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She leaned back to look at him, and he let her go. Let his hand fall away.
“But,” he said softly, echoing her earlier statement.
“But,” she agreed with a sigh.
It was only the wanting he saw there in her golden eyes that kept him from shattering completely.
For a long beat, he wondered if she would reconsider, but eventually she reached back beneath her sweater and refastened her underthings. Then she retrieved a small notepad from the chair where she must have been sitting before he woke.
“While you were sleeping, I’ve been working,” she told him. “I think I’ve figured out some things.”
His stomach sank. She was talking about going back, about returning the piece of magic to the whole. She was talking about risking everything for an ancient goddess who would give nothing but death and destruction in return. He’d wanted to forget about those problems—he’d wanted Esta to forget as well.
“I think I’m going to need to put on some pants before I hear about them,” he told her.
He wrapped a sheet around himself and, taking the trousers she offered, retreated into the bathroom, where there wasn’t enough cold water in the world to wash away the morning’s desire.
When he could finally fasten the pants comfortably, he reemerged and found her sitting curled in the velvet armchair, deep in concentration as she read through a stack of Nibsy’s papers. She noticed his entrance immediately this time, and when she looked up, her eyes raked over his body, taking in his shirtless torso and the soft woolen trousers. A part of him thrilled at seeing the heat in her gaze, but he needed her to stop looking at him like that if they were going to talk.
“Shirt?” he asked, his voice coming out more strained than he’d expected.
She blinked, and her cheeks flushed a damn delicious shade of pink.
“There are a couple to choose from,” she said, visibly pulling herself together. She nodded at a pile of clothes near the television. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”
Once he was dressed, he took the chair at the desk, not trusting himself near the bed. Not when Esta kept looking at him like that. It took everything he had to listen to all she’d managed to puzzle out. But as she talked, some of the tightness in his chest eased.
“You really think that’s the answer?” he wondered. “To use Seshat as Newton would have?”
“I do,” she told him. “We have the Book, and with the artifacts, we can control Seshat. We can go back and use her power to fix the Brink. We can stop Jack before he causes any damage. We can save our friends.”
The diary. Harte reached for the small book and skimmed through it until he found the date of the Conclave. He read the part of the entry that was still legible. Most of it was obscured, the details hidden by the strange changing letters, but one point was clear. “If we go back to save them, you die at the Conclave.” He showed her the entry. “I kill you, Esta.”
“No…,” she told him, as though the words weren’t there, stark and accusing. And the truth. “I trust you with my life, Harte. You wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t, because according to this, I already did,” he said. “It’s already done.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, wishing he could erase the words from his memory. When he spoke again, he softened his voice. “What I don’t understand is how. How the diary can be so sure—when we’re here now? Years after this supposedly already happened.”
Esta took the diary from him, frowning down at the page. “It didn’t change to this scenario until I found it in Nibsy’s library. I think the diary is certain because we are. We will go back. We’ve decided it, and one way or another, we’ll change the past. We’ll change it to this.”
“But we know now,” Harte pressed. “Shouldn’t that fact change everything? Shouldn’t we be able to avoid it?”
Esta’s brows bunched as she considered the diary. “Maybe,” she told him. “The details are still indistinct. They’re still unsettled, so maybe the outcome is still undetermined.”
“Except that,” he said, pointing to their names, stark on the page.
“Except that,” she repeated softly, staring down at the words as they undulated on the open page. Neither of them seemed to know what to say at first. “Maybe Nibsy knows too much. He must have had this diary in the past along with his affinity. Maybe he’s seeing what we’re seeing. If he has this diary, he’ll always see us coming. He’ll be able to outmaneuver us.” She looked up at him then, a spark of determination in her golden eyes. “But he doesn’t win.”
“It sure as hell looks like he does.”
She shook her head. “No. He doesn’t. If he won—if he was able to get the Book and artifacts—the rest of this diary wouldn’t be unreadable. History would have already settled itself into something more certain than this. And if he had won? Nibsy wouldn’t have been the weak old man we just met. He would have used the Book and taken its power, and the world would already be unrecognizable.” She flipped through the unreadable pages. “I think this means that there’s still a way to beat him. There has to be.”
“If we could kill Nibsy before the Conclave—”
“We can’t,” she told him. “We can’t kill him at all.”
“Why the hell not?” Harte asked.
“Once the Brink is fixed, we have to send Ishtar’s Key forward with the girl. That fact hasn’t changed. She still needs to be raised by the Professor, so he can send her back to find the Magician and search for the Book. Otherwise, none of this can happen.” Her expression bunched in concentration. “I can’t exist as I am now—this can never be—unless that happens,” she told him, frowning. “Even though I die in this scenario, someone must have given the girl the stone and sent her forward. Otherwise—”
