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Kit had destroyed the Riders’ enchanted horses, vanished them into nothingness. And he still didn’t know how, or if he’d ever do anything like it again. With Jem and Tessa’s help, he’d tried everything they could think of to call the power forth again: They’d gone through moldering old books, tried ley line convergences, had the Silent Brothers look inside his head for hidden memories.

Nothing had worked. The only time he felt a spark of the cold fire in him was when he used the Herondale gun, but it was faint and fleeting. As far as Kit was concerned, being the Heir was useless—all burden, no privilege. But of course he should have expected that it was why Ty had come to Cirenworth, come to him. Not because of who Kit was, but because of what he represented. Ty had made it clear that Kit, the real Kit, wasn’t that important to him four years ago.

A knock on the door cut through Kit’s spiraling thoughts. Kit took a deep breath and turned away from the backpack, a pair of socks in one hand.

“Leave me alone,” he said. He knew perfectly well he sounded like a sullen mundane teenager, but he didn’t care. He did want to be left alone, and he was a teenager. Who felt sullen.

Silence. Then the same knock again, this time louder. Kit strode across the room and threw the door open.

It was Ty. Of course it was Ty.

He’d dried himself off, so at least his hair wasn’t clinging damply to his neck in distracting tendrils. Now it looked soft and was falling over one of his eyes. He’d changed into jeans and an old blue T-shirt Kit was almost sure he remembered. But surely Ty’s old clothes wouldn’t fit him now. Maybe it was just that he still had some of the same habits, and worried at the cuffs and hems of his shirts the way he had when he was fifteen.

“Your socks have dinosaurs on them,” Ty noted. Kit didn’t have to look to know this was probably true; Tessa liked to buy him socks with funny patterns. “I went through a dinosaur phase once. I was eleven.”

Kit knew Ty well enough to know that this was simply an observation, not a jab, but he still bristled. “I said I wanted to be left alone. I’m sure you’ll get plenty of me and my dinosaur socks in New York. Along with the traffic and the weird mold that only grows in the corners of New York subway stations.”

Ty blinked. “I know you want to be left alone. But I figured you’d want to know what really happened at Pandemonium more.”

Kit opened the door wider. “It wasn’t Thais who told you what happened to Dru, was it? It was Livvy.”

Ty tensed visibly. Kit couldn’t blame him for being paranoid about being overheard. With an inner sigh, he ushered Ty into his room and shut the door behind him.

“Livvy visits me, you know,” Kit said. “Sometimes.”

“I know,” Ty said. He was standing in the middle of the room, looking a little uneasy, as if he’d spent so long forgetting about Kit that it was unnerving to be surrounded by his things. His space. Him.

Good. Be uneasy. Kit crossed his arms over his chest.

“She doesn’t tell me the things you talk about,” Ty said.

Kit grunted, which was not in his normal repertoire. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of guy who grunted. But he did weird things when Ty was around. He always had. “All right,” he said. “You lied to Jem and Tessa. You don’t want to go to New York. You clearly have some other idea about what we should be doing. So what’s the truth? I assume it’s more than just ‘I heard what happened from Livvy.’ ”

“You know why I had to lie,” Ty said, quietly.

“I know that what you did four years ago means you always have to lie,” Kit said. “To everyone.”

That hurt. Kit could tell, from the way Ty was rapidly blinking, and he immediately felt awful.

“I don’t have to lie to you,” Ty pointed out. “It’s ironic. I think. My roommate says I tend to have a little trouble with irony. It mostly seems to be a sarcastic way to say that something apparently good is actually bad. Like when you said that you didn’t think my plan could possibly go wrong.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s bad that you don’t need to lie to me,” said Kit. “Especially now. What happened at Pandemonium exactly?”

Ty had pulled a thread from the sleeve of his shirt and was rolling it between two fingers. “Livvy saw Clary go off with Jace to one of the storage rooms. But she realized it wasn’t the Jace we know. It was Jace from that other world—Thule. And he was there for Clary.”

“There for Clary—you mean, to kidnap her?”

Ty nodded. “Livvy can’t really affect things much in our world. So she went to Dru—Dru already knows Livvy exists, that she’s a ghost. It makes it easier for Livvy to be seen, and she was already at the limit of how far she can go.”

Kit knew from his own meetings with Livvy that it was difficult for her to go too far away from Ty. It seemed to weaken her, her ability to speak and be heard, to affect objects in the world. She’d told him she was “practicing” being able to go farther away from the Scholomance in Romania, to stretch the bond between her and her twin, but it wasn’t easy.

Ty went on, his voice low but urgent. “Once they were in the storage room, Thule Jace knocked Clary out and carried her up to the roof. Dru went after them—”

“By herself?”

“She didn’t have time to warn the others, but Simon could tell when Clary was knocked out. He felt it through their parabatai bond,” said Ty. “Livvy says Simon, Jace, Alec, the rest of them, all made it up to the roof just as Clary was being flown away. She said Jace just collapsed. Alec had to hold him up.”

“I don’t get it,” Kit said. “What’s the connection between Thule Jace and Faerie—”