After that, Laurence had a new best friend, with only one topic off-limits. He had a million questions for Peregrine, but Laurence wouldn’t talk about her. The Caddy kept trying to bring her up anyway, one way or another, but Laurence would just hit the “off” button the moment that name was mentioned or even hinted at. This went on for weeks.

Laurence wasn’t sure if he was unable to forgive Patricia or if it was himself that he couldn’t forgive. It was messy. Not messy like a closet piled with electronic components and wires and stuff, that you could possibly untangle and sort out and assemble into a device with some utility, but messy like something dead and rotting.

Chapter 30

30

—DEAD COLD INSIDE even with the sunlight cooking her face and shoulders, and reflecting off the cloud under her feet.

Carmen Edelstein was saying something to Patricia about grave necessity. But Patricia’s mind was on Laurence, and how he had owned her trust. Stupid. She should have known better. She had failed some Trickster lesson somewhere along the way, and now she had some catching up to do. She would smile and flirt and fade. This gray world would never even see her moving through it. She would be the least Aggrandizing witch ever, because she wouldn’t even exist except as a surgical instrument. She needed—

“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.” Carmen sounded amused, not angry.

Patricia knew better than to lie to Carmen. She shook her head, slowly.

“Look,” Carmen said. “Look down there. What do you see?”

Patricia had to lean over, fighting her fear of falling off this cloud into the ocean, far below. Standing on a cloud felt less buoyant and more crunchy than Patricia would have expected.

A black scorpion shape rose out of the water below: an old converted oil rig and a single luxury liner, that had become the independent nation of Seadonia. “It’s like a fortress.” Patricia watched the dots of humanity run around the old oil rig, which was a massive scaffolding on a platform on stilts in the middle of the gray, oxygen-starved ocean. Seadonia’s flag showed an angry cockroach on a red splotch. At least some of the hundreds of people down there had been part of building Laurence’s doomsday machine.

A seagull swooped past, and Patricia could have sworn it shouted, “Too late! Too late!”

“It is exactly like a fortress, with the world’s biggest moat.” Bathed in sunlight, all the lines on Carmen’s face were gilded. Her thick-rimmed glasses twinkled, and her short white hair buzzed with silver flashes. Patricia was used to seeing Carmen in her dark study full of books, with a tiny lamp and a thin curtain-slice of light coming through.