“Did you think you could beat a god with a rock?” someone asked.
Lydia whirled around, scrambling to find her rock again, but Samira stepped out of the shadows, and Lydia nearly wept. She stumbled toward her friend and hugged her tightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same thing,” Samira muttered into her hair. “I’m not alone.”
Lydia looked past her to several plains dwellers. They nodded, and she lifted a hand to wave, then stopped, seeing another person step from the shadows, her face half hidden by tattoos.
Lydia’s breath shuddered out, and she was out of Samira’s arms and into Fajir’s in a second. All of Samira’s sighing and groaning couldn’t have stopped her from kissing Fajir over and over.
“Save the questions,” Samira said before Lydia could even ask. “And let’s answer, what are we going to do?”
Lydia stepped out of Fajir’s embrace. “I really thought the rock would do it.”
“Why don’t we try a sword?” Fajir asked.
“As much as I hate you, you might be right,” Samira said, though she had the grace to grimace.
“If it’s just power,” Lydia said, “knocking her unconscious should have helped. Killing her might make this”—she gestured to the crater—“permanent.”
“We need a macro or a telepath,” Samira said.
Fajir held a hand toward the crater. “After you.”
“Listen, jerk—”
“Enough,” Lydia said. “I always knew I was going to have to separate you two. Whatever Naos did might be restricted to this area, like the Sun-Moon’s telepathic shield. We need to get someone out, not go in.”
“Throw a rope over someone?” Fajir said.
Lydia shook her head. “Don’t have one.”
“Perhaps we could shove one free with a tree branch.”
“Before you go poking holes in people,” Samira said as she walked past them, “let’s see who’s close enough for me to grab with my power.”
Lydia grinned at her back as she followed. “I’m so happy you’re here, Samira. And so is Fajir.”
“Speak for yourself,” Fajir mumbled.
* * *
Lyshus lay in Shiv’s arms like a wooden doll, lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling. He lived; she could feel him, but he would not rouse no matter her words.
“If this is your help,” she called, “I do not want it.”
No one answered. She should have known the help would be naught but a ruse. Despair choked her, but she clawed through it. She had to find a way out of this cold metal place.
Turning a corner brought her to a group of her mother’s drushka. She sighed in relief, though she did not know how they could help her. She opened her mouth to speak when she saw how strangely they acted, bending or reaching as one and running into the backs of one another.
When they spoke, saying, “What is this place, Sa?” Shiv jumped. She cast around for Sa but saw no one else.
“Are you well?” she asked.
They turned to her as one. “Daughter?”
Shiv leapt back from them. “Shi’a’na?” She had heard tales of how the old Shi had dominated the minds of her drushka, but no story was like this. Shiv turned and fled, carrying Lyshus. When she heard a sound from ahead, she ducked back, staying out of sight.
A woman marched down the hall, dark hair fluttering around her shoulders as she strode. “Naos?” she shouted. “Patricia Dué, I know you’re here! Show yourself.” A blue circle sewn in glittery thread adorned her back, and Shiv waited until she had passed to continue on.
Shiv walked for what felt like miles, and the shining hallways did not change except that some had doors, and some did not. Shiv avoided the doors, not wanting to see what was within. At last she reached something different, a hole cut in the wall. She looked through it and saw a world of starlight above and below. She was in the sky; space, as the humans called it. Before Lyshus, before she had become a queen, the idea would have excited her. Now, though, she wanted to go home and make Naos keep her promise.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Horace’s voice said, and only the fact that she recognized the sound kept her from clawing his face off as she turned.
“Shawness.”
“Not here,” he said with a shake of his head. “Here, I’m the same as everyone else.”
She did not know whether the thought comforted or pained him, so she tried to pull him away. “Come. There are many strange people about.”
“Tell me about it.” He stepped past her and led the way to one of the rooms. The door hissed open on its own. A host of drushka waited inside, all making the same gestures and saying the same words. “I’ve been collecting them.” He raised his voice. “Pool?”
The drushka turned as one, and Shiv was horrified to see Nettle and Reach among them. “Shawness? You have found another?”
“It’s Shiv.”
“Wait for us there, shawness, daughter. We shall find you.” The drushka began to walk until they bunched up against the wall and walked in place.
Horace pulled Shiv from the room. “So far, the ones I put in haven’t gotten out, but they’ll run right over you if you stay inside.”
“What is happening?” Shiv said, her mind turning in too many directions at once.
“I’ve been talking to Simon through Pool and…them,” he said, nodding at the door. “Simon said Lyshus can use human telepathy?”
“Yes, but he is…” She lifted him and held him close.
Horace studied him a moment. “Simon thinks we’re in Naos’s mind. I think she pulled in you and Pool through Lyshus, but since all of Pool’s drushka are connected to her…” Again, he nodded at the door.
“As Sa would say, creepy,” Shiv said.
Horace smiled. “Very. But maybe keeping you in here is keeping Lyshus unconscious.”
“So, if we free ourselves, he should awaken?”
“Won’t know until we try.” He sighed and leaned against the hall. “This is all so strange that it’s hard to be irritated by it.”
“Not all feel as such.” She told him of the angry woman.
“Sounds like the Moon. We should avoid everyone we don’t know. Powers don’t work here, and I don’t know if we can be hurt.”
Shiv blinked, then kicked his ankle.
He sprang back, eyes wide. “Ow!”
“Now we know.”
He sputtered a laugh. “Why kick me and not the wall?”
“That is not smart, shawness,” she said slowly. “The wall cannot feel.”
He gave her a wry look. “Right.”
She wondered if they should collect more drushka, but when she turned to ask, Horace was gone. “Shawness?” Shiv walked forward a few steps and peered around the hall. Nothing. “Shawness?” she called softly.
Still nothing. He had not gone inside the door as she had not heard the hiss. She went a few halls over, tearing tiny strips off her leather shirt to mark the way, but saw nothing.
Horace had vanished.
* * *
The cold hallways of the Atlas became the cold ground of the mountainside in a snap that left Horace gasping. He sat up, coughing and flailing. He’d gotten used to one uniquely strange situation just to be pulled into another.
“Are you all right?”
Samira was bending down and peering into his face, and Lydia the ex-prophet was behind her along with Fajir.
“What?” he managed.
Samira knelt in front of him and smiled. She’d always had a comforting smile, but how could she be so calm when they were…
“You were down there,” Samira said, nodding to the side.
Horace looked and saw nearly everyone he cared about sprawled on the ground inside the crater. “How?”
“Naos did something,” Samira said. “When I…rolled you out of the crater, you woke up.” She reached up, and he felt a tug on his hair as she pulled a sprig of greenery free. “Sorry about that.”
Horace looked down to find himself filthy, but he couldn’t be bothered. “Naos did something.” He frowned, trying to remember. Shiv had accused Liam of not being Liam, then the hatch had opened. He’d barely had time to wonder what to do when a screaming horde of people raced down the crater’s side, and Cordelia led her group to fight the horde. He’d run for the side of the crater and then…
“The lights of the Atlas came on,” Horace said, “and then I was in there.”
“On the Atlas?” Samira asked.
“That’s what it looked like, but…it felt like a nightmare.” The drushka acting as one, all of them without their power, and the halls that just went on and on. He shook his head and reached for his power again, comforted when it answered his call. He healed himself and those around them with the barest thought.
“I hit her with a rock,” Lydia said suddenly. “Naos, I mean, because I thought it would wake everyone up, but it didn’t.”
Movement to the side drew his attention. A group of plains dwellers hauled a body through the trees and laid it next to him. It was the woman who’d been laughing from the heights: Naos.
She didn’t seem very threatening now. Her face was slack, one eye closed, and the other a divot where an eye should be. Simon had always described her empty socket as a black hole or a well of blue light, but without her power to fool people, it was just an empty space.
“Can you figure out what she’s done?” Samira asked.
Horace touched her face. As harmless as she looked now, he really didn’t want to go back inside her mind. But everyone else was stuck there, and he wasn’t just going to leave them.
He took a deep breath. He’d been wanting to be a hero for a long time. Now was his chance. “Get your rock ready,” he said. “If I start acting like a mad god, give me a few hard hits.”
Samira seemed pained by the idea. “I really don’t think—”
“I’ll do it if you don’t have the stomach for it,” Fajir said.
“Oh, fuck off, you.”
Horace tuned them out and touched Naos’s forehead again. With another deep breath, he immersed himself in his telepathic power and opened his mind to hers.
* * *
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Patricia said over and over. She knew a few things: she was back in the hellscape of her Atlas memories, she didn’t have her power, and there was nowhere to run.
Soft singing echoed in her ears. She put her hands over them and rocked back and forth in the Atlas’s gleaming hallways. “No, not again.” She screamed, trying to drown out the singing, but as always, it was in her head.
“Why?” she shouted, the sound echoing crazily through the halls. “We were free of each other! Why?”
At least she had company. She’d seen Sun-Moon worshipers and paladins as well as pockets of strange-acting drushka. Real people or more nightmares? It hardly mattered. She ignored them all. A few had tried to grab her, but she slid through the wall away from them. They didn’t understand how this place worked. You could change it, move through it, or interact with it.
You just couldn’t leave.
Patricia had caught a glimpse of herself in the shiny black plastic of a toolkit locker. Her old face, her old eyes, the old hair she could never quite tame. She wore her blue flight suit with Dué stitched on the breast. At least Naos hadn’t made her live with the empty socket. She no doubt reserved that honor for herself.
Patricia sobbed and curled herself tighter into a ball. “Why, why, why?” she kept asking. She tried to tell herself to get the fuck up, to do something before it was too late, but time was meaningless here. Naos hadn’t even visited her, probably too busy watching all her new friends with glee. She couldn’t possess people anymore, so she’d dragged them all into her instead, but Patricia bet that no one else would get a turn to drive the body.
“Patricia?” a voice asked softly.
Patricia laughed and squeezed herself tighter. “You don’t need to whisper. You can shout, and it won’t make any difference.”
A hand touched her arm. She jerked away, prepared to glide through the wall again, but a soothing wave of power made her sit up and gape at Horace.
“How did you…” She scooted away from him, panic choking her. “You’re her wearing his face. Get away from me!” She slid through the wall into one of the ubiquitous rooms that always lined these hallways. Gasping, she reached for the controls and locked the door. Maybe he wouldn’t know how to work it, but if he was just her, then—
“Patricia,” he said from behind her. “It’s all right.”
He had his hands out, placating, but that was how she always looked before she struck. “Leave me alone, Naos,” she said, sobbing around the words. “Please.”
Begging now. Patricia had never hated herself so much.
Again, those soothing waves washed over her. “It’s all right. It’s really me. Horace.” He glanced around as if the walls could hear them. Which they could. “I’m outside the crater now. I went into Naos’s mind.”
She laughed and knew it sounded crazy for all his calming power. “You were out, and you came back in?” She laughed and laughed until she sobbed once more. “Please, let me trade places with you. I won’t waste my time outside again, I swear it, I swear.” She grabbed his hands, but he felt brittle, as if he might dissolve like smoke if she squeezed. “Get me out.”
“I’ve tried,” he said with a sigh. “It’s as if you’re all tied together. Her mind is your mind and…” He sighed again. “The only thing I’ve thought to do is…bring some of you closer together.”
Patricia tried to think about his words, but the meaning escaped her. “Bring us? Out of the crater?”
“No, Samira can’t reach any more of you.” He waved vaguely. “It’s a long story, but if I heal you and Naos together again—”
Patricia fled. “I knew it was you,” she shouted as she ran, phasing through the walls, willing them to change, but she couldn’t bend them like she used to, couldn’t transform them into the park on Earth where she’d met her fiancé Jack, couldn’t have the restaurant where they’d dined together so many times, couldn’t have her parents’ house, or the first ship she’d ever flown. It was all Atlas, Atlas, Atlas!
“Think of something else!” she roared at a group of people as she passed. “Something besides this stupid fucking hallway!” But this place took time to learn.
“Patricia!” Horace’s voice said. “I’m not here like the others. I’m using a telepathic signal, so running from me is useless.”
“I will not go back!”
“Neither will I,” another voice said, and oh, she knew this one: her inner darkness given form.
“Where are you?” Patricia asked as she stopped. “It’s about time you showed your real face. My face.”
Horace appeared beside her, and Patricia pointed to him. “Not that one. Show me you!”
Naos appeared in Patricia’s form with Patricia’s hair flowing around her head as if she walked along the ocean floor. Her missing eye was a blaze of light, and she wore a black satin evening gown better than Patricia had ever worn anything in her life.
And she continued with this Horace façade, too. That was new.
“He wants to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Naos said, turning her glare on Horace.
“He?” Patricia shrieked. “It’s you! Everything here is you!”
“Patricia, please,” Horace said.
“Don’t talk to me, talk to her, talk to yourself!” Patricia laughed again because what else could she do.
“See?” Naos said to Horace. “I don’t want this crazy person back. I’d let her go if I didn’t think she’d ruin everything.”
“What everything?” Horace asked as if he wasn’t part of a whole. “What is your plan? You can’t take over all these bodies. Your own body is lying out cold on the side of a mountain.”
“I need them!” Naos said, curling one hand into a fist. “I need purpose, and she took it, so
I’m getting something new.”
Horace drew back. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Welcome to the fucking club,” Patricia said.
“Let me heal you,” Horace said, his hands out. “Let me make you whole.”
“I won’t go back to being her!” she and Naos shouted at the same time.
“Neither of you is going to be the other one,” he said, and it sounded as if he was getting angry at last. “You’ll be like two united flames, and you won’t know where one ends and the other begins.”
“No,” they said again. Patricia looked at Naos just as Naos looked at her. They’d never been so in sync, and it seemed as if they were closer together in the hall, though Patricia didn’t remember moving.
“Snake!” Patricia shouted at Horace. “You’re already doing it!”
His eyes went wide, and he blinked out of sight.
“We have to find him,” Naos said. “Before he does any more damage.”
Patricia whirled on her, seeing her movement mirrored by her counterpart so that she was talking to Naos’s back. “Let me go, and I’ll kill him outside.”
“You’ll just run from me.”
“Not before I take care of him, I swear!”
Naos turned slowly, and it took everything in Patricia not to turn as well. “I don’t believe you.”
Patricia started from the pain in Naos’s left eye, the pain of loneliness, purposelessness. When Patricia had gone, she’d taken her own sense of direction in life, her ambition, and what was left of her inside Naos had acted out in the only way it knew how: by trying to claim everything because it didn’t know what it wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. She didn’t think she’d ever say those words to Naos, but she’d been capable of self-pity since she was a child.
The two of them laughed together.
“Split up,” they said. “We’ll find him.”
Sometimes, being split in two came in handy.
Chapter Twenty-five
Dillon sighed and ran his hands along the walls of the Atlas just like he used to when he’d wandered this ship. He’d been as bored then as he was now, but at least then, Lazlo had been his friend. Now, he had no one.
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