Sturges fell back and Hopkins pressed his advantage, slashing at him again and again and howling. Sturges managed to swipe him onto the ground, but Hopkins quickly righted himself for another go. Sturges, face cut into bloody stripes, aimed his gun at the center of the cat’s chest.
Through her rapidly fading Affinity, Glenn felt the brightest spot within Sturges, his quickly beating heart. As he was about to pull the trigger, Glenn reached out and crushed it like a scrap of paper.
Sturges’s body jerked, sending his shot off into the trees. He dropped the gun and clutched at his chest, his face pale and wrenched.
His terror washed over Glenn as he hit the ground, eyes wide. He grasped at the last strands of his life as they slipped away. With the final wisp of her Affinity, Glenn tried to reach out to him, tried to pull him back, but it was too late. It was as if a massive door fell closed and Michael Sturges was gone.
Glenn stared at the cold emptiness on the ground in front of her.
“Glenn, we have to go. Now!”
Her father had appeared and was kneeling beside her, tearing at her bonds.
“The agent took the bracelet,” Glenn said, staring at Sturges’s body. She felt hazy and disconnected. “We have to get it. We have to — ”
“It’s gone,” her father said. “We have to run. They’re already regrouping.”
As he pulled her up, the Colloquium crashed into her, dull and flat. The trees were just trees, the wind was just the wind. He pushed Glenn up onto her feet, and the three of them ran, followed close behind by Hopkins. Glenn stumbled and faltered, still weak from the poison and sick from the image of Sturges’s abandoned wife and their little girl.
“Faster, Glenny,” her father urged. “It’s not much farther. We have to go faster.”
She could hear the agents pursuing. Soon the drones would come too. They ran as hard as they could until they finally crossed under the red lights and made it through the border, running another twenty feet before Dad told them all to get down and they collapsed in a deep thicket. There were more gunshots, a flurry of them, and then they went silent. The agents had stopped at the border. Glenn struggled to catch her breath, but her Affinities were already reaching out and painfully drawing the world into her. She needed to get to Opal and her nightshade. She turned to her side.
“Mom, we — ”
Her mother was on her knees, bent over, her arms around her middle, gasping.
“Mom?”
Her father reached for her mother and she fell sideways into his lap. Her eyes were already clouding over, slowly turning black.
“What do we do?” her father asked. “Glenn?”
There was a crash out in the woods. A pack of agents. Now that they had crossed the border, she could feel them too. They were an ice storm, anonymous and deadly.
Glenn’s thoughts raced. Opal had said her mother was too strong for the nightshade to have any effect, and so without the bracelet, going deeper into the Magisterium meant losing her mother to the Magistra forever. And it was clear that with or without Sturges, none of them could ever return to the Colloquium.
Glenn searched for an answer, looking up at the stars. The sky was clearer on this side of the border, making it easy to pick out the line of three blue-white stars, a gleaming arrow pointing far out toward 813, millions of miles away.
813.
Glenn’s pounding heart slowly went still. Agents were still moving out in the woods, but Glenn barely heard them anymore. What had Opal said?
People walked from world to world….
Glenn could feel her mother’s Affinities crashing into her own. It was like being next to a nuclear reactor. Something clicked and Glenn seized her mother’s wrist and pulled her into an embrace. The power of her Affinities was overwhelming, terrifying.
“I need your help,” Glenn said into her mother’s ear, as she struggled to control the torrent that was battering at her. “I need you to concentrate.”
“What are you doing?”
Glenn could feel the agents’ wolflike prowl and hear their voices just feet away from their hiding place.
“Opening a door,” she said.
Every voice around them screamed. Glenn desperately wanted to push them away but she forced herself to drop her resistance. The universe poured into them until there was no distinction between her and her mother or between them and blades of grass or fields of stars burning light-years away. It was as if their bodies were melting away.
Disappearing. And for the first time Glenn wasn’t frightened. She could feel every life in the world as if it was her own, all their hearts pounding together. It was glorious. Her mother clasped her hand, holding her steady, keeping her grounded.
“Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka,” Glenn whispered as more power
than she ever imagined coursed through her.
Glenn saw the three bright points strung together, could feel their raging fusion drive. She moved from one to another and then off to the bright green eye that was 813. Glenn repeated her prayer under her breath, holding on to her mother and father and her one single intention as if it was an anchor. She gave a single push and suddenly there was an immense flare of light and the three of them were surrounded by a brilliance that grew until it seemed to cut through everything around them — the woods, the earth, the air. They sat suspended in that blinding void, the forest around them wiped away.
Nothing is separate, Glenn thought. Everything is one thing.
She stood and raised her hand in front of her and then, just as she had once pushed at the face of Opal’s wall, she set her palm against the surface tension of the universe until, with a tremble, it parted.
The light swirled and a smudge of green grew and took shape. It slowly came into focus until Glenn saw swooping curves of rain forest trees festooned with vines. A flight of birds, pink and yellow, soared through the lush emerald jungle of 813. Glenn could feel the planet’s warmth and the clean moist air. It was impossible and yet there it was.
Another world. Not Magisterium or Colloquium. A place they could all be safe. Glenn looked to her father, who was staring wide-eyed into the portal.
“Take her,” Glenn said. Already the portal was trying to collapse, like a slow-healing wound. Keeping it open was a massive weight bearing down on her. “We’ll be safe there. Straight ahead through the forest you’ll find the base. I’ll be right behind you.”
Dad staggered to his feet and lifted Mom into his arms just as a man, a scientist in his whites, appeared in the foliage and stared, dumbfounded. He called back to someone behind him.
“Go!” Glenn called. Her father looked back at her and then he took a single step through the opening. The fabric of the air rippled and he dropped to his knees in the midst of lush green grass, breathing alien air for the first time. Mom slipped out of his arms and then slowly stood up beside him. When she turned, her eyes were clear and blue.
She tried to call to Glenn, but her voice couldn’t make the journey. She waved Glenn forward instead.
Glenn felt a surge of joy as she took a step toward the portal. But before she went through she turned and saw Aamon and Kevin standing, partially shrouded in the dark woods.
Kevin walked forward and was washed in the light of the portal.
He raised one hand to her, saying good-bye, brown eyes glimmering in the otherworldly light.
Glenn paused, inches from the portal and freedom. Beyond Kevin and Aamon she felt all the millions living in the Magisterium. The Colloquium agents had fled, but they’d be back. With the whole of Authority behind them, it wouldn’t be long before they cracked the secret of the bracelet’s technology. Once they did, they would send fleets of armed skiffs, drones and agents, and not even the Miel Pan could stand against them. They would tear the Magisterium down brick by brick.