Turner hesitated. “I can—”
“No,” said Alex. “Dawes and I will manage.”
“Fine,” he said, already heading toward the back door. “You’re lucky this dump of a town is gentrifying. Like to see me walk into the Family Dollar looking for goat’s milk.”
“You should have let him carry you,” Dawes grunted as they made their slow way up
the stairs.
Alex’s body was fighting every step. “Right now he feels guilty for not listening to me.
I can’t let him make up for it just yet.”
“Why?”
“Because the worse he feels, the more he’ll do for us. Trust me. Turner doesn’t like to
be in the wrong.” Another step. Another. Why didn’t this place have an elevator? A magical one full of morphine. “Tell me about Scroll and Key. I thought their magic was
waning. The night Darlington and I observed, they couldn’t even open a portal to Eastern Europe.”
“They’ve had a few bad years, trouble getting the best taps. There’s been some
speculation in Lethe that portal magic is so disruptive it’s been eroding the power nexus
their tomb is built on.”
But maybe the Locksmiths had been pretending, running a little con, trying to look weaker than they actually were. Why? So that they could perform rituals in secret without
Lethe interference? Or was there something shady about the rituals themselves? But how
would that connect Colin Khatri to Tara? All Tripp had said was that Tara had mentioned
Colin once in passing. There had to be more to it. That tattoo couldn’t just be coincidence.
Dawes led Alex to the armory and propped her up against Hiram’s Crucible. It felt like
it was vibrating gently, the metal cool against Alex’s skin. She had never used the Golden
Bowl, just watched Darlington mix his elixir in it. He had treated it with reverence and resentment. Like any junkie with a drug.
“The hospital would be safer,” Dawes said, rummaging through the drawers in the vast
cabinet, opening and closing one after another.
“Come on, Dawes,” Alex said. “You gave me that spider-egg stuff before.”
“That’s different. It was a specific magical cure for a specific magical ailment.”
“You didn’t hesitate to drown me. How hard can it be to fix me up?”
“I did hesitate. And none of the societies specialize in healing magic.”
“Why?” Alex said. Maybe if she kept talking, her body couldn’t give up. “Seems like
there’d be money in it.”
Dawes’s disapproving frown—that “learning should be for the sake of learning” look—
reminded her painfully of Darlington. Actually, everything she did in this moment was painful.
“Healing magic is messy,” said Dawes. “It’s the most commonly practiced by
laypeople, and that means power gets distributed more broadly instead of being drawn to
nexuses. There are also strong prohibitions against tampering with immortality. And it isn’t like I know exactly what’s wrong with you. I can’t x-ray you and just cast a spell to
mend a broken rib. You could have internal bleeding or I don’t know what.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“We’re going to try reversion,” said Dawes. “I can take you back … will an hour do it?
Two hours? I hope we have enough milk.”
“Are you … are you talking about time travel?”
Dawes paused with a hand on a drawer. “Are you serious?”
“Nope,” said Alex hurriedly.
“I’m just helping your body revert to an earlier version of itself. It’s an undoing. Much easier than trying to make new flesh or bone. It’s actually a kind of portal magic, so you
can thank Scroll and Key for it.”
“I’ll send them a note. How far back can you go?”
“Not far. Not without stronger magic and more people to work it.”
An undoing. Take me back. Make me into someone who has never been done harm. Go
as far as you can. Make me brand-new. No bruises. No scars. She thought of the moths in their boxes. She missed her tattoos, her old clothes. She missed sitting in the sun with Hellie. She missed the gentle, dilapidated curves of her mother’s couch. Alex didn’t really