“But Ivers will get to Graceland Cemetery any minute now.”

I almost seized Paulo. “What time is it?”

“About eleven-thirty p.m.”

Conn said, “We’ve got to go, Darcy.”

“But, Conn,” said Paulo, “if our agents surround the Sanctuary, the Shades are going to notice, and if the IBI doesn’t attack, the Shades will.”

“We won’t let that happen. Just reach Fitzgerald. Promise me you’ll do that.”

Paulo hesitated.

“Unless you want to see Ivers running the IBI.”

Paulo let out a resigned sigh that seemed a good enough promise to Conn, because he took my hand and began to run.

As we raced down the corridor, I said, “Is that true? Is that what Ivers is trying to do?”

“I don’t know. But it’ll make Fitzgerald act.”

“If Paulo calls her. If she gets there in time.”

Conn didn’t say anything to that, and as the word “time” echoed in my head I realized something that almost stopped me in my tracks. “We don’t have time to do both.”

Conn glanced at me and began to run even faster.

“It’s impossible,” I said desperately. “We can’t stop Meridian from burning Deacon’s house and keep the IBI and the Society from tearing each other apart at the Sanctuary. Deacon’s house and Graceland Cemetery are at opposite ends of town.”

We jumped down a flight of stairs.

“It’s too late,” I said. “Everything’s too late.”

Conn paused before a door and pressed his thumb against a lockpad. The door swung open. “It isn’t,” he said. “Not if we split up.”

“Bad idea.” I followed him into a garage. “No way.”

“It’s the only way.” He stopped. “Darcy. There are two tasks. We are two people.”

“Then I’ll go to the Sanctuary.” It seemed more dangerous, the place where anything could happen. It was the place where Conn would most likely get hurt, even killed.

He shook his head. “Let me go. Please.”

“No. The Society will attack if it’s to defend their home.”

“I think I can stop them.”

“How? With your two bare hands? You’re insane.”

“I’ll talk to them. I’ll convince the Shades not to attack.”

“Conn—”

“I know what to say.” He cupped my face in his hands. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good,” he said. “Now, realistically, Meridian’s fire will happen. The only thing you can do at this point is damage control—and you’ve already started that, since you’re brilliant. You alerted the firefighters. As for Deacon’s house, it’s just a tourist attraction no one lives in. It can burn.” Conn handed me a small, square object the size of a quarter. “This is a sort of megaphone. Talk to the crowd. Keep them from panicking. That will save lives.”

“Me. You want me, a Shade, to keep humans from panicking.” My voice rose and echoed in the cavernous garage. “The very sight of me will make them panic.”

“They’ll trust you. Like I do. You will make them trust you. Okay?”

That word felt like a harness loaded with the world. But when I looked at Conn his eyes held a strength that helped me find my own. “Okay.”

“Let’s go. I’ll drop you off midway.”

It was then that I looked over his shoulder and saw the machine behind him. “What is that? Is that a motorcycle?” As soon as I said that I realized that this was what Conn had been drawing in his sketchbook.

“No,” he said. “It’s a hypercycle.”

“Conn, did you make this?”

“Come on.” He reached for the helmet hanging by its strap from one of the handlebars and straddled the machine.

“Well,” I said, “at least I get a helmet this time.”

He laughed. “You don’t need a helmet, Darcy, and you never did. This is for me.”

I climbed up and held on to him tight.

The engine caught with a roar and we peeled out of the garage.

48

I found out why Conn needed his helmet, and why he hadn’t worn one on our trip to the railroad tracks in the Alter.

It was because, for him, riding a motorcycle was like riding a bike.

And the hypercycle absolutely was not.

The machine screamed down the street.

We scraped around a corner and hit heavy traffic—all the partygoers, the cars cramming the streets to get wherever they wanted to be by midnight. It filled me with frustrated despair to think that this—traffic—was going to stop us. But then Conn’s helmeted head turned skyward, and I followed his gaze and noticed, as I had on my first day exploring this Chicago, that odd metal rail looping high around the buildings. I had just enough time to wonder why Conn was looking at it and what it had to do with escaping this demonic snarl of traffic, when he jerked at the handlebars and the hypercycle kicked beneath us. It rocketed into the air and slammed its wheels down on the rail, then swung to ride along at a right angle with the building, the machine parallel to the ground.

I probably yelped or did something similarly unheroic. I mean, hey, I’m practically invulnerable, but more than a decade of human living is pretty hard to shake. Humans like their spines. They like them attached to the rest of their bones. They usually don’t like being a hundred feet in the air, hurtling along at killer speeds, their bodies hanging over the streets below.

Then I saw that the city block was about to come to an abrupt end. We were reaching an intersection, and the buildings we were driving on were going to sheer off into thin air.

The hypercycle sped toward the edge. I clung to Conn’s waist and buried my face against his back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this.

But before I could decide whether to close my eyes, the hypercycle kicked again and we launched across space to slam onto the rail waiting for us on the other side of the street.

Another thing about humans—and I wasn’t entirely sure whether this was true for Shades, too—is that they can get used to almost anything. I’d been human long enough that after about fifteen minutes on the hypercycle I relaxed enough to have an idea. “Hey!” I yelled near Conn’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

He nodded.

“Most people die of smoke inhalation in fires,” I shouted. “Not from the fire itself. If you can stop a battle over the Sanctuary, ask the Society for help. Shades can ghost up high buildings to smash windows for fresh air. They can tell firefighters where people are trapped. If the Shades can handle being near the fire. If they’re willing.”

We jumped over another street, and I could feel Conn thinking as we arced through the air. Then we hit the other side, and he nodded.

Soon after that, the engine seemed to fail. I clamped my legs to the sides of the machine and hung on to Conn for dear life—whether his life or mine, I didn’t know. They felt like one and the same.

The hypercycle hovered, its wheels spinning in place, and Conn flung up the visor of his helmet and turned to look over his shoulder at me. “Here,” he said. “We have to split up here.” He took one hand off the handlebars—a suicidal move, if you ask me—and pointed west. “That’s Deacon Street. Head that way, and it’ll take you straight to the celebration.”

I didn’t know what to say, because everything I wanted to tell Conn felt more dangerous than fire.

“Darcy?” he said.

“Be careful.”

He gave me a half smile. “You, too.”

For a moment, I wondered if all the things he wasn’t saying were the same things I wasn’t saying. Then I ghosted, and turned so that I wouldn’t have to see him speeding away.

The streets below swam with people, the crowds getting thicker and louder as I flew toward Deacon’s house. I could see the nineteenth-century sidewalks radiating from the house like spokes from the center of a wheel.

I passed an old clock tower—11:55 p.m. Five minutes till midnight.

In front of Deacon’s house was a low stage. Dancers in flame-colored leotards leaped and spun across its surface as a man who I guessed was the mayor watched from a chair seated at the far end of the stage. I glanced at the clock, and saw another clock in my mind, the sculpture that Conn and I had made for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It struck me then that the poem wasn’t simply about love, but about how love demands the risk of one’s whole self. Could I really do that? Could I shake my identity to its foundations? Could I put my life on the line?

I looked out into the sea of strangers who would recoil the moment I appeared. Of course they would. I was a Shade. My name was Lark. Yet I was also Darcy Jones, and somehow I would have to love both parts of me, or I would never be able to save anyone, and would never know the answer to this question:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

There wasn’t time for me to think about what to say—or even what to do. I simply did it. I manifested in the center of the stage.

A dancer screamed, then another, and then they poured off the stage, running away as fast as they could. Some secret service types pounced on the mayor, protecting him with their bodies, while someone in the crowd yelled, “Assassination! It’s an assassination attempt!”

“No!” I shouted into Conn’s micro-megaphone, and was shocked to hear how loud my voice was. People blocks away must have been able to hear me. “I’m not trying to kill your mayor. I just want to talk.”

There were more screams, and calls for the IBI. Panic was brewing—exactly like I’d told Conn it would.

“The IBI isn’t here,” I told them, “so there’s no one here to protect us. We’re going to have to protect ourselves. Because you’re right: something bad is about to happen.”

Not the smartest thing I’ve ever said.

It made the mayor’s bodyguards lunge at me. I ghosted and reappeared a few feet away. “Where are your basic math skills?” I shouted. “Can’t you count? I am one person surrounded by thousands. I am way more in danger of you than you are of me.”

This didn’t seem to calm the crowd much—or the bodyguards. One of them snagged my arm and slapped a firecuff around my wrist.

I wriggled away and darted to the very edge of the stage.

The bold guard slipped toward me warily, but he needn’t have worried. I was frozen, staring at the flickering bracelet around my wrist. I fought to fill my lungs with air.

Yet this is what they need to see, a tiny idea whispered inside. That you can be as vulnerable as they are.

I forced my free hand to move. Almost as if it didn’t belong to me, it reached for the dangling half of the firecuffs. Then I cuffed myself.

There was a gasp. It might have come from me. Or the people who had seen what I’d done. The guards hung back, astonished that their prey had practically hand-delivered herself.

Soon. They would seize me soon. As soon as the shock wore off. I had to find the right words to convince these people. I had to find them now.

I held up my wrists so everyone could see the flame coursing through the glass cuffs. Now my hands cupped the megaphone as if lifted in prayer, and as I saw the minute hand on the clock tower swing toward midnight, I searched for my voice. It came out shaky, throaty.

Afraid. Afraid of what I’d done to myself. Afraid of what I probably wouldn’t be able to stop. “I know you’re thinking I’m part of some plot to kill you,” I told the crowd, “and that even cuffing myself is an act. You’re standing there, torn between running away and stampeding me, because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know what I am going to do. And that’s because you don’t know me. You have no idea who I am. Think about that. Think about the fact that if you don’t know me, then you can’t know that I’m out for your blood. I could be a halfway decent person. I could even be trying to help you. And I am.

“Four Shades are going to burn down this house”—I pointed as best as I could with my cuffed hands—“at midnight. In one minute. The sidewalks you’re standing on are going to catch fire. I’m sure those Shades are watching us right now, and they are counting on you to let them frighten you, to let them steer you into the fire. Don’t let them. Be smart, and listen to me.

“I’m not asking you to like me. I’m just asking you to get off the sidewalks. Trust me that much. Trust me enough to stand in the streets. Put your feet on concrete. Get away from anything that can burn.”

The crowd muttered to itself, the mutters building to a low roar. Then someone stepped into the empty street and everyone fell silent.

It was Lily.

I saw Raphael step into another street, and Taylor did the same, and so did Jims, who (bless his big, loud mouth) shouted, “Listen to her!”

Slowly, miraculously, people began filing into the streets.

Then the house exploded behind me.

49

I went blank. The fire was so big. I was dimly aware that people were now fighting to get off anything wooden, and that claws of flame tore at the stage, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. It was like my brain had ghosted out of my body.

Then someone with huge arms grabbed me from behind. I snapped out of my trance and began to struggle.

“Don’t,” said a voice in my ear. “You’ll break your cuffs. I’m here to help you, Darcy. I know you’re on our side.”

I went still. I glanced down and saw that the man was wearing a thick uniform. Not IBI. The fire department?