Page 112 of The City of Stardust

Violet tries to bring him back to the present. “After me, there will be no more Everlys,” she says. “It’ll be over.”

“You would be safe here,” he reminds her.

“But my family would die.”

Penelope always keeps her promises. Violet—or her uncles, Caspian, anyone who ever helped her. An endless list to protect. Against Penelope’s wrath, she could never save them all.

“What would you have me do?” Ever asks.

And Violet knows, with the crushing weight of truth, that she cannot ask him to sacrifice himself.

That leaves just one choice left.

From the vantage point of his workshop, Ever Everly watches a shadow steal across the courtyard. It takes him a moment—it always does—to recognise the shadow as belonging to a real person, and not as another ghost mournfully watching him from its haunted perch. Violet thinks the ghosts are nothing more than a figment of his imagination; he’s overheard her whispering to her companion about the way he rants and raves in his workshop.

But they are real, and all the more terrible for it.

Some are smokey wraiths, little more than wisps of fog that could just as easily be a smear on a window. Others hold the features theybore in life, damning Ever to a lifetime of seeing their faces: the butcher down the road, who used to open his shop as Ever closed his; the teacher who often took her students out on to the lake; a particularly noisy downstairs neighbour, whose walls he had to shore up with fresh supports in the decades after their demise. Too many more of them he no longer recognises, though they seem to know him well enough. And isn’t that the fickle nature of memory? To see into the past, but only through a glass darkly.

They cluster around him like mist on a foggy night. They say,Everly, we cannot rest. Everly, we will not rest. Everly.A litany he knows all too well. When all else is dust and ruin—though isn’t that where he is now?—he will remember his name, whispered at every single moment of the day in relentless chorus.

Everly, we beg you. Everly, we see your regrets. We wish to rest.

A soul for a year and a day of love. A soul for a year and a day of knowledge. He no longer remembers the bargain itself, but the aftermath forever surrounds him.

He hears the astral’s words:It is survival. And his entire body sinks into a sigh. They are words he has used so often to console himself, to placate the wraiths, he has almost forgotten what they mean. It’s what he told Violet only hours earlier.

A thousand years, and they have not learnt. A thousand years, and they are still so afraid. They cannot kill each other—and now they cannot even die for each other.

Everly Everly Everly.

What a stupid man he has been.

CHAPTER

Fifty-Four

TIME MOVES QUICKLY, after that.

Violet stands in front of the ring of smashed archways as faint threads of sunrise flicker on the horizon. From here, she has a perfect view of the sprawling city and the desert beyond it. The end of a city. The end of a world.

The end has such a very finite ring to it.

“This is it,” she says aloud, just to listen to the words echo around her.

If she had told herself this was where she would be, after a too short lifetime of wanting, and a too long journey of hunting her mother down, she might have climbed back into her wardrobe. So much effort and worry and heartbreak. It would be easier to rewind time and save her the trouble.

Part of her very much wishes she could. She has paid for this quest in too many horrors: Tamriel in his basement; Yury and his transformation. The bodies in the tower.

The rest of her recalls the undeniably seductive glamour, the thrill of learning to play the scholars’ game of cunning and power. Caspian Verne, with his quiet smile and whispers of greater possibilities. Erriel and her coronet of light. Even the asteria spreading out his asteros cards to command a future for her.

Aleksander. She presses her fingers to her lips and lets herself remember the bite of his kiss. The way his hands had roamed across her skin.

How wonderful and devastating this life has been. How badly she wishes it wasn’t ending this way. And she’s not ready, not by any means.

She could run.

There are other ways out of the city, after all. And she has the blood that runs through her veins, the liquid key to unlock the other doorways. There are provisions she could steal, maps she could tuck into a bag to take with her. And there is adventure, waiting for her in some middle distance, like an especially vivid mirage. The bite of the forbidden fruit she’s never quite had.

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