A surge of panic flickered through the sticky sweet sensation of connection and belonging.
If the Heart had come home, where was the eggshell of a girl that had kept it safe, had carried it between worlds, and set it free?
What had happened to Eli?
Tav inhaled sharply and turned their intention to Ariel. “We have to find her. Or what’s left of her.” Their voice shook. “Turn on, damn it. We don’t have time.”
But Ariel was frozen in place, rapturous and dreamy. Tav jumped off the bike and tried to look through the dancing lights for evidence of Eli — the girl whose ribs they had kissed, whose crocodile teeth they had licked. Eli, with her knives and fists and anger like a beehive.
And then the sky cracked.
Tav stared up into a fractured galaxy. Oxygen stopped. Frost curled over the edges of a cut that had been reopened a thousand times, and now split easily. The fabric of the galaxy had grown thin and fragile.
The transplant of a heart back into its body is no easy thing.
It sent shockwaves across the planet, through its very core, shaking every leaf and stream and gust of air. The power of the Heart infusing the world sent new life into the trees and earthworms and magic creatures hiding under the walls. It pulled on threads that had been left ragged, it made new growth, and sent brush fires racing through the undergrowth of the forests.
It reopened wounds that were still trying to heal.
Tav was pulled into the Vortex, swept away from Ariel, from Eli, from a home they had only just found.
Back to the beginning.
THE HEIR
Kite, one hand wrapped around the neck of a first-ring witch, his lantern-like head flashing like a siren, felt the galaxy crack. The sword trembled of its own accord.
She arched her swanlike neck back, tipping her head to watch the sky open up.
There was no ceiling, no stone, no trees, no clouds. Only empty space, and a few glittering lights — stars or forest fires or birthday candles or the fluorescent lights of a planet that never slept.
Kite let go of the witch. His head floated up, up, up, like a helium balloon, and then vanished, sucked into the vacuum between time and space.
The seam between worlds had come unravelled.
Sixty-Seven
THE HEALER
They were standing on a river of black ice. The river flowed past the outskirts of town, past The Sun, past trees heavy with rich green leaves, their bark dark and glossy as iron.
This was the place where they had first stared into Eli’s yellow eyes and felt that kick of desire, that afterbite of guilt, that grassy taste of curiosity.
This was the place they had made their own door, had let the enchanted succulents coax an opening between the City of Ghosts and the City of Eyes. Here the Heart and the boi had broken the laws of physics.
Of course it would take them back here.
Here, to the moment that haunted their dreams.
Just like in the dream, the black sky was slashed with silver and white. The river had frozen over and reflected the sky and the sliver of the moon bearing silent witness. It was night in the City of Ghosts.
There was no logical reason for the ice, but the magic had hardened and turned an August river into a winter nightmare. It was getting easier for Tav to accept these things that defied reason, that broke the rules they had been born into.
In this mirror world it was hard to tell where the City of Ghosts ended and the City of Eyes began. The worlds were coming together at last, a collision more beautiful and destructive than the dying stars who, watching, flickered once, thousands of years away, and went out forever.
Here was the Witch Lord, hiding in the Vortex, in the in-between. Waiting to pick apart a broken boi like an owl with a mouse. The Witch Lord hung suspended between worlds, in a body once more, her essence darting wildly across her finger bones, bluegreen hair spilling out around her head like a halo.
The armies had been scattered like snowflakes: they were stranded on stone and ice, trapped by gravity in the human world, or else watching from the shattered war room as it if were an observatory. Their glimmer and shine made them look like someone had upended a jewelry box onto a length of dark fabric.
The eyes of witches and children and plants and ghosts and objects and humans and assassins glittered like stars, like thousands of fireflies in the night, and Tav couldn’t tell ally from enemy. Tav was beginning to suspect that, in the end, there weren’t sides, and never had been. Only hope and hurt and longing, and bodies trying to survive in unkind worlds.
Silence, fragile as the mist that wound its way around their feet, pulsed gently in this moment before the end.
There might not be sides, but there was always change; and sometimes there had to be winners and losers; although winning could look an awful lot like losing. Tav knew that. The Witch Lord, raised in the crypt of her own self-importance, taught to treat life like it didn’t matter, had tried to make a universe as brutal as her heart and as razor-sharp as her teeth. She did not know that simple truth, had never learned to recognize failure as beauty and power as self-harm. In many ways, she was like a child herself, still waiting for knowledge to deepen into understanding.
Tav stared up at the alien who was also a star who was also family. They knew what they needed to do.
Feeling small, and sad, and human, Tav walked to meet her.
THE HEIR
Kite found herself on a strange shore, the stone rough and quiet under her feet. She looked out over a
