I point my right arm at him. “And you still lose.”
He looks down again, then to the pedestal platform, where the corpse of Smith is lost in the raging column of fire. He looks at the broken X, then back at me, and I understand—even if I didn’t have him dead to rights, he has no way to overwrite his defeated, younger self.
The big, broad shoulders sag. The shine of victory leaves his eyes. He is old, sad, exhausted.
“I am so tired,” he says. “I hurt. All my life, I tried to do the right thing. I followed orders. But those orders…they were for the wrong things. I followed them anyway.”
He grabs his mask, tears it off, tosses it aside. He points down at my Bishop, at what was supposed to be his new body.
“Help him choose the right thing,” the ancient man says.
My scorched throat and sizzling lungs won’t let me answer him, so I nod once.
He puts his shoulders back and stands rigid.
“I am Ramses Bishop, and I am ready to finally rest.”
I flick my fingers forward. My arm tingles with deep pinpricks, then the white light flashes out and tears the black monster to pieces.
I am the wind…I am death.
I stumble, have to grab a coffin-table to stay upright. Borjigin and Barkah help my Bishop up. His face is a swollen, bloody ruin. I can’t believe he’s still alive. He coughs up globs of blood.
The other Springers swarm around us, push me stumbling through the thick smoke. I can’t see anything, so I let them guide me. I have to focus just to stay on my feet.
The sound of the flames recedes slightly, then a door creaks shut and the blaze’s roar drops to a dull crackling.
A torch flares to life. We are in a narrow hallway carved out of the Observatory’s rock. The Springers gently urge us on.
Only now do I get a good look at Barkah: leg bleeding, a blood-spotted patch over his middle eye, the other two eyes half-lidded from pain and exhaustion, his every move a source of agony. He didn’t run and hide—as badly as he was hurt, he found more of his kind and came to rescue me.
I glance at the Springer faces, and see one other that I recognize.
“Hem,” Lahfah says.
He isn’t laughing anymore. How could he, after what we’ve been through?
I gently check my nose—even the lightest touch fills my face with pain. I think it’s broken.
Bishop gently pushes Barkah and Borjigin away from him.
“I can stand on my own,” he says.
He leans a hand against the wall, takes a rattling breath, then starts walking.
We all move down the hall. I try to understand what just happened, parse out the madness of the last few minutes. O’Malley is gone (he was still in there and I killed him I KILLED HIM). I didn’t see Matilda’s body, or Gaston’s—I’m positive they’re both still alive. I tried to send Borjigin away, assuming he was weak, but he came back for me.
Borjigin saved my life, true, but without Barkah and his friends we would all be dead. The Springer prince is brave beyond words. Although he unleashed violence just now, he did so because he wants peace.
Together, we can deliver on that promise.
The corridor is long and straight—like the ones we walked on the Xolotl—but at least this one is flat.
“Matilda,” Bishop says, his voice a croaking, broken thing. “Is she dead? You’re not safe until she is.”
“She’s alive,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”
Matilda won’t stop until she gets me. And we have no idea what this city holds—she built it, maybe there are places other than the Observatory where she could wipe out my mind.
I assume Matilda got away…so where would she go?
No, that’s the wrong way to think about it—where would I go? If I was defeated, if my friends were killed, what would I do?
“Bello’s ship,” I say. “Matilda is too old to run far. She’ll try and use Bello’s ship to get back to the Xolotl. I don’t know what time it is—are we sure Aramovsky is still going to attack? If he isn’t, we can go after her.”
“He is,” Bishop says. “Aramovsky sent some of the young circle-stars out scouting on spiders. They had just come back when he ordered me here. They reported hundreds of Springers near a clearing west of the city. He said he was going to attack at dawn.”
I quickly explain what Barkah showed me about how the Springer king is luring Aramovsky in.
“Our people will be outnumbered a hundred to one,” I say. “Aramovsky is leading them into a trap.”
Borjigin shakes his head. “I don’t think so.” He’s still wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. The skin there is rubbed raw. “Before he ordered me here, I’d repaired four more spiders, so he marched with six of them. Zubiri and the others were working on other machines, but I wasn’t paying attention to them and don’t know what they might have fixed. The thing is, I fixed the cannons. All of them. The bracelets are nothing compared to what the spiders have now. Em, Aramovsky will slaughter Springers by the thousands.”