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When the nights are long and starless, when there are fires that threaten to burn down the city and send it crashing from the sky like a dying star, when the cobblestones are painted with blood and death hangs in the air like smoke, Elizabeth tears open the world and shows Daisy what it will be like when they win.
It's not a promise. It's nothing certain. Lutece has explained this to them in her cool, crisp, perennially amused voice, and they both believe her. But Daisy raises a hand to that torn possibility, her dark eyes wide, and she wants it to be true.
There are layers of that blood now, slapped on top of each other as if applied by an indecisive painter. But each layer is the mark of every decision Daisy has ever made, and she needs it to be worth something.
I took too much from you, she says as the tears close and Elizabeth subsides into herself, the glow that always surrounds her becoming muted and soft. She's tired more and more these days. They both are.
You took my tower, Elizabeth says, You took my cage, and she touches Daisy's hand. There's magic in the lines and whorls of her skin, and Daisy turns her scarred hand palm-up, closes her fingers around. Holds on. This is an anchor. This is what keeps her here.
This is the only world she has.
~
Maybe there was a man, but there wasn't. Maybe there was a bird, but then there was not. Maybe there was a daring rescue, and there was, but not the one Daisy saw that single glimpse of, which might have been a dream except she knows it wasn't. Maybe there was a lighthouse and a man, but that was a lie. That was wrong. There is not always a man. There doesn't need to be. Sometimes there is no man at all.
Maybe there was a war, and there was.
There is always a war.
That part is true.
~
It took Daisy a single day to teach Elizabeth how to use a gun, and not a day has passed since where she hasn't fired one. She loves it, Daisy can tell, though she never says so. She was a soft girl, with a heart like a little caged bird, but now her heart is a hawk, sharp of beak and claw, and it soars over the fighting, its eyes cold.
Elizabeth picks her targets and brings them down.
There isn't time for rumination when you're trying to take back a city, but as they run and dodge and kill, Daisy wonders at what that soft little girl has become, and she wonders if this is the best of all possible worlds.
Because they're together. That might be enough.
Standing in the middle of the square, the buildings belching flame, her face streaked with dirt and blood and her hair a wild dark halo around her head, Elizabeth looks up at the piercingly blue sky and laughs and laughs. The Vox are a red flood and they fill the streets, but Elizabeth is somehow above it all, high and apart, and Daisy goes to her, frames her waist with her hands.
Her dirty little secret is that this is the only victory she really wants anymore.
Elizabeth's mouth tastes like blood and ashes. The world rips open around them and she smells summer roses. All the rest of it is dreams. That's all it's ever been.
~
I am not picking sides. Lutece had sat very erect without being stiff, very proper without being prim. She had sipped tea, tapped her nails on the edge of the saucer. Tea in a smoky, dimly lit bunker. But Daisy had been able to oblige. There was no payment for this, but the tea seemed like the least that could be done.
She wasn't asking for Lutece to pick sides. Nothing so simple.
I am on a side, you understand. The ghost of a possibility of a smile. Just not yours. That doesn't mean I'm averse to sharing information.
Daisy nodded. Was silent. Now she looks back on this exchange as the lynch pin in everything.
You're in a unique position here in regards to a particular variable that will not come into play on this timeline. That gives you an opportunity to fill the role of that variable, at least in part. I wouldn't waste it.
It doesn't mean that you'll win, you understand. Then again, you must decide for yourself what the parameters of victory actually are.
Lutece handed her a scrap of paper on which was sketched a cage, a bird, a name. It was a map. Daisy folded it into the palm of her hand. Later, when she was alone, she tore it into myriad tiny pieces and consumed it, washing it down with hard-edged whiskey.
Fire felt like giving it up. It belonged inside her, in her skin and her head and the core of her belly, where it could burn with its own strange light.
~
They've been invisible their whole lives. This is a war of invisible people, a fight for a future only they can see. But in Daisy's mind that future is becoming indistinct, fuzzy, questionable. Something that changes and fluxes from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Before, she had consulted Lutece like the woman was the goddamn Oracle at Delphi. Now she pulls Elizabeth into her arms—her little bird burning down its cage—and whispers Show me them other worlds, the better worlds, where this place don't exist at all.
No future. She doesn't want to see the future. Lutece could never show it to her either—or perhaps could, but refused—but now she's truly given up the idea.
It's taking all she can do just to hold onto right now.
~
I don't remember the face of my father. Elizabeth is staring at an ornate painting of Comstock, which stretches from floor to ceiling and stands dark and somehow drab in a gilded frame. It's torn and half burned, but his face is still visible, and though every image of him has presented him as kindly, fatherly, though stern, now he looks like skin stretched parchment-thin over a skull, a memento mori in oils.
All of him has changed as he's pressed back, an animal herded into a tight corner. Daisy stands in the center of the room as the Vox gather and loot and prepare to burn, and she holds her gun in her hand, hot death in hot lead. It feels good in the worst way.
She hasn't looked in a mirror in weeks. She wonders about her own face.
I see him, Elizabeth continues. But I don't remember him. He isn't real, not anymore. He's a ghost of a world I already killed. She turns, and her hair looks like gilt as well, a thin layer of dark gold over rich brown wood. Too lovely to burn. Daisy raises a hand and Elizabeth takes it, and then she turns to the side, twirls, dancing for a few wonderful seconds. Dancing in the ruins.
And Daisy thinks, This is all of what we fight for.
You saved me, Elizabeth says, and it isn't anything like the first time. Daisy releases her, turns away, touches a wide smear of blood along the painting's frame. It's still wet. Someone was killed up against this frame, and blood is blood.
I ain't no savior. My hands ain't clean enough. She smiles. She knows, now, that she looks like death as well. These people gonna save themselves. If they can be saved at all.
She lifts her hand and drags her bloody finger down her cheek. She has her share of scars, and she's shed her share of blood, but somehow it won't ever be enough. You believe in Comstock's God? You believe there any salvation for them such as us?
She feels hands on her shoulders and she presses back against them. In the distance, screams are rising into a crescendo. There's laughter in there somewhere, but she long ago lost the ability to tell the difference.
No.
Elizabeth tongues the blood from her cheek. Together they drag the painting out into the courtyard and give it to the fire.
~
There is a lighthouse, Lutece tells Daisy before the last of Columbia is put to the flame. Even here, there is a lighthouse. What you do with it, obviously, is up to you, but I think you might benefit from the information.
Benefit how? Daisy has no idea. She's not even sure what the hell Lutece is talking about, but that's not an especially new thing. All the same, she listens, crouched in the ruins of a doorway. All around them are the piled belongings of fancy white folk who didn't run in time. Who were fools and are now dead for it.
A lighthouse, but no man. Rather, half of a man is no longer there. The other half, you have yet to contend with, but in this one iteration you have a kind of unfettered access that you have in no other timeline.
You have a choice, Daisy.
Daisy shakes her head. Now she really has no idea what Lutece is talking about, what the meaning of all these spun words really is. I ain't got no choice. They took that from me, too.
No. That was one thing not even they had the power to take from you. All you have to do, Daisy, is reach out and grab hold of it. Some choices are illusions. But some mean everything.
~
It's true, she supposes, that by the time they reach the prophet, he truly has seen his death coming. Seen it for a long time.
Kneel, Elizabeth says, her voice as cold as the firestorm raging outside is hot. The ice at the bottom of the pit of the Hell Daisy no longer believes in. No longer believes, because you can't only believe in a thing you've seen with your own two eyes. Kneel before me, Father. Look at what you've done.
Comstock doesn't answer. But there's terror in his eyes. Revelation. Daisy feels no satisfaction. She stands back, lets Elizabeth have this moment for herself. The rotunda in which they're standing is—or was—topped by a roof of stained glass, a scene of soaring angels. Now the angels are broken and fallen, shattered into shards that glitter red in the fire like they're spattered with blood. Elizabeth is the last whole angel, lit by an infernal glow. She is not harrowing Hell. She is that Hell made glorious flesh.
I said kneel. She raises her hands, and the wind that sweeps through them is the wind in the void between all the worlds. Comstock screams and drops, not to his knees but prostrate, his face pressed to the shards of glass. Elizabeth stares down at him, her face unreadable.
You're nothing, she says. And she raises her hands again and makes him nothing. She simply makes him gone. The world turns over and they're alone in the rotunda, and Daisy finally steps forward.
It's finished, but she doesn't feel any joy. Not that she expected to.
Can you take us away from here?
Elizabeth turns to her, looking confused, and Daisy senses that her confusion is about more than what Daisy has said. Everything is different now. They're in the world that comes After, and everything they were living for is over.
I don't wanna be here no more. We're done. Columbia is fallen. The rest of 'em will pick it back up, make it somethin' new. But we ain't got no more place here.
Devils cannot make a Heaven of Hell. They can only burn.
Take us to the lighthouse.
Elizabeth looks at her for a few seconds more, and Daisy wonders whether she understands, whether Daisy understands, but she also wonders whether understanding is needed. Or maybe they already do, because this was always part of the story, and this was always where their strange, winding path was going.
The world goes to static, then to solid light.
All right.
Now Daisy can see the choice, and it isn't one but so very many. She steps forward, looking around at all those doors, all those places, and Elizabeth takes her hand.
They both smell like death. But this place doesn't.
With all these worlds, there's gotta be one that'll take us in.
Maybe not. Maybe there will only be wandering. But maybe that is also acceptable. Not all of it will be fire, not all of it will be the crumbling mountains of men, strong men, men with pale skin and cold eyes, men who take and devour and ruin and make their slaves ruin as well. In some of them there has to be rest. Or in some of them there might simply be a place to sit together, to be free, to watch birds fly.
There were always choices. Daisy laughs.
What is it? Elizabeth turns to her and cups her cheek with a hand smeared in blood and ash. What's so funny?
The world. Daisy covers her hand with her own. Ain't no cage ever made can't be broken.
The sun is sinking toward the horizon as they walk, burning fire across the water. But then the fire turns to a flood of gold that washes everything away, and as Daisy lays her hand on the first door, she thinks she might finally know what freedom is.