جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 40

Nadia's POVThe city is gone inside twenty minutes and the open road is ahead of them and she is sitting in the back seat of a car that does not belong to anyone she knows with her sister beside her and the man she came to destroy in the front passenger seat and none of that is the most significant thing happening right now which is that she is not afraid and she cannot remember the last time that was true when she was moving toward something instead of away from it.Sable is quiet beside her and the quiet between them is not the resolved kind and is not the unresolved kind either, it is the kind that belongs to two people who have said the significant thing and are sitting with the weight of it while the road moves under them and the city recedes and the thing that needs to be worked through between them exists in the space where it exists and will still exist when there is time to work through it properly and right now there is not that time and they both understand that without say

Nadia's POV She has known the fragment was there her entire life the way she has known her own heartbeat, present and constant and entirely unremarkable until the moment she turns her attention directly toward it, and turning her attention directly toward it is the thing she has never done because every Rememberer who documented soul fragment knowledge in the network files described the opening of a soul connection as the kind of action that cannot be undone once it starts and requires an anchor to pull you back when the transfer is complete or the connection does not close cleanly.She looks at the woman in the chair and the woman looks back and the knowledge transfer is not going to happen through language because the woman has not spoken anything recognizable since that first sentence in a dead dialect and the window Marcus described is not the kind that waits for a more convenient method to become available.She looks at Dorian."I need you to hold onto me," she says. "Not metapho

Nadia's POV"Vienna," Nadia said, and the word sat in the car like something with weight.Nobody spoke for a full ten seconds. Sable was looking at her from the adjacent seat with that expression she got when she had already processed the worst version of something and was waiting to find out if the actual version was worse. The woman who built the anchor point was looking at the road ahead with the stillness of someone who already knew this and had been waiting for everyone else to catch up. Dorian turned from the front seat and looked at Nadia directly and his face was doing the open thing, no management, just him."The 1423 ballroom," he said."The building still exists," Nadia said. "I found it three years ago in the archive research. It has been through six different owners and four different functions since 1783 but the original structure is intact underneath the renovations." She looked at the road ahead. "I filed it under historical documentation and moved on because at the t

Nadia's POV "The passage is sealed," Dorian said, and he was not looking at the window or the seat in front of him, he was looking at her, turned sideways in the narrow plane seat with his arm on the rest between them and his voice low enough that the engine noise covered it from the seats behind where Sable and the woman were both asleep. "My father went to Vienna thirty years ago and got inside the building and found it and understood within sixty seconds of being in that room why Vael's predecessor sealed it in 1784.""What did he find," Nadia said."A room that amplifies everything," Dorian said. "The root anchor point does not just hold the entity's connection to the bloodline. It broadcasts it. Any soul in proximity to that room gets the interference whether they want it or not. In 1783 the ballroom above it was full of people experiencing things they could not explain and someone noticed and the passage was sealed to contain it."Nadia was quiet for a moment. Outside the smal

Nadia's POV "Move," Dorian said, and they moved.Off the plane before the steps were fully extended, across the tarmac with the cold Vienna morning hitting their faces and the fragment burning steady against Nadia's sternum and the woman walking beside her with the specific speed of someone who has been waiting thirty years for exactly this morning and is not wasting a second of it now that it has arrived.Sable was on her other side with her hand wrapped around Nadia's arm and her bruised cheek and her jaw set and she had not said a single word since the plane touched down which meant she was in the mode she went into when she had made a decision and was executing it and Nadia had stopped trying to talk her out of things when she went into that mode seventeen years ago.A car was waiting at the edge of the tarmac. Marcus had arranged it from the city. The driver did not ask questions and Dorian gave the address and they were moving before the door was fully closed."Tell me what we