newton’s quest for the philosopher’s stone—how he was trying to form a boundary out of time—and she thought of what Seshat had been trying to do as well. Maybe myth and history had it wrong. Maybe the philosopher’s stone wasn’t an object but a place—a space—carved out of time. After all, Seshat had never intended to live forever. She’d wanted to make the old magic infinite—both outside of time and part of all time at once.
On the opposite page, Esta found markings that mirrored the burned wounds on her arm. The page was complete now—the other version of herself must have put the two together. The cipher was also complete, and she could see that what had appeared as symbols when torn in two were actually some kind of Greek. It was archaic, to be sure, but readable.
The answers are here. You need only be strong enough to take them.
Her hands trembled as she grabbed a pen and some of the hotel stationery and started to work.
Time dissolved around her—or it felt like it did. By the time she was done decoding the page, her hand was cramping, but Esta barely noticed. She finally understood.
Running a finger over the intricate sketch of the Philosopher’s Hand, she wondered how she’d missed it before. The icons on the hand were connected by the element of mercury—Aether—just as the stones had been, both in Seshat’s ritual and in the ritual that created the Brink.
And in the ritual the girl completed.
The boundaries formed by uniting the stones were made from time—or rather, Esta realized—they were made from time’s opposite.
Her own affinity didn’t control the seconds; it simply found the spaces between them and pulled them apart. Because magic lived in those spaces. It waited there, ready to unfurl, as time kept it constrained and ordered. In perfect balance. When Esta reached for her connection to the old magic, when she used her affinity to slow the seconds, she pulled those spaces apart, and in doing so she asserted power over the order imposed by time.
