The first indication that something was wrong was the entrance to Professor Lachlan’s Orchard Street building. When Dakari got them back, the building looked the same from the outside, but inside, things had changed. There was a new, ultramodern lobby, complete with a security desk and a guard she’d never seen before. And extra security measures on every floor, at every door.
The building had always been something of a fortress, an odd place to call home, but now its austerity made the unseen threats outside its walls seem that much more foreboding.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The brightly lit workroom in the basement of their building, where Mari once had produced everything the team needed, was nothing more than a dusty storage closet. Esta had returned from 1926 to find Mari was gone.
It wasn’t just that Mari was no longer part of their team. Mari no longer even existed.
Esta had used every skill she’d learned over the years from Professor Lachlan to look for her friend. She’d searched immigration records and ancestry registries for some sign of Mari or her family, but instead Esta had found the unsettling evidence that her world had somehow changed.
It was more than Mari’s disappearance. Small shifts and subtle differences told Esta the Order of Ortus Aurea had grown stronger and become emboldened in the late twenties and beyond, when they hadn’t before. Waves of deportations. Riots that hadn’t existed before. A change in who had been president here and there. All the evidence showed that the Order was more powerful now than they had been before Esta and Logan went to steal the Pharaoh’s Heart.
With shaking hands, Esta did the one search she’d been dreading—the night of the heist. She had to know if that had been the source of the changes. She had to be sure.
She wasn’t surprised to find herself inserted in the historical record where she never should have been. Not by name, of course. No one there that night could have known who she was. But she found a small article that talked about the break-in and the theft of the Pharaoh’s Heart.
They knew she’d taken the real dagger.
And from the sparse two inches of print, it was clear they knew that Mageus were behind it.
She’d underestimated the danger they faced. She’d been raised to defeat the Order, trained since she was a young girl in all the skills necessary to do just that. Esta had read the history—public and private—and spent her childhood learning about the devastating effects the Order had on Mageus in the past. She trained daily with Dakari so that she could fight and defend herself against any attack, and still she hadn’t truly understood. Maybe it was because the Order of Ortus Aurea and all they’d done so long ago seemed more like myth than reality. The stories had been so monstrous, but in actuality, the Order itself had always been little more than a shadow haunting the periphery of Esta’s vision, the boogeyman in her unopened closet. It had been so easy to slip through time, to take things from right under their noses, that she’d never understood . . . not really.
Yes, the Order had created the Brink, and yes, that invisible barrier had effectively stripped the country of magic—and Mageus—over the years. Maybe there had once been a time when everyone knew magic existed, and certainly there was a time when people feared and persecuted those who had it, but by the end of the twentieth century, old magic—natural magic—had been mostly forgotten. A fairy tale. And as the public forgot magic, they forgot their fears. The Order had gone underground. It was still a threat to those few Mageus left, of course, but without public support, it operated in secret and its strikes were limited.
The changes in the Professor’s building, the small differences in the history books, and, most personally, the erasure of Mari’s very existence made Esta think that might no longer be the case.
She had caused this.
In the choices she’d made, she had somehow traded Logan’s life for Mari’s, traded the relative safety that had been her life for this other, unknown future. She hadn’t even realized that was possible.
She had known that traveling to other times carried risks, but Professor Lachlan had taught her that time was something like a book: You could remove a page, scratch out a word here and there, and the story remained the same except for the small gaps. He had always believed it would take something monumental to change the ending.
Apparently exposing her powers to save Logan had been enough.
? ? ?
Three days after she brought Logan back, Esta found herself sitting at the end of his bed, watching his slow, steady breathing. He’d lost a lot of blood, and Dakari’s affinity for healing hadn’t been strong enough to stave off the infection his body was fighting. He still hadn’t come to.
It wasn’t that she’d ever been particularly close to Logan, but he was a part of the Professor’s team. They needed him. And seeing him pale and so very still shook her more than she would have expected.
She knew the moment Professor Lachlan entered the room, his soft steps punctuated by the click of the crutch he used. Esta didn’t turn to greet him, though, not even when he took a few steps through the door and paused as he often did when he had something to discuss with her.
“Don’t say it. Please—don’t even say it.”
“Perhaps I was going to thank you for saving him.”
“Bull.” She did turn then. Professor Lachlan hadn’t moved from the doorway. He was leaning, as usual, on his silver crutch.
She wasn’t sure exactly how old he was, but despite his advanced years, the Professor was still fit and slender. He was dressed in the same uniform of tweed pants and a rumpled oxford shirt he’d worn when lecturing to scores of undergraduates at Columbia over the years. He was a small man, not much taller than Esta herself when he straightened, and at first glance most people overlooked him, often dismissing him as too old to be worth worrying about.
Most people were idiots.
The cataracts that had plagued him for years clouded his eyes, but even so, they were astute, alert. ?Three days ago, when she’d told him what had happened and tried to explain about Mari, he’d simply listened with the same impassive expression he usually wore, and then he’d dismissed her. ?They hadn’t talked since.
“You were going to tell me I broke the most important rule,” Esta said. She’d been waiting for this lecture for three days now. “I put us all at risk by blowing our cover and exposing what we were to the Order. I already know that,” she said, feeling the pang of Mari’s loss more sharply.
“Well, then. It’s good of you to save me the trouble.” He didn’t smile. “We need to talk,” he said after a moment. “Come with me.”