The fort burned.

  It began as three small points on the west wall, the side nearest the barracks tent. The paint took my Authority like an old hearth longing to be fed; for a breath the strokes flared, shadowlight licking the paint, and then the pretend-fire I’d painted turned true. Tongues and ribbons of heat that hungrily unrolled across wood. It was ugly and gorgeous at the same time, and it felt inevitable, but it was not wild. It was controlled.

  I didn’t mean to kill anyone. I didn’t want to. I’m a thief and a killer but I am not a murderer, not an executioner for hire to be used by glass-born manipulators. There’s a line I refuse to cross.

  As the flames grew, people moved. Guards ran from the wall, stumbling down to the tents; men flung out of canvas doors with extinguishers. From the tent where Victor was held, a commander sprinted—Adrian Brawn, head of the EoT cleaning company. Perfectly cast to lead a cleanup. He barked orders and ten responders fanned out, hosing and smothering, and Brawn’s own shadowlight—white, nearly pure with a silver edge—swept over his people and the blaze as if to calm it, to make the fire obey. The light coalesced at their heads and winked out; the flames, oddly, bent to that will. My suspicion that he was a mage, finally satisfied.

  While their team fought the fire, I moved.

  I slipped around to the opposite side of the compound where men were thin and one lone guard kept watch. He was nervous, glancing between the chaos inside and whatever danger might be coming from outside. I told Liora, through Anansi, to flare between the trees. One brief, bright burst of shadowlight to snag the man’s focus just as the drones banked toward the burning sector.

  I vaulted the wall. With Ella folded into baton form, I shocked him. Enough voltage to drop him clean, not to kill. As his eyes rolled and his limbs went slack, I returned Ella into the Domain, slid under his weight, and took him up. He felt oddly light in my arms, my strength still a surprise. I carried him through the fold and into my Domain. Before I vanished, I flicked three more of my painted fires under the spot I’d left. My parting gift for the response team.

  Inside my Domain I stripped him of uniform and armor and slid into it myself. It was big on me, but serviceable; I rolled the sleeves and cuffed the pants and left my boots on. I tucked hood and mask beneath the vest and jammed on a short, blond wig. Then I touched the man—thermal underarmor still warm—and sent him, quietly, to Times Square.

  When I blinked back to the outskirt of the fort, the compound looked less like a stronghold and more like an enormous bonfire with a tree shoved through its center. Smoke made the sky sickly, and the responders were at full theater. Order and panic braided together.

  Lio hovered high above it all, his silhouette blending into the night while the camp below churned like a disturbed anthill. People ran in frenzied lines, voices rising and falling, a chaos made rhythmic by Adrian Brawn’s barked orders. They even managed to plug a hose into a water tank they’d rolled out of the barracks tent and began dousing the flames with the clumsy determination of real firefighters. Near the tent where Victor was held, movement sharpened. Two guards rushed inside while the rest struggled to tame the flames that still gnawed at the western wall. It was working too well. Time to start a few more.

  They bloomed the moment I teleported back to the card embedded in the tree. New fires sprang to life like thoughts breaking the surface, and in the confusion my new uniform rendered me invisible, just another shadow cast by the green lights of the tree. My senses, however, dimmed. Without the hood and the mask on, I saw less, felt less, heard less. Only Lio’s eyes from above filled in the gaps, his silent watch painting the battlefield in my mind.

  I walked toward the tent with the easy stride of someone who belonged. The smell of sweat, gun oil, and smoke pressed in from every direction. I’d caught traces of perfume earlier—two, maybe three women among the crew—so my presence shouldn’t stand out.

  I’d learn soon enough.

  “Let me in,” I said to the guard outside, pitching my voice low and steady. “Brawn wants me to bring him the weirdo.”

  The man barely looked at me, too intent on the burning wall. His wall, the one who he most likely built along with others, turning to cinders. He just stepped aside, muttering something lost under the hiss of extinguishers.

  Inside, the tent was divided cleanly, precise as a diagram. The first section was an office. Tidy, almost obsessively so. Binders lined the small metal shelves, their spines marked with neat labels. A laptop glowed faintly on a desk wired into a portable generator whose hum carried a faint undertone of shadowlight, pulsing slow and steady. A chair waited beside it, perfectly aligned. Across the room, a narrow bunk bed stood stripped and squared, corners tight.

  A translucent plastic partition split the space, the next section dimly visible beyond it. A zipper-door hung half open, light spilling through in an uneven stripe.

  They saw me come in from the flap, so I didn’t linger. I moved deeper, doing my best to look worried and in a rush.

  Three people were inside. Two soldiers stood watch while Victor hunched over some kind of device. A nautilus shell with shadowlight tubes sprouting from it, hooked to a clock and a laptop. He was drilling into the shell.

  “Brawn needs this freak by his side now. We can’t contain the fires. We’re evacuating,” I said, strings of words tumbling out in a hurry. The soldiers glanced at each other, then one of them turned to Victor.

  “You heard her. Let’s go, big guy.”

  Victor Bohr was crouched on his long, grasshopper-like legs, lab coat bunched around him. He mumbled, sighed, and kept working.

  “I can’t go right now. I need to finish this, or everything you wanted me to do will be wasted,” he said, calm as if the world wasn’t burning. The soldiers looked at him, then back at me, clearly unsure. The room was long and full of equipment. Some I recognized, some I didn’t.

  “Apprehend him. Orders were clear,” I said. When both soldiers turned toward Victor, I stepped forward, touched them both at once, summoned my Spellbook, and with a thought sent the two of them to Times Square to meet their unconscious friend.

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  “You have to come with me,” I told him as the soldiers vanished. “Joan wants you under her protection.”

  He didn’t bother to look up, just kept drilling. “I have to finish this,” he replied.

  What was his deal? I was here to save him.

  “Razash sends his regards,” I said, dropping Joan’s safe-phrase into the room. Figured it might buy me credibility.

  “Razash can go fuck himself right now,” Victor snapped without looking up. “We can go, but after I finish this.” He pressed the drill deeper and the shell split.

  “Look… you may not realize it, but I can teleport us out of here. Right now. We might not get a better opportunity.”

  He shifted his body a bit, not to meet my eyes, but to reach for a container on the desk. It glowed with white shadowlight, bulb-shaped. He started fitting it into the hole he’d just made.

  “Fine. Then I’ll leave you here. I am not dying for you if you don’t want to be saved.”

  “Saved? I’m doing just fine,” he said.

  “It seems to me those people forced you into this,” I pressed.

  “They did,” he admitted, “but they have resources I need to finish my project, so I’m staying.”

  “I don’t think that’s a possibility anymore. This entire fort is going down very soon. Everything’s on fire.”

  “Chronoak too?” he blurted.

  “Chronoak?” I asked, surprised.

  “Why did they send a dumb one to save me?” he muttered, half to himself. Ungrateful bastard. Then, more quietly: “It’s the tree in the center, the one connected to my device.”

  “No, not yet,” I said. “But I will set it on fire the moment I have to.”

  “No. You can’t do that!” He turned sharply, movements erratic and quick. Just like when I’d seen him rage in his workshop, flinging things to the floor only to pick up the pieces later. “This tree is too important!”

  “Okay, listen up, man.” My voice was low but sharp. “Right now, they’re all busy putting out the fires on the walls.”

  And they were. Through Liora’s eye above, I could see the chaos I’d unleashed. People running in confusion, the air thick with smoke and shouts. My distraction was holding for now, but the balance could shift any second.

  “—and I can try to leave your tree unbothered,” I continued, “but I was tasked with getting you out of here. So unless you give me a very good reason not to, I’m taking you. Now.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Try to shorten it.”

  “Fine!” he snapped, the anger still there but fading under urgency. He crouched again by his cluttered table, his long fingers hovering over the strange shell. The heat from the surrounding fires was beginning to press in, flickering shadows dancing across the tent walls. One section of the blaze outside had been contained already. I didn’t have much time.

  “I need the Chronoak’s Authority over timespace to imprint onto my machine,” he said quickly, “so I can open ways into the splinters that have been cut off from Ideworld’s universe.”

  I wanted to question him—what the hell that even meant—but I bit my tongue. Now wasn’t the time to parade my ignorance. So I just nodded, as if I followed.

  “And they?” I asked instead. “Why do they want it?”

  “They?” He gave a humorless chuckle. “They want to force their way into Pangea. That’s why they need the Chronoak. I couldn’t care less about their little conquest.”

  “You want to access a different splinter, then?” I asked, piecing together what little I knew. Chronoak: chrono—time. Pangea—old Earth, when all continents were one. Splinters, fragments of Ideworld that branched away from Earth’s copied and twisted main body. I hadn’t known some could be cut off, but apparently, they could.

  “Yes.” He said simply.

  “The machine you built in your workshop,” I continued, “was it meant to do the same?”

  “No,” he admitted, glancing briefly at me. “I didn’t have proper shadowlight then. Or enough knowledge. That device was just a communicator, something to bridge splinters, not access them.”

  “How much time do you need to finish your device?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

  “I don’t know! Soon maybe? A month, half a year? It’s hard to tell.”

  “Half a year is soon now?” I shot back. “Can’t you finish it elsewhere?”

  “If I could, I would,” he snapped, slamming a palm onto the table. “You think I want to work with these bastards? They trashed my lab. They told me about it, showed me the wreckage, every piece of what I built. Gone.”

  “And you really think they’ll let you keep the device if you finish it?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  I almost laughed at that. He’ll think of something. The man didn’t have a plan, he was just surviving, doing what he always did: burying himself in his work and hoping the world wouldn’t notice.

  “What’s your deal with the Shattered then? Why do they want you back?”

  “They gave me what I needed, if they could find it,” he said, voice lower now. “In exchange, I made them a few things. It wasn’t a bad deal.”

  “Right,” I muttered. “And what exactly do you need from here? The tree? The shadowlight? What? Because if we can take it with us, we go.”

  “I need the Chronoak’s Authority,” he said, like that explained everything. “I’m siphoning it in.”

  “How much longer do you need?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is what you have enough for now?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice cracked with frustration, and mine nearly did too. He didn’t want to be saved, that much was clear.

  He finally turned to look at me, his eyes darting across my face, studying me for a beat. His upper shoulders sagged a little before he spoke.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. “I know you came here with good intentions, but I really don’t have a choice. I’m trying to save someone too. And to do that, I need an Authority that connects things. Worlds, spaces, people or anything else. This oak gives me that. There’s no replacement. It’s not easy to find.”

  I blinked. Seriously?

  “Did I mention,” I said, crossing my arms, “that I can teleport us out of here?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “I have Authority over space,” I said, leaning forward slightly. “Through my Domain. I can bend it. Fold it. Move myself and others through it.”

  “It’s not an easy task to extract Authority from people,” Victor said, his voice tight, eyes darting between me and his device. “Is your Domain one of space?”

  “No,” I replied. “One of my soulmarks gives me an edge over it.”

  His face darkened, the expression of someone who’d just realized the solution he wanted wasn’t the one he’d get. And I had another problem. Adrian was moving straight toward us. Liora’s watchful eye tracking his moves.

  “Even harder, then,” Victor muttered, frustration slipping into his tone. “We’d have to find a proper way to extract it. Are you willing to sit still for hours while I work?”

  I exhaled sharply, already calculating my next move. “Doubtful. Depends on what I’d get in return.” I stepped closer, voice lowering but sharper now. “Listen, man. I get that you’re trying to save someone, but gambling your life on a maybe isn’t heroism. It’s suicide. Pack your things, whatever you can carry, and we get out. Right now. We might not get another chance. Your jailor’s coming.”

  And he was close enough that I heard his steps through the canvas walls.

  Victor’s jaw tightened. His eyes flicked to the device, then back to me. “Fine!” he spat, frustration twisting his face as he started unplugging the cables, hands—all four of them—working in practiced fury.

  “How long to pack everything?” I asked.

  “Five minutes. Maybe less.”

  I reached into my holder and pulled out two of my eye-cards, their edges faintly glowing with the touch of my Authority. I breathed shadowlight into them, granting each an extra senses.

  “Take these,” I said, pressing them into one of his outstretched hands. “When you’re ready, tear one apart, but keep the other intact. I’ll come for you. Buy yourself time.”

  He nodded once, terse and uncertain, but it was enough.

  I turned on my heel and bolted from the tent, mask sliding back into place, hood drawn low. My suit flexed with every motion, Authority pulsing through it like a second heartbeat.

  And then—impact.

  I slammed into Adrian just as he was about to step through the flap, the hit fueled by every ounce of momentum and fury I could muster. The force sent him flying backward, crashing through the dirt a good ten feet away.

  Before he even had the chance to rise, I vanished, teleporting toward the first card embedded in the trunk of the great oak, leaving behind the echo of displaced air, a borrowed suit and the rising roar of the firestorm I’d made.