by Carter Roy
“Too late.” Legion’s eyes snapped open and she spoke into a cell phone. “Everything is ready up here. The order has been given. Time for the Reckoning!”
Almost immediately, the thunderclouds over our heads began to churn and the wind picked up.
Nearby, I knew, along the shores of Brooklyn and Manhattan, hundreds of teams of Bend Sinister agents were focusing all their powers on the skies, bending the weather to their will. This was why they’d been gathering since spring: to create the most monstrous lightning storm that New York City had ever seen, one that could lash the Brooklyn Bridge with bolt after bolt for hours.
And kill my best friend over and over again.
There had to be something I could do to spare Greta.
And suddenly I knew what it was—the very first thing Dawkins had warned me about, the secret he made me promise never to reveal.
“Greta!” I shouted. “It’s you! You’re the Pure!”
CHAPTER 22
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
While I’d been lying there listening to my dad and Evangeline Birk bicker, I remembered something Dawkins had explained the very first time I’d met him, on the train from New York to DC: a Pure can’t know what she is, or it changes who she is deep down where it matters. Self-knowledge ruins a Pure, and she loses that essential innocence forever.
Except hardly anyone even knows about the thirty-six Pure souls, so that kind of self-awareness isn’t really much of a danger.
But there’d never been a Pure in the history of the world like Greta Sustermann. She was an annoying know-it-all who really did know it all. Unlike any Pure before her, she knew what a Pure was, and she understood exactly what it meant.
“You’re the Pure! My mom and your dad—they were guarding you.”
“You’re joking!” Greta shouted, laughing nervously. “You have to be.”
“She doesn’t understand what you’re saying, fool,” Birk said. Then she saw my dad aim his Tesla gun at me. “Does she? How could she?”
“Don’t make me kill you, Evelyn,” my dad said.
The bearded agent under Legion’s control snapped his arm up and yanked the Tesla gun out of my dad’s hands.
“Oh my gosh,” Greta was saying, looking at where she was: the frame, the forest of lightning rods, the Bend Sinister staring at her. “All of you are here because of me? That’s silly … isn’t it?”
“Someone has to stop him!” my dad shouted. “Evelyn, stop talking right now.” He pointed at the huge blond guy. “You. Put your foot on his head.” When the blond guy slowly moved his boot from my chest to my face, my dad turned to Legion. “Don’t you get it? Stop my son from talking!”
“Greta, you know it’s true!” I yelled. “Look inside your heart! And hurry.”
Exasperated, my dad bellowed at Legion, “What are you waiting for? Have someone knock her unconscious! Have someone knock him unconscious! Throw him off the bridge! Do something, you idiot!”
“Kill them,” Legion said.
“Finally!” my dad said. “Hurry, before it’s too late.”
“Birk and Truelove,” Legion continued. “Take them out now.”
“Do you understand nothing?” Dad yelled. He elbowed the bearded agent in the head, grabbed back his Tesla rifle, and broke into a run—straight into the circle of lightning rods.
“Come on, Greta,” I whispered.
Greta’s eyes were tightly shut, and she was muttering to herself.
“You’re the reason my dad went after your mom! You’re what changed Agatha! It’s you! It’s you! It’s always been you!”
Listen to me, I thought. You know what I’m telling you is true.
“Oh my gosh. It makes sense.” Her eyes widened. “It’s true.” She convulsed in her bindings before sagging, her head rolling forward.
“Greta!” I started to get up, then had to stop as the blond giant again pushed his boot against the side of my head.
My dad got to Greta as she slumped. He reached forward and put two fingers against her neck.
That was when it began.
A twisting fountain of white sparks shot up from Greta’s limp body, hundreds of feet into the sky, like she was the world’s biggest roman candle. A million swirling shards of light, a flurry of burning bright dots, a blazing river of stars silently poured out of her.
It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
And also the most horrible.
I blinked away tears and made myself keep watching.
What had I done? Had I killed her?
“The stars!” Evangeline Birk cried. “We are too late!”
Far above us, the glimmering river of light split into thinner streams, like a tree’s branches, and arced away into the night in dozens of directions. Thirty-five people around the world would feel a pang and not understand what it meant, but would feel the loss just the same.
The flow of stars tapered off into a trickle.
And then a pulse of energy exploded from Greta.
The light was so bright it hurt; if not for that big goon’s shoe covering half my face, I would have been blinded. Half a heartbeat after the light was sound and wind and suddenly the huge blond guy’s foot wasn’t on me anymore because he was gone. I covered my ears, but it was already too late: all I could hear was a ringing that seemed to have swallowed the world.
After a few seconds, when I was sure it was over, I sat up and looked around.
Greta was still there, strapped into that rectangular frame, but we were alone on the silk-covered tower. Everyone else had been blasted clear off the rooftop. Thanks to that giant’s foot pinning me down, I’d been spared.
I shivered and stared at Greta.
A shimmery outline of light, made of the same bright sparks, slowly expanded from her. I could see Greta’s shape in this outline at first, but not so much as it grew—bigger than the bridge tower, and after a while, bigger than even the bridge. The figure finally broke apart into a hundred thousand twinkles of light that seemed to fall upward and burn away.
She’s made of stars, I thought.
When I stood up, I saw that I’d been wrong: Not everyone had been blasted off the rooftop. Evangeline Birk was lying on the ground, clinging to the central railing. Some of the other gear had also come to rest against the rail, and I went over and started rooting through one of the metal chests.
“What you did makes no difference,” Birk croaked when she saw me. “I’m still going to kill her.”
Greta wasn’t dead? Startled, I hopped up, spun around twice, then crouched again to dig through the chest. “First things first,” I said.
“What are you so happy about?” Birk snarled.
“Be quiet,” I said. In the second chest, I found a utility knife.
“They are coming,” Birk said. “You’re not going to escape this place, you know. But if you help me, you can depend on my pity.”
I extended the blade. “I asked you to be quiet,” I said.
She closed her mouth as I walked away.
Weirdly enough, most of the lightning rods were still standing. The shock wave hadn’t affected them. Was that because they were so thin?
Greta hung limp in the metal frame, held up by her arms. She looked dead. I unclasped the metal bands from her arms, legs, and head, then kneeled and used the knife to saw through the leather bindings around her ankles. Finally, I cut away the bands at her wrists.
She fell forward into my arms, and, man, was she heavy. I had to ease her to the ground because I couldn’t figure out a way to carry her. I pressed my fingers to her throat and felt a pulse. She really was alive.
I needed to get her some help. I looked up, and that was when I saw it. There was a clear path through the lightning rods, a straight line to the edge of the tower where they’d all been knocked out of place.
My dad. It had been his body that mowed down the lightning rods; the shock wave had blown him this direction. I followed the destruction,
through the thicket of rods, all the way to the northern edge of the tower roof.
When I got close, I found something surprising: two hands clinging to a twisted bolt of the orange silk.
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to where I could peer over the edge and see him.
“Ronan!” he gasped, and laughed.
It was the first time he’d called me Ronan since … since I couldn’t remember. A long time.
“Boy, am I happy to see you. Help me up, will you?”
I started to stretch my hand out, but something told me that was a bad idea. “Hold on while I find a rope.”
I scooched back, then got up and looked around. Most of the Bend Sinister’s junk was gone now, and there was no rope anywhere to be seen. But there was a lot of electrical cable connected to the lightning rods.
Within a few minutes, I had what I needed. I tied one end of the cable to the center railing, made a loop in the other end, and made my way back to my dad.
“Put that loop around your shoulders,” I said. “You’ll be more secure. In case you slip.”
“I am not going to slip, Evelyn,” he said, releasing his right hand and quickly winding the cable around his forearm.
While he was doing that, I said, “You know that Damascene ’Scope thing?”
“Yes, Evelyn, of course I am aware of the Damascene ’Scope.”
“It works,” I said. “It really works.” I felt something new about my dad, something I hadn’t felt about him in ages. Hope, maybe. “It can burn the bad right out of a person. I’ve seen it happen! It changed this woman Agatha Glass from evil to good. It could work for you, too. You could go back to how you used to be—a good man.”
“Evelyn,” my dad said, wrapping his other arm in the cable and hoisting himself up a foot. “There is no bad in me to burn away.” He pulled himself up another foot. “I do what I do because it is the right thing to do.”
“Dad,” I said, stepping out of reach, “what you do is wrong.”
“I can tell you this with all honesty, son: I have done nothing I am ashamed of.”
“But you were going to kill Greta,” I said.
You were going to kill me.
If I’d been a real Blood Guard, I suppose I would have kicked him in the face and sent him plummeting to his death. Or used my knife to cut the cable he was using to pull himself up. Or done anything to stop him from climbing to safety.
Because he was a bad guy, and I knew it—had known it, for a very long time.
But he was also my dad, and there were some acts I realized I’d never be able to carry out. So I just sat down and watched him muscle himself back to safety.
He had half his body up and was trying to swing up a leg when footsteps behind me made him look up.
“Not the welcoming party I’d hoped for,” he said. He suddenly sounded tired.
I turned, and there behind me were my friends, my family—my mom, staring lasers at me, probably out of her mind with worry; Mr. Sustermann, who’d already broken away to run to Greta; Ogabe, bigger even than the blond giant who’d kept me under his foot; Diz, her sunglasses on and her pile of pink hair a windblown mess; and Dawkins, still damp, but wearing a crazy big smile like the one he’d worn when I first met him.
“What took you so long?” I said.
“I went for a swim.” He laughed. “I figured you had everything under control.”
Then Dawkins stretched out his arm to my father and said, “Mr. Truelove, let me give you a hand.”
“No, thank you,” my dad said. He caught my eye. “Good-bye, son.”
And releasing the cable, he fell backward out of sight.
CHAPTER 23
THE NEW WORLD
Back in eighth grade social science, I had to write a paper on this scientist named Harlow who did a lot of experiments with baby rhesus monkeys. I got a B+, which was completely unfair, but that’s another story.
Anyway, his work was all about figuring out how babies bond with their moms. Or, in the case of this one twisted experiment, with a cloth-covered wire armature that the baby thought was its mom, but that randomly shot out spikes every now and then, hurting the little monkey.
But no matter how often the baby monkeys got hurt by their wire robot mamas, they always came back. Because, this Harlow guy figured, they longed for a mama, needed a mama, and that spiky wire robot mama was the only one they had.
It broke my heart, reading about those experiments.
And it broke my heart when my dad fell off the bridge.
That’s the only way I can explain why I cried out, “No!” and slammed my fists into the silky orange tower rooftop and crawled forward until my head was hanging over the edge. I imagined that if he looked up, he’d see me watching him fall, just like he watched me in my dream.
None of this changed what I knew in my heart: My dad was an awful man. A bad man. The worst man, maybe. I knew all that. But I cried anyway.
It took me a while before I realized that my mom was there with her arm around me, holding me back. Maybe she thought I was going to jump after him.
“I’m okay, Mom,” I said. “Really.”
“Good, because I’m not,” she said, her voice gravelly. “I’m sorry, Ronan. No son should have to see his dad …”
“Is he like those other Bend Sinister agents?” I asked. “Will he come back to life?”
“Afraid not, kiddo,” she said. “At least, not as we understand things. We could always ask that white-haired crone back there.”
She was pointing at Evangeline Birk, who’d not only been bound hand and foot, but also gagged.
“I wouldn’t trust her to tell the truth,” I said.
My mom laughed, but it sounded so fake that we both raised an eyebrow. And then she laughed for real. “Used to be, you cut down one of the Heads, and seven more would appear in his place. But this Birk woman is higher than the Heads.” My mom pressed her forehead against mine. “She’s the real heart of the Bend Sinister. We lock her up, and they will be in disarray for a generation at least.”
“Won’t the rest of them come looking for her?” I asked.
“Who knows? But if they do, we’ll be ready.”
“She’s the monster who created the Perceptor,” Dawkins said, walking over. “But I’m guessing you figured that out, Ronan.”
I nodded. “And about the Perceptor—I kind of kicked it off the bridge. It’s somewhere down there in the water.”
Dawkins’ smile was the biggest I’d ever seen from him. “Are you pulling my leg?” he asked. “It’s gone?”
And then, before I could stop him, he grabbed me up by my armpits and raised me high like a baby, shouting, “Well done, Evelyn Ronan Truelove! Well done, indeed!”
“Put me down!” I said. “You’re going to make me sick!”
“I happen to know you’ve eaten nothing since you last vomited some nine hours ago. Ergo, I am safe.”
He set me down anyway.
“I’ve longed for the destruction of that thing since I was seventeen,” he said.
“Birk says it’s indestructible,” I said.
“I’m willing to accept that challenge,” Dawkins said. “I’ll find that monstrosity and see just how indestructible it really is.”
“Am I happy to see you,” I told him.
“Ronan,” he said, clapping my shoulder, “I have never in my life been happier than I was on seeing you and Greta alive and well.” At the startled look on my face, he said, “Okay, Greta is not in the best of shape, of course—she’s been through the proverbial wringer—but she’s alive, and so are the other thirty-five Pures, and, well, it is all thanks to you.”
I leaned in and whispered, “I broke my promise, about … Greta. I—I blabbed that she was a Pure. I told her!”
“And it was a brilliant move, Ronan. And one that had never occurred to me, because until Greta joined our ranks, it was virtually impossible. No Pure has ever been ‘woken up,’ so to speak, because no
Pure has ever understood what it meant to be a Pure.” He hugged me tight. “You saved her, Ronan. Thank you.”
“How’d you even get here?” I asked, breaking away. “When I cut the silk, you—”
“Fell a long way,” he said. “From that height, striking the water is like slamming into concrete; I, um, broke many bones—more, I think, than I actually have in my body. Felt like that, anyway.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was necessary,” he said. “And lucky for me, our friends saw a body go into the drink trailing a big orange silk tail.”
“Somehow I knew it would be Jack,” said Ogabe. “Call it intuition, if you wish, though it probably had more to do with his hollering ‘Geronimo!’ as he fell.”
“Nothing else was appropriate.”
“How did you know to come to the bridge?” I asked Ogabe. “That Hand took our phones away.”
“Yes, but not before Sammy located your signal and figured out your direction,” Ogabe said.
“Everything pointed to the bridge,” Sammy said, appearing behind Ogabe. “The way the Cat-o-Grapher site told us the cat was in the river near the bridge; the direction the van that took you guys was going. It was a lucky guess.”
“So we mobilized three-dozen retired Guard to help us search the anchorages at either end,” Ogabe said. “You, of course, know what we found.”
I laughed. “I warned Birk that you guys were probably already here, and she didn’t believe me.”
“What’s unbelievable,” Sammy said, “is that we’re standing on the top of the Brooklyn Bridge!” We both looked out. The clouds had broken and sunlight was poking through, making New York look about as pretty as it ever gets.
“Unbelievable is one word for it,” I said.
Then the six of us—me, Dawkins, my mom, Ogabe, Sammy, and Diz—gathered around Greta and her dad.
There were dark circles under Greta’s eyes, and she was having trouble keeping them open, but she was awake and looked like herself. What I mean is, she looked supremely irritated.
“So I’m a Pure?” she said to me and Sammy. “Seriously, you guys?”