Page 169 of By the Lockpick and the Lyre

“Are you kidding? Barberro is practically pissing himself with excitement.”

The giant faerie hoisted up the thing he and Nara had been working on ever since I’d given them those metals from the human territories. Slightly bigger than his head, the cannonball was made of iron, steel, and lead, and magically-modified to target a very specific type of antipower. To disrupt it beyond repair.

In theory, at least. Only one way to find out.

Rubbing their palms, Sasha and Sylvie used their Object Summoning to lift the cannonball from Barberro’s arms and pull it back, back, back, as if it had been hooked in some kind of giant invisible slingshot.

Beneath the wash of starlight, it looked like a floating moon.

All around us, the din of shouting, screaming, alarms, explosions—of battle—had already begun to shake the ship. I hardly heard any of it over the rush of blood in my ears. Over how Rayna had called my name and what Fate had declared.

“Fire,” I told the twins.

And the cannonball surged forward, crashing into Dyonisia’s web.

CHAPTER

RAYNA

A boom rattled the prison floor, and my eyes flashed open.

I was back in my cell, no longer contained within the confines of my own mind or in the deadly hallway of that in-between world, reaching for Coen with all my might. Dyonisia was gone. So were the elites, Gregor Bilderas, and…

“Jagaros?” I whispered into the shadows beyond my cell.

Nothing answered besides a flutter of shelled wings near my ear.

“Friend said you might need company,” the rhinoceros beetle chirped as it whirred around and around my shoulder. “Friend says you were screaming in your sleep. Friend is worried for you.”

“I–I’m okay,” I told Nuisance, pulling myself up with a groan.

I wasn’t okay, exactly, and I hadn’t been asleep. No, what had just happened to me in the last hour alone—the final torture method Dyonisia had inflicted followed by Fate’s declaration—had permanently altered my very being.

I flexed my fingers, staring at them before a flickering of Dyonisia’s antipower caught my attention. Squinting at it, I frowned at the misty strings.

Were they thinner? And more translucent than before?

Before I could second-guess it, I reached out a hand. My fingertip grazed one of the strings and…

Didn’t curl with excruciating pain. Only a slight sting thrummed against my skin. As if her antipower had weakened from the force of that boom.

More eagerly now, I trained my eyes on a piece of rubble beyond my cell door—firmly latched and locked once more—and tried to conjure it.

My Object Summoning hands remained motionless. They still couldn’t operate within Dyonisia’s web of antipower, but at least I wasn’t jerking in pain when I stretched out a foot and sliced right through that mist.

“Gileon?” I whispered, scrambling upward. “Gileon!”

“I’m here,” came his voice. Still a bit slurred, but obviously intact, thank God. Dyonisia must have been so focused on me that she hadn’t done any more damage to him. “Are you okay, Rayna? I-I’m sorry they hurt you.”

“They’re about to be sorry, too,” I said, a dark seed sprouting in my chest where it hadn’t been before. “I think Dyonisia’s antipower is weakening.”

“You mean we can—?”

“Touch it, yes.” To prove it to both him and myself, I forged my way forward, through the mist and to my cell door, hands curling around the bars. If only Dyonisia’s antipower had weakened a little bit more, I’d be able to lockpick us all out with my magic. “I don’t suppose you’re strong enough to pry these things apart, are you, Gil?” I asked with a half-laugh.

“He might not be,” another voice coughed out between us. “But I am.”