“You promised me miracles, Majnun,” she says, stroking his chest. “Tell me of them now, so I have something to dream of.”

For a moment, Séverin cannot speak through his pain, but dawn is swift, and time is finite, and he must make use of what has been given to him.

He curls her hand to his chest and thinks of miracles. Once, he had promised her glass slippers and apples of immortality. Now, he wishes to show her something else entirely.

“I’ll … I’ll learn how to make cake,” he says.

Laila snorts. “Impossible.”

“No!” he says. “I will. I’ll make you a cake, Laila. And we’ll … we’ll have a picnic. We’ll feed each other strawberries to the utter disgust and repulsion of our friends.”

Laila is quietly shaking, and he hopes it is from laughter. Night fades quickly. A poisonous tinge of blue touches the sky.

“Do you promise?” she asks.

“I promise that and more, if it will make you come back,” says Séverin. “I promise to take you and Hypnos to the ballet in winter. We can stand in line for smoked chestnuts and try to stop Zofia from recreating such a delicacy at home with an open fire in the library. We can spend a whole day by the fireside, reading books and ignoring Enrique reading over our shoulders—”

“Majnun,” she says.

But he is not done. He grips her hand tightly.

“I promise that we can waste time as if we were gods with endless troves of it.”

The light grows brighter, and Séverin turns to her. He kisses her fiercely. Her tears wet his face.

She splays her hand against his, and when the light touches their joined palms, it is as if they have been knit together by a thousand dawns.

“You and I will always be connected,” she says. “As long as I live, so will you. I will always be with you.”

Séverin can feel it—this new interweaving between their very souls—but he does not understand what it means.

“Laila … wait. Please.”

He knows he will never forget her, but he memorizes her all the same: sugar and rose water, the bronze line of her throat, her ink hair, such that only poets may write in its shade. When he kisses her again, her teeth hit his, and the moment is so achingly human, it nearly moves him to tears.

“I will come back to you, Majnun,” she says. “I love—”

Dawn arrives.

It steals the night and her last words in one breath, and then—as ceremoniously as it brought him to the floor of heaven—it unceremoniously releases him back to his reality.

38

HYPNOS

In the years that followed, Hypnos would never be certain what he glimpsed that day on the top of the ziggurat. He had imagined a sentient, celestial presence … an engulfing of gold light. But it was not that. It could not be ordered into something so straightforward as color.

If anything, it was like a living song, undulating and incomprehensible.

For one single moment in time, that song moved through Hypnos, so that he was like a secret pane of glass through which the sunlight shone and the moonlight moved, and he was not illuminated so much as he was enlightened. He saw all the people he had been. The boy who loved to sing, forced to keep his mouth shut. The boy who yearned for song and was surrounded by a thousand different kinds of silence—the silence of his mother’s race, the silence of his own desires, the silence of the luxuriously appointed rooms he haunted like a ghost. All his life, Hypnos had felt like a wandering set of notes, desperate to be set into music, and he had found it in the friends who had become family. Even with them, he felt nervous, as if they might throw him out of their music at any moment … but this grand song assured him otherwise. The song told him he was enough as he was, that his soul held a symphony of its own, for that was how he had been made.

But then the song released him.

And he was left with the memory of vastness … and the barest hint of warmth.

PART VI

39

ZOFIA

Three days after they had escaped the crumbling ziggurat and left Poveglia behind, Zofia sat in a private train compartment en route to Paris. Already, the world had changed. According to every newspaper, ancient Forged objects all around the world had ceased to function.

No one knew why.

There were reports of protests outside churches as religious leaders shouted that this was a sign that God was displeased with them. Industrialists spoke of how modern invention erased the need for Forging altogether. For those with an affinity for mind or matter, their art remained intact, but Zofia suspected that one day … even that would change.

Amidst all the uncertainty, there was one thing Zofia knew without a doubt: She did not know what would happen next.

In the past, this would have discomfited her. She would have spent the entire train ride counting the tassels on the rug, the hanging crystal pendants on the light fixtures. Now, she found herself far less bothered by the unknown. Even if the world were dark, Zofia knew she could be a light.

Alone in the compartment, Zofia stared at her hand, where Laila’s large, garnet ring now shone on her finger. Inside the jewel, the number read zero.

The thought of seeing that number had once paralyzed Zofia. But that moment had come and gone, and though it had not ended at all how she imagined, it had not devastated her.

Zofia flexed her fingers beneath the weight of the garnet ring. She had found it near the clay-lined shores of the lake in the cavern, toppled beside a broken lantern. It must have slipped off Laila’s hand right before they entered the sanctum.

When Laila had asked Zofia to make the ring for her months ago, Zofia had not liked the idea of the red stone. It was the color of blood and reminded Zofia of the warning signs she had once seen placed around the university laboratories.

“I like red,” Laila had insisted, smiling. “It’s the color of life. In my village, brides never wore white because we consider it the color of death. Instead, we wear bright red.” Laila had winked. “Plus, I think red looks rather well on me.”

Zofia turned the ring on her finger. When she thought of Laila, an ache opened up inside her. She remembered her friend lying lifeless on the stone, the temple crumbling around them. She remembered the burning light and the portal opening. But after that, Zofia’s recollections became muddled. She could no longer recall what she had glimpsed on the other side, but she remembered the feeling of extraordinary calm. When she opened her eyes, the temple was silent and Laila was gone.

Séverin had pressed his hands into the place where she had disappeared, his head bowed. “She said she will come back … when she can.”

There were no answers beyond that, and there was no time to look around the temple as it continued to crumble and break. Despite not knowing or understanding where Laila had gone, Zofia was not worried about her friend.

“Phoenix?”

Zofia looked up to see the door to her compartment pulled back and Enrique standing at the entrance. He wore a dark blue suit, and the hat pulled over his head nearly hid the bandage covering his wounded ear.

“May I join you?” he asked.

Zofia nodded, and Enrique took a seat across from her. In the days since they had returned from Poveglia, there had been so much to do and discuss that bringing up her own feelings was hardly a priority. There was travel to arrange, L’Eden to contact, and the Order of Babel to deal with.