She made a sound that could have been humor or horror. “Lucky me.”

Magnus took her face in his hands, and gently kissed her lips. “No,” he murmured, flush with wonder. “Lucky me.”

She returned his kiss, first tentatively, then with growing hunger. He shifted his weight and brought them both down to the mattress, displacing a soft pouf of smoke from the sheets. Propping himself up on one elbow, he ran his open hand over her skin, caressing the dip of her waist, the curve of her hip. His hand came to rest on a few words in delicate, slanting cursive tattooed on her rib cage on her right side, and he traced them with his fingertips.

I listened to the bray of my heart; I am I am I am.

“It’s a quote from The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath,” she said quietly. “I was a huge book hound when I was young. Still am, I guess. It kept me sane, reading those words. It was validation for me. Like, I’m here, even if no one wants me to be. Even if I’m pretending to be something I’m not. Even though I’m hiding, even though I’m unseen, I still exist. I am. And no one can ever take that away from me. No matter how hard the world tries to crush it, my heart just won’t give in. I won’t give in. Ever.”

Magnus was gripped with fierce admiration. He leaned down and gave her a passionate kiss, his hand wrapped around her jaw. When he broke the kiss, she was breathless and wide-eyed beneath him.

“I had no idea talking books could get a man so worked up,” she said, laughing. “If you like I can recite a little poetry next.”

“You told me I was courageous,” he said gruffly, brushing aside her comment. “But the things I do, I do to make amends. That’s not real bravery. Of the two of us, you’re the brave one, not me.”

She looked up at him, tenderly stroked a lock of hair away from his eyes. “You don’t always have to be so hard on yourself, Magnus. Sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning is an act of courage.” Her fingers lingered on the scar tissue on the side of his face, and he looked away, jaw tightening.

She didn’t ask, though he knew she desperately wanted to. He could feel how hard she tried to hold her tongue. It wasn’t as if he would’ve answered, anyway, but he appreciated her restraint, appreciated how hard it must be for her to let the moment slide, to leave the question unasked, though they’d just shared every intimacy a man and woman could share. He closed his eyes and breathed, then turned his head and pressed a kiss to the center of her palm.

“I’ll go check to make sure they’re all right,” he said, meaning their hosts. He guessed there was no imminent danger, guessed the house had taken no more damage than their room, but he suddenly needed to get away from the unspoken words that lingered between them, silent as ghosts.

What happened to you?

What, indeed.

He swiftly rose and dressed. He left her on the bed, bare and lovely, watching him with her angel eyes, and he’d never felt such desolation. Such endless, aching loss.

He already knew the end to this fairy tale. There would be no salvation by faith, no eleventh-hour reprieve. He walked, however willingly, toward his own death, and the thing that made it more than tragic was the knowledge that he’d finally—finally—found the thing for which he’d been searching for years.

A reason to live.

He checked on the elderly couple; they were fine, if spooked by the noise and the smell of fire. The house had taken no damage, and he assured them everything was all right. When he came back in the room he shared with Lumina, he found her dressed and waiting.

“We have to go now,” she said, her voice hollow. She avoided looking directly at him.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

When finally she did meet his eyes, her own were filled with dread. “I’ve heard from Honor.” There was a long, terrible pause. “We don’t have as much time as we thought.”

And so they left. They rode as fast as the bikes would take them to their next stop, pausing only to recharge the batteries and wolf down some food, then were on their way once more, betting against the odds they could make it to their next-to-last stop before sunrise. They did, but barely. They were welcomed by more kind-faced strangers, fed again, shown to another cramped bedroom. They slept. And when they awoke, they made love with feverish, desperate hunger, both of them knowing that tomorrow would change everything. Tomorrow would be both an end, and a new beginning.

Tomorrow they would arrive in New Vienna, and the wheel of Fate would spin once again.

PART FOUR

TWENTY-NINE

Sebastian Thorne was a man used to getting his own way.

Even as a child, he’d been fearlessly single-minded, permitting himself only one day a week when he didn’t study his beloved molecular biology. On that day he studied biochemistry instead. He’d developed an unnatural passion for both subjects and could, by the age of twelve, best his professors at school with theories so far advanced his elders merely looked at one another with raised brows and shrugged shoulders, admitting their precocious pupil was an anomaly whom they had little idea how to handle.

Knowing as he did that almost ninety-nine percent of the mass of a human body is composed of just six elements, young Sebastian Thorne became obsessed with the question of why. Why is a dangerous question, even for the most learned and wise of adults, but for a child with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a moral code one could only describe as flexible, the question of why led to a brief but intense interest in religion, and the ultimate meaning of life.

He soon dismissed religion as the tool man used to manage his existential terror of death. God, Allah, Yahweh, Satnam, whatever name you used, in essence they were all the same thing: manufactured punishment and reward systems for weak-minded people. To live without believing in God was, in Sebastian Thorne’s opinion, true courage. Only cowards needed to ascribe divine power to the chaos of the universe, and he was no coward.

He was a visionary. Or so he liked to think.

So religion went by the wayside, as did anything else that interfered with his ruthless intellectual curiosity. He grew to a man, he built a successful company, he married, he had a child of his own.

Then the chaos of the universe paid him a personal visit, and Sebastian Thorne’s carefully controlled world was turned upside down.

His wife fell ill. She was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic defect that caused abrupt, coordinated failure of the major organs of the body, as if a timer had been set, and counted down to zero. Technology in the form of life support kept her functioning, but in reality his wife was dead.

Several years later, his daughter fell victim to the same malady, courtesy of her mother’s genes.

It was then Thorne was gripped by a new obsession: finding a cure.

On a safari he’d taken years prior in Africa, he’d heard a local legend about creatures who looked like humans, but were stronger, faster, altogether better. More intriguing was their purported ability to change shape as they desired, shifting from animal to human to the mist that was a constant of the rainforests from whence they came. These creatures were called Ikati, meaning cat warrior in ancient Zulu. When his wife and daughter fell ill, Thorne remembered the story, and his search began.