Below them, the town of Siegen and the military base stretched out, picturesque white stone and streaming river.

And a thick cloud of black smoke billowed over the blazing fire at the military base.

CHAPTER SIX

LIAM

The Eisenberg siblings took it pretty well, all things considered. A world washed in darkness and fire and blood, the ruins, a shattered and unknowable past. The creatures who loped through it, each dangerous in different ways. Professor Einstein’s theory called it a dimension, but that wasn’t enough. It was the shadow of another world, a universe that lived beside theirs like the pages of a closed book. Given their similar geography, he suspected the worlds shared a common link, a common seed, but like dinosaurs and chickens, they’d somehow grown apart.

It was enough to send most folks screaming, or at least calling the warden at Bellevue. Daniel understood because he’d seen it; he saw its potential as a weapon for ending wars. Rebeka, though, seemed more resigned to their fate. She donned that long-suffering look Liam knew too well from their neighbors back in Hell’s Kitchen: worn out and incapable of being shocked, betrayed so many times she just expected it.

He wanted desperately not to disappoint her—not to disappoint either of them. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t dumb. He’d always been the overachiever, the insufferable one, the youngest kid in class practically crawling out of his seat to answer the professor’s questions. He never knew when to give up—he was always wanting. More knowledge, more power. He was going to get into Siegen whether they helped him or not.

But it’d sure be easier with their help.

Liam hadn’t stumbled into the dark arts like in some Bela Lugosi movie: with a secret wish in his black heart; with candles, incantations, blood. That story came later. In the beginning, there was only the flame of his anger casting strange shadows on the walls. In the beginning, there was nothing but his own yearning and a sheet of numbers that wouldn’t add up.

It began when he was sixteen, when, yet again, he hadn’t been enough to stop all the evil in the world. He’d just started his second year at Princeton, and only visited his mother on weekends, like it proved he was all grown up and could take care of himself. (He wasn’t, but he loved to pretend.) But when the call came from her neighbor that Tuesday night, he raced for the last train back to New York, feeling the whole way as if his lungs were full of glass.