Worse, the boost twisted her body so that she was facing the street. All the green luxin she’d readied to extend in hooks was useless. Then some primal part of her remembered something and acted before it could rise to the level of thought. She snapped her hands out and streamed unfocused green luxin into the empty air.

Like a tiny rudder steering a mighty ship, it didn’t take much. She threw luxin, and the luxin threw her back—toward the vast open arch. She started spinning, but too late. Her left leg hit stone, and she tumbled.

In.

She’d made it. Her butt had cleared the ledge, just barely.

Karris hopped to her feet amid the standing crowd. No one had even noticed her entrance except one little girl on her father’s shoulders. The girl was patting his head, trying to get his attention. Karris straightened her skirts, brushed off the dirt, and pushed hair out of her eyes.

Now, the hard part.

Chapter 85

Aliviana Danavis spotted the superviolet seed crystal after midnight. She and Phyros were camped just off the bare rock that made up the north peninsula of the Everdark Gates. The sailors they’d hired had refused to make the climb, their fear so great that Liv had left her last remaining drafters with them, to make sure the sailors didn’t abandon them here. For three days, Liv and Phyros climbed alone, guided only by Liv’s intuition. She hoped it was a sense of superviolet, but she wasn’t sure.

Until now.

They had found a campsite just below the final pitch, where windblown grasses gave way to the bare rock of the cliffs of the Gate itself. The site had obviously been used by every party ever to make the climb to stare out over the Gates and the sea. Liv had sat with her back to the fire, thinking about tomorrow and stealthily checking her guns. She checked them all without ever moving her hands, letting her luxin wrap invisibly around her back or down to her belt. She was no smith, but when she pressed her superviolet luxin down the first pistol’s barrel, she noticed that the wadding was in place, but there was no ball. She’d loaded the pistol herself, so it was possible she’d done it improperly and the ball had fallen out.

But on all four? The only question that remained was when it had been done, and by whom. One of the drafters or sailors, back when they were on the galley? Or by dear Phyros?

She took a deep breath, and that was when she saw the seed crystal. In the air above and perfectly between the Everdark Gates, a winking, spinning crystal like a star hung low. Something about the moonlight made it glow cool in the visible spectrum.

Liv rose and started walking, barely aware of herself. In the superviolet spectrum, the crystal looked entirely different. It was hard to get any idea of the size of the thing. Light in the visible spectrum seemed unaffected by the crystal, and indeed, overwhelmed it. In the superviolet spectrum, though, the delicate light of a thousand stars bent toward that one point. When the moon emerged from a cloud, its powerful light beat down, scattering the superviolet streams like iron filings in a wind. But the moon’s face was hidden once again, those delicate streams were sucked toward the seed crystal as to a lodestone.

“Aliviana!” Phyros said. “Where are you going?”

During the day, it would be invisible even in the superviolet. The sledge of sunlight was too strong. This tiny point of light would be a mote in a storm.

“Eikona!” Phyros said.

Liv made her way up the bare rock promontory, captivated. The Everdark Gates were more than twice as tall as the Prism’s Tower, and from each side it was a straight drop from promontory to frothy sea, hundreds of paces below. The waters of the Cerulean Sea warred with the waters of the ocean outside, sometimes jetting through the narrow channel with incredible force one way, and at others, the opposite direction. Rocks lined the channel like teeth of every size. Some were barely above the surface of the water; others were taller than a galley’s mast. Liv couldn’t imagine how any ship could ever make it through the maelstroms.

She reached the top of the Gate, an unnaturally flat plain of bare rock several hundred paces wide. A road etched into the stone itself led out to the precipice.

“Eikona!”

The road was flanked by ancient statues, now broken down to nubs by time and weather and vandals or invaders. Liv walked the road, transfixed by the shining crystal that would change everything. It was, she was certain now, no larger than her fist. Maybe even smaller than that.

“Eikona, that’s far enough,” Phyros said, grabbing her arm.

She stopped and stared hard up at him, as if shocked and disgusted he would touch her.

He released her. “Liv, I’m sorry, but you are to go no farther unless you wear the black jewel. That is what our prince has ordered.”

She stepped back and pulled a pistol from her belt and pointed it at him, and then another.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” he said.

“Am I not? Look in my eyes and tell me I lack the will to do it,” Liv said.

“It isn’t will you lack,” Phyros said.

“So it was you.”

He looked confused. Then, briefly, frightened. If she knew her pistols had been unloaded, did that mean she’d loaded them again?

She had thought to talk to him, to appeal to the loyalty she thought she’d built in him, to offer him a choice, to appeal to logic. But he wasn’t a superviolet or a blue drafter; Phyros was a warrior. He attacked instantly, and was on top of her before she could think.

His gigantic hand was around her throat, squeezing, throwing her into panic. With his other hand he flung the pistols away from her hands, grabbed the others from her belt, and tossed them away, too. The sword and knife at her belt followed, as the blackness closed in.

Phyros carried Liv by her neck and her belt up the weatherbeaten stairs out to the very point of the promontory. She curled into a fetal position and kicked, kicked blindly. Then they reached the top.

His hand was still wrapped around her throat, though loosely now, and he was pawing through her pockets. He found the necklace and pulled it out. He pushed her back until she was on the very edge of the cliff. The wind whipped them. She could barely breathe. There was no strength in her.

“What’ll it be, lady, the black or the abyss?” He loosened his grip just enough for her to speak.

“The blade.”

“What?” he asked. Perhaps the wind had swallowed her words.

She rammed the hidden blade her father had given her deep into his chest, twisted hard, and pulled it back.

He pulled away instinctively, which was the only thing that saved her from falling off the cliff as he dropped her. She flung herself toward the ground and rolled past him.

He roared wordlessly and drew his huge sword. He darted forward and stood over her. There was no escape. He lifted the sword, but then lowered it, the expression on his face softening. “You killed me. I guess I—” He fell over sideways, lifeless.

Liv stood and walked past his corpse. Walked out onto the cliff. She glanced at the drop. It should have terrified her, but she was numb. She looked up to the superviolet seed crystal, twinkling in the air. It floated at the nexus of a thousand streams of superviolet light, some of it spontaneously shimmering into luxin in the presence of the crystal, lifting it. The crystal tumbled end over end, and each time it did, it sent a little flash of purple light in the visible spectrum.

It called directly to Liv’s heart. Here is calm, here is reason, here is power, here is fearlessness. The seed crystal called to Liv, and Liv raised her hand and called to it.