“I don’t,” Glenn said. “I just don’t want you to be the one to kill her.”
The Magistra’s eyes narrowed. Glenn saw her chance and threw her arms around her, pulling her close, battering at the wall between them. When it fell, the entire weight of her mother’s last ten years crashed into Glenn all at once. In that moment, Glenn knew that during all those years, there was a small kernel of the woman her mother once was, imprisoned deep inside her, forced to watch the things the Magistra was doing and helpless to stop them. Every death hung on her like the links of a chain, endlessly heavy, always present. There were ghosts in the Magisterium, and they never let her rest.
Worst of all, her mother always knew exactly how far away she was from everything she wanted — her husband, Glenn, their life in the Colloquium — and she could do nothing about it. The moments of the three of them together — gathered around the dinner table, in the garden, floating in the cool lake waters — lived in her like bits of a distant sun, dazzling but too far away to reach, taunting her day in and day out.
“Come back,” Glenn whispered, willing her last bit of strength into her mother, unraveling a plea that had been knotted up inside her for ten years. “I know you’re there. Please. Just listen to my voice and come back.”
Glenn held her breath and pulled away slowly.
Her mother was gazing down at her, her eyes a deep and piercing blue.
They rose out of the cavern together, Glenn’s mother’s arms wrapped tight around her, until they reached the surface and landed on the muddy ground.
“What do we do about …”
In answer, her mother lifted one hand, and the ground shook as the gash in the earth sealed itself up.
“She’ll free herself eventually,” she said. “But we’ll be long gone before she does.”
Her mother’s palms were pressed into the muddy ground, just barely keeping her upright. Her chest was heaving. The blue of her eyes was already clouding over as her Affinities rushed back in. Glenn took her arm and held it tight.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “You’ll be all right.”
“Glenn!”
Kevin dropped to his knees in front of her. Aamon appeared just behind him.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, overwhelmed by the feeling of being near him again. “I’m fine.”
Kevin pulled something out of the inside of his coat. The bracelet.
Glenn took it and hurried to her mother’s side.
“Glenn, no,” her mother protested. “You should — ”
“Take it. I’m too exhausted to do much more damage tonight
anyway.”
Glenn clamped the bracelet onto her mother’s wrist. As soon as it touched her, she winced, but the change was slow in coming. Glenn held her breath until she felt her mother’s body begin to wither under her touch.
“Sturges’s forces are in retreat, but it won’t last long,” Aamon said. “Opal has coordinated with the last of Farrick’s forces.”
“Fine,” Glenn’s mother said, finding a surprising amount of command in her tired voice. “Aamon, have Opal take Kevin and Glenn as far west as she can.”
“No!” Kevin shouted. “We’re not running away.”
“I’m sorry,” Glenn’s mother said crisply. “There’s no other choice. It’s too dangerous here. It’s no place for either of you. Aamon, we’ll coordinate with the Miel Pan to secure the border.”
“Mom — ”
She turned to Glenn and knelt down close. “There’ll be no more fighting for you,” she said. “If you keep on like you are, you’ll lose control. I won’t allow that. Opal will keep you both safe. She can help you control your Affinity in a way I never learned.”
“But with the bracelet on — ”
“I’ll have to rely on Aamon and the others,” she said, and then, quietly, “I have a lifetime to make up for, Glenn. I have to try.”
Glenn could feel her mother’s grief, even through the bubble of the bracelet. It was a hard and cold thing, sunk deep inside her.
Aamon and Kevin stood waiting. Her mother was right. No
matter what had happened, she and Kevin weren’t soldiers. They weren’t rulers. They were never even meant to be here.
“Are you ready?” her mother asked.
Glenn turned to the border forest and thought of her home: the arcing run of the trains, the classrooms that were her second home, nights spent lying in bed and listening to the
Dad …
Glenn looked down at the bracelet on her mother’s wrist.
“No,” she said. “There’s one more thing we have to do.”
Glenn glided far over the treetops through the chilly night air. A train passed by below, winding on its magnetic track through a landscape dotted with the lights of shops and towering stacks, toward the city center of Colloquy that glowed a harsh white, miles away.
Glenn wanted to pause and take it all in; she had never seen her home like this before, but she knew that even now, Colloquium forces would have detected her and were closing in.
Luckily, once Authority had destroyed Dad’s workshop, they had left, unaware of his basement lab. It had taken Glenn hours to break into the heavily encrypted files Dad kept there, but once she did, she found detailed schematics for the bracelet, and notes theorizing a way to reverse the bracelet’s field and use it to keep the reality of the Magisterium with her. Sitting there at his workbench, the guts of the thing laid out before her, Glenn appreciated for the first time how brilliant her father really was. That simple band of metal contained not only microcircuits and power generators but small gems and
rune-covered bits of metal. It was a perfect melding together of Affinity and technology. Magisterium and Colloquium. It should have been impossible, but there it was. Glenn had it rebuilt and back on her wrist in a matter of hours. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.
Now Glenn focused her attention outward, hunting for one person amidst the millions huddled all around her in the hivelike stacks and office buildings. Her mind moved through building after building until she came to a place of darkness, a kind of hole in a large tower at the north end of the city. The tower was teeming with people except for one floor that was almost entirely empty. Empty, save one person. Even as far away as Glenn was, she could feel the despair coming from that floor’s single inhabitant.
Trees below bent in her wake as Glenn shot out over the
landscape. She swung around the edges of the city, careful to avoid that gravity well of people below her, the combined force of which threatened to pull her down.
The tower stood on its own, knifing into the sky from the center of a concrete sea, surrounded by gates and alarms and security systems.
All of it would have been forbidding to the Glenn of weeks ago, but they were toys to the Glenn of today. She flew to the top of the tower and then let herself slowly drop down along its windowless face until she found the floor she wanted. Once she did, Glenn drifted away from the wall and hovered there, staring at the sleek gray of it.
To anyone else, the expanse of steel and concrete and insulation would have seemed like an impenetrable wall, but Glenn opened herself up to it. She moved into the pores of the concrete and steel, ingratiating herself with them until they were grudging allies, then slowly drawing them aside. The outer wall of concrete was the first to part. A band of it, ten feet high and two feet thick, simply peeled back from the rest of the building like arms opening to embrace her, exposing the rib cage of steel beams that lay inside. Those too opened up at Glenn’s urging, soundlessly floating out of the building and into the air. Next came the layers of insulation and the interior walls, all of them gently parting from their brothers, opening up the deep insides of the tower, down to its
