“No,” Aaron said.

  “Look,” Call said. “If you’re mad at me —”

  There was a light knock on the door. It swung open slowly.

  Tamara came into the room. She was wearing a lavender dress she hadn’t bothered to cut the lace off of. She looked pretty, like she was on her way to a garden party.

  Call blinked, surprised to see her.

  “Aaron,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  He sat up slowly and looked at Tamara. His eyes weren’t swirling. He wasn’t Chaos-ridden. But Call could see Tamara wince anyway as she looked at Aaron, as if he seemed strange to her. But he’s just Aaron, Call’s mind screamed. He was traumatized. It couldn’t be easy to come back from the dead. Call willed Tamara to be understanding. He could tell she was trying. She sat down on a chair next to the dresser and clenched her hands in her lap.

  “Sorry I was so weird before,” she said. “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “I remember you crying,” Aaron said. “When I died.”

  “Oh,” Tamara said, swallowing.

  “And you knocked Call out of the way of the Alkahest,” he said. “It hit me instead.”

  “Aaron.” Tamara gasped. Call’s heart was twisting inside his chest. He remembered Jasper saying to him, I just think Tamara — well, Call, I just think she liked someone else, if you get my meaning, and how he’d felt when Tamara had told him she’d never regretted saving him.

  “She couldn’t save both of us and she made a split-second decision,” Call said, his voice rough. “So knock it off, Aaron.”

  Aaron nodded. Call felt a slight pressure ease off his chest. That was more like Aaron. “I’m not angry,” he said. “Not at Tamara, and not at you, either, Call. I just feel like — like I have to concentrate really hard to pull myself together. Like all I want is to lie down and shut my eyes and have it be dark and quiet.”

  “That makes total sense,” Call said, his words tripping over themselves in his eagerness. “You just have to get used to being alive again.”

  Aaron nodded. “I guess people can get used to anything.”

  “It’s incredible,” Tamara whispered. “Sitting here and listening to you talk, actually talk.”

  “I’m going to be an example,” Aaron said. “Master Joseph is going to use me and Call to show them he knows how to end death.”

  “Probably,” said Call.

  “We have to leave,” said Aaron. “They want to use us, but they won’t hesitate to hurt us if they need to.”

  “We’re going to run,” Tamara said. “All of us. We have to make it to the Magisterium.”

  Aaron looked surprised. “Why go there?”

  “To warn them,” Tamara explained. “They need to know what Master Joseph is planning. What his weaknesses are.”

  “We won’t be safe at the Magisterium,” Aaron said. “We’ll just be in a different kind of danger.”

  “But if we don’t warn them, they’ll be in danger,” Call said.

  “So what?” said Aaron.

  Tamara was twisting her hands in her lap. “We’re talking about our friends,” she said. “The Magisterium — people you know. Master Rufus, Celia, Rafe, Kai, Gwenda —”

  “I don’t know them that well,” said Aaron. He didn’t sound angry. Just distant. Weary and distant in a way he’d never sounded before.

  Tamara pushed her chair back. “I have to go — go to sleep,” she said, and moved toward the door. She paused and picked up a book from on the dresser. Jericho’s diary. Call wondered what she wanted it for. He was going to ask her when Aaron spoke again.

  “Everyone has to die eventually,” said Aaron. “I don’t see how us dying for the Magisterium helps.”

  Call heard Tamara choke back a sob as she fumbled for the knob and let herself out of the room.

  When Aaron turned back to him, Call felt more exhausted than he ever had before. He didn’t want to talk to Aaron, for the first time in his life. He wanted to be alone.

  “Go to sleep, Aaron,” he said, standing up. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Aaron nodded and lay down, closing his eyes, asleep almost immediately, as if nothing had happened at all to trouble his dreams.

  After an hour of listening to Havoc snore and the eerie silence from Aaron — he didn’t turn or rustle and barely seemed to breathe — Call realized that he wasn’t going to sleep. He kept thinking about his dad, about Master Rufus, and what they would think of what he’d done. He wished he could talk to one of them, get some advice.

  Finally he got up, deciding to brave the creepy house and the Chaos-ridden to get a glass of water. He padded down the stairs, into the kitchen.

  “Call?” a voice called. Tamara stepped out of the shadows. For a moment, it didn’t seem possible that she was real. But then he saw how tired she looked and figured he wouldn’t have imagined that.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I’ve been sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to do.” She was wearing the clothes she’d arrived in. He looked down at his pajamas and then over at her, puzzled.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You said that if he wasn’t right, you’d let him go,” Tamara said. “You promised.”

  “It’s too soon.” It was true that Aaron was acting weird, like maybe some of him was still stuck in death. “He’s going to get better. You’ll see. I know he was a little weird tonight, but he’s just back. And he sounds like himself sometimes.”

  Tamara shook her head. “He doesn’t, Call. The Aaron who was our best friend never sounded like that.”

  Call shook his head. “Tamara, he was murdered. He’s not going to come back from that cheerful and optimistic!”

  She flushed. “I’m not expecting him to be perfect.”

  “Really? Because it sounds like you are,” said Call. “Like you think either he has to be exactly the same as he was or he’s — broken. You didn’t say he couldn’t be different, or traumatized. I wouldn’t have agreed to that.”

  She hesitated. “Call, the way he talked about other people — Aaron was never indifferent.”

  “Just give him a few days,” Call said. “He’ll get better.”

  Tamara reached out and touched Call’s face with the palm of her hand. Her fingers felt soft against his cheek. He shivered.

  “Okay,” she said, but she looked incredibly sad. “A few more days. We better get back to sleep.”

  Call nodded. He got his glass of water and went back up the stairs.

  Back when he’d been at the Magisterium, Call had known right from wrong — even if he hadn’t always done the right thing. In prison, everything seemed to have slid away from him.

  Maybe it was just that Aaron had always been his moral center. He didn’t want to believe that there was anything wrong with Aaron that couldn’t be fixed. He wanted Aaron to be okay, not just because he was Call’s best friend but because if Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call wasn’t okay either.

  If Aaron wasn’t okay, then Call was exactly what everyone had been afraid of all along.

  Back in Constantine’s bedroom, Call flopped down, willing himself to sleep. This time he did.

  He woke up what felt like a few moments later, to an explosion. Leaping out of bed, he went to a window. Trucks were revving up outside, the sound almost drowned out by shouting.

  His first thought was that the Assembly had come to arrest them. And in that brief moment, fear warred with relief.

  Master Joseph came into view as he stepped off the porch, wearing the silver mask of the Enemy of Death. Without what looked like any effort at all, he flew up into the air. Below him, crowding around the porch steps, Call could see a cluster of figures: Anastasia in a white dressing gown, Alex glowering.

  “Find them! Find them both!” Master Joseph shouted. It was then that Call realized what he was looking at. Who had set off the explosions.

  Tamara and Jasper had done it. They had run.

  Tamara and Jasper had run and they had left him behind.

  CALL THREW HIMSELF against the window, scrabbling at it, before he remembered that it was made of some kind of air magic.

  Barely thinking, he conjured flame into his hand. Havoc started to bark. Call could barely pay attention. He felt like his head was full of bees, buzzing so loudly that he couldn’t think. The magical flame wore away at the window, but it was working too slowly. Call didn’t have time for this.

  He drew on chaos. It came to his hand quickly, an oily curling ribbon of nothingness. He could feel how hungry it was and how it seemed to tug at something deep inside of him.

  You don’t have enough soul left for this, a part of him thought through the buzzing, but it didn’t matter. He sent the chaos toward the window.

  It began to eat away the air magic and the glass and the frame outside it. Call didn’t care. By the time he stepped out of the window and onto the roof, it was through a huge hole in the side of the house.

  In the distance, he saw fire.

  He walked to the edge of the tiles and stepped off, concentrating on drawing air magic to him. He wobbled and, for a moment, was afraid he was going to crash down on the grass.

  But the magic held. He hovered in the air. Havoc was on the roof behind him, barking wildly. Call turned back to look at him and saw that two of the other windows in the house were smashed out — appearing like they had been burned, the wood around their edges sparking with low flames.

  Call’s leg had given him a reason to practice this kind of magic, but since the Magisterium was in a cave system and at home there were neighbors, he’d never really flown. It was one thing to hover a little, but this, up in the air, high off the ground, like he’d dreamed, was new. He knew he ought to be more nervous, but all his concentration was on the scene unfolding before him.

  He looked out toward the fire. Not a natural fire, he realized. Elemental fire. As he stared, he saw something undulate over one of the hills on the horizon.

  A huge, snakelike winding ribbon of fire that slipped over the ridge of a hill. The elemental reared up like a cobra, fire spilling from her edges, and Call remembered running through the Panopticon with Jasper and seeing her there in the hallways.

  Ravan. Tamara’s sister. Which meant Tamara had summoned her. Tamara had been planning this escape for far longer than a single day and night. When Call kissed her in the tunnels, she must have been planning even then. He’d thought that bringing back Aaron had made her stop trusting him, but she must have stopped trusting him before that. Because if she’d trusted him, she would have told him she was contacting Ravan. And she hadn’t. The knowledge was like a heavy block sitting on his chest.

  The air wobbled again beneath him, his concentration stuttering. Master Joseph shot a bolt of icy magic at Ravan, who dodged it with a smoking hiss.

  Call could hear contempt in that hiss. Fire exploded along the ridge of the hill. Through the leaping orange flames he thought he could see two small figures running.

  Tamara had trusted Jasper but not Call. She was leaving Call, leaving him here because she’d meant what she’d said in his room. That she’d staked her whole life on the certainty that he wasn’t the Enemy of Death, but he was.

  Only now, hovering over the burning landscape, did Call realize how much it had always mattered that Tamara believed in him.

  Pain rose up in Call, a pain that made him feel like he was choking.

  Master Joseph was shouting, and the dark, swarming figures below were hurling magic at Ravan, but she was fast and clever and dodged everything they sent at her.

  Call raised one hand. He was remembering a maze made out of fire, how he’d been lost in it until he’d realized his chaos magic could suck the oxygen out of everything, killing fire. He could kill Ravan. In that moment, he knew he could do it.

  “Call.” It was Aaron. He was out on the roof of the house, one hand on Havoc’s ruff. He was barefoot, and had found a T-shirt somewhere to replace his uniform top. He looked pale in the darkness. “Let them go.”

  Call could hear his own breath in his ears. Trucks were spinning their wheels all over the front lawn of Master Joseph’s house, none of them willing to get close enough to Ravan to explode their gas tanks.

  “But —”

  “It’s Tamara,” said Aaron. “You think Master Joseph will forgive her for running? He won’t.”

  Call didn’t move.

  “He’ll kill her,” Aaron said. “And you won’t be okay after that. You love her.”

  Call lowered his hand slowly, hovering just above the roof. He felt Aaron reach forward, grab the back of his shirt, and pull him down onto the tiles. He collapsed, half on top of Havoc, nearly knocking Aaron over. By the time they’d sorted themselves out, Call could no longer see the small running figures of Tamara and Jasper.

  Hot tears started in Call’s eyes, but he blinked them back. “She left me.”

  Aaron sat up, disentangling himself from Call. He scooted sideways on the roof tiles, Havoc behind him. “She left us, Call.”

  Call made a choking sound that was partly a laugh. “Yeah, I guess she did.”

  “She wants to warn the Magisterium,” Aaron said. “It’s better for us not to go there.”

  Call suddenly realized what was weird about the way Aaron was talking. “Why do you suddenly hate the Magisterium so much?”

  “I don’t hate them,” said Aaron. He looked out toward where the battle must be taking place. “But it’s like I can see them more clearly than I could when I was alive before. They only ever wanted what they could get from us, Call. And they can’t get anything from me anymore. And they’ll want to punish you. You proved them wrong, you know. They never believed Constantine could really raise the dead.”

  Call stared at him, trying to decode something from his expression, from the clear green of his eyes, but this Aaron wasn’t easy to read. He was, however, super creepy.

  But he hasn’t been back long, Call reminded himself. Maybe death clings to you for a while, shadowing everything. Maybe that shadow lifts eventually.

  “Do you think I did the right thing, bringing you back?” After he asked it, Call felt like he couldn’t quite breathe until he had the answer.

  Aaron made a sound that was not quite a sigh. It was like wind whistling through trees. “You know I’m not a Makar anymore, right? I’m not a mage at all. That part of me is gone and everything feels — I don’t know, washed-out and dull.”

  Call felt a little sick. He’d known Alex had taken Aaron’s Makar power with the Alkahest, but not that Aaron would come back with no magic at all. “That could change,” he said desperately. Without Aaron, he didn’t know what he’d do. He didn’t know what he’d become. “You could get better.”

  “You should be asking yourself if you’re glad you brought me back,” Aaron said with a half smile. “The mages will never take you back now, and I know you don’t want to stay here with Master Joseph.”

  “I don’t need to ask myself anything,” Call said fiercely. “I’m glad I brought you back.”

  Havoc barked at that, and nosed in between them. Aaron reached to pat the wolf, and Call felt the tension in his chest ease slightly. Surely if there was something really wrong with Aaron, Havoc would sense it?

  Master Joseph came into view, a phalanx of the Chaos-ridden and several dozen mages following him. He was marching back toward the house. When he saw Call and Aaron sitting on the roof, the chaos-eaten hole behind them, he looked momentarily furious. Then his expression smoothed out.

  “It’s lucky for you two you didn’t go with them,” Master Joseph yelled up.

  Coming up behind him, Alex laughed. “They weren’t invited.”

  “Once the Assembly knows the power you have unlocked, everything will be different,” said Master Joseph, but Call wondered if that could be true. Tamara’s parents were on the Assembly. If she was horrified, weren’t they likely to be equally horrified — if not more so?

  But Call just nodded.

  “Come inside,” Master Joseph said coldly. “We’ll talk.”

  Call nodded again, but he didn’t go inside. He sat on the roof until the sun was much higher in the sky. Aaron sat there, too.

  As the yellow light burnished his lashes to gold, he turned to Call. “How did you do it? You can tell me.”

  “I gave you a piece of my soul,” Call said, checking Aaron’s expression to see if he was horrified. “That’s why it didn’t work before. Constantine Madden would never have tried something like that. He would have never given any of his power away.”

  Aaron nodded. “I think I can tell,” he said finally. “I think I can feel it — part of me, but also not.”

  “And that’s why it’s not going to work the way they’re hoping,” Call stumbled on. It was uncomfortable to talk about sharing souls. “Because I can’t keep using pieces of my soul to bring people back. They’re not … unlimited. You can run out.”

  “And then you’d die,” Aaron said.

  “I think so. I think that’s why Constantine kept Jericho around — so that he could use his soul. And I read Jericho’s diary —” Call looked around, meaning to show it to Aaron, before he realized it wasn’t there. Tamara had taken it with her. To show to the Magisterium, Call assumed. Proof. He felt sick again.

  “You don’t feel Constantine’s soul in you, right?” Aaron said. “You just feel normal. You’ve always felt normal.”

  “I’ve never known anything different,” Call said.

  “Maybe I just have to get used to it,” Aaron said, sounding a lot like his old self. He even grinned a little, sideways. “I’m grateful. For what you did. Even if it doesn’t work.”

  But it did work, Call wanted to insist.

  Before he could, someone knocked on the door. It was Anastasia, who didn’t wait for them to answer before she opened it. She stepped into Call’s room and then stopped at the sight of the devastation Call had wrought — the chaos-eaten wall and the morning sunlight streaming in. She blinked a couple of times.

  “Children shouldn’t be cursed with so much power,” she said, as though she was speaking to herself. She was dressed in what looked like battle gear — pale silver-and-white steel over her chest and along her arms and a chain-mesh hood over her silver hair.