“She is dead,” Tetsyev said dully. “We must leave immediately.”
“We?”
Tetsyev reached to a bag on the ground, pulled out stripsof gauze, and began to wrap her midriff. “Listen carefully. The siphons are only a part of it all. There is a bigger picture to this—a much, much greater plan she has chartered for our world.”
His words tugged on a memory just beyond her grasp at the moment. Before she could make out the meaning, there came movement from the Salskoff Palace. A sharp gale gusted past them, rippling over the rooftops of dachas and stirring the surface of the Tiger’s Tail. The waters roared, churning with a viciousness, a hunger.
The Palace gates were opening, stone grinding on snow. From within, pouring out in immutable waves of white and gray livery, came an army of Imperial Patrols. In their midst, a rock in a wending river, was their Empress astride a valkryf white as bone.
She turned her gaze, and those cold, still eyes came to a rest on the Kateryanna Bridge.
To where Sorsha lay.
Ana thrust herself to her feet. She could feel the newly knitted flesh on her wound tearing from the movement, pain splicing through Tetsyev’s healing salves as she began to walk. Warmth leaked down her side, but she didn’t stop.
She staggered up the steps of the bridge and dropped down next to Sorsha’s body. Sorsha’s left arm hung limp, bent at an odd angle, and there, against her wrist, was the ocean-colored band Ana had searched for. Whereas previously, it had clung tight to Sorsha’s flesh as though it had been welded into her skin, it now hung loose like a regular bracelet.
Ana’s fingers closed around it just as Morganya’s Affinity found her. The Empress’s power twined around Ana, squeezingand twisting and burrowing its way into her flesh with poisonwrath. Ana barely had time to draw breath, to clutch thesiphon as tightly as she could, before she was flung back through the air.
Her body cracked across the stones of the bridge, skidding back to the steps, trailing snow in its wake. Pain exploded in her shoulder and across her back so that, for several moments, she could only lie there, stunned and attempting to draw breath.
Dimly, she heard Daya shout her name.
But all that mattered, in this moment, was the band Ana held in her grasp. The morning light reflected on it, but its surface swirled as though it held rivers, lakes, entire oceans within its turquoise patterns.
Ears ringing, head singing, she looked up to see Morganya lift Sorsha’s body. The girl’s head tipped back, exposing the bare flesh of her neck; her arms and legs flayed out like a rag doll’s. And, at her waist, looped into the leather of her belt, came a glimmer of green.
The second siphon.
Horror washed over Ana.
“Ana!” Daya yelled again. Her voice sounded very distant; the world slowed as Ana watched Morganya’s hands close around thesecond siphon. Her own fingers still tightly gripped the first, the one Sorsha had worn and used.
Somewhere deep inside, she knew how this would unfold.
Theonlyway it could unfold.
Morganya and Ana raised their siphons, and at the same time plunged their hands through.
—
The world fractured. The colors leaked, rendering her sight in monochrome: gray sky, pale palace, white river, black bridge, allfaint as though she were seeing them through a frosted-glass window.
Amid it all, there came sensations. They churned into the empty pit of her belly where her blood Affinity had once rested, and she tasted them deep inside. They warmed her mind, and she found that each tug of a thought rang a different note. Crimson blood, bright fire; steady earth and sharp iron, clear water and cold stone, blending in her head in a blur of consciousness, a chaotic harmony.
Affinities.
They spun faster and faster, growing louder and brighter, each demanding her control, each needing a piece of her. Her mind—it was splitting into too many fragments—any more, and—
She screamed then, expunging them from her head in the only way she knew how. By instinct, as though she were using her Affinity again, she pushed.
The world coalesced, sharp sounds and garish light. Her mind seemed to have cracked like a pane of glass, splitting into fragments, each reflecting a different view. The grind of stone and marble, the deluge of river water, the trembling of the earth, the burning of blood. A colossal rift had split the Kateryanna Bridge in two: she on one side, Morganya on the other. They were both bent over the ground, hands clutched to their heads.
An echo of Ana’s name from somewhere behind her; she turned to see Daya waving at her from the riverside promenade. The ground had cracked, giant crevices running jagged along the streets. There were bodies, tucked away behind dachas and alleyways; she could sense them all, she could sense their—
Blood.
Her throat closed; she looked down at her wrist, where thesiphon nested against her flesh like a part of her skin. It glowed. She could see shimmering threads of light weaving like veins just below the surface of her skin.
