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FORTY-ONE

THE BREEZE OFF THE OCEAN GHOSTS THROUGH us. Its chill makes me shiver and Erik pulls away, rubbing my shoulders to warm me, both of us dazed enough to forget where we are for a moment.

Unfortunately, a moment is too long to waste.

“Ahh, young love,” purrs a voice. “Isn’t that sweet?”

We whirl toward the voice. Ahead of us, the others are frozen to the spot. No one tries to run. We’re all trying to figure out what the next move is.

“Not expecting us?” Kincaid asks. “We RSVP’d.”

“This is so embarrassing,” I say, twisting from Erik’s arms. “But we have a previous engagement.”

“Yes? That is a pity,” Kincaid says, snapping the fingers of his gloves and removing each in delicate order.

Approaching footsteps—many, many footsteps—draw my attention away. Even Kincaid turns, but his face doesn’t fall when he sees Cormac Patton approaching. My own sags in frustration. We’re seriously outnumbered.

“I’ve tried to help her with her manners,” Cormac’s voice calls above the wind. He crunches across the pavement, a small army in tow. “But she’s resistant to change.”

“I like that,” I say to him, pushing against the roar of my pulse in my ears. It’s been nearly two months since I faced Cormac, years for him. “I’m ‘resistant to change.’ I think that’s a compliment coming from a would-be immortal.”

“Would-be?” Cormac cocks an eyebrow. “Don’t undersell me.”

“I’ll leave that up to you,” I assure him. “And, might I say, Cormac, that you haven’t aged a day.”

Cormac’s smirk deepens. “I’m glad we don’t have secrets anymore. Now you know what I can offer you. Erik,” he says, turning his attention to him, “I guess I know why you didn’t come back. It’s impolite to go after your boss’s wife.”

“Adelice isn’t your wife,” Erik says, stepping closer to me.

“She will be,” Cormac says. “You were supposed to watch her, not help her escape.”

“What’s he talking about?” Jost demands.

“You know how adept your brother is at keeping secrets, Jost. I suppose he never told you—” Dante begins.

“I see where she gets her smart tongue from,” Cormac butts in. “Don’t look so surprised, Adelice. Valery has kept us well informed of the many sordid developments from the surface.”

“That was low, you old dog,” Kincaid says, wagging a finger at Cormac. “You knew she was my style.”

“It takes an old dog to know one,” Cormac says. “And you know we can’t be taught new tricks.”

The exchange is cordial, even amused, like old friends bantering.

“That’s it!” I yell, stamping my foot. “Don’t you want to kill each other?” Because I wouldn’t mind killing both of them.

“Of course,” Cormac says.

“But we can be gentlemanly about it,” Kincaid says.

I storm forward against the protests of Erik.

“You hate him,” I say, pointing from Kincaid to Cormac, “and I assume he hates you. Why the charade?”

“I don’t hate him,” Cormac says. “I pity him.”

Kincaid makes a choking noise and flips his gloves in his hands. “I don’t need your pity, Cormac. I’ve found the Whorl. The girl has done her part and extricated him, and now your blessed world will unravel into the universe. My only regret is that you won’t be there to fade into the stars with it. But you can watch. Imagine everything you worked for, lied for, killed for—gone.”

“Sour grapes,” Cormac says with a false laugh. He waves off Kincaid’s threat. “Come back to Arras. I’m prime minister. Everything will be running smoothly once we tie up this loose end.”

I’m surprised when he gestures to me. “You need me,” I remind him.

“Need? Perhaps want is a better term. Wait, I have an offer you can’t refuse, my love, but right now the men are talking,” Cormac says, wagging a finger.

“I don’t see any men here,” I say, but they ignore me.

“An intriguing proposition,” Kincaid says, “but I’m afraid I’ve grown fond of Earth. My estate is lovely, I took the liberty of claiming it from the man with the newspapers. The one we ripped early on.”

“Hearst? I remember him. Troublemaker,” Cormac says.

“Arrogant, too.”

I can’t keep my mouth from falling open at the bizarre exchange. Their eyes shift, feet tap—they’re buying time. Each trying to determine the best way to destroy the other.

“The thing is, Arras is monotonous,” Kincaid says in a bored voice. “You employ the same standards. You add new tech to control the masses. There’s nothing challenging there, but you’ve created a virtual playground on Earth and I’m king of the hill.”

“So you’d unravel it?” Cormac says, and his eyes flicker to mine. He wants me to hear this.

“Yes,” Kincaid snarls, losing his composure. “I want to watch it fade away like I watched her fade before me. I want to see you burn into the sun, and I want to feel that sun on my skin every day and know that I put it there and that I took it from you.”

“Destroying it won’t bring her back,” Cormac says. “And without your petty dreams of revenge, how will you fill that loss?”

“There are other realms to reach for,” Kincaid says. “Space, perhaps. Maybe even death someday. This is my world, full of liars and cheats and the unwanted wastrels of Arras—my kind of people. Each more honest than a single official left in Arras.”

“And when they rise up and start a war?” Cormac challenges. “How will you control them?”

“Why control them? Kill them. It will be no waste. I have my men. They have skills, as you know. I’ll start over if I care to.”

“Caring isn’t in your vocabulary,” Cormac says. “Your ability to care died with her.”

“Is that why you exiled me?” Kincaid demands. “So I couldn’t force you to pay for what you did to her?”

“I did nothing to her.” Cormac’s voice stays gentle, catching me off guard.

“You told her lies. You turned her against me,” Kincaid says. “Why, Cormac? Why did you want her to hate me?”

“I wanted her to help you. The experiments you were doing were against Guild law.”

“What kind of experiments?” I ask, thinking of the X-rays and measurements hidden in the labs of the estate.

“Kincaid dreams not only of controlling Tailors but also of being one himself,” Cormac tells me.

“It’s the natural step in evolution,” Kincaid snarls, “and I was close until you ruined everything.”

“I warned her. That’s all. What you did to her—that was the result of your madness.”

“I’m perfectly sane,” Kincaid says. “But you awake the sleeping sword of war.”

“Poetic,” I mutter.

“Whatever you paid those scientists to do to you, it didn’t make you into a Tailor, Kincaid. It stripped you of your humanity. That’s why you killed Josin.” Cormac doesn’t look triumphant as he says it. He looks sad.

And I realize he’s right. Kincaid doesn’t hunger for power and control like Cormac does, and for the first time, I realize he wants something far more dangerous. Destruction. Total and pure nihilism. This isn’t about a lost power play. Whatever transpired between Cormac and Kincaid runs deeper and closer to Kincaid’s heart than I realized. He guarded the information from me so I wouldn’t see that his perverse fascination with change and control had twisted his very soul into something irrevocably malignant.

“What about me?” I ask, drawing their attention from each other. “What’s my offer? What will you give me?”

“You can watch it burn,” Kincaid seethes. “Everything they took from you. Everything they controlled. You’ll have a front-row seat to the dawn of a new age outside the Guild’s control.”

“A dawn of your control,” I clarify.

“I’ll share,” he says simply.

“Fair offer, but I think I have a more enticing one,” Cormac says, snapping his fingers.

The army of guards behind him shifts and out of the dark sea of black uniforms a girl emerges. She’s fair-haired and wearing combat gear like Cormac, but her features are painted in lovely contrast to her fair skin, her eyes framed by dark lashes, and although her hair is pinned in perfect curls that frame her delicate face, a few tendrils have escaped, leaving curls behind her ears.

She’s my age now, or close to it, and I see the startling evidence of the time dilation we’ve been fighting against. I told myself a few months wouldn’t matter. How old would Amie be? Fifteen. Still a girl. But as she stands before me, I see a young woman. My equal. Her bright eyes recognize me. The last time I saw her, amid a crowd in Cypress, she believed she was someone else—Riya. A result of her being rewoven after my retrieval night. Cormac has been busy preparing for this moment by creating the perfect bait. He’s dangling my sister in front of my eyes, knowing I’m too weak to resist.

“Amie,” I whisper. I step forward tentatively, and my eyes meet Cormac’s. He nods slightly to indicate it’s okay, and the part of me that wants to embrace her accepts this, pushing against the smaller voice that reminds me that nothing with Cormac is free.

My arms find her, and she hugs me back. My heart swells, knowing she recognizes me, and for an instant I’m transported to the dark cellar a lifetime ago. She was shorter then, her head rested on my chest, and now it falls on my shoulder and I smell her soap-clean scent and I remember why I fought for her. Why I needed to cling to the hope of getting my sister back. Her bright chatter and mindless gossip. The way Amie’s enthusiasm could be catching. She was the sun in my world. On Earth, she could be the sun for everyone. I’d give anything for that.

We stay like this for a long moment and no one speaks, no one breaks the spell, and I don’t let myself think of Cormac or his devious intentions.

I pull back and study her face, looking for signs of fear, but I see happiness.

Joy.

“Have they hurt you?” I ask.

“No,” she says with a laugh. “I’m training. It’s marvelous. A Spinster. Me! Wouldn’t Mom and Dad be surprised?”

I bite my tongue. I want to ask her what she thinks happened to our parents, but I know better. Cormac might let her remember me, but he’ll have altered her memory.

“Do you remember anything?” I ask her, my eyes traveling from her to Cormac. I don’t want to overstep this moment and have her ripped from me again. “Where have you been?”

Her eyelids flutter and she stares at me, like she’s trying to dredge up a memory but cannot.

“She’s been at the Coventry,” Cormac says, prompting her and letting me in on the lie I need to embrace if I want to spare my sister the devastation of the truth about what happened to her and my parents after my retrieval.

“You’ve been happy there.” My voice breaks on the words, my throat swelling over the lie, but I push it through. It’s better if Amie doesn’t remember Riya and the men who dragged her from the tunnel under our house. Someday I can tell her the truth, when she can understand it.

“I’m not without a heart,” Cormac says.

“I never said you were,” I respond coolly. “It’s just a small one.”

“Enough of this,” Kincaid says, walking from his entourage toward me and my sister. “Take her with you. My men can handle the rest.”

“Why would you think I would leave with you?” I ask him, pushing Amie behind me to keep her a safe distance from him.

“You want to go back with Cormac? Playing dress-up and weaving the world in a tower?” Kincaid asks.

“‘Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,’” Cormac says.

“Well done, Cormac,” Kincaid says. “But this thread of life is spun.”

“Shakespeare suits any occasion,” Cormac says, his eyes on me. “‘His thread of life had not so soon decay’d.’”

Cormac’s message is clear to me. Kincaid is rotten, and I know then what I have to do. I feel my consciousness fading down, focusing in on the basic world around me. The strands of Alcatraz are dark and the time here moves slowly. It’s not frozen like in the buildings, but it’s still otherworldly. Unnatural. The sooner I get off this island the better. But I’m not interested in the island, I’m interested in the man advancing on me. His composition reminds me of Albert’s, and I’m sure if I looked at Cormac now with my newfound ability, I would see something similar—a mass of artificial threads neatly patched into place around the stagnant, staid individual time thread. Kincaid’s time thread is worn, mixed with newer threads into a macabre patchwork. Away from the Guild’s technology and labs, he would have used any means to survive. How many have died so he could live?

I step forward. I’ve seen it done. I can replicate it now, but to do so means I have to count on Cormac’s army to back me up against Kincaid’s entourage, but I know that’s why Cormac has drawn us here together. Why he sent Valery to lead us to Kincaid. He’s been planning this moment, orchestrating it from offstage. He knows I have a choice: destroy him or Kincaid. I can’t have it both ways, but now I understand my choice, what’s truly at risk. I could watch Arras fade into the sky, but I’m not jaded enough not to see the thousands of laughing schoolgirls, the mothers fawning over their infants, the couples learning to fall in love. I can’t destroy them to destroy one man or the Guild. There’s another way, and now I’m playing with a full deck.

I won’t turn back.

The realization bursts inside me, flooding me with strength, and I lash out with the ferocity I felt the night I was attacked at the estate, my fingers grazing into Kincaid’s very being and latching on to his time strands. I have to pull hard against its efforts to stay in place, but everything rides on this and it gives me a strength I didn’t know I had. With a pop, it uncoils, pulling through him.

I ignore his agonized shriek and I watch the unwinding in its purest form. I don’t see flesh or bone, merely the threads falling apart. The thin silver strand of his soul dissipating into the night sky along with the rest of him, until the golden strand of his life—his unnatural time in existence—fades from my fingers. By the time I regain full awareness, there’s chaos around me and dust scattering at my feet.

Dust to dust, Kincaid.