“Tanith bled the magic out of me,” said Caius. “It was easier to steal when I was wounded and vulnerable.”
A pall fell over the room. After a few moments of silence, Jasper said, “Your sister’s a real bitch.”
That pulled a startled laugh from Caius. “I…yes. Yes, she is.”
“But why screw with the in-between?” Echo asked. It didn’t add up. “What is she hoping to accomplish?”
With a shake of his head, Caius started in on the last banana. “If I had to hazard a guess, I would say she’s trying to sow as much chaos as possible. The ku?edra seems to thrive on it. She mentioned creating a new world from the ashes of the old, but I haven’t the foggiest idea if she means that literally. I don’t see how it would be possible.”
“Well, it seems like an awfully elaborate plan just to create a little chaos,” Dorian said. “What does tampering with the in-between accomplish? Why seek to destroy it?”
He wasn’t wrong. There had to be something they weren’t seeing. Some hidden cog in the machine that would make it all fit together. Echo drummed her fingers against her thigh. Think. Think, think, think. They were missing something—some crucial detail that, when revealed, would illuminate Tanith’s endgame. From everything Caius had told her about Tanith when they had spent months hiding in Jasper’s London warehouse, Echo knew his sister to be a cunning commander: strong on the battlefield and sly at the war table as she designed plans that lesser minds could never have dreamed up. Caius had been the youngest Dragon Prince elected in the history of the Drakharin people, and Tanith had been the youngest commander of their armies. Her elevation had nothing to do with her brother’s position; she had earned it entirely on her own merit. But the ku?edra had changed her. Echo hadn’t accounted for that. The firebird hadn’t changed her. At least, not in any way she had noticed. Beyond the obvious. The fundamentals of Echo—of who she was as a person—were the same. But the ku?edra was different; it could not be tamed or controlled. Tanith was not its vessel—she was its slave. The calculating commander would never have set in motion a series of events that might result in nothing but wild, chaotic destruction. The ku?edra craved such a thing. Tanith wouldn’t. But if there was any part of her left, as Caius so desperately hoped, then perhaps she was trying to steer that unbiddable beast in a direction not too far off from her own aims. Glory for the Drakharin. Victory against their enemies.
Zugzwang, Echo thought. German. A situation that arises in a game of chess when a player has to make a move that would harm their own position. It was not impossible to win a game once maneuvered into such a position, but it was difficult. That was where Tanith must have found herself once she’d realized what, exactly, she had let into herself. A skilled tactician could theoretically turn the tide of a game in her favor after landing in zugzwang, but the ku?edra cared not for tactics. Echo had looked into its swirling depths after it had torn through Grand Central. Caius was right. It did want chaos. It was a mad horse, champing at the bit; Tanith was its rider, attempting to rein it in. She might not be able to direct the pieces in this chess game to a neat victory, but there was one move left to her: flipping the damn board.
“It’s not the in-between she wants to destroy,” Echo said. The conversation had continued, but the others went silent at her words. She knew they were true as she spoke them, with a great, ringing clarity. The chorus of voices in the back of her mind swelled from their relative silence, words blurring together so they sounded like trees rustling in a breeze.
“Then what?” Dorian asked. “What is she trying to destroy if not the in-between?”
Echo met that single, sharp eye and said, “Everything else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The air smelled wrong.
Not the normal wrong of New York City subways, a unique pungency composed of a mixture of noxious aromas—sweltering trash, old urine, and something unidentifiable that made Ivy think of rat sweat. Not that she had ever had the opportunity to smell a particularly sweaty rat, but she imagined that was what one would smell like.
This was a different sort of wrong, hard to put a finger on. It was the nasal equivalent of staring at two nearly identical images full of nonsensical clutter and trying to find the slight variations—the discrepancies difficult to find at first, but once the eye saw them, they couldn’t be unseen.
Or, in this case, unsmelled.
The cocoa in Ivy’s hand grew less and less appetizing the more she tried to puzzle out exactly what was off about their surroundings. The subway platform was as quotidian as ever. She and Helios had migrated to the far end, where they were least likely to draw attention to themselves. That left the entirety of the station open to her inquisitive gaze. The crowd was of the usual sort: professionals coming home from a long day at the office; a cluster of high school students wearing blue blazers and khakis, probably only just leaving whatever fancy academy they attended after practicing some sport or studying for whatever standardized test plagued their existence. Ivy didn’t know what went on at human schools, but from all she had gathered, it was unpleasant. There was an artist with a large rectangular portfolio hanging over her shoulder, reeking of something that smelled like skunk but probably wasn’t. A woman taking a nap surrounded by worn shopping bags, an empty coffee cup sitting in front of her with a few coins in it. An elderly man muttering to himself as he worked his way through a book of crossword puzzles. More than a few souls still wearing scrubs, which made sense this close to the hospital.
None of them seemed perturbed by the wrongness of the air. None but Helios, who was scrunching his nose as he peered over the top of his sunglasses and looked up and down the tracks.
“Do you feel that too?” Ivy asked.
He nodded. A mostly empty coffee cup dangled from his fingertips. She wondered if he’d also lost his appetite.
“What is it?” Ivy took a step toward him, closing the distance between them until only a few inches separated the fabric of their sleeves. The air felt slightly less wrong this close to him, as if the magic innate to his presence counteracted whatever was causing the disturbance they both felt.
“I’m not sure,” said Helios. “It feels like…”
The remainder of his sentence was cut off by the rumbling of a train entering the station at their end of the platform, the wind in its wake sending the ends of Ivy’s scarf fluttering about her neck. She held the scarf in place with one hand. A weird vibe in the air would be the least of her problems if she were unmasked and her feathers revealed to a platform full of humans.