by Dakota Rusk
I shook my head vigorously. “It wasn’t like that. No one was supposed to know. She only found out by accident.”
“And now she tells me there’s a great plot to unseat the President by exposin’ her dastardly plans for the JH program,” he continued. “And that your old pals are all behind it. Well, of course then, you’d have to be too. It didn’t take long to get her to admit it, and not long after that to get her to tell me where to find you.”
“Never mind, I’m glad you did,” I said. “I’ve missed you. I’m just happy I got to see you one more time before—”
I stopped short; I felt my face go pale. He must have seen it; but instead of being upset, he laughed uproariously, and even slapped his lovely, furry knees.
“Before I go off and get myself killed in the line of duty? Is that it?” he asked. “Don’t look so abashed; I ken that’s an option. But if Ntombi’s ready to put herself on the line—and your friend the vamp boy, too—well, so’s this no-good wallaper.” He winked. “I just wanted to see you as well, before it came to that.”
We sat there, grinning at each other like idiots; and I didn’t know what to say or do. All I wanted was to throw myself into his arms; but I wasn’t sure he felt the same.
I cleared my throat, which had gone suddenly very dry, and said, “You’ll come back, I know you will—I insist you come back.” I paused. “But just in case you don’t…”
He laughed again, and said, “Out with it, you bonnie daft thing!”
“It’s just…could you tell me, finally, how you arranged to have my name come up in the first lottery? The one I didn’t even enter?”
He sat back and stroked his beard. “Now, I don’t know if I should sell my secrets that cheap…”
I couldn’t help myself; a blaze of happy anger came over me. I picked up a book I’d dropped earlier and threw it at him.
He ducked it easily, then laughed and said, “All right, I’ll confess!” And then, when I’d settled back down, he said, “The fact of it is, your name didn’t come up.”
I blinked. “What are you saying? Rowella read it right out loud. Everyone heard her. She—”
I came to a dead stop. Suddenly I realized what he’d done.
“She didn’t read it,” he said. “There was someone else’s name on that paper. But she said yours instead. And when she held it up to the crowd, no one bothered to check it out…because why would they?”
“But…why would she?” I asked, knowing the answer, and dreading it.
“Well,” he said, chuckling lightly and stroking his beard again, “I asked her to.”
“You…asked her to.”
He grinned. “As I’ve just said, I can be very persuasive with the female of the species.”
He’d flirted with Rowella, then. No, more than that…as experienced a jezebel as she was, it would have taken more than a bit of cuddling and flattery to get her to bend to his will.
He’d seduced her, then.
For my sake, yes; but all the same, he’d seduced her. And probably thought no more about it than…well, than she did, obviously. But what did that matter?
What mattered was that I was suddenly seeing him in an entirely new light.
And things were beginning to come together now. That scent that I couldn’t identify—the scent on his body, intermingled with his own—
—it was jasmine and spice.
Ntombi’s aroma.
And there she was, suddenly appearing in my memory, saying something I’d barely even noticed before—telling me about Donald, saying, You don’t know him like I do…
I got to my feet. I’m not sure what was on my face, but whatever it was, it alarmed him. All at once he looked chastened.
“Fabia!” he said. “You don’t mind, surely? You can’t mind…it was just a bit of fun…”
It’s only ever a bit of fun, I realized; even here, with me, right now.
I ran out, through the tunnels and up a flight of stairs leading to the commons. I needed fresh air, the sky above me—room to think, to scream, to explode—
I’d no sooner emerged than I stopped to take in my first lungful of freedom. It was also my last.
Two men in long flowing robes wordlessly flanked me; each grabbed an arm, and one applied a compress to my face that pulled first the sky, then the world, then even my thoughts away from me…
…And as I sank to my knees, the last thing I heard was one of them saying, “Well, there it is—the High Priestess was right. The boy led us straight to her.”
30
I began to struggle back to wakefulness—but only because I was being repeatedly slapped in the face.
“Fool, you overdosed her,” I heard someone say.
“I’m sorry, I panicked; she’s just so big.”
“Wait—she’s coming around.”
I opened my eyes. My surroundings swam about me for a while, until they coalesced into what I didn’t immediately recognize as the President’s office. I hadn’t been here since Valery was in charge, and it looked very different now—draped in fabrics, wall-hangings, plants. I only determined where I was by seeing Jocasta Foxglove seated behind her desk—and by the smell of ash and soot, which was still strong…in fact, even stronger. There’d been another fire since I’d last been here, after all.
“There you are,” Jocasta Foxglove said as I sat up from where I was slumped in the chair opposite her. “I must say, I’m impressed. I have no idea how you’ve eluded me this long. Fortunately, your Scots lover is very careless in his movements.”
“He’s not my lover.”
“Good. He’s not worthy of you.” She paused. “I take it Olwen is dead.”
“Yes,” I said, rubbing my temples to try to work the numbness out of my brain.
“You killed her?”
“My cats,” I said. Then I shook my head. “Her cats. The other Fabia’s.”
She blanched momentarily; then recovered her poise. “Well…I suppose it doesn’t really matter, given what we have in store.” She looked past me and said, “It’s all right, she’s weak as a kitten. Leave us.”
I turned in time to see the two witches who’d apprehend me depart the office.
And then we were alone.
“I just want you to know,” Jocasta said, “it wasn’t in my original plan to kill you. I’d hoped you’d join us, and when you didn’t I was content to leave you alone. But when you won the lottery, I knew I had to be rid of you…you’d have discovered conclusively that we can’t return you to your home parallel, just a close analogue; and you’d have come back to Parallel U. to say so. I had to prevent that.”
“But you didn’t prevent that.”
“No. As I said, I’m impressed by your resourcefulness and strategic thinking. Returning Olwen’s phone kept me perplexed for days.” She nodded at the Hopper on my wrist. “That’s Olwen’s as well, I take it.”
“No; it’s a new one. Hers was destroyed by High Priest Peragon.”
At the mention of her old adversary, she looked visibly alarmed; I immediately sensed that he might be one of the few people in the multiverse she actually feared.
“My, my,” she said with deliberate sarcasm; “you’ve been much busier than I had any idea. So I take it you also had something to do with the Mason boy’s escape, as well?”
“Yes,” I said. And as I said it, I had to wonder why I was being so forthcoming; surely I shouldn’t be telling her all of this.
She must have seen this thought play across my face, because she laughed and said, “I’ve given you an elixir that both hobbles the mind and loosens the tongue. I’m afraid you can’t help telling the truth, child.”
“Well, that explains it,” I muttered.
“And the Mason boy…he was responsible for inserting Rowella’s name into the winners’ list?”
“He was responsible for inserting all the names there.”
Her look darkened. “I’ll make him pay for that, if there’s time. Where is he now?”
I couldn’t help smiling as I said with absolute truthfulness, “Nowhere.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You mean he’s not in this parallel?”
“He’s not in any parallel.” Well, he wasn’t; not at the moment. And wouldn’t be for some hours to come, when he manifested out of his chronal jump.
She looked perplexed for a moment; then shrugged. “Again, it scarcely matters,” she said. “And what have you and your little band of busybodies learned? At least I presume you’ve been working in tandem with them.”
“You’re trying to awaken the dreamer,” I said, wishing I could summon the strength of will to shut up. “The demon god Azathoth.”
She raised her eyebrows; clearly I’d impressed her again. “And…?”
“And…that’s all. We haven’t figured out how.”
She sighed in satisfaction. “Well then, I won’t feel such a complete fool for underestimating you.” She gave me a look—almost coquettish—and said, “Would you like to know?”
“Yes.”
She was pleased; and it occurred to me that she was actually eager to boast of her plans—to enjoy the reaction of someone not already in her circle. She gestured across the office to where a large wire sculpture sat on a coffee table. “Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a three-dimensional map of the Veil,” she said. “I commissioned it myself, and oversaw its manufacture.”
“You—mapped the Veil?” I said, unable to hide my amazement. “Eddie said you were brilliant; but this…”
“Thank you, child; that’s very gratifying to hear.” She scowled. “The trouble is, the Veil keeps altering its form, so that the map has to be revised every few days; but by just about this time, it’s in a fair position to allow for this.” She opened a drawer on her desk and took out a small hand-held projector, which she shone against a wall. It displayed an image of a circle with eight arrows projecting from it, at different angles and of different lengths.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s called the chaosphere, and it’s a sigil of very great power; it has tremendous dispersing energy.” She moved the projector so that the image now fell over the sculpture of the Veil—each arrowhead falling in a different spot on the map. “And see how nicely it fits, at just this particular juncture in the Veil’s continual shifting. I attribute it to the vernal equinox; the Veil is expanding, in accordance with this period of germination and renewal.”
I nodded, not quite knowing what the point was.
She switched off the projector and replaced it in the desk. “I see you don’t yet grasp what I’ve intended. I can’t blame you; it only came to me gradually—the first inklings birthing when the Mason boy came to me and showed me his Hopper. I realized that if it could be used the cross from one parallel to the next, it could be used for shorter journeys as well.”
I frowned. “ ‘Shorter journeys’? I don’t follow.”
She smiled, and it was one of the most frightening things I’d ever seen—a look of sheer amoral glee. “Those students who won the lottery? I’m not sending them across the Veil to their home parallels. I’m sending them into the Veil—each to a different location, corresponding to the eight points of the chaosphere.”
I thought of the Veil as I’d glimpsed it freshman year, through the rift made by the Terminus Engine. It was a hellish, fiery place; anyone sent into it would be reduced to ash in seconds. “They’ll die,” I said.
“That’s the point. I want them to die. But in dying, each will trigger a bomb that’s activated by the cessation of his or her heartbeat.” She raised her hands in triumph. “I’m going to blow up the Veil. That ought to be sufficient to awaken Azathoth.”
“What has Azathoth got to do with it?” I asked, my heartbeat suddenly skittering. Jocasta Foxglove, I realized, was flat-out crazy.
“Haven’t you read anything about him? Honestly, the way you children shirk even the most rudimentary study! It’s a scandal. Never mind, I’ll enlighten you. Azathoth resides at the very center of all existence; the major texts, across the parallels, are all in agreement on that. Well, what does that sound like to you? The nexus of all existence…isn’t that exactly what the Veil is?”
“You think Azathoth lives in the Veil?”
She laughed. “I think Azathoth is the Veil!”
Once I grasped what she meant, I had to admit…it was a plan of no small ambition. Blowing up the Veil would almost certainly have the same effect as the legends attributed to waking the dreaming god: reality would cease to be.
“But why?” I asked. “Why would you ever want to do that?”
Her face took on its darkest aspect yet. “Life,” she said with a sneer, “is an infection—a reckless and uncontrolled plague across the time-space continuum. It’s damp and fetid and stinking and convulsive. Look at us,” she said, gesturing in disgust at my body, then at her own, “pillars of ambulatory meat, creatures of urine and phlegm, feces and menses…we’re filth, producing filth, filling up the cosmos with our dirt and dissipation.”
I sneered at her. “So all those things you said when we first met, about communion with nature and the dangers of science…that was all just an act. Pure cynicism.”
Her jaw dropped, and she looked at me as though deeply offended. “Child, you malign me. Have you never heard of cognitive dissonance? The ability to believe two contradictory things simultaneously? One of the paradoxical quirks of human nature. In fact I was in earnest everything I said to you that afternoon in the library…and still am.” She smoothed out her sleeves and straightened her spine. “But I believe all of this, too. And more strongly.”
I felt a chill of fear. “You’re insane.”
“Perhaps. But not cynical. You shouldn’t have said that. It wounds me, it really does.” She took a deep breath, as if summoning up a kind of prayer. “I want to scorch all vestiges of life from every corner of the cosmos. I want to return the multiverse to its original form: pure energy, pure mathematics.”
“And you think that will do it? Setting off bombs within the Veil?”
“Possibly. We’ll find out, won’t we? And soon; the students are set to commence their journeys within even as we speak.”
I felt myself growing hot with anger and frustration. “And their escorts? The witches who are accompanying them? Do they know they’ll be going to their deaths?”
“No escorts,” said Jocasta, folding her hands over her desk. "That was just for you…for purposes of the video. The students today will be sedated and sent on alone.”
“But…that means they’ll have to be wearing the Hoppers themselves.”
She shrugged. “So? I won’t need them back. There won’t be any ‘back’ for them to come to, in any case. We’ll all be gone. Everything will be gone.”
My head—still addled by the elixir—was swimming with all this madness. I was getting a clearer picture, and feeling an increasingly awful foreboding.
“I still don’t understand why you had to come to Parallel U. to do this,” I said. “You had both Eddie and the Hopper; you could have carried out this whole plan without leaving your own parallel.”
“I should’ve thought that was obvious: there are no explosive devices on my parallel—not of any kind, much less the sort capable of damaging the Veil. But even beyond that, there was the variety of subjects available to me here. At Parallel U. I could find eight sacrificial victims who possessed the chronotemporal energies of eight separate parallels. That gives a different amplification to each of the detonation sites—those being the eight arrow points of the chaosphere.”
The flaw hit me at once. “But you only have seven.”
“I had seven,” she corrected me, “and I was willing to take my chances, given the unlikelihood of ever obtaining an eighth Hopper. And in theory it’s possible even a single explosion might do the trick, provided it sets off a chain reaction. But I don’t need to consider the theoretical anymore�
�because here you are, with your very own Hopper. Delivered to me by the elder gods, who must bless this venture.”
I tried to get up, but my knees were still too weak; and also I seemed heavier than usual. I looked down for the first time since regaining consciousness, and saw that I was wearing a black harness, strapped to something at my back.
Instinctively I reached for it, but Jocasta called for me to stop.
“That,” she said, “is your very own bomb. It’s synchronized to your heartbeat, so the moment it’s disconnected from that, it’ll detonate.” I jerked my hand back, terrified.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “You really did this to me?”
“It’s a TATP-triggered explosive,” she said. “Triacetone triperoxide—also known as ‘the Mother of Satan.’ Which was a bit of poetry I found rather apropos. Don’t you?”
“Where did you get this?” I asked, suddenly afraid to move.
“Oh, it’s just one of the benefits of traveling the world and meeting with global leaders,” she said airily. “You’d be surprised the kind of deal you can cut with, say, an insecure dictator who’s desperate for an immortality spell.”
Jocasta rose from her chair and came around the desk to stand in front of me. I was still too weak to do more than raise my arms in self-defense.
But that instinctive move was just what she wanted. It presented my wrist to her—the one wearing the Hopper. “Already programmed,” she said as she clamped her hand around it, “while you were unconscious. All I need to do is this.” She tapped the activation button, and started to fade from my sight.
“Thank you,” she said before I lost her completely, “for helping me to wake the dreamer.”
31
And then I was in the Veil.
I’d only gotten a glimpse of it freshman year, but that glimpse had been terrifying; I’d seen a place of raging, fiery energies. I braced myself, hoping I’d suffocate from lack of oxygen before my skin was blistered away.
But in fact the flames kept their distance…and my breath kept its rhythm. Impossible—impossible—
And somehow I seemed to be suspended; not quite weightless, but with nothing beneath me that might bear the weight I did have.
