by Dakota Rusk
I was trying to figure it out when something crept up on me—a kind of static charge that ran up my legs and torso like a million electrified beetles, then entered my nostrils, my ears, my mouth—
—I gagged and gasped, and tried hacking it out, but it took hold of me—invaded me down to the cellular level, before twining around my cerebral cortex and spiraling up to my brain stem—
—and settling in my gray matter, as though it into a big, feathery nest. It was less acid now, less acrid; in fact, it was almost a tickle…
…almost a kiss.
“You—you’re—you’re sentient,” I said, not quite believing it.
Sennnntient, it repeated, as if testing out the concept—rolling it over its metaphorical tongue; then repeating it, to show me that it understood and agreed. Sentient. Yes.
“Are you Azathoth?” I asked.
There was a static flurry—like feedback from a speaker—that I took to be laughter. Some have called me that, was the reply. Others know me differently.
And just like that, he was familiar to me—this thinking being at the center of all creation. I was certain I knew him; possibly everyone knew him. But how we interpreted him—how we saw and named him—depended on who we were, what mattered to us, what we dreamed.
“I know you,” I said, and there was a catch in my throat.
You revere me, was the reply. You serve me.
I didn’t understand until I let my consciousness relax a little; then I realized that he was a she. The Veil—at least to me; in my presence, to my understanding—was female.
“Vesta?” I asked tentatively.
Another burst of furious static. Applause. I’d guessed right.
Vesta, the goddess to whom I’d promised my entire life—however much I might have struggled to honor that commitment of late. Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home in the Roman pantheon; but older than that, and far more primal. Vesta, the sacred flame, the purifying fire, the fire of creation, of rebirth, renewal, consecration. Of course this would be the Veil! How could it possibly have been otherwise?
I pitied the stunted, poisoned minds like Jocasta’s, and those of the writers and mystics who had seen this exquisite being as a tentacled, threatening monster. Vesta’s reach was embracing, not constricting; nurturing, not consuming.
“Can I—touch you?” I asked.
Permission was granted. I reached my hand into the flame; it danced around my fingers—it burned—I withdrew it quickly; but I hadn’t been marked.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “The last time I saw you, you were so furious, raging out of control.”
I had a hole pierced through me, was the reply; I was in agony.
“How is it I can breathe?”
You are in the palm of my hand, which manifests as I will it…in this instance, as a skein of air and light.
I was in the palm of Vesta’s hand.
Suddenly I was overcome by a crushing sense of shame.
“I’m not worthy,” I said, cringing away from her—which was impossible, because she was everywhere.
You are very worthy.
“I’m not. You say I worshipped you—revered you—but I never really believed; I never gave myself over to you the way the other sisters did. I was always distracted—looking elsewhere—”
You have honored me in your own way, she said.
“But I haven’t,” I insisted, feeling crushed by self-loathing. “I barely even thought about you.”
You brought flame to the forest, Vesta said. You found yourself in a world in need of me, and you anointed it with my touch. You believed; you acted; you were my agent and my daughter. None has ever done me greater service.
I’d forgotten about the Wild Hunt; it had never occurred to me that what I’d done then—torching the forest so that it could find new life—had been in actuality a Vestal rite.
But my momentary pride was quickly dampened by the realization that my service to Vesta was likely to be succeeded by my destroying her.
“I have a bomb,” I said with sudden urgency. “It’s set to detonate the moment I stop breathing.”
You will not stop breathing.
“There are others, though; seven more, strewn about your—your surface, your body—”
I am aware of them.
“They’re armed as well.”
They will not stop breathing.
“They'll be frightened, confused.”
And so she brought them to me.
Seriously, that’s how it was. They were all just…there. Donald and Ntombi; Gerrid and Rowella; Gunther and the Hyena Girls—all looking as though they’d just snapped out of some trance.
“What did you do?” I asked.
Contracted the portion of myself on which the sigil is traced.
“You know about the sigil?”
I do. I feel it gouged into me, like a wound.
“Fabia!” Gerrid exclaimed. “What are you doing here?” Then, a beat later: “Where is here?”
“We’re in the Veil,” I said; and it must have sounded as strange to his ears as it still did to mine.
Now that we were within what seemed to be the same vicinity—though distance was hard to judge here—we almost naturally separated into two groups. Rowella, Ntombi, and Donald drifted over to Gerrid and me; the Hyena Girls joined Gunther, all of them looking seriously alarmed.
“What do you mean, we’re in the Veil?” Gunther snarled. “We’re supposed to be home! What are you pulling here? I’ll rip your freaking head off!”
“It was Jocasta Foxglove’s plan all along,” I said—to Gerrid, not to Gunther. “To send students into the Veil, not through it.”
“But…shouldn’t that kill us?” Ntombi asked.
“She certainly thought so.”
“Then why aren’t we dead?”
“The Veil is protecting us. She knows we’re here and she’s keeping us alive.”
For a moment no one seemed able to respond to that…and I could understand why. Finally Gunther snarled, “‘She’? The Veil is a frail?”
When he spoke to me, he seemed closer to me; it was a disturbing effect of the lack of spatial fixity in this placeless place. “That’s how I see her,” I said, trying to back away from him, but not quite knowing how to manage it; “she appears differently to different people.”
There was a sort of keening sound issuing from Rowella; I’d been so overwhelmed by everyone’s sudden appearance that I hadn’t noticed her—hadn’t realized that, for her, what I’d just said must be an emotional hammer blow.
“Nooo,” she wailed; “you’re lying—this is some trick; Jocasta wouldn’t do that to me—to anyone—”
Donald reached out to comfort her, but she angrily shrugged off his hand.
“Jocasta has been playing her own game all along,” I said, pitying her. “Everything she’s done—coming to Parallel U., taking over the university—has all been to set up this exact moment: sending eight sacrificial victims into the Veil, to blow it up.”
Just moments before I said this, I’d notice Gerrid running his hand over the harness he was wearing.
“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Some kind of explosive device?”
“Yes; it’s attuned to your heartbeat. When you die, it detonates.” I gestured to the others. “They put you intro a trance before sending you here, and while you were helpless they fitted you with bombs. The idea was that when you materialized amidst these flames, you’d immediately die, and the resultant blast would collapse the Veil.”
“Father of mercy,” muttered Ntombi.
“How do we get out of here?” one of the Hyena Girls demanded to know. They were both looking more panicked with every passing moment; though Gunther, at their side, maintained his contemptuous sneer.
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I confessed. “And I don’t know how long the Veil can keep us safe.”
“Why?” Rowella shrieked. “Why would Jocasta do this?”
&nbs
p; “It’s a fair question,” Donald asked. “What does she get out of it? I mean, the Veil collapsin’— doesn’t that destroy the whole bleedin’ multiverse, parallel by parallel, right on down the line?”
“That’s what she wants,” I said, trying not to meet his eyes; it was crazy, but even in these extreme circumstances, I was still shy of him—unwilling to look directly at him after making such a fool of myself over him. “She’s a nihilist…actually, that’s too tame a word.” I looked at Gerrid and Ntombi, choosing to address them instead of Donald. “She loathes life; she calls it a plague—a contagion. To her, it’s an infection on all of space and time, and she wants to wipe it out in one massive, scalding burst of fire.”
“She wants to waken Azathoth,” Gerrid said, suddenly getting it.
“I can’t take this,” said Ntombi, trembling; “this is—I’m not—I can’t fit anything so horrible into my head. How do you do it? How do you—”
She started to cry, and the Hyena Girls were still sufficiently themselves that they laughed at her.
Gunther, however, looked suddenly different; his face seemed lit with a kind of terrible rapture. “That’s what Foxglove said?” he asked. “That’s what’s been guiding her all this time, and she’s been hiding it?”
“Yes,” I said, growing worried; there was something in his look that put me on even greater alert…which I wouldn’t have thought possible, given that I was essentially floating in the Veil strapped to an actual bomb.
“I wish she’d just said so,” he continued. “If only she’d been upfront about it! That is a philosophy I can actually get behind. Rid the whole freaking time-space continuum of the stinking garbage that fouls it up—preening around like it owns the place. Ha! Decontaminate the whole stinking corpse of reality. I’d love to see that; love it!”
One of the Hyena girls began to edge away from him. “Gunther, for God’s sake…what are you even—”
He grabbed her. “In fact,” he said, “I think I will see it! You said the bombs are linked to our heartbeats?” From within his jacket he drew a knife—so fast, we could barely register what was happening—and plunged it into the Hyena Girl’s chest.
32
She groaned and crumpled, blood spurting from her wound.
“Portia!” screamed the other Hyena Girl, who reached over to try to support her friend.
But I prevented her; I grabbed her wrist and held her, saying, “No—you don’t understand—it’s just seconds until her heart stops—”
And then, something sailed over me; I looked up—
It was Donald.
He’d hurled himself at Gunther, and now grappled him by the throat. “You jobby bastard,” he cried, “filthy degenerate scunner I’ll break your murderous face—”
“Donald!” I screamed, trying to pull the Hyena Girl away from the brawl. “Get away from him—get away from—”
At that moment Portia’s heart must have stopped; because we were rocked by an explosion that threw all of us about like billiard balls. The blast instantly swallowed up both Gunther and Donald, causing two more detonations equal to the first—
—and in fact it should have done the same to all of us; but within the quickness of a thought we were watching the whole thing from very far away. Gerrid, Ntombi, Rowella and I—along with the surviving Hyena Girl—could feel the stinging heat on our faces; but the smoking, billowing area of the triple blast was now almost at the edge of our field of vision.
“What happened?” Gerrid asked.
“Vesta,” I guessed. “She contracted earlier; she must have expanded, now to save us.”
I’m hurt, Vesta said; I’m hurt, I’m hurt…
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, I should have prevented it.”
“Who are you you talking to?” Gerrid asked; so it seemed that only I could hear her.
Rowella and Ntombi were both shrieking Donald’s name; they’d devolved into hysterics. I felt a sudden sense of shame when it became clear to me that they—both of them—had actually loved him; whereas to me, he’d been no more than a figure of girlish fantasy. He was gone, and I felt nothing.
Well, no; I felt the call of duty—the impetus for action. I saw—or rather felt—a sudden compression; a drawing in of the fabric of whatever this place-between-places consisted of.
I’m hurt, said Vesta; I’m dying…
And it was true; the blaze of the Veil—which had burned so deeply into my memory when I’d first seen it a year earlier—was now dimming.
The fires of creation were going out.
And in their place a brutal blackness rolled in, like an avalanche of smoke and tar—a lightless, frictionless, absence—a wall of churning nothing.
“What’s happening?” Gerrid asked.
I felt strangely calm. “The whole foundation of the multiverse is coming down around our ears.”
“I want to go,” the Hyena Girl cried. “I don’t want to be here—I want to go home, I want to go back—“”
I whirled on her, stung by an uncharacteristic impatience. “Well, you can’t, no matter how much you blubber. There’s no way back.”
But just as I said this, my eyes happened to fall on the panel of her Hopper—which crossed my line of vision as she flailed her arms in a panic.
I was an idiot…a dunce. Of course there was a way back.
It would have occurred to me earlier, if I’d known the sacrificial victims were being sent on their journeys alone…if I’d had time to think of what it meant, that they, and not an escort, would be wearing the Hoppers.
“Gerrid,” I said, shoving the Hyena Girl at him. “Take her; hold her. Do as I say!” He reached out and gripped the girl’s forearm. “Ntombi!” I called out. “Stop screaming and listen to me! Stop it, I’m warning you—” And amazingly, something in my tone cut through her grief and reached her. She turned to me, her face streaked with tears but her eyes wide in inquiry.
“Take hold of Rowella,” I said, “and press the Daimon Seed button on your Hopper; the one that looks like a devil’s head. You too,” I said to Gerrid.
“What will that do?” he asked.
“Take you out of here,” I reminded him. “Remember? To the Hopper’s point of origin.”
“Parallel 39,” he said, his face lighting up as he suddenly remembered.
“That’s right—go on,” I said. “Do it!”
“What about you?”
“I’m staying,” I said, rolling up my sleeves and turning toward the encroaching black leviathan that was rolling in, powering over the last of Vesta’s flames. “For months now, I’ve been dying for something to hit.” I managed a wry grin. “Looks like I found it.”
Ntombi clutched Rowella tight and pressed the Daimon Seed button; and at precisely that moment, Gerrid turned and flung the Hyena Girl at her—so that the impact occurred just a split-second before the jump.
All three girls were gone.
“What was that about?” I asked angrily.
He wagged his finger at me. “Hogging all the glory, Warrior Nun? I don’t think so.”
“You’ll die if you stay here!” I snapped.
“I’ll die anyway, if you don’t beat this thing back,” he said, clenching his fists. “And you’ll be more likely to do that if you’ve got help.”
I didn’t even have time to thank him; the black wall was upon us.At first there was almost a kind of joy in it, standing there at the bitter end of all existence, doing what I did best: just hitting—and hitting—and hitting—giving myself over to the sheer propulsive ecstasy of being a machine; my arms mere pistons, fueled by nothing more than indomitable human will.
And it was thrilling as well to have Gerrid fighting beside me. His style was different—he tore at the blackness, ripped it apart with his hands and teeth, shredded it like some kind of wildcat.
But the exhilaration ebbed as the mass gained ground; and as the space we occupied constricted, diminishing in size and scope, the mass grew harder, more c
rystalline. At first it had had a yielding quality, almost like human flesh; now, it was like punching cement. My knuckles crunched against it—I could hear my own bones crack—and Gerrid’s fingers were bloodied and torn.
“We’re losing,” he said. “We can’t stop it.”
“I know,” I called back; and I supposed I’d always known. I just had to try—had to pit myself against this final adversary—to go down swinging, never giving up.
And so I redoubled my efforts, shutting out the pain and pounding away at the unforgiving black bulwark that closed in on us. I pictured myself pummeling every single thing that had ever caused me pain: my father’s early death—I’d never forgiven him for it; my mother’s inability to see my suffering; my sisters forming an alliance of mockery against me; the schoolmates who ridiculed me for being so big; my first coach for driving me too hard; my uncle for using my fame to advance his own; all the boys I’d ever wanted, and who laughed at me if I showed it; Merri for dying and leaving me alone; Merri for coming back and not being Merri; Donald for making a fool of me; Donald for dying; Eddie for having to be rescued; Eddie for not rescuing me in return.
It was only when I conjured this last angry thought that I remembered his parting words: that he’d added a feature to the Hopper just for me—something to help me in my moment of greatest need. Typically, he’d been all sly and mysterious about it, so I’d forgotten it, thinking it must be something silly or inconsequential. But then, he’d done things—unimaginable things; genuine boy genius things—he’d learned to jump parallels without a Hopper—
—and really, at this point, what did I have to lose?
Gerrid was on his knees, slashing away at the impenetrable black walls closing in on us, spattered by his own blood. I’d be no better off, in a moment.
So I brought my Hopper up to eye level, and in the dimming light scanned it…
…And there it was. A single button, which I hadn’t seen before, marked F.
I took a breath, and pressed it.
And waited.
I was just about to give up, when from behind me, someone said, “What in the name of the great goddess—”
