“I can’t believe he would . . . ,” she started to say, but her words fell silent.
But it would explain so much about how tense the last couple of days had been at the Strega, about why Nibs had insisted on the gun against her back. “You were in the hall with us,” she argued. “You can’t know—”
“I know what he intended to do,” Harte continued, his voice urgent. But he wouldn’t look directly at her. “For all his ability to see how things will turn out, he wasn’t expecting me to punch him that night you got taken to the Tombs.”
She glanced back at Nibs, his face frozen in a sort of strangled fury, and she saw him suddenly in a different light. She’d been a fool not to see it all along.
“He’s been pulling Dolph’s strings the whole time. Dolph had no idea.”
Esta shook her head again, wanting to deny everything he was telling her. It had to be more of his lies. “You should have warned Dolph.”
“I couldn’t,” Harte said, not meeting her eyes. “Nibs had my mother, and I’ve already wronged her enough in my life. I couldn’t do anything more to her. I thought I could work around Nibs. I thought I could get you out too, but things didn’t go quite as I planned that night.”
“You should have told me.”
“I couldn’t chance him finding out that you knew. The only way I could figure to get around him was to keep you working blind. There was too much at stake.”
“You mean like Dolph’s life?” she argued.
“I never meant for Dolph to die, but this was bigger than Dolph’s life, Esta. He understood that. Nibs cannot get the Book. Do you understand me? He doesn’t want to free the Mageus from the city. He wants to rule them. To use them—us—against the Sundren.” His jaw clenched. “The Book’s dangerous, Esta. It’s not what you think—it’s not what any of us thought. In the wrong hands, it would give someone devastating power. If Nibs were the one to control it, he’d be able to make himself more powerful than any Mageus who’s ever lived. I can’t imagine the devastation that would follow. No one would be safe.”
“I can’t . . .” The enormity of what he was saying felt unbelievable. “Why now? Why tell me all of this when it’s too late to do anything?”
“Because it’s not too late for you,” he said. “I’m giving you a way out.”
He took her hand and placed something heavy and smooth into her palm. The cuff with her stone. Immediately, she felt the warmth of it. The sureness of its power calling to her.
“Do what you need to do, but either way, get yourself out and take the Book with you. You can’t let either Nibs or Jack get ahold of it. Everything depends upon that. Do you understand? Take it where they can’t follow.”
“But I—”
“Do you understand?” he demanded again.
“What about you?” she asked, still looking for the angle, the indication that this was all part of a larger game for him.
“I’m dead either way. The Book—it’s not a normal book. It’s like some sort of living thing.” He grimaced, and then he met her eyes. The gray irises that had become so familiar to her were different now. She thought she could see something more than her own reflection in them, colors that she didn’t have names for flashing in their depths. “When I touched it, I read it more easily than I can read a person. I’ve seen what’s in there, and it’s a part of me now. Even if you take the Book to where they can’t reach it, the Order won’t ever stop hunting me.” He shook his head. “I can’t risk that. If they see me jump and see me die, they won’t have any reason to hunt you . . . or anyone else. You want to protect the people Dolph was protecting? This is the only way.” He gave her a heartbreaking smile. “Whatever happens, the great Harte Darrigan won’t soon be forgotten after what I do here today.”
Her heart ached. Yes, you will, she knew. If he jumped from that bridge, no one would remember him in a week or a month, and definitely not over the years.
“So we bring down the Brink before that happens,” she told him. “We free everyone right now and take the Order’s power away from them.” It wasn’t the job she’d been sent to do, but it was what Professor Lachlan intended anyway, she reasoned.
“You don’t understand. None of us do. The Brink isn’t just a prison, Esta. It was built to protect magic. If it comes down, it won’t free Mageus. Think about Tilly—when Jack’s machine blew up, it took her life with it. Destroying the Brink would do the same thing. It would destroy any magic that it’s taken, and when it does that, it would break everything connected to that magic. You, me, every Mageus who exists is connected to the old magic. When part of that dies, so will ours. And without our magic . . .” He couldn’t finish.
She didn’t have words to respond to him. It was too ridiculous and too big a lie to be believed. The Brink was what killed them, not what protected them.
“You can’t expect me to believe that.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” He swallowed hard, his mouth tight. “If the Book had offered me a way out of the city, don’t you think I’d be gone? Do you really think I’d be here, in the middle of this circus otherwise? I could have used the Book to get through the Brink, but the magic in the Book is too powerful. The Brink itself might not have held. Jack told me how they made the Brink—connecting the elements through Aether. The Order has been trying to find a way to make it larger and more powerful, but Jack told me the connections through the Aether are too unstable. The Book might have been able to get me through, but that much magic could be enough to overload the circuit. And if that happens, it would be worse than any electrical outage.”
“Because it would make magic go dark,” she said, slowly putting the pieces together.
“Exactly. If I could have gotten out, I would have. I would have even taken you with me. But I can’t risk destroying the circuit through the Aether. I’m still here because there’s no way out without destroying the entire Brink, and to destroy it would be to threaten all magic. All Mageus. There’s no way out for me, so I’m trusting you to help me finish this.”
She stared at him, searching for the crack in the mask that would expose the lie in what he was telling her. But she did believe one thing—if there was a way out of the city, if there was a way through the Brink, Harte Darrigan would have taken it already.
But he hadn’t.
Even now he was giving the Book to her and giving up the one thing he’d wanted from the beginning. If that wasn’t enough to convince her, the fear in his stormy eyes was.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” she said. There were a million other questions she needed to ask. There had to be another way. “I can’t—”