Nightwash felt a million miles away, like something that could never touch Ronan. He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.

Chainsaw cawed up above and Ronan spontaneously leapt to his feet, keeping his balance easily on the ridge of the roof. He cawed back to his dreamt raven at the top of his lungs. The sound echoed all around the roofs of this dead town, making it sound like there was a whole flock of ravens, a whole flock of Ronans, even though there was just the pair of them.

“It’s so strong,” Hennessy said, even though it was already beginning to wane.

The world was changing. It was becoming a place someone like him had been made for.

Bryde said, “This is only the beginning.”

Chapter 20

Carmen Farooq-Lane hadn’t told Lock about Jordan Hennessy’s sword.

In the commotion of Rhiannon Martin’s death, she’d hastily shoved it through one of the galvanized fans at the end of the turkey barn. Later, after they’d all been briefed and the area was being cleaned up, she’d snuck it back into the rental car.

It was not the first secret she’d kept from the Moderators, but it was certainly the most dramatic. The sword was nearly as tall as she was, and wondrously and impossibly made. It felt like an extension of her arm, no more or less heavy than her own hand. The hilt was stunning, smooth silvery metal engraved with the words from chaos, and when one was gripping it, one felt the words even when they weren’t visible. The blade was made of the night sky, a sentence absurd to say out loud but even more absurd to process. It did not look like a sword-shaped window into the night sky. It did not look like a blade painted to look like the night sky. It was the night sky. That was all there was to it. When she swung it—and she did, an embarrassing number of times, to Liliana’s amusement, taking it out in living rooms and hotel rooms and in the backyards of places where they stayed—it trailed starlight and moonlight, comets sparking and universe dust shimmering. It could slice through just about anything, but slice wasn’t exactly the right word, either. The blade won. It won like the night won, like the darkness won. It simply descended. Farooq-Lane suspected there was only one other weapon that would stop it: the sun blade last seen strapped to Ronan Lynch’s back.