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I want to tell Paul how amazing it is, but his face shows that he already knows—a mixture of elation and exhaustion. “It’s a shame to ruin this with an explosion,” I say. “There’s so little art left.”

“But if this works,” Paul says, “think of the art we’ll be able to create again. Once the City is back on its feet—”

Mangold interrupts. “It’s time to get started. Syd, you’re steering.”

“Isn’t it kind of dangerous in here?”

Mangold waves a hand at me. “We’ll complete the circuitry for the explosives when we get a bit closer. Should be just fine.”

I swallow a lump, sliding into the driver’s seat for the last time.
It’s okay,
I tell Cress.
You’re saving Cas. You’re saving New Charity. I’ll miss you.
I remind myself that the statue is my idea. My conception. And it’s a good one.

It’s a slow process, rolling the car the few miles to the gate. We stop to navigate rocks and gullies, but the way is mercifully flat. We’re about a mile out when Len asks why we aren’t just driving it. “Doesn’t it run?”

“We want the car to have as much gas inside as possible,” Mangold explains. “When they turn the key, we want to maximize the blast radius.”

“Wait a second.” I look at Len, who blanches. “How big?”

“Should take out the courthouse, the church, a good bit of downtown anyway.”

My chest feels like the car is sitting on top of it. “This isn’t what we discussed. I gave you a plan to take out the Bishop. If you want to put a crater in the world, why not just set off the Ward and be done with it?”

“At first we thought sacrificing ourselves would be inevitable. Now we know better. Look, we’ll try to warn your people,” Mangold says, taking my shoulder. I wrest it away from him. I’m tired of being touched. Of men touching me. “But you won’t have a lot of time.”

“You’re not listening. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just give me a gun. I’ll shoot the Bishop myself. We don’t even have to bring the car in.”

Mangold shakes his head. “The explosives are well hidden in false walls. But they’re not going to let us in with guns or we would’ve gone with that plan in the first place.”

Len is studying his shaking hands. He’s no doubt fighting back visions, and I have no whiskey to give him.

“They’ve never lifted a finger to help us,” James spits. His face is twisted and ugly with revulsion. “Why’d you help us if you’re so concerned about casualties?”

“The Bishop is the problem, not New Charity,” I say.

James shakes his head. “They’re one and the same.”

Len is coughing, retching. “Syd. Make it stop. There’s blood everywhere.”

I put my arms around my friend and plead with the Survivors. “I thought you were decent. I thought you were truthful. Are you even half the men I assume you are? You’re not mass murderers. Don’t do this. We’ll find another way.”

“Are you going to steer?” Mangold asks. “Or is this where we part ways?”

Len nods at me. He’s white as a sheet. We only have a mile left to think.

I regulate my breathing. I pretend I’m back at the barre. Avoiding the brake pedal, I roll through the arches of my feet, up and down, like I’m doing sets of
relevés
. I think about home and before I left and what kind of person I have become in just a handful of days. Before I got here, I would have volunteered to start the car myself if it had meant the City would survive.

The starting harness. I remember the day Doc explained how to hotwire the car if the starter went out. Instead of using the harness to start the car, maybe I can figure out how to make sure it never starts again.

In our first stroke of good luck in a while, Len is pushing at the left mirror, right beside me, and James, on the right, is refusing to even glance down at me—though whether because of his own handiwork or his sheer hatred of me, I don’t know, and don’t care.

As surreptitiously as I can manage, I lean forward on the wheel, as if stretching my back. With my left hand, I feel underneath the steering wheel and fish around until I find the harness. Doc didn’t bother to replace the housing, and had marked the starter bundle with a red piece of electrical tape.

Len looks down at the wires in my hand. He nods at me and walks to the back bumper, where Paul is pushing with Mangold. “Do you have a bandana or anything? Syd’s nose is bleeding again.” Mangold and James look away, but Paul hands him a greasy cloth from his back pocket.

When Len drops it in my hand, the cloth is heavy with his pocketknife. Not real magic, but a parlor trick. And a good one too.

I cut the wires, twice, leaving a wide gap so that they can’t be pulled back together. I shove the wire section into my pocket, the bandana bloody from cutting into my palms, trying to act without moving, trying to avoid drawing any more attention to myself.

They probably have another way to detonate the car. But at least I’ve tried something. Len smiles down at me. I know he’s trying to say something tacitly, like he does with Cas. And for a moment I lament not having siblings. I lament it for Mina, too. I lament that if we can’t stop this, she’ll never meet Cas or Jayne or Pi. And my chances aren’t that hot either.

As it is, too much has already been lost. When I think about Troy, my heart swims in my empty chest with seven kinds of aching. Anger, disbelief, regret. We almost had everything we’d dreamed of as kids. Now there’s no possible future for us together, with or without compromise. Was it my fault, his fault, the Bishop’s fault? Did it even matter?

This last push to the gate takes what seems like an eternity. I’m so nervous. I begin thinking ahead to when we get inside, how we can warn as many people as possible. If I sent Pi and Cas and Jayne and Nelle, Becky, Tess, and whomever they wanted to take to the ranch or even the bramble house—maybe they’d be far enough away to be safe.

But Mangold has one more surprise.

We’ve stopped about a quarter mile from the gate, and have huddled up behind the car.

Mangold smiles at us. “I want to thank you both for your contributions to this project. Without you, well, we wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure. Here’s to the restoration of the City and its surrounding communities.”

I squint, trying to find some humanity in his features. “Dr. Mangold, please. What if the tables were turned?”

“Paul, James, it’s time.” Mangold unlocks the trunk and the two men climb in awkwardly.

Mangold steps into Len’s position, with his right hand on the wheel. “Len, you get the right mirror, would you? Syd, you’re in back.”

The arrangement is strange. But I can’t put my finger on why. It’s not until we’re at the gate that I realize Mangold knows full well Len and I have been expressly forbidden to reenter the gates. We should be in the trunk, and yet here we are, unarmed and undisguised. Unadmittable.

“This is the end of the line for the two of you,” Mangold says.

“You lying bastard,” Len growls. “New Charity doesn’t deserve this. The Bishop used them. You’re
choosing
to hurt people. Innocent people. Please listen.”

But Mangold has turned to talk to the guards. One says he’ll send someone to check with the Governor, who is a few blocks away, setting up the stage for the relighting ceremony. A few minutes later, the gate opens, and three guards take up positions around the sculpture, and while marveling, heave their way forward, escorting their own deaths through the town gates.

Those same gates close on Len and me, even as we beg and plead. We offer our bodies, our souls, our first-born children, but our offers fall on deaf ears. One of the guards laughs. “You
are
the danger,” he says. “I’m not stupid, you know. I can read orders.”

We stand for a moment, on the outside looking in, the great steel horses of the gate looking down from their tossing heads. They’d once let me through with ease, with the wind of my dad’s spirit, my mother, with Danny alongside me.

“Pray with me?” Len asks. I’ve never been more frightened, and I don’t know what to do, so I take his hand. When our knees touch the ground, something happens. Half migraine, half carnival ride, everything shifts.

The car rolls into the Sanctuary square and people are milling about, children delighted. The Bishop and the Governor climb into the car and turn the key. The car blows sky-high, leveling the square. There is smoke and blood everywhere, screams are coming from every direction—

“Stop, Len. Please.” I pry my hand away from his. “Is that what you’ve had to see all this time? What Cas had to see?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you would be able to . . .”

I thought it wasn’t possible to feel any worse than I had before, but I was wrong. “I thought I had the right wires, I swear.”

This time he doesn’t tell me it’s okay. There’s no way to make those sorts of assurances, or even believe in them anymore.

Len’s head is bowed low, his hands on the ground. “Pray, Syd.”

He’s right. The Spirit—or maybe just the idea of it—is all we have left.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cas

The morning of relighting day dawned cool and bright. Jayne and Becky had taken the night watch, while I slept in Syd’s old pink bedroom, sheets thrown over the piles of tulle and sequin.

The night before, Jayne had held my hand, and then it was done. The exchange had been silent, and ideally undetectable to the Bishop. The new power in my body felt strange, heavy, as if my feet were connected to the very ground, as if I were dragging the soil behind me. I wondered if I was strong enough. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, how to use it—I couldn’t practice if the Bishop was still wasting his Hindsight—but skill or none, surprise was our edge.

Pious was slow to wake. Jayne and I asked Becky to watch him while we went to find Nelle. To tell her that the Bishop suspected her plans. That she was trapped.

White chairs with streamers were being unfolded in rows facing a large stage half a block from the Sanctuary. The Governor was front and center, accepting condolences and well wishes as he ordered volunteers around.

A buzz floated over the crowd as we passed the mercantile. At first I thought it was because of us, but everyone’s attention was on the gate, shielding their eyes from the morning sun with the shelves of their palms. From some angles, the object rolling toward us looked like a jumble of metal.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Looks like art,” Jayne mused. “What in the hell are we supposed to do with art?”

“Don’t let Syd hear you say that.”

And then the piece came into view from the side. It was a shining sculpture of the land. Two hundred miles west to here. The City, whose skyline I’ve known only on posters and in books, the mountains in the distance, and, at the back of the car, the river running into our town, the bumper a small-scale replica of the gates.

It felt like someone had clubbed me over the head. I twisted in agony, the edges of my sight blurring red, an oncoming vision—unstoppable.

When I’d had the vision about Nelle, it had contained the worst images I’d ever seen. And yet, it was vague in cause. Consequences of something unknown. This time, though, the vision showed how the sculpture would come apart, tearing into yielding flesh and flaying buildings. How could Syd and Len have let this inside the gates? Were they so angry they’d given up completely? Did Len think I could protect myself because I’d be able to see?

I tried to push back my panic. I slowly worked my way back to reality, Jayne on the edges of it, shaking my shoulders.

“Are you okay?” she asked. I opened my eyes. “You were making this . . . this sound.”

“I’m sorry. I saw . . . the car. The sculpture. We have to get it out of here.”

“It’s a bomb, then, isn’t it?”

I looked back at the statue. Four men were pushing, though none of them were Len. Syd was nowhere to be seen, either. A thousand possibilities ran through my mind. What if they hadn’t been involved in the sculpture at all? What if they’d been hurt trying to keep it from coming through the gates?

The Governor was on the stage, fussing over the placement of the town seal. “To the right. No, right. No,
my
right.”

“Governor?”

“Not now.”

“Governor, please, it’s important.”

He turned to look down his nose at me. “I thought I was clear on where we stood, Casandra.”

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. The statue—”

“I don’t care.”

I followed him anyway. “You have to get rid of it. Tell them to take it away.”

“That heap of junk? It’s probably put together with pinesap and spit. What harm can it do?”

“I had a vision. After the dinner with Nelle. Just now. I swear this is important. It’s a bomb. You’ll kill everyone in New Charity if you don’t do something.”

“Hyperbole and nonsense. Getting everyone all riled up, reckless. Your brother is dead.”

“Don’t you think I know that? You’ve lost all of your children. What else will you give up for power over—what—this, this place, this patch of ground? Why? If you ever loved any of us, even a little bit, you’d listen to me.”

“Out of my sight. Now. Before I call someone.”