Li Min ran to him and the man glanced up, desperate. He shifted to allow her to inspect the wound with careful hands. She reached for the small leather bag draped from her belt, one of her own knives.
“I understand now…you led them away from us, didn’t you?” he was saying to Rose, distracting her from Li Min’s work. “Clever, clever darling. You won’t go, now that you’ve only just arrived, will you? Won’t you stay for just one more dance?”
Just beyond them, Etta was on her knees, heaving for air, trying to crawl toward her parents. Julian started toward her, but she waved her hands, trying to control her crying so she could speak. Nicholas thought he had never seen anything so brave in his life.
“The astrolabe—” Etta pointed toward the nearby patch of forest, squeezing the words out between her tears. “I can’t, I can’t do it, it’s—”
Footsteps crashed through the forest; voices cried out, searching for the astrolabe. Shadows, undeterred. Finishing what their master had begun.
He pulled Julian away from her. They were nearly out of time and he loved her, he loved her, he loved her enough to not go through with it, to not leave her side. Which meant he had to go, and it needed to be now.
He and Julian broke apart to search with nothing more than a frantic look between them, Nicholas bracing himself against one tree, then the next, making his way through the darkness. In the distance, he saw two shadowed figures weaving through the trees. Branches and rocks mauled and battered him on all sides, but he kept his eyes on the ground, searching through the pockets of darkness, the shifting dirt, the patchwork of ferns and shrubs. The breath burned in and out of his lungs, and his side began to ache in a way that might have doubled him over if he were not so singularly terrified for the lives of everyone he had left behind on the path, of the way the Shadows around him were beginning to shift and gather.
But he felt it. He felt the vibration, the dread that broke out across his skin; slowly, he turned and retraced his steps to where a glimmer of ancient gold peered out of a small animal’s burrow. His left hand was slick with his own blood, from the deep cut which he’d been a fool to get; it had been protesting each time he so much as twitched a finger. He hardly felt it now—hardly felt the cold, or took notice of the way his hot breath steamed out into the air, hardly heard Sophia and Julian calling out to him.
Time seemed to bend around him, encasing his body in amber. Even his movements felt distressingly forced, as if he were struggling to move forward against a great wind without a line to assist him.
But he knelt.
He crawled.
He took the considerable weight of the astrolabe in his hand, staining it with his blood as he removed his dagger from his boot with his other.
Touching it flooded his senses, shot his blood through him with dizzying heat. He felt the astrolabe pulse, as if with its own heartbeat, its pace increasing to match the slamming of his heart. Now that it was in his hand, his reason for taking it slipped out of his mind; he couldn’t quite remember it, not with the images that suddenly flooded his field of vision like dreams borne on the wind.
Standing on the bow of his newly commissioned ship, the wind fair and the ocean tame, as he gave the order to change course.
Moving through a great house, chasing a small child across the soft Oriental rugs, beneath the portraits of ancestors and descendants yet to come, sunlight spilling in through the tall windows that overlooked the green lands below.
His mother, taking his arm as he led her away from the fields, from the plantation, from the illness that had killed her.
And Etta…
Etta in the silk dress he had seen her wear to dinner on the Ardent, the one that had suited her so well, guiding him forward to a passage, her smile dazzling—
All of this. He heard the sweet whisper of words as clearly as if someone were sitting beside him. I can give you all of this.
Nicholas did not want to pull back from these dreams. He wanted to live each moment through to its conclusion, to see what other sweet wonders might be offered to him. But the light, the mist hanging over his mind, it all pulled back.
It left him in the darkness again, with a choice.
A man made his own future. He chipped it from whatever hardships insinuated themselves into his life; he carved out the happy, glad moments to capture his gratitude for them. It came from the simple magic of merely living. Of surviving. Seeking.
Not this. Not this.
Using his wounded hand, he pinned the astrolabe to the ground and raised his dagger, driving it down hard against the metal surface. If he could just crack it—if he had just enough strength left in him to wedge it apart—
The astrolabe heated beneath his hand, scalding to the touch. Nicholas let out a cry, but held it fast, blinking as it began to glow. He drove the dagger down again, piercing its center; the hotter it became, the more malleable it was, until at last the bulk of the blade broke through its case and black blood burbled up from inside, spilling against his hand, searing it with a pain that whipped him down to the seat of his soul.
He fell back, his jaw working out a scream as the light around him flooded his senses, drowning out the image of Etta racing toward him, her mouth open, calling something to him, trying to tell him something. But the light swept over her, and she vanished, dissolving in front of his eyes.
No, he thought, trying to rise again. No!
The sound of thunder and fury bore down on him, drowning out her name. There was a tug at his back, a weight that wrapped around his core, and he felt himself lifted, pulled and tossed, the pressure crushing against his skin. The whole of the world tilted around him as time caught him in its torrential stream.