Her voice was cool and detached when she spoke again. “Aren’t I? Maybe you can separate what you want from what everyone else is suffering through. God knows you have before. But I can’t. I won’t.”
Her words hit their mark, in part because of how true they were. The mess they were in was his doing, all because he’d wanted to be free of the city. Because he’d been willing to sacrifice almost anything for that one dream. But that didn’t change the fact that they were on a mission, and if they didn’t succeed, Mageus would have a lot more to worry about than the Guard.
“We have to find the stones, Esta,” he said softly. “We need the necklace, and then we need to find Bill to get the dagger, and then we have the rest of the continent to cross for the crown, and we can’t do that if we’re in jail or dead.” He paused, gathering himself, pushing away the power that was poking at his weaknesses. Esta’s eyes were still blazing at him, but he went on. “If we don’t get the stones, Nibsy wins. Jack wins. I wanted to help those kids, but doing that would have put a great big target on our backs. You want to help those kids and countless others like them? We have to win. We have to find the stones and get the Book back.” I’m running out of time. And so are you.
The thought came to him so clearly that he knew it was true.
Esta frowned at him, but some of the heat in her expression drained. “I hate them,” she told him, her voice hollow. “I hate the Guard and I hate the Society—all of them.”
“So do I,” Harte said, meaning every word. “So let’s not just beat up a few Guardsmen here and there. Let’s bring them to their knees. We steal the necklace, we humiliate them, and then we move on and do it again until we have what we need. Until we can go back before any of this happened—before the Act, before the Guard—and stop it. That’s how we’re going to save those boys.”
She let out a heavy breath and scrubbed her hand over her mouth. It was an utterly guileless gesture, and one that made her look every bit the man she was dressed as. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But that doesn’t change how angry with you I am right now.”
“Be as angry as you want,” he said. “As long as you’re angry here, and not in some jail.”
“There isn’t a jail that can hold me,” she told him, cutting her eyes in his direction.
“I don’t know. . . . Those bars on the Nile exhibit might do the trick.”
Her expression faltered at the mention of them. “Speaking of the Nile, you want to tell me what happened on that boat?” she asked.
He took a breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was there, and then I wasn’t.”
“You were talking about Thoth like you knew him,” she said, a question in her eyes. “You called him a liar.”
Vaguely he remembered saying those words, but they felt like they were someone else’s memories, someone else’s words. “I think it’s whatever—or whoever—was trapped in the Book. Every day it gets stronger. Every day it gains a little more control.” And being around you is making it worse.
“Well, whatever it is, it sure doesn’t like Thoth,” she said, looking away from him.
“It’s old,” he told her, not sure where the words came from. “I get this sense that it’s been waiting a very long time to be freed. . . . It’s not going to wait much longer.”
Esta glanced up at him, and for a moment the anger in her eyes was replaced by worry. “Well, it’s gonna have to,” she told him. “We’re close. The necklace is right there.” She pointed toward the Pike. “And opium or the Guard or whatever, that building isn’t Khafre Hall. We can do this.” She paused, thoughtful. “What if we used a parade as a distraction?”
A couple passed close by, the man eyeing the two of them with a serious frown. “Maybe, but let’s not talk about it here,” he said. “We don’t know who might be listening.”
“Fine,” she said. “What do you want to do, then?”
“We need to waste a little time, but standing around like this is drawing attention. You want to go in there and see what’s inside?” he asked, pointing to a nearby building. “It might be cooler, since we’ll be out of the sun.”
The building turned out to be the Palace of Transportation. The enormous hall was filled with all manner of machinery—sleek steam engines and automobiles that gleamed under the electric lights. As they walked through, pretending to be tourists until they could safely leave, Esta had a far-off, almost sad look in her eyes.
“Someday, everyone will have one of these,” she told him as she ran her finger along the curved metal of an automobile. “No one really stays in one place unless they have to. You could get onto an airplane and fly anywhere you want. . . .”
“Fly?” It seemed impossible. “Like in an airship?”
She shook her head. “Faster. And higher. You can be across the country in a handful of hours.” Her expression faltered. “Or some people can.” She glanced over at him, a spark of hope in her eye. “When we get the stones and the Book—because we will—we have to do something with them. We have to figure out what to do about the Brink—fix it or destroy it. There’s an entire future coming, and Mageus won’t survive by being trapped in the city. Maybe they’d have a chance if things were different. Maybe that’s why we ended up here, so we could see what might be. So we could understand that things can be changed. That we can change them, only this time, we can change them for the better. Even if we can’t go back. We can start now.”
He couldn’t feel an answering hope. Standing in the Palace of Transportation, he was surrounded by machines built for speed, all ways for ordinary people to escape from their lives and travel wherever their hearts desired. They were machines of the future, machines that one day would be. But Harte Darrigan knew that they were not for him. He was a man without a future, and not one of those wondrous machines could move fast enough or go far enough to help him escape from the danger he carried within.
NEVER ENOUGH
1904—St. Louis
North had been trying to see past the spectacle of the parade to the Cairo exhibit when everything erupted. As soon as the Jefferson Guard went charging in, he gave up his attempt to follow the Thief and made his exit, working his way through the crowds that were all trying to flee in the same direction. They were Sundren, so they couldn’t tell that the eruption was nothing more than smoke set off by some stupid kids trying to play Antistasi.
He didn’t exactly blame them for trying. He’d spent his whole childhood hiding the bit of magic that flowed in his veins. His daddy had taught him how to keep it still, so that no one would know. But hiding away their magic hadn’t improved their lives any. It certainly hadn’t saved his father.
North had been seventeen and already two years on his own when that train derailed in New Jersey and the newspapers began spreading the fear that Mageus were beyond the Brink. Until then, most Sundren thought magic was something that the Brink had dealt with. They went through their ordinary lives not thinking that Mageus could be among them.