Zachary wonders if he has been in this cavern the entire time, walking through it while he saw what looked and felt like snow and trees and starlight. If he has now traveled through his stories and come out the other side.
Something hits his ankle, soft yet insistent, and he looks down to find the familiar, squished face of his Persian cat.
“Hey,” he says. “How’d you get down here?”
The cat does not reply.
“I heard you were looking for me.”
The cat neither confirms nor denies this statement.
Zachary glances behind him, unsurprised to find the door he stepped through has vanished. There is a cliff where it had been, a tall cliff that might have a structure atop it, it is difficult to tell from this angle.
The cat pushes its head against Zachary’s leg again, nudging him in the other direction.
This way there is stone expanse that terminates in a ridge. There is a glow beyond it.
He can hear the waves.
“Are you coming?” Zachary asks the cat.
The cat does not reply, but it also does not move. It sits and calmly licks a paw.
Zachary takes a few steps forward, moving closer to the ridge. The cat does not follow.
“You’re not coming?”
The cat stares at him.
“Fine,” Zachary says, though it is not what he means. “You can talk, can’t you?” he asks.
“No,” says the cat. It bows its head and turns, walking off into the shadows, leaving Zachary staring dumbly after it.
He watches until he can no longer see the cat, which is not long, and then he walks toward the ridge. When he is high enough to see what waits beyond it he realizes where he is.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins stands on the shore of the Starless Sea.
The sea glows, like candlelight behind amber. An ocean caught in perpetual sunset.
Zachary takes a deep breath expecting sea-salt sharpness but the air here is rich and sweet.
He walks down to the edge, watching the waves coat the rocks as they approach and retreat. Listening to the sound they make: a gentle, lulling hum.
Zachary takes off his shoes. He places them out of reach of the waves and steps into the gently rolling surf and laughs as the sea clings to his toes.
He reaches down and runs a hand over the surface of the honeyed sea. He lifts a finger to his lips and tentatively licks it. He has been given sweetness when he expected salt. He is not certain he would want to swim in this sea, even though it is delicious.
He would think it impossible had he not succumbed to believing impossible things much earlier.
What happens now? he thinks but almost immediately the question leaves his mind. It doesn’t matter. Not right now. Not here in the depths where time is fragile.
For right now this is his entire world. Starless and sacred.
In front of him the Starless Sea stretches into the distance. There is the ghost of a city across the sea, empty and dark.
There is an object on the ground by his feet, where the sea touches the shore. Zachary picks it up.
A broken champagne bottle. It looks as though it has been here for years. The label has worn away. Its broken edges are jagged and sharp and dripping with honey.
Zachary looks up at the cavernous darkness. The structure looming above him almost looks like a castle.
Beyond it, Zachary can see the layers and the levels spiraling up. Shadows that are deeper than others. Spaces that curve and move outward, speckled with lights that are not stars.
He marvels for a moment at how far he has come, turning the broken bottle over in his hands and picturing the stairs and the ballroom so very high above.
He hears footsteps approaching. Appropriate, he thinks, to have found Fate again now that he’s finally reached the Starless Sea. Now that not yet is just now.
“Hi, Max,” Zachary greets her. “I found your—”
There is a strange swift motion as he turns. For a moment his vision is a shadowed blur and when it focuses, it is not Mirabel standing in front of him.
It is Dorian.
Zachary tries to say Dorian’s name but he can’t and Dorian stares at him in eyebrow-raised shock and Zachary can’t breathe and he’s never met anyone who literally took his breath away before and maybe he is actually in love but wait, he seriously can’t breathe right now. He feels light-headed. The glow from the sea is fading. The broken champagne bottle falls from his fingers and shatters.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins glances down at his chest where Dorian’s hand is wrapped around the hilt of the sword and just as he begins to understand what is happening everything goes black.
excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
I was at the Gryphon sitting in a booth in the back so I wasn’t in anyone’s line of sight drinking and reading and this older woman in a white fur coat sat herself down across from me like I’d been waiting for her. She had one blue eye and one brown eye and a crystal-clear martini in her hand with two (matching) olives in it. The glass was still frosty, she must have just picked it up at the bar.
“You’re a difficult woman to locate, Miss Hawkins,” she said with a fake pleasant smile that looked almost real.
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s not that big a city. There are, like, two bars that I go to. You probably have my class schedule, too, right? Don’t really need the tracking devices.”
She stopped smiling. Definitely one of them but now I’ve earned the big guns, this lady’s a pro. No obvious spying from across the room this time.
She didn’t say anything so I asked, “What did that used to be?”—nodding at the gigantic fur coat. She wasn’t going for inconspicuous at all and I kind of admired that.
“It’s faux,” she said, which was disappointing. “How’s the book?” She tipped her martini at my copy of The Kick-Ass Writer.
“It’s for class,” I said, which is true. The chattiness threw me off. I didn’t think any of these people were actually going to talk to me, ever.
“You miss him, don’t you?” She directed this remark at my drink. Sidecar. I’d ordered it because I couldn’t think of anything else, I just wanted to sit somewhere that wasn’t my apartment. I forgot to tell them to hold the sugar and it was making the stem of the glass sticky.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything but she had this weird look in her eye—the brown one, I thought the blue one was a cloudy-cataract situation. I couldn’t tell what the look was, I know it sounds like it should have been an aha you DO know where he is moment but it wasn’t. She looked at me and sipped her martini and when she put it back down she said, “You must be sad about your breakup.”
I haven’t told anyone that Lexi and I broke up. L got all mad at me when I started trying to figure out what happened to Z and said he probably just took off and said I was just mad that he didn’t tell me and then I accused her of setting up the bee-key-sword thing as one of her theatrical scavenger hunts and then she called me a “waste of her time” which seemed overly harsh and I’m not sure I am sad. I feel okay about it. I’m not sure I want to be in a relationship right now anyway. Things change. Things are changing particularly fast right now, like a week ago everything was different. It’s still snowing, though. That hasn’t changed.
“Not really,” I said.
“But you don’t have anyone anymore,” the lady said. “Not really.”
I was pissed because she was kind of right but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I have my notebook and my projects and I was sitting there alone with my drink because there was no one else I wanted to be drinking with. I don’t have people. She said it in a way that kind of implied she knew my family isn’t all that fond of me either.
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re on yo
ur own. Wouldn’t you prefer to belong somewhere?”
“I belong here,” I said. I didn’t understand what she was getting at.
“For how long?” the lady asked. “You’ll stay for a two-year graduate program because you don’t know what else to do and then you’ll have to leave. Wouldn’t you like to be a part of something bigger than you are?”
“I’m not religious,” I told her.
“It is not a religious organization,” she said.
“What is it, then?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Not unless you agree to join us.”
“Is this a cult or something?”
“Or something.”
“I’m going to need more information,” I told her, and I took a sip of my sidecar because it seemed like something to do but it made my fingers sticky. Sugar on cocktail rims is stupid. “Or is this an ‘I know too much already’ situation?”
“You do, but I’m not particularly concerned about that. If you were to tell anyone what you know, or what you think you know, no one would believe you.”
“Because it’s too weird?”
“Because you’re a woman,” she said. “That makes you easier to write off as crazy. Hysterical. If you were a man it might be an issue.”
I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for my more information. She stared at me for a long time. Definitely not a natural blue on the eye.
“I like you, Miss Hawkins,” she said. “You’re tenacious and I admire tenacity when it is not misplaced. Currently yours is misplaced but I think I might make good use of it. You’re clever and determined and passionate and those are all qualities I look for. And you’re a storyteller.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It means you have an affinity for our area of interest.”
“Literary charity, right? I didn’t think literary charities had this much of a secret-society vibe.”
“The charitable organization is a front and you knew that,” the lady said. “Do you believe in magic, Miss Hawkins?”
“In an Arthur C. Clarke sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic type magic or actual magic-magic?”
“Do you believe in the mystical, the fantastical, the improbable, or the impossible? Do you believe that things others dismiss as dreams and imagination actually exist? Do you believe in fairy tales?”
I think my stomach fell into my feet because I have literally always been the kid who believes in fairy tales but I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a kid, I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink so I said, “I don’t know.”
“You do,” the lady said, sipping her martini again. “You just don’t know how to admit it.”
I probably made a face at her but I don’t remember.
I asked what she wanted from me.
“I want you to leave this place with me and not return. You will leave your life and your name behind. You will aid me in protecting a place most people would not believe exists. You will have a purpose. And someday I will take you to that place.”
“I’m not really a someday baby, sorry.”
“Aren’t you? Hiding in your academic temples avoiding the real world.”
That, I thought, was a pretty low blow even if it was accurate but at that point she was pissing me off so I said, “Dude, if you have some fairy-tale place to be in why are you in the back of a bar talking to me?”
She gave me this weird look and I don’t know if it was because I called her dude or if it was something else and she stopped and thought about that more than most of the things I’d said, but then she just took a business card out of her pocket and slid it across the table at me.
It said Collector’s Club.
There was a phone number on it.
And a little sword at the bottom.
True confession: I was kind of tempted. I mean, how often does some old lady offer you a fairy-tale law-enforcement job like she’s the wonderland police? But something felt off and I like my name and the fact that she dodged the question about Z rubbed me the wrong way.
“Did Zachary accept your job offer or is he the one who burned down your clubhouse?” I asked, figuring it would be one or the other. From the look on her face it was the latter. The fake smile was back.
“I can tell you a great many things that you would like to know, but first you would have to agree to my terms. There is nothing for you here. Aren’t you curious?”
I was. I was super-duper curious. I was beyond curious. I thought about telling her I’d think about it if she let me talk to Z or if she could prove he was alive but I didn’t get the sense she was the bargaining type. If I didn’t follow her now I was never going to see this lady again.
“I don’t think so,” I told her. She looked legit disappointed and then composed herself again.
“Is there anything I can say that might change your mind?” she asked.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked, even though I knew whatever she said wasn’t going to change anything.
The smile I got for that question was real.
“Once upon a time I sacrificed an eye in exchange for the ability to see,” she said. “I’m sure you know magic requires sacrifices. For years I could see the whole story. It doesn’t work anymore, not here, because I made a decision and it left me with hazy versions of the now. Sometimes I miss the clarity, but again, sacrifices.”
I almost believed her. I stared at her and that cloudy blue eye stared back at me and caught the light from one of those vintage bulbs above us and it wasn’t a cataract at all, it was a swirling stormy sky, clear as anything. A crack of lightning flashed across it.
I downed the rest of my sidecar, grabbed my book and my bag and my coat with my stupid, sticky hands, and stood up, and lifted the book to my forehead, and saluted her.
I left the business card on the table.
And I got the heck out of there.
“I’m disappointed, Miss Hawkins,” she said as I walked away. I didn’t turn around and I couldn’t quite hear what she said next but I knew what it was.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER is dead.
His world is an impossibly quiet darkness, empty and formless.
Somewhere in the formless darkness there is a voice.
Hello, Mister Rawlins.
The voice sounds very, very far away.
Hello hello hello.
Zachary cannot feel anything, not even the ground beneath his feet. Not even his feet, for that matter. There is only nothingness and a very faraway voice and nothing else.
Then it changes.
It is like waking and not remembering falling asleep but it is not gradual, his consciousness returns suddenly and shockingly, his existence suspended in surprise.
He is back in his body. Or a version of his body. He is lying on the ground wearing pajama pants and no shoes and a coat he still thinks of as Simon’s though both the coat and this death-worn version of it know they belong to the one who wears them.
On his chest is the mark of a freshly burned key but no wound, no blood.
He also has no heartbeat.
But the thing that convinces him beyond any doubt that he is truly dead is the fact that his glasses are gone and still, everything before his eyes is clear.
Zachary’s ideas about any possible afterlife have always varied, from nothingness to reincarnation to self-created infinite universes, but always came back to the futility of guessing and assuming he would find out when he died.
Now he is dead and lying on a shore much like the one he died upon, only different, but he is too angry to notice the differences just yet.
He tries to recall what happened and the memory
is painfully clear.
He had Dorian back. Right there in front of him. Just for a moment he’d found what he’d been seeking but then the story didn’t go the way it was supposed to.
He thought he’d finally (finally) get that kiss and more than that and he replays those last moments over in his head wishing he’d known they were the last moments and even if he had known he doesn’t know now what he would have done, if he would have had time to react.
It was definitely Dorian, there on the shore of the Starless Sea. Maybe Dorian didn’t think it was him. He hadn’t thought Dorian was himself at first either, back in the snow. He’d raised the same sword then but this time Dorian did, in fact, know how to use it.
It feels as though all of the pieces were put in place to lead to this moment and he put half of them there himself.
He is mad at himself for so many things he did and didn’t do and how much time he wasted waiting for his life to begin and now it is over and then he has another thought and is suddenly, distinctly livid at someone else.
Zachary pulls himself to his feet and screams at Fate but Fate does not answer.
Fate does not live here.
Nothing lives here.
You’re here because I need you to do something that I can’t.
That’s what Mirabel had said, post–elevator crash and pre–everything else.
She needed him to die.
She knew.
She knew the entire time that this would happen.
Zachary tries to scream again but he doesn’t have the heart.
He sighs instead.
This isn’t fair. He’d barely gotten started. He was supposed to be in the middle of his story, not at the end or in whatever post-death epilogue this is.
He hasn’t even done anything. Accomplished anything. Has he? He doesn’t know. He located a man lost in time or maybe he became one. He made his way to the Starless Sea. He found what he sought and he lost it again, all in a single breath.
He tries to decide if he’s changed since this all started because isn’t that the point and he feels different than he did but he can’t weigh feeling different versus having changed from inside himself with no heartbeat, standing on a shore with no shoes.
The Starless Sea Page 43
