What now? Was there an after? Would time keep traipsing forward, indifferent? Nova wasn’t ready for after. There was no “next,” not for her. She had failed. This was all there was, only this, forever.
There was one last gift in her cohort that she hadn’t yet commandeered: Rook’s. She snatched it from him now and threw out her arms in a spell-casting motion.
As Sarai started back up the walkway, a faint iridescence, all but invisible, appeared in the air like a bubble around her father and Azareen.
“Sarai, no,” said Lazlo. He gripped her hand, wanting to stop her, but she turned to smoke and slipped out of his grasp. She couldn’t fathom what she had just witnessed. It couldn’t be real. She was still trapped in Minya’s dream. That had to be it.
If it was a nightmare, she could change it. She could fix it. She reached them and came up against the faint, shimmering sphere that enclosed them. It looked fragile as a soap bubble, but when Sarai went to push through it, she found she couldn’t even get near it. A field of stillness seemed to surround it. There was no sensation of a physical barrier. She couldn’t feel anything. Simply, the air redirected her movement, her will, like a slow running dream, so that no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t get close to the two fallen Tizerkane. She cried out in frustration.
Their blood was flowing. It oozed out from under their breastplates, spreading over the walkway and dripping off the sides. “Father,” said Sarai, for only the second time in her life. He was slumped over Azareen. Their eyes were open and unseeing and dead.
A sob choked up Sarai’s throat. “No no no,” she said. She felt hands on her back. Lazlo had followed her. He came to her side, his arms wrapping around her. She clung to him. Together they stared at the bodies, and over them at the invader.
At the murderer.
Today Sarai had finally met her father. He had spoken the word daughter and filled an empty place inside her, and now it was empty again. He was dead at her feet. He was dead.
…wasn’t he?
Eril-Fane moved. Sarai was staring across his body at Nova when a movement caught her eye. She looked down and beheld the incredible sight of her father sitting up. He had slumped. Now he straightened. Sarai caught a glimpse of Azareen’s eyes that a moment before had been lifeless, and they were not lifeless, not anymore. They were haunted, bleary, fierce, imploring, and unmistakably alive. She sat up, too.
There was a moment when it was possible to hope.
Eril-Fane and Azareen were alive. It could not be denied. But some part of Sarai froze and waited, feeling nothing, holding off relief, because the dead don’t come back to life. Who knew that better than she? But more than that, it was the way the two were moving. It didn’t make sense. They had subsided to the floor. To pick themselves up, they ought to have had to push up with their arms. But they didn’t. They rose up like they were on strings, and…and their blood.
The blood that had pooled around them and was running in rivulets off the walkway, it was flowing back up them, back into their armor.
Their blood was pulsing back into their bodies.
Sarai and Lazlo didn’t understand what they was seeing, not when it seemed as though Eril-Fane pushed Azareen backward to teeter at the edge of the walkway, or when she regained her balance, or when their swords, which they had dropped, flew back up from the floor far below to clatter against the walkway and then…jump back into their hands?
From the corner of their eyes, they saw a bloody blue streak. It was the stinger, flying back at them. Sarai gasped when it reentered Azareen’s back and burst out through her chest before cutting again through Eril-Fane. His blood that had painted her…it peeled away from her and was sucked back inside him, and the stinger exited between his shoulder blades and shot backward, bloodless now, to the wasp whence it had first come.
“. .. what?” breathed Sarai, speechless.
Her father was only a few feet in front of her. She clearly saw that there was no hole now in his bronze backplate. It was unpierced, as though nothing had happened.
“. .. how?” asked Lazlo.
They understood that they were witnessing magic. The bubble, the field of energy. The invader possessed this gift, the extraordinary ability to turn back time. And she had used it to unkill her victims. They understood, but they didn’t trust it.
And they were right not to.
Time snapped back and it all played out again, precisely as it had before. The stinger, the blood, the dropped swords. Azareen teetered at the edge. Eril-Fane caught her and pulled her to him. He said, “Azareen. I wish…” They collapsed to their knees.
“What? My love,” Azareen pleaded. “What do you wish?”
He hadn’t answered before, and he didn’t now. Again, as before, they died.
Then it all reversed and happened again.
Eril-Fane died with his wish unspoken on his lips, its irony bitter on his tongue. I wish we could start all over again. That was what he’d wanted to say to his wife. He meant start a new life—together.
Instead it was death they would share. Again.
And again.
And again.
…
Nova couldn’t stop. There was nothing after this. So she just kept on killing him.
…
Rook’s gift was to close off a loop in space and time—a small space, a short time—so that events trapped inside happened over and over until he opened it again. Or, until Nova did, as the case may be. With her hands, in that spell-casting gesture, she had sketched the bubble around her sister’s killer. Everything inside it was trapped in the loop. It stretched from the moment the stinger disengaged from the wasp to when it fell, bloody, to the floor of the chamber—around five seconds, all told. It was meant for him, but it caught Azareen, too, because she’d gotten in the way. And so over and over they played out their deaths, aware every second of what was happening, but powerless to break the cycle. Each time the stinger cut through them, the pain burned through them anew. And each time their vision dimmed and life ebbed, the other’s anguished face was the last thing they saw.
The first time Rook ever used his gift, he’d been five years old, in the nursery. One of the toddlers had vomited right in Great Ellen’s lap. He’d thought it was funny, and wanted to see it again. When it happened again, he’d had no idea it was his doing. Then it happened again, and kept happening, all while Great Ellen grew red with rage, and the toddler’s eyes streamed frantic tears. It quickly stopped being funny.
And then it really wasn’t funny, because Korako came and took Rook away.
She’d brought him here, to this very room, as she brought Werran and Kiska after him, and hundreds before him, thousands. It was surreal for the three of them to be back in this hangar and see the wasp ships on the wall. They couldn’t see the cages within, but they would never forget them, or all that had come after. And they could never betray Nova, who had saved them.
She looked so much like Korako that the first time they saw her, they had thought she was her. But Korako had put them in cages. Nova had gotten them out. She’d killed the men who kept the keys, and anyone else who came looking for them, until finally they were left alone.
“Where did they take you?” Sarai had asked. “Are all the others alive, too?”