“Is it over?” she asked Pasha.

Pasha nodded slowly. “I think so.”

She looked at Nikolai. Through Nikolai. He was so weak now, he was hardly even a shadow anymore. But he nodded, too.

She frowned at her metal fingers some more. Then she said to Nikolai, “Quite honestly, it’s ugly. And heavy. But it will be more satisfying now to punch you.”

He didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh.

“Why did you do it?” Vika asked. “You could have won and taken the throne with me incapacitated.”

Nikolai sighed. “Because when you were hit—when it was like the end of the Game and you were going to die again—what I truly wanted broke free of the darkness, and everything became clear.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked into her eyes. Her fiercely beautiful, defiant eyes.

His single dimple crinkled his shadowed cheek, as he smiled fully for the first time in a very long time. “It’s because you said you loved me. And I didn’t forget.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

“I see you,” Vika said.

Nikolai shook his head and looked down at his fading silhouette. “I’m hardly here.”

But he was. He was faint, but her Nikolai was still there, as she’d hoped all along. He had found a piece of himself and fought Aizhana’s energy.

And yet, his mother’s darkness still lived within him. Would it come back after Nikolai had rested? Would it take over his body and his will again? If only there were more of the old Nikolai to fight it.

Vika looked at her new bronze hand. It was a shame she couldn’t simply punch Aizhana’s energy out of him. She flexed her fingers, still adjusting to the feel of the metal. She was made of so many different parts now: the statue’s old magic, Nikolai’s energy at the end of the Game, Sergei’s energy through his bracelet.

Wait. Nikolai’s energy! Vika’s mouth dropped as the realization hit her. All this time, energy had been transferred to her. But what if Nikolai could reclaim some of his own energy he’d given her during the Game? The pure, self-sacrificing Nikolai she’d been searching for might still exist in her own veins.

“Give me your hand,” she said as she reached with her human fingers for his shadow ones, so faint they were like dissipating wisps of smoke.

But as soon as she touched him, a jolt of heat shot through her. It knocked all the air out of her lungs.

“What’s happening?” Pasha demanded.

Neither she nor Nikolai could answer. He was swallowed by light, first a dull glow where she held his hand, but then expanding, brighter and brighter until they were engulfed by a halo so blinding, she had to squint.

It was like touching him for the first time at the masquerade, and wanting him to kiss her in his bed, and dancing with him in the volcano dream, all bound in a ribbon of mandarin and thyme and fire.

Vika gasped for air. It was working. But why now? Why hasn’t this happened before? There had been plenty of interaction between the two of them recently.

But there had always been something between her and Nikolai. An egg. A dream. Misguided ambition.

Now, though, there was nothing separating them.

Their connection was both torment and rapture. It was bewildering yet simple, wretched yet joyous, but in a way that Vika could not, and did not, wish to escape.

It was life, compacted to its essence.

As his old energy—and some of her own—flowed back to him, Vika could also feel the dark, chilly edges of Aizhana’s energy. Vika squeezed Nikolai’s hand.

His shadow began to recede where they touched, like spilled ink dripping away from his fingertips back into an unseen well. The coldness of Aizhana’s energy also drew back, chased away by the warmth that tumbled from Vika’s body.

“I know this energy,” Nikolai whispered.

Vika imagined pushing harder on his shadow, and more of it fell away. Nikolai’s human form slowly returned—traveling first from his fingertips and up his arm, then across his torso, into his other arm, his legs, his feet. It spread over his collarbone, where the wand scar had once been. Up his neck, along the line of his jaw, and over the sharp planes of his cheeks.

The shadow had receded. Vika gasped, hand over mouth, hardly believing who was before her.

But it was him again. Finally. Her Nikolai.

He looked down at himself, held his arms out and turned them from side to side, touched his face and his chest, all as if not quite believing. Finally, though, he looked at Vika. “You saved me.”

“You saved me,” she said.

“Perhaps we saved each other. It seems we have a habit of doing that.”

Vika looked from her own hand to Nikolai’s, now also flesh and blood. Then she laughed, not so much from happiness, but from extraordinary, overwhelming relief. “Yes. It seems we do.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Pasha helplessly watched the halo surrounding Vika and Nikolai.

“It’s how they defied the Game, isn’t it?” Yuliana said, linking her arm through his and gesturing at the same time at the halo. “They’re part of each other. And stronger when united.”

There was a pain in Pasha’s chest, the dying of hope that Vika would choose him, but he gritted his teeth and nodded. It was never a choice, he realized. It was always Nikolai, whether any of us knew it or not.

He stood, pulling his sister up with him. “This is what Plato meant,” he said, although mostly to himself, “when he wrote of two broken halves finding each other.”

Nikolai looked at him and shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Or, more accurately, it’s only part of what we’re all looking for.”

Pasha stepped back. He wasn’t surprised that Nikolai knew which allegory he spoke of—they’d always had a shared love of books—but he was surprised at Nikolai’s tone. It was almost as if they were in the library in the Winter Palace, debating philosophy. Friends again.

“What do you mean?” he asked, mindful of the fragility of this conversation. Was it possible to recapture the past, to mend what they’d broken? Pasha ran his hands through his hair.

“I mean, your interpretation contemplates only romantic love,” Nikolai said quietly, as if he, too, understood the significance of their conversation. “But what about family? And friendship? I think we’ve all been blind to the importance of those. Me, most of all.” He rose and helped Vika up. When he released her hand, their halo of light vanished.