My heart fell. Every hair on my body stood at attention.
The Red Queen was on the ground, face first, her armover the side of it so I didn’t see her eyes, but she wasn’t moving.
And the White Queen was already standing from where she’d fallen on her back.
She was standing, wiping dirt off her cheek, rubbing her hands together while she looked at whom she’d calleda sisterfor decades like she was disgusted.
“There,” she said and went closer, touched the Red Queen’s leg with the tip of her white shoe.
She didn’t stir. Didn’t wake up. I wanted to think her torso was moving slightly—she was breathing, alive—but I couldn’t be too sure.
“You always were too sentimental for this job, anyway.”
And the White Queen turned to us.
Her eyes were wild, her hair all over the place. The mask she wore today—and the first time I met her, and the last before I forgot—was gone. What was underneath was not a queen but a woman who was enraged. Who was about to unleash everything she had onto the world.
“Eh, I guess death is better, after all. Easier. Less messy.” She rubbed her hands together, raised them, and a little light was already shining in her palms.
“No,” I breathed, and a few others did, too, and we were dragging ourselves backward on instinct, though we knew there was nowhere to go. Soldiers were right behind us, a wall of them with their armor and their swords. March tried to push me back behind him anyway, but it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered anymore. If even the Red Queen couldn’t stop this woman, we were doomed for real.
“We’ll try,” Silas whispered while the White Queen closed her eyes and cranked her neck to the sides and worked her hands together as the light between them expanded, grew more intense. It wasn’t just white now—it had strings ofpurple in it, too. Two magics at once—how strange. I never knew it was possible.
I never knew a lot of things were possible, but I did want totry, whatever that meant.
“We’ll try,” Silas repeated—and he was talking to Master Talik, who had two chronobanks in his hands, one silver and one gold.
The old man nodded, offered the silver chronobank to Silas, who eagerly took it.
“We’ll try,” said Seth and Mimi and Levana, and I nodded, too. Whatevertryingmeant, we weren’t going to go down without a fight. At least we wouldn’t die kneeling, would we?
The queen’s hands rose. The Red one was still on the ground, as motionless as Reggie.
“On three,” said Silas, and I still had no idea what we were going to do, but we would be getting up. It wasn’t that difficult to figure out—we’d charge for the queen, no matter that the soldiers would get to us before we got to her. We’d still try.
“Three…”
His voice was barely there, and the light in the queen’s hands was almost her size now. We couldn’t see her face at all from the brightness as she gathered more and more and more…
One blast, and it was going to kill us. That big a charge of magic was going to fry every second in our bodies.
“Two…”
I swallowed hard, squeezed March’s hand for one last time.
He leaned in to kiss my temple, and to whisper in my ear, “I love you, too, Velvet.”
In that split second, I lived three timelines. Three different lives.
And in all of them I fell from him—in that split second.
I was in that ballroom, a mask in my hand, whispering to him that I loved him, asking him to find me.
Find me, Heartling. Find me.
He had.
