One side of his face was illuminated. The smooth, unmangled side.

The rush of recognition felt like stepping off a ledge and free-falling. Like remembering something she’d forgotten, something important, dizzying relief and elation and the startling urge to laugh and cry at once.

“Magnus,” she whispered.

His lips parted. His dark eyes grew fierce.

Then the fireworks faded, her lids slid closed, and Lu sank back into the waiting darkness.

When next she awoke, Lu was certain she was dreaming for three reasons. One, she couldn’t hear anything. Two, it was cold. Not just cold. Freezing. The teeth-chattering, body-shaking, curl-into-a-ball-and-want-to-die kind of cold . . . the kind Lu had never felt in her life.

And three, she was flying.

Pain was still carving molten pathways along her nerve endings, but her mind was slightly clearer, the pressure in her chest slightly less. She was able to lift her head to try to get a better look at her surroundings, but her stomach violently rebelled against that idea, sending the acid bite of bile into the back of her throat. She clenched shut her eyes again, but the one brief glimpse had been enough.

She was lying on her back on an unforgivingly hard surface, covered by a heavy piece of canvas, wedged between a wall and the back of two seats. A man was strapped into one of the seats with his back to her, a pair of headphones over his head, his big hands gripped around a wheel that protruded from a console forested with a million colored buttons and digital gauges. From this angle, he could have been anyone, save for the breadth of his shoulders, the thick, corded muscles of his forearms that showed beneath his rolled up shirtsleeves, and the hatched scars marring his knuckles. There was that hair, too, thick and inky black, its shine like sunlight on water, so different from any she’d seen before.

Never seen sunlight on water, she thought, still groggy. How would I know?

In front of him was an expanse of curved glass. Far beyond that in the shimmering distance loomed the jagged peaks of a mountain range, emerald and dusky gray in the morning light.

Which made no sense whatsoever. If it was daylight, everything should be tainted red. Crimson, crimson everywhere, like an endless sea of blood. Even those clouds that wreathed the highest peaks were all wrong. They weren’t the roiling, angry thunderheads lurking always over New Vienna, casting bloody shadows over everything below.

These clouds were soft and fluffy, white as goose down. They almost looked cheerful.

Lu opened her eyes again, blinking into the brightness, desperate for another look at those happy clouds. Could they be real?

As if sensing she was awake, the man turned his head to look at her, and Lu saw him in profile.

Not a dream after all. In this light, his scarred face was even more startling.

“We’re almost there,” said Magnus. His voice sounded scratchy and tinny, as if coming from far away. Why couldn’t she hear him right? She lifted a hand to her head and felt a bun of cold metal over her ear; she wore headphones, too.

“Protection. For the noise,” he explained, seeing her bewilderment. Those dark, dark eyes met hers, and the snap of connection felt like a plug shoved into a socket.

Electric. Humming. Complete.

He held her gaze for a moment, then turned away, the corners of his lips tugged into a frown.

“Almost where?”

Either Magnus didn’t hear or didn’t want to respond, because he didn’t answer. He didn’t turn around again.

SIX

“A PHONE!” screamed the Grand Minister. “BRING ME A FUCKING PHONE!”

For the hundredth time since being dragged from the rubble of the Hospice and lifted to the gurney that had rushed him to the hospital where his badly burned body—what was left of it from all his previous entanglements with the Aberrants—was now being hurtled down a corridor on the way to a surgical suite, his screams were ignored.

Goddamned do-gooders.

He was going to ensure every one of these pieces of shit was strung up and hanged, their corpses left to rot until even the birds weren’t interested in their dried remains. The EMTs: hanged. The ambulance driver: hanged. The nurses in the ER: hanged. And every single worthless pile of good-for-nothing crap currently running alongside his squeaky-wheeled gurney: hanged. Or maybe publicly decapitated, then hanged from their ankles until their rotted legs separated from their bodies and their headless, legless torsos fell with the unholy thud of dead meat to the ground.

There would be hell to pay for ignoring his commands.

He’d been spared the total barbecuing suffered by a good portion of his men due to pure luck. The desk he’d been sitting behind in the Hospice Administrator’s office had been made of industrial-grade steel, and when the thing calling itself Lumina Bohn had turned the air to fire, a gust of heated wind had preceded the blaze. Fortune had been on his side; he was thrown against the wall, the desk was blown apart, the steel desktop had wedged itself between him and the she-devil, and he’d been saved.

Or at least not altogether roasted, as his men had been.

“PHOOOOOOONE!” the Grand Minister howled, eliciting a kindly cluck of comfort from one of the nurses running alongside his gurney. She patted his shoulder.

“Everything is going to be fine. You’re safe now. We’ll take care of you,” the nurse said gently, patting him again.

This one he’d kill himself.

He continued to scream and thrash all the way down the corridor and into the surgical suite. He screamed as the doctors lifted his body from the gurney to an operating table, screamed as they cut his melted suit from his flesh. Finally, just before someone leaned in to cover his face with an oxygen mask, one of his men burst into the room. He shoved the staff aside, toppling them like so many toy soldiers.

“Escaped!” Hans spat, ignoring the cries of outraged medical personnel around him. “Vanished near the waste treatment plant. She must’ve had help.”

The Grand Minister reached out and curled his hand around the lapel of Hans’s jacket, jerking him down with the strength of a much younger man. He’d been badly injured so many times before the pain was like a visit from an old friend, and he welcomed it. Pain kept the mind sharp. Pain reminded him what the stakes were.

Pain was a tool that could harden a man’s will, and the Grand Minister’s will had been honed to lethal solidity.

“Get me Thorne,” he hissed into Hans’s face. He was instantly obeyed as Hans withdrew a cell phone from his pocket. While the room fell into shocked silence and stillness at the mention of Thorne’s name, Hans hit a button, then held the phone to the Grand Minister’s ear.

It rang once. The call was answered, but no greeting came over the line. There was never a greeting. Only that heavy, ominous silence waited, its chill and darkness that of a tomb.

“We’ve been wrong all along!” he rasped, his throat raw from screaming. “It wasn’t that bitch of a Queen of theirs who brought us down in Manaus. It was her daughter.”

The silence on the other end of the phone throbbed. Then the man who ruled what remained of the world spoke only two words before he disconnected.