Page 94 of The Devouring Time

My head spins, and for a moment I feel utterly untethered from reality. The coruscating light around the machine vanishes, and the stink of burning wires and insulation grows stronger, before being overwhelmed with the more nauseating stench of scorched flesh.

“Sterling? Sterling!”

Adrian crouches beside me, hands cupping my face, his expression frightened. One eye is swelling shut, but even so, he’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.

“I love you,” I whisper, because it’s the only thing I can gather from my scattered thoughts.

He smiles in relief. “Love you, too,” he replies, and kisses me.

“He’s alive, then?” Mary asks. “Did it work? Are we safe?”

“The orb was tethered to the machine.” My voice comes out in a croak. “It’s gone. Without it, they can’t—couldn’t—travel through time or swap bodies.”

“Thank God.” Adrian closes his eyes briefly, then helps me sit up. My back twinges, and I let out a gasp of pain. “You’re hurt!”

“Pulled something in my back,” I reply through gritted teeth. “Don’t worry.”

A few feet away, the scorched remains of the machine continue to smolder. The woman’s body slumps to the side, smoke leaking from beneath the helmet.

Sadness pierces me. I can’t think of a single way to have saved her, but knowing she died in a body that didn’t belong to her, in a time not her own, makes my heart hurt.

The Timekeepers and members of Vitali’s gang who drank the tainted wine stand placid and still, unmoved by events. Hart remains in his chair, now slumped face-down on the table, one of the clock-hand daggers driven into the base of his skull, no doubt by Mary. Any remaining guards seem to have fled, leaving behind their dead.

“Dorset, you all right?” Mary calls, making her way over to her follower. “Hellion—shit, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig!”

“Help her,” I tell Adrian. He nods and hurries to where Helen sits pale and bloody, holding onto the wound in her forearm. Mary instructs him to pull an unbloodied shirt off one of the dead men and start tearing it into strips for bandages.

I lever myself to my feet, wincing as my back complains, and stare down at the ruined machine. After the war, I’d sworn never to kill again. By breaking the machine and the orb, I condemned the Swarm to extinction, as well as any surviving young Tschchch in the creche.

The loss of the last few Tschchch is a tragedy, though with some outside extinction coming for them, I suppose they were doomed no matter what actions I took. As for the Swarm…

I don’t know how to feel. Not guilty—they meant to wipe out all of humanity, to replace us. To raise future generations to adulthood in creches, then evict them from their own bodies. And not just humanity, but whatever future species might meet the Swarm’s needs, once the earth can no longer support the human form.

Perhaps later I’ll feel triumphant. Jubilant, even. But for now, I’m simply tired.

“I can walk,” Helen says, pushing away Mary’s hands. “Adrian, help me up. Once we’re out of here, I’ll call the police and tell them I heard a rumor some bootleggers were meeting here.” She looks at the Chrysalis-drugged figures. “They’ll see to the survivors.”

I pick up the Key of Mithras from in front of Hart’s corpse. Fortunately, it seems undamaged.

We limp out of the cave, Dorset leaning on Mary, and Helen on her own feet. Though my back hurts, whatever muscle I pulled is high enough up that I can walk, albeit slowly. Still, when Adrian puts his arm around my shoulders, I accept the support gladly.

When we emerge onto the beach, we pause to catch our breath. The waves lap gently against the strand, and far off on the horizon shine the lights of a ship making its way to port.

I hand the Key of Mithras to Adrian. “Your job is done.”

He squeezes me close. “That it is.”

I lean my head against his shoulder, breathing in the scent of salt and seaweed from the ocean, the clean smell of warm skin and lilac from him. My gaze follows the waves out to sea, to the horizon, then up to the stars that Bianca painted so long ago.

“Thank you,” I whisper to her, too quietly even for Adrian to hear over the sigh of the incoming tide. “You never knew, but you did it. You saved us all.”

Epilogue

One year later

“On the house,” Cleo tells Helen, signaling to the bartender as she does so. “My brother tells me you did him a good turn, and while normally I don’t listen to a word he says, I like the look of you.”

Helen grins. “I’ll never turn down a free drink.”