She lifted her pale eyes, hardened now like chips of ice. “There is nothing more natural than families. You haven’t seen what I have. These are people who love and need one another. We can still fix the timeline—it’ll take longer, yes, but it’s possible to do it one piece at a time.”

“And then what?” he prompted. “The astrolabe is hidden again? We risk someone else resuming the search, finding it, unraveling everything we’ve done? This is the only way to hold Ironwood accountable, to make him answer for what he’s done to us all. If not for that reason, then think of the millions upon millions of lives he’s toyed with, the disregard and apathy he’s shown them. He is not the exception, Etta, he is the rule. There is too much power in what we can do.”

Nicholas knew it was unfair of him that he could make this decision with the callousness it required, knowing it would be one of his last. But only days before, he’d been running toward vengeance like a man on fire, burning up the last parts of his soul. Some part of her, at least, seemed to see the truth in his last argument. Her whole body tensed in frustration.

He was staring down another loss, and, though he had been so logical, though he knew her to be logical, he saw the stricken look of betrayal on her face, and all of those arguments threatened to fly away from him. What was history anyway but the lies of the winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? It was an imperfect record written by a biased hand, diluted to garner the most agreement from competing parties. He was tempted to see her point, to imagine that she could realign the past and present and future into something beautiful. God, if anyone was capable of it, it would be her.

But their history, the one forged by travelers, was one of violence, war, and revenge; they had not simply made it. They were made by it.

“And what about us?” she asked, running her small, lovely hands up to his shoulders, his neck, his face. Nicholas leaned into the callused tips of her fingers. “What if I love you, and I need you? What was the point of this? Why did we fight so hard, if you were only ever going to give up?”

“Carter!”

The man’s voice echoed down to them, still a distance away. Owen.

Etta made as if to draw him behind her, and he wanted to kiss her then more than he wanted his next breath. The seconds unraveled around him, blistered his raw heart.

“Stay with me,” she begged. “Stay with me. This isn’t over yet.”

“This is freedom—this, the freedom from fear, is what it means to rewrite the rules,” he said. “A world in which the astrolabe exists is a world in which either of us could be taken at a moment’s notice. If nothing else, I’ll know you’ll be safe.”

“Alone,” she corrected sharply.

“Never alone,” he promised. “Did you not feel me with you in all of our days apart?”

Can you not feel my heart beating for you?

“It’s not the same,” she said, her eyes flashing again. “And you know it.”

“I only know this: our paths were separated by centuries, but we converged. No matter the outcome, my destiny has always been joined to yours.”

“Carter! Where the hell are you?”

Etta leaned forward into him, her face against the curve of his neck. “Don’t do this—please don’t do this.”

“Do you believe in that world you spoke of, the one made for us?” She swallowed, nodding. Her soft lips were against his bare skin, and he was a man, damn it all, and he was burning for her. The words that escaped him were choked with emotion. “If we aren’t to have it in this life, then in the next. If not now, then we’ll have forever.”

She pulled back, only to surge up onto her toes and grip him fiercely by his robe. The kiss shot down his spine like lightning striking a mast, blowing him apart.

It wasn’t a retreat, and it was far from a surrender. She invaded his every sense at once, the way the sun first breaks in the morning and illuminates the horizon. The taste of her, the smell of her, those small sounds she made in her throat; all of these things were secrets entrusted to him, prizes he had fought so desperately to retake. Etta seized every part of him at once, and he pushed the deadening dread away, let the frantic joy of her rush through him, flooding the empty places, turning him inside out.

His skin felt drum-tight wherever her lips touched, and Nicholas wondered, in those spaces between the battering of his heart, how it was possible that she was so soft, when all of the days that had led them here had been so very hard. She did not cry, his brave girl, but he felt the rage beneath her skin, moving her to fit against his body, to disappear into him.

“Nicholas!” Sophia called softly. “He’s coming!”

The blade hanging over them fell at last.

Nicholas eased back from her, wondering if this was what death would feel like—the painful release. He had envisioned it so many times as wading out into dark, cool water, letting it rise past his hips, his shoulders, his head. This was a breaking, a thunderclap of agony. How short a person’s life was, but how very many times they were asked to die inside.

“I love you,” he told her softly. “Time can never steal that.”

And somehow, before she spoke, Nicholas knew what she was about to say. Her face was steeled, defiant.

“I’m not giving up,” Etta said, the loose strands of her hair flying about her face. A shining storm of a girl. “I won’t destroy it. This isn’t the end.”