Voices draw near, and soon my view of the snow-covered park is blocked by a voluminous black skirt with silver brocade. Leather boots and the bottom of a greatcoat join her and I stifle a tiny sigh of relief as the thick fabrics block some of the punishing wind. I try to go back to sleep—to take advantage of the slight warmth before they stand and leave, but the words they’re saying keep waking me up.

“It will destroy nearly all of them. And half the Earthbounds. We can start over. It will be the Reduciata’s finest moment. Our finest moment.”

“It’s not ready yet. You cannot release it without the antidote.”

“How many more lifetimes? Three? Ten? I grow impatient and the Curatoria … they grow bothersome.”

“Don’t you think I know that better than you?”

Earthbound … Reduciata … Curatoria.

I don’t know what the words mean, but my mind latches onto them and clings, forcing my eyes open, my thoughts spinning.

And spinning.

And then something else.

A sensation unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Pictures flash before my eyes, and it feels as though someone has opened up my head and poured in hot broth. It fills me with warmth, with knowledge, with voices.

Voices that warn me into silence.

I try to remain quiet, but as lovely as the warmth is, it’s also a hurricane of … something I have no words for. Like suddenly I am a hundred people all at once.

I gasp and feel beads of sweat forming on my brow, despite having been so desperately cold only moments before.

Moments?

Yes, it has only been moments.

Suddenly a hand is wrapping around my arm and the man yanks me out from beneath the bench. His face is inches from mine and he shakes me with teeth-rattling force. I am still too full of those strange feelings to hear a word he says, but I manage to whisper, over and over, “I heard nothing, sir. I heard nothing!”

He stops shaking and it’s all I can do to keep my head up at all. I stare at that face, craggy, with a short beard and a scar along the side of his cheek. I can’t be sure if he’s a gentleman or a rough sort.

But his eyes are a light, ale-colored brown and I stare at him for long, silent seconds.

I know this face.

I’m certain I’ve never met him before, but I know this face.

“She’s just a little human child,” a woman’s voice says from out of view. I spin my eyes over to her. She’s going to save me!

But what greets me is the small barrel of a flintlock pistol, nearly touching the skin on my forehead, held in a delicate, gloved hand.

“No one will miss her,” the woman finishes. My eyes widen and I look into her face. She looks kind, regal, almost beautiful.

But she shows no remorse or hesitation as she draws back the hammer of the gun, and my last moment is flooded with the earsplitting report of a shot as my head snaps backward, alight with pain.

And then my soul rips away again.

I gasp for breath, my lungs begging for air. I touch my forehead and find whole skin there. Perspiration mingles with splattering rain, but I am unharmed.

I’m alive.

It was only a memory.

I look up at Marie; there is no gun this time, but I see that same look, devoid of emotion.

“It’s such a shame,” she says evenly. “You and I, we were friends once, before you sided with the Curatoria. So many aeons ago and yet I still remember the ages we spent making a river, a canyon, whose great walls and beautiful landscape would be legendary, just because we could. You creating high mountains, me carving out those deep ravines. Give-and-take, balanced exactly the way the Earthmakers were intended to be. The two of us making something beautiful while our lovers quarreled and fought. I still have a tiny twinge of regret every time someone speaks of the Grand Canyon.”

I’m still trying to make sense of her words when a stinging slap flings my head to the side.

“That’s for leaving me behind,” she says softly.

Anger roils inside me, filling me with a rage that blots out any pain from the slap. My life, my parents, my love; she is responsible for everything I no longer have.

“You have taken everything from me,” I shriek, a flash of lightning accentuating my words.

“Yes, I suppose we have,” she says, utterly calm.

But even as I’m sure the rage is going to overwhelm me, something shifts inside and a black calm settles in my mind.

No more. Voices I don’t recognize echo in my head as a razor fury makes a pit in my stomach, white-hot anger at wrongs I can’t remember—and yet the pain, the agonizing loss, that I recall with perfect clarity. Not one. More. Damn. Thing.

I push my hands out in front of me, pour out my rage, and instantly I’m standing before a mountain: a dusty red behemoth of crags and sharp boulders that towers hundreds of feet above my head, the sheer face of a cliff an arm’s length away. The forest that was is nothing more than a destroyed memory, swept away by stone.

For an instant.

It blinks out of existence. Not the normal five-minute way—it’s forced out of existence, leaving Marie standing there, looking almost bored, surrounded by splintered trees as far as I can see in the murky dusk.

Marie the Destroyer.

But I’m not done. That was only a test.

Lava, steel, bullets. They come from every direction as the women in my head pick weapons from memories out past my reach. And I let them. I surrender my mind, allowing the Tavias of old to let loose every drop of anger and pain I’ve built up for millennia.