Ninu cut his hand through the air. “Irra is nothing but a fly that needs to be swatted.”
The anger in his voice vibrated in my bones.
“He can play hide-and-seek all he wants. I’ll find him soon enough,” Ninu said.
What? I gritted my teeth and lowered the knife. Kalla had draped herself across a plush white sofa, apparently ignoring the conversation.
“Then what the drek do you want from me?” I shouted.
“What do I want?” His question echoed across the room. “No one but Irra could have helped you infiltrate the Tournament. So when R-22 reported your presence, I saw an opportunity finally to catch him.”
It had been Reev. Ninu’s wall in his mind had allowed him to recognize me and still betray me.
“But you tried to have Reev kill me,” I said.
“We needed only one of you,” he said simply. “Your friend’s information would have sufficed. And what better way to demonstrate our power than to let him watch his friend die by her brother’s hand? But then I saw what you did in the arena.” His eyes closed again, head tilting. “Irra must have suspected who you are, and yet he sent you anyway.”
What if Ninu really did know something about my past? “Who am I?”
“Irra had no information to offer you?”
“He didn’t know,” I said. The flicker of uncertainty in Ninu’s face gave me a brief moment of satisfaction. He might be just as confused by all this as I was.
“You are an answer to a question,” he replied confidently. “A means to an end. A bridge to the other side. Take your pick.”
I decided he had no idea what I was. “If you don’t care about finding Irra, then what was the point of sending Istar to intimidate me? And your puppet’s threats?”
“My human counterpart was told only about your significance to Irra. And his threats still stand.”
“But what do you want from me?”
Someone tapped at the door behind me. “Perfect,” Ninu said.
The door opened. Two sentinels guided Reev and Avan into the room. Reev entered by his own will, as distant and cold as his guards. Avan had to be supported. I struggled not to show the way my body went weak at the sight of them.
Avan was still in his cadet uniform, which now hung off his shoulders in bloody shreds. Physically, he looked okay, but the state of his clothes was evidence of what they’d done to him. And when I searched his face, the damage was clear. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, but I could see that they were weary and dark with pain. His gaze darted around the room. Alert but uncertain. Haunted.
I rushed forward, choking on his name. The sentinels stepped in front of him.
“Get out of my way!” I shouted, shoving the bloody blade up beneath one sentinel’s jaw. She didn’t move; she just looked to Ninu for orders.
“Please, Kai,” Ninu said, his voice crawling beneath my skin. “You’re not helping either of them.”
“Stop it!” I pointed the knife at him. “Quit trying to get inside me.”
His mouth curved in a predatory expression. “Good, you have enough of your father in you to be immune.”
“And stop talking about my father! He’s dead.” What I really wanted to say was “What do you know?” But I couldn’t care about a dad I couldn’t remember. Reev was the only family I had, and he stood next to Avan, awaiting Ninu’s orders like a dog.
“Oh, believe me, no one would prefer that truth more than I would,” Ninu said. “You have his eyes, do you know that?”
I glared in response.
He laughed. “On you, they’re kind of beautiful. Like the pale blue of the River.” He stepped closer to me despite the knife pointed at him. “How much do you know about your powers, Kai?”
I didn’t touch the threads. I wanted to hear more.
“Your father trapped you in a human body and abandoned you to a confused sentinel without even a note of explanation. He’s always been so difficult.”
“Tell me what you want,” I said again.
“The River, of course. Access to it, to be precise.”
Did he mean the threads?
“I thought the Infinite could already feel it.” Or rather, they could feel when I manipulated it.
“That doesn’t mean we have access,” he said flatly.
“I don’t know how to teach anyone—” I paused because Ninu was waving his hand at me.
“No, no, I need access to the actual river.”
“A real river?” I assumed Irra had been speaking metaphorically.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, it exists all around us. But it also has a physical location, hidden in a place only Time can grant access to.”
Well, then I had no idea how to get to it. But I crossed my arms and pretended otherwise. “Why do you need it?”
“Time flows forward. Only ever forward.” His lashes lowered, and he looked almost melancholy. “But you were born of the River. You have the power to manipulate its flow. To move it backward.”
“I can’t.” Of everything he might have asked from me, he wanted me to perform the impossible. “I’ve tried, but I’ve never been able to do anything more than slow it down.” Except that one Sunday, but Ninu didn’t need to know that.
“In your current form, yes,” he said. “But you can free yourself. You’re his daughter. Time wouldn’t bind you permanently to a mortal body.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, because it was the only way to make sense of his words. I glanced at Avan and Reev. Reev remained unresponsive, but Avan was glaring blearily at Ninu. “I’m not one of you.”
He gave me a pitying look. I couldn’t tell if it was real or more mockery. “We’ll see how long you can cling to that lie. It was cruel of him, allowing you to know a human’s life.”
“I am human.” I was different. A freak. But I was still human. I wouldn’t let him take that away from me.
“For now. It was cruel, but also clever. It hid you from me. I needed a favor that Time refused to grant,” he said, his expression stony. “I almost trapped him; he escaped and hid you with the humans. But you were meant for more, because here you are. And now I will ask of you what I wanted from your father.”
I didn’t know why he pretended I had a choice. Not with Reev and Avan here.
“Throw away your mortal body, Kai. Claim your true powers, and give me back my past.”
I could hear the longing in his voice. It was real, as wistful and desperate as what I felt when I thought about my brother and a freight container we had called home only because we had each other to fill it.
If I closed my eyes, I could see Ninu’s longing take shape: Towers of shimmering stone and crystal, not like the buildings in the White Court but older, like the ones from the history texts. Trains that spat plumes of smoke, speeding across green fields that stretched for miles. The vermilion robes of the mahjo, magic heavy in the air and carried along the wind like spices. And the Sun. The Sun ever present in a blue sky more vivid than any poster. Beautiful and clear like a cherished memory.
Maybe he was still weaving magic. I shook my head. The last thing I wanted was to understand him.
“The world then—my world—wasn’t paradise. But it was better than this,” Ninu said quietly.
“But you’re Infinite,” I said. You’d think they would be used to changing times.
He laughed again. “Now, yes. But not always.” He gestured to Reev and Avan. “So? What do you say, Daughter of Time?”
I still wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. I had no idea where the River was or how he expected me to stop being human—which I had no intention of doing. Did he really think I could just drop him into the past? While I couldn’t argue that it would benefit all of us to get rid of him, I didn’t exactly have instructions for how to rewind time.