Once I fell, there would be no doubt. I would do what I needed to do without checking every tiny step against some imaginary set of rules. It wouldn’t matter who disapproved of me. I wouldn’t have to convince and cajole people. I wouldn’t have to bargain for them to please, please make some small, tiny effort to ensure their own survival. I could simply do. I hated waiting. I hated all the political bullshit. Don’t upset the Pack, don’t upset the witches, don’t upset the Order or the mages or the humans. It was like being thrown into a fighting pit with my hands tied together. I could still fight, but it was so much harder.

If I fell, Curran would leave me. Julie, too. I’d made her promise she would. Derek . . .

Voron used to tell me over and over that friendships and relationships weakened you. They made you vulnerable. They gave other people the ability to control you. He was right. I had ended up in this mess because I ran around trying to keep everyone safe, and now, as I hovered over the abyss, their love tethered me to the edge but their very existence pushed me in. I needed more power to keep them safe. I needed autonomy to make decisions.

In the end it wasn’t up to them what I became. It was up to me. Even if everyone I cared about got up and left to never come back, I stood for something. Some things were right and some things were wrong, not because Curran or Julie or Derek approved or disapproved, but because I did. I had a set of rules. I followed them. They made me me. I had to remember that.

And I had to own up to Curran about Adora. Hey, honey, here is a girl I saved against her will. Good news, I’m not her slave master. Bad news, she thinks my blood is divine and if she doesn’t serve me with her every breath, she won’t get into heaven. I have to shatter her world if she is ever to have a life. And by the way, I did all this, because I wanted to stick it to my father. Because sometimes, when the magic grips me just right, people become toys to me. Aren’t you proud of me? That would be a hellish conversation. With everything else I’d pulled recently . . . I didn’t know where that conversation would end.

The wind blew a piece of notebook paper off Julie’s desk. I walked over, picked it up, gathered a loose stack of papers, and tapped it on the desk to get it all even.

“It’s the lot of the parents to fix the messes their children make,” my father said.

I turned around. He stood by the door, wrapped in a plain brown cloak that reminded me of a monk’s habit. The hood was drawn over his head. He held a walking stick in his hand.

“You look like a traveling wizard from some old book,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“Mm-hm. Or an incognito god.”

“Odin the Wanderer,” he said. “But I’d need a wide-brimmed hat and a raven.”

“And only one eye.”

“I’ve tried that look before,” he said. “It isn’t flattering.”

We’d been talking for a whole minute and he wasn’t screaming at me about resurrecting his sister. Maybe he really couldn’t feel Erra.

“Why are you here, Father?”

“I thought we’d talk.”

I sighed, went to the back, and got two bottles of beer from the fridge. He followed me to where a rope hung from the ceiling, attached to the attic’s pull-down ladder. I handed him the beer. “Here, hold my beer.”

“Famous last words,” he said.

I pulled the rope. The attic ladder dropped down. I took one of the beers from him and climbed up the steps. He followed me. We crossed the finished attic, where we kept our supplies, to a heavy steel door. I unlocked the two bars securing it and stepped out onto the side balcony. It was only three feet wide and five feet long, big enough to comfortably put two chairs. From this point we could see the city, the hustle and bustle of the street below, the traffic on Ponce de Leon, and beyond it, the burned-out husks of skyscrapers, falling apart a little more with each magic wave.

I took one chair; he took the other.

“Nice,” he said, and drank the beer.

“I like it. I like to watch the city.” I’d had the balcony and the attic ladder installed two months ago. When Jim found out, he had called me. He worried it was a security risk. Jim wouldn’t worry about anything related to me anymore. When a ten-year-old friendship shattered, the edges cut you.

My father drank his beer.

“What was Shinar like?”

He put his beer on the wooden railing and held out his hand. I touched it. A golden light rolled over the city below. I had expected crude, simple buildings the color of sand and clay. Instead beautiful white towers rose before me, drenched in greenery. Textured walkways led up terraces supporting a riot of flowers and trees. Sparkling ponds and creeks interrupted open spaces. In the distance a massive building, a pyramid or temple, rose, the first tier white, the second blue, the third green, topped with a shining gold sun symbol. People of every color and age strode through the streets. Women in colorful flowing dresses, in plain tunics, in military garb, carrying weapons and leading children by the hand. Older kids running, waving canvas bags at each other. Men in leather and metal armor, in robes like the one my father wore, in finery and a couple nude in bright swirls of red and blue body paint, some clean-shaven, some with a few days of scruff.

“No beards?” I said. Sumerian civilization was the oldest on record, and men on the few artifacts that survived always had full, curly beards.

“It came into fashion much later,” he said.

“It’s not what I expected.”

“It was called the jewel of Eden for a reason. I remember the night it fell. That tower with the red roof was the first. I ran out in the street and tried to hold it up and couldn’t. The magic simply wasn’t there. One by one, the buildings collapsed in front of me. Thousands died.”

The first Shift, when the technology wave had flooded the planet.

“Do you blame yourself?” I asked.

“No. None of us had any idea that such a thing was possible. There were no theories, no warnings, no prophecies. Nothing except for the random reports of magical devices malfunctioning or underperforming. Had we known, I’m not sure we would’ve done anything different. We were driven by the same things that drive people today: make our land better, our lives safer, our society more prosperous.”

The vision died and my Atlanta returned.

“I can rebuild it,” he said.