“Bullshit!” Mitch’s eyes were wide, his nose crinkled in a bizarre display of fear.

“Sit,” Sera said, and he sat reluctantly, then scooted his chair closer to the table and leaned with his elbows on it, watching us all.

“She’ll look for me and she’ll find me, because her other Travelers can move just as fast as I can. And I will be a priority, because Jake taught her how to do business. She has to kill me, or everyone else will think Sera can be their savior. Which is exactly why she’s killed most of the people your dumb-ass sister set free.”

“What?” My stomach sank into my heels, weighing me down. Julia had killed the people Kenley had freed? “Do you know that for a fact? They’re dead?”

“Not all of them.” He turned to Kori, sitting on the edge of his chair as if he still wanted to stand, and his next words carried special, bitter weight. “A couple of them are still in the basement, wishing they were dead. In front of a live studio audience.” Then he turned back to Sera. “She’s going to hunt down everyone you set free until you stop doing it or she gets to you, just like she got to Kenley. And you’re a bigger fool than I can even comprehend if you don’t believe that.”

Sixteen

Sera

“She killed them?” The words echoed in my head long after they’d left my tongue. They resonated in my bones and churned in my stomach, urging my dinner to stage a revolt.

“Only the lucky ones.” Kori took the whiskey bottle back from Ian and sank onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen peninsula.

“You mean we’ve been making it worse?” Kris leaned with his elbows on the table, his arms tense, his brow deeply furrowed. “All that time and effort trying to fix things, and we were really just getting people killed?”

“What the hell were we expecting?” Kori rotated her stool so that she faced us, her grip on the neck of the bottle so tight her fingers had turned white. “That Julia would just pout and shrug, then go on with her life? She can’t afford to let us beat her, and she certainly can’t afford for people to know we beat her. This is our fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” I insisted. “You were doing the only thing you could do. The right thing.” The same thing I’d tried to do for Ned. But then, that hadn’t worked out very well, either.

“Right is irrelevant.” Kori twisted the lid from the bottle again. “It’s just a word. Or do you really believe it’s better to be dead than alive but enslaved?” But before I could answer, she stared down at the bottle in her hands and seemed to be reassessing her own question. “We should have just killed them ourselves.” She took a long swig. Then one more. “It would have been a mercy.”

Anger blazed in my chest like heartburn. “How the hell is death a mercy?” My parents wouldn’t have considered their deaths a mercy. Neither would my sister. And losing them was about as far from merciful as an act can be.

“No offense, Sera, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s what makes you dangerous.” Kori’s gaze pinned me like an insect tacked open for display. I felt as though she could see what was inside me. And she didn’t look impressed. “You have more Skills than anyone I’ve ever met, but you don’t know how to use them. You have power Julia Tower would slaughter half the planet to keep for herself, but you don’t know how to control it. And you brought all that to our doorstep. Like she needed another reason to hunt us down.”

Kris stood and tried to take the bottle from her, but she pulled it out of his reach and swigged again. “Kori, back off. None of this is her fault.”

“When has that ever mattered?” she demanded, and when Ian stood for the bottle, she actually let him have it. But her frustration didn’t fade. “The whole damn thing was Jake’s fault, and he lived like a fucking king. Now Julia’s taken over where he left off, and if she’s suffering guilt or grief, she’s hiding it really well.” She turned to me then, while we all stared at her. “That’s what you don’t understand, Sera, seeing as how you just fell off the family tree into a pile of money and power. The Tower birthright isn’t just fortune and clout. No matter how you use it, it’s an obligation. A responsibility you can’t shirk. If you abuse it, like Julia, people will die. If you waste it—if you hide out with us and do nothing—people will die, because Julia will kill them.”

“Kori, that’s enough.” Kris glanced at Mitch, to make sure he wasn’t trying to pull something while they were all distracted, then turned back to his sister. “Picking a fight with your allies isn’t going to help.”

“You think I’m hiding?” I could feel my cheeks burn. But wasn’t she right? Wasn’t I hiding from Julia with them, even as I hid them from Julia?

Kori pushed Kris out of her way and took two steps toward the table. “I think that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

“That’s not fair.” Kris’s jaw clenched in anger at his own sister, and something in my chest tightened. Then warmed. “Sera didn’t ask for this. You said it yourself, Kor, she fell into this mess. Not everyone eats and breathes revolution, you know.”

He was trying to help. I knew that, and it was so sweet, and I was certainly grateful, but somehow his words chafed even worse than his sister’s.