I wiped the sweat from the back of my neck. This changed everything and nothing. Her sight was too powerful to leave her in Doctor Nagi’s hands. And still…

Just watching her made my chest ache. I couldn’t kill her.

Not after all she’d been through. Not when she was still fighting.

That left the impossible.

I was going to have to save her.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

QUANTA

I spent about five days pacing my room without a glimpse of the real Altair Orpheus. After that long, his timeghosts shouldn’t be dogging me, but I couldn’t say I was surprised as his past and future selves overlaid every scrap of my room. Each step felt like punching through a thousand layers of tissue paper, and the edges of moments waiting to be seen brushed at me in glowing blue insistence that I pay attention. When I banished one image, two more popped into its place.

Nope.

If I had to pick an emotion, I was going with annoyed. I still couldn’t page through his past in any kind of order, but the volume of nonsense was starting to flesh out the guy’s background.

Altair was a senator’s son, blah blah blah, nearly perfect in every way, super pretty, blahbity blah, and joined up with the Ravens while he was still in a snazzy academy for Seligo-bound kids. At some point, he’d switched from cocky rich boy to brooding, haunted rich boy, but I hadn’t seen what caused the change.

I was sure I’d find out eventually. What with him dancing through my head every blessed minute.

I clutched my arms to my body as I started another lap around the room. I’d glimpsed Eva and enough lab scenes in his past to make me worry. They worked together on the science junk.

Had Eva sent him for me specifically?

The thought of her trying to rescue me thawed a bit of the permafrost in my chest, but I shook my head of the mushiness. It was too dangerous. I’d yet to see a future where I made it out of here alive and there was no point in taking one of Eva’s agents with me on the one-way ferry down dead creek.

Unless he wasn’t loyal to her. I still couldn’t tell if he was working both sides.

Bottom line: Altair Orpheus and I needed to chat. Then I could figure out what to make of him. Ally? Enemy? Pointy thorn in my side? Or just a joke the universe was playing?

The closest I could get to present Altair was a series of recent pasts that showed him wading through a metric ton of paperwork. So I paced.

And paced some more. I couldn’t deal.