Her eyes flicked to me, wild and desperate. “But I need both of you. No one can Wield this magic but you. They know who you are, and they want you, and they’re going to keep coming for you. So help me. Help me build a better world. Or at the very least keep this one from being destroyed.”
I was so angry that everything went numb — numb, until I looked at Tisaanah and saw the gutting heartbreak written across her face.
That expression devastated me.
I had given up on so much. I couldn’t even remember the moment it happened, the moment I realized you could dream and fight and bleed with the purest of intentions, and it would still end up rotten and maggot-infested. But Tisaanah — Tisaanah, from the minute she showed up at my doorstep, believed. Even in the worst times, she truly had faith it could all be better.
And now, I was watching that belief shatter. An irreplaceable treasure destroyed.
“This is the only way.” Nura approached Tisaanah slowly, hand outstretched, only for Tisaanah to lurch away.
“Don’t touch me.”
And then the door was open, and Tisaanah was setting off down the hall. But I lingered for a moment longer.
I felt exhausted.
“After a while, it becomes my own damn fault,” I muttered. “Expecting more. Expecting better.”
Nura lifted her head and looked at me. Suddenly she looked so much like she had ten years ago. And it was the voice of my friend, not my enemy, that said, “I always wanted all of it to be better.”
The worst thing was, I believed her.
“This isn’t how it happens, Nura.”
“Not without you.” She moved towards me, one tentative attempt at bridging the gap between us. “I need you, Max. Please. We’re the only ones left.”
The only ones left. Yes. Maybe that was why there was a part of me who could never abandon the version of Nura that I had known, once. Because she was the last thing I had of a more innocent life.
Even if the core of that had been infested, too. None of it looked the same as it had back then.
“Not anymore,” I said, and left her there.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Tisaanah
I had to get out of the Towers. Everything about this place revolted me, all the way down to my bones. I was halfway down the hall by the time that Max caught up with me. I could feel his rage vibrating off of him, our anger surrounding us both like smoke. We didn’t speak. When we made it to the front steps, I cast one last glance over my shoulder at the two white columns looming over us.
The day I had seen Vos, or what had become of him, I had staggered out of these doors and stood in these shadows and struggled not to fall apart. That was the first time I had looked up at the Towers and thought they looked foreboding rather than comforting.
Now, they disgusted me.
Max drew the final line of his Stratagram, and they unraveled.
The first part of the world to return was the smell — a scent of ash so strong it burned my nostrils. And when everything else followed, I made a small, wordless sound of horror.
The cottage was gone.
Max’s home — our home — had been reduced to nothing but a blackened skeleton. The stone still stood, though it was crumbled and charred. The roof had caved in, only a few broken rafters still remaining. Shattered glass glittered among the wreckage.
And the garden… that beautiful garden was now shriveled ash.
I tore my eyes away from the scene to look at Max, and he was staring at it with a tight jaw, mouth thinned, face betraying everything that he wasn’t expressing aloud.
“We’ll rebuild it,” I said, even though we both knew that we would never be able to recapture what made this place so precious.
His throat bobbed. He walked among the charred foliage, nudging the dirt with his boot.
“There have been people here,” he said. “Look at the footprints.”
“Nura’s people.”
“Had to be. Those things are gone.”
Gods. So much had happened that the attack felt like it had been years ago. Max stopped at what had once been the door. At an open crate, scorched but still standing.
I joined him and looked down. The slave hands within were still there, some burnt so badly that bright white bone cut through blackened skin.
And there, the weight of it all broke me.
I sank to my knees. I bowed over that crate, the smell of burned skin hanging in the air like incense. Tears left little wet spots on their flesh. One, then two, then more, until silent sobs wracked my body.
“How?” I choked out. “How can anything we do make this better?”
“It can’t. Not this part.”
These people were gone forever, and nothing anyone could do — me, or him, or the world — would mean anything to those who had lost their loved ones.
“I should have listened to you,” I said. “You tried to tell me so many times that no matter what I did, it would end up this way.”
“No, Tisaanah,” Max murmured, but the words poured out of me.
“It doesn’t matter how good our intentions are, or how hard we try. It would become something— something twisted. That is what we were fighting for? Just another slaveowner? I brought them here and I asked them to trust me. Now their families are dead and they’re just gears in a different machine. And I have given them nothing.”
Nothing. I had traded away every bargaining chip, and now I was left with no magic and corrupted influence wrenched from a corrupted system. All while an even
