“Why?” Tristan asked. “Why does she want you?”
“She wants Lily to replace her as the leader because she’s sick. From the way she looked in Rowan’s last memory, I’d say she was dying,” Juliet answered. Everyone turned to her, surprised that she could guess this. Juliet smiled warmly at Lily. “You wouldn’t trust anyone but yourself to rule the world. So why would she?”
Lily stared at her sister, hurt.
Am I really like that, Juliet?
You tend to think you know better than everyone else, Lily. Please don’t think I’m judging you. I know it’s just the way you are.
“Come on,” Rowan said, his eyes on Lily’s troubled face. “It’s late and you all have to be alert tomorrow.”
He started shoveling sand onto the last embers of the fire.
Breakfast groaned as he hauled himself up to help. “I haven’t done any of my homework. Maybe I’ll skip school tomorrow.”
“No,” Rowan said firmly. “I need all of you to stay with Lily.”
“Give me your homework, Breakfast. I’ll do it for you,” Tristan offered as they headed up the beach.
“Thanks, but I don’t think that’d do me any good,” Breakfast said despondently. “My teachers would know I cheated because of all the right answers.”
As they walked back to Lily’s house, she could hear Tristan and Rowan speaking quietly to each other at the back of the group.
“In that last memory—that was your father?” Tristan asked.
There was a long pause. “Yeah,” Rowan replied.
“I was there. I saw my face in the crowd,” Tristan said, shaken.
Rowan laughed under his breath. “You were there for me. In my world, you and I have been stone kin since we were kids. You’re my best friend, Tristan.”
“No, seriously,” Tristan said disbelievingly.
“We fight all the time,” Rowan said.
“Constantly,” Lily chimed in, looking at them over her shoulder. “When I first got to Rowan’s world, you two bickered for hours.”
“Really?” Tristan said, cracking a smile. “About what?”
Rowan shrugged, like the answer was obvious. “What we always fight about. Her.”
“Are we in your world?” Una asked. “Breakfast and me?”
“I don’t know,” Rowan answered. “But anything’s possible.”
CHAPTER
7
Carrick got off the train they called the T. He was so used to trains running only underground that it unnerved him when, occasionally, a train would pop up from the safety of the tunnel system. Luckily, his stop was underground. Carrick made his way up the short staircase to the center of this tiny city of Boston. It was so easy to move around this world. No walls, no citizen checks, no Woven. Anyone could get on a train and go anywhere, even clear across the continent, at any time of the day or night. All one needed was money, which was unbelievably easy to steal here.
Without wards protecting the buildings, Carrick could walk up to nearly any property and let himself in without the tenants ever suspecting his presence. The “alarm systems” people used here were a joke. All Carrick had to do was cast a glamour over himself to blend seamlessly with the shadows, wait a while for a tenant to come home, and watch that tenant type in the entry code on the keypad. The same method applied to those bank machines. Watch a mark’s fingers type, pickpocket his card, and off you went with his money. Even more ridiculous were the locks and keys they used on their apartment doors. A nudge from any willstone could knock the inner tumblers into place, opening the door in a moment.