I’m left to wonder about the future, and all I can see is the past. A past emptied of wonder, a future I’ll never see. That doesn’t make a lick of bloody sense, but it sounds brilliant, don’t you think?

—The Book of Newt

CHAPTER SIX

Below and Above

She sat in the cold, wet air of the . . . underneath. Underneath all that hung above, beyond the stone and cement and steel, beyond the barrier of what was and what would be. Somewhere, even higher, unseen at the moment, the real sky loomed like a dome, droopy and drenched, gray clouds billowing angrily. As if prepping for the torrent that brought both life and misery to the inhabitants below.

It had been a week since she’d encountered Mikhail here, at the Box. A week since his revelations and pronouncements—terrible utterances of opening the Box and using its contents to erase everything they had built, or contrarily trying to increase the Evolution to such extremes that all may be erased regardless. In a word, danger. Too much danger to take these leaps now. Especially with the return of Nicholas Romanov, Glory in the Highest, God of All Who Tread, the One Above Two, He Who Sees, the Tip of the Spear . . . and so on.

More like the butt of the donkey, she thought. Ass of the Ass. Oh, she longed for the day she’d finally say that to the man’s face. That day was coming. Soon. The buffoon had gotten far too big for his britches, what with these plans to utilize the contents of the Box, for good or external ill. The time had simply not come yet for those decisions. But she had to tread carefully. He still held the cards, if not the whole deck, and she had to play things right, keep to his rules. The day was coming.

Her day.

Alexandra shivered. The Box had been opened, its priceless artifact removed, all in the blue swift of night. Unless Mikhail had conspired with Nicholas—and he might have, she had no illusions about that—they were at a very serious crossroads. Decades of work, decades of planning, decades of protecting the Box and what it held within, decades of hunting down those who dared speak aloud hints of what they dreamed in their restless sleep. Words dribbling from their crooked mouths like saliva, spraying out through the snores and grunts and moans of those exhilarated by their traitorous dreams.