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“She isn’t!” It came to me in a moment of triumph. “I’ve seen her! In the hospital. She’s lying there in bed.” She had been pink and vital and alive.

“Her body is. That is the ruin that Alan Gar left for Rose’s mother. A warm body to weep over. Everything that was Rose Penrose, everything beyond the flesh and the blood and the bones, lies at our feet.”

“You can put them back together!” I’d been grasping at straws my whole life. I needed to catch hold of one at long last. “You can do it.”

“But I did not.”

“What…the hell…are you talking about?” I stood in front of her now, just inches between us, me trying to drill holes into her with the force of my glare.

“Time is not a river. I see it all.”

“You can do it, but you won’t?”

“It lies, lay, and will lie within my capability. But I did not, will not, am not doing it.”

“If I did it…” I looked back at the stone circle. Nobody was moving. Not even the wind. “If I—what did you call it? Took the white? I could do it, right?”

“You would be capable.” The assistant lifted a finger, and we stood in the forest of pools again, the Exchange, seeing Rose’s image on the surface of the water. “You would see time as I do, though, with perfect crystal clarity, in which the desires of the ‘now’ are lost in the vastness of possibility and completeness.”

“You’re telling me I wouldn’t want to help her?”

The assistant paused, and before she could answer, a harsh voice broke the silence for her. “Don’t believe everything that one says.”

A woman with wild black hair stood behind me, supporting herself with one arm against the nearest tree while the other one hugged her chest as if she’d suffered some great hurt. She looked out of her time, not like the people of the circle, but wearing too many shawls and skirts, too ragged, dirty, and homemade to make me believe she’d walked the same streets I had. The witch! The witch I thought the Smith had killed.

“She thinks she knows everything,” the woman continued. “But she doesn’t know all ends. You follow your own path, Red.” She winced and shifted position. “Don’t sacrifice yourself for the girl, though.”

“Why do you care?” Suspicion narrowed my gaze.

“You broke the curse on my book, young man.” She spat blood into the grass. “Hannah Cooper. Pleased to meet you.” She looked from me to the assistant and back. “This white creature, she just wants you to stop scaring the Library. Cracks are dangerous. She wants you healed and changed, or in the white, safely sealed away. You’ve got hard choices. Own them.”

“She ain’t wrong, yoot.”

I spun around, and there was Grandma Josephine, supported by Olivia. The old woman looked unsettled, eyeing the trees and the pools, but too proud to let it show through as more than a glimmer here and there. Olivia, on the other hand, couldn’t have looked more surprised if you’d teleported her to the Moon, and to be honest, it might have been her grandmother supporting her rather than the other way around.

“She ain’t entirely in your corner, but she ain’t wrong.”

Hannah straightened and dropped her arm, revealing a blood-soaked hole in her chest. She eyed Grandma Josephine and gave a superior sniff. “I’m surprised to see a witch of this age who can find her way to the Exchange.”

The old woman arched her brow, determined not to show how out of her depth she might be. “We’re here for the boy. Any witch worth her salt can write herself into a story, can’t she, ’Livia?”

She came forward and took my pale hands in her dark, dry ones. “Now you, Red, you’ve done a noble thing here. And whether you come to regret it or not, that won’t change that you were the hero we needed. But she’s right. You gotta choose this. Not for Rose. Even if it works, she won’t owe you anything—”

“I don’t want her to—”

The old woman squeezed my fingers. “Still. It has to be said. If she’s your friend. If you want to help her…”

Was Rose my friend? We’d spent so little time. Said so little. “I want to help her because it’s right.” The truth was that I wanted to help her because I’d wanted someone to help me. To help me and Sophie. I’d wanted it so badly. And nobody ever came. Not really. I wanted to help Rose just to show that the world could have that in it. Something good. Even if it was me.

And before anyone starts thinking I’m that brave…what else was there for me? To become someone else. Red Mark II, wearing my face but not being quite me, not having whatever it was that made me me, that let me bug my sister so badly…Or to live as me, under the curse that not even Hannah Cooper could break. A thousand years of gathering up my hurts.

At least in the white a thousand years could come and go and not even weigh on my shoulders.

I was a crack in the world. Cracked. The terror of falling into pieces as our mother had was a horror that had haunted me, every year of my life, every month, week, and day. The assistant offered me sanity, an escape from both the witch’s curse and from my own, a chance to save Rose—and God knows she deserved something good—and I would get a job like Xavier’s, on steroids.

I turned toward the assistant. “I want to do it. To be part of the Library.”

Olivia stared at me, blinking, tears filling her eyes, and goddammit, I did feel like a hero for a moment.