“I saved him,” I said. “Not you. And I’ll save Ethan.”
“Lucie,” Aunt Leila said, obviously trying to be patient, “I don’t understand the way you are acting. I spent so long planning for us to be reunited. I rallied the sans-merci to bring you back to me. I told them what had been done to you and to my sister, and they rose up to reunite us. I thought of you every day of the two years of your exile. And now . . .”
“And did you think that nothing would happen to me in two years? Did you think this is what you were going to do to me, once you got me back?”
Aunt Leila looked annoyed, as frustrated as a parent with a child who could not understand their homework. Her determination did not even waver. She did not take me seriously at all.
“We are finally together again. The city is ours, and justice is being done. Can’t you be good?”
She walked over to where I was sitting and gently stroked my hair back from my face, and I knew then what I had not known when we were separated by exile and time: that she was lost.
She acted like I was a little girl who would accept Carwyn instead of Ethan as if they were dolls. Neither of them was real to her. Even I was hardly real to her. Maybe the child she had loved was real, but that was not me. Not any longer.
I whispered to her, “You should know me better than that.”
Outside, I could still hear the murmuring of a crowd, like the turbulent air before the violence of a storm.
“And you should know me better than to think you could save him. You should remember better. Tell the wind and fire where to stop,” said Aunt Leila. “But do not tell me.”
She should have remembered that my grandmother was the first to say those words, when people said she could not save the man she loved.
She should have remembered that she had taught me to be unstoppable too.
When she let me leave the hotel, she thought I was going back to Penelope’s apartment, but I did not. The subway was running again, and I took it downtown. I followed the path to the Dark city, to the ruined wall, along the single remaining bridge. I went back to be buried again, back home.
The Dark city was not as different from the Light city as I had recalled. It did not bring back memories of standing with Dad in the cemetery, of crawling home every night too spent even to weep. It felt familiar in a different way. There were streets I knew, and a skyline I had seen from my bedroom every night. There had been more to my life here than the end.
I felt different, though. There was so much to be worried about, but I wasn’t worried. I had a single focus and I was heading toward it.
My aunt and I had walked past the clock tower many times when I was a child. She used to tell me how the windows of the tall gray building had once looked out on another bridge across the river, before the city was torn into Light and Dark and all but one bridge ripped down. We would walk along the wall and listen to the river sighing behind it, and my small, cold hand had felt safe in hers.
The building looked pale and stark by day, but the clocks at the top of the tower were the same as they had been during our evening walks: one of the few mechanisms in the Dark city operated by Light magic, the first tower built when Light magic came. The hands on the clocks had burned gold with magic, cutting the night up into shimmering seconds.
There was a guard at the door, wearing a band of black and scarlet on each arm.
This had been the stronghold of the Light Council’s men in the Dark city, and now the Dark had reclaimed it.
I stood on the dirty corner of the street and remembered what my aunt used to warn me about. She’d said that if you lingered on the corner too long, the Light guards at the top of the tower could see you.
Where else would they keep their prized prisoner, the one they wanted to show off as an example, but at the highest, most conspicuous point of their new fortress?
The guard at the door was young, I thought. The rebels at the hotel and around the cages in Times Square had been older, but of course they sent their most experienced and embittered to do murder. This was a prisoner being kept for display, to show the power of the sans-merci. Nobody in the Light or the Dark city would want to help a Stryker. The sans-merci did not think anybody was coming for Ethan.
I stood on the street corner and stared up at the glass face of a clock, at the lucent hands making their inexorable progress around it. Somewhere behind the gray stone and golden light was Ethan. I squinted until my eyes stung, looking up at the top of the tower, and from high above I thought I saw a pale face looking down.