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
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.
FORTY-TWO
CORMAC’S MEN REACT AS I EXPECT THEM to, engaging in cross fire with the few Tailors that dare to take them on. Most of them are smart enough to make a run for it, and a few even escape the range of fire.
“Leave them,” Cormac says flippantly. He has a smug look on his face, and I hate him for it. “I knew I could count on you to make the right decision, Adelice.”
“What is right?” I muse out loud. I turn to Amie, but she’s backed away from me, her face ashen. I’m a monster to her, but it doesn’t matter. I knew that would happen. Better now than later.
“What did you do?” she gasps, one hand reaching to her throat.
“I made a decision,” I say in a calm voice. Amie thinks she wants this life, but she needs to know what it really entails. She needs to see the dirty work—the horror behind the looms, the capability of the Guild, the choices she’ll have to make.
“And now you have another one to make,” Cormac says. “I can’t leave you here, Adelice. You’re dangerous.”
“And you expect me to go with you? To turn my back on my friends and lie down in your clinic, so you can make me into the perfect wife?” I ask.
“Wife?” Amie mumbles, peeking from behind Cormac.
“Cormac and I are engaged, or didn’t he tell you? Like he didn’t tell you what he did to our mother? Our father?” I ask, but my voice is too cold and I regret speaking so cruelly to her. Amie’s as much a victim of Cormac as any of us.
“Come, come, darling,” Cormac says. “I have a proposal that will be more to your liking. Your life for hers. If you come with me, she can stay with your friends.”
Amie stares at him, confused and hurt, but nothing about his proposition surprises me. Using Amie was always part of his endgame.
“And them?” I ask, gesturing to my friends. “They can go?”
“All of them, even your pitiful scientist. He’s no good without you,” Cormac says. So he knows. “Good move not telling Kincaid the truth that Einstein is incapable of completing the binding without you—that you were the true Whorl the whole time.”
“I am getting smarter,” I say absently. I don’t trust Cormac to release them, but this isn’t just about my choice anymore.
“I’ll let her go, too, and you’ll return with me. I’ve seen the light, Adelice,” Cormac says. “I’m a changed man. Maybe becoming prime minister has done that. We’ll sever the worlds. We have his notes. I’m not unreasonable. You come back to my world and I’ll give them their own. We need you there, Adelice. None of them can do this, and in exchange, I won’t touch you.”
It’s a honeyed promise, coated in something sweet to make it palatable, but I taste its bitterness, the venom he’s trying to hide. I merely nod in agreement.
“Adelice!” Erik calls from behind me, and I turn to look at him. He’s watched this without a word until now, and his brother stands beside him looking set and determined. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Take her,” I cry, pushing Amie toward him. She’s sobbing, and I want to reassure her, but how can I after what she’s seen?
Erik’s face sinks and he nods. One last promise he’ll make to me for a lifetime of promises we’ll never keep.
“I’ll come with you, Cormac, and if you so much as try to alter my hair, I will rip you in half,” I warn him in a low voice.
Cormac’s face contorts. He knows I can do it. He’s seen it with his own eyes. It doesn’t ensure my safety. It merely raises the stakes of our cat-and-mouse game. And I know something he doesn’t. Something that could change everything. If it’s true and Amie has been training, our small resistance will have everything it needs, save one thing. One thing I can give them: time.
Cormac offers his arm and I take it tentatively, not daring to cast one more look over my shoulder at what I’m leaving behind—a life I’ll lose forever.
A bullet whistles overhead, cracking through the solemn moment, and I realize with horror it’s come from behind me. I’m simultaneously furious and terrified. Enough blood has been spilled here today.
