by Laura Legend
In light of Thomas’s question, it wasn’t hard for Cass to put the pieces together: her timesickness had clearly begun in that well. Time had flickered out of sync for the first time only as she’d crawled out of there.
“Yeah,” Cass replied. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I have been to the basement of the Underside.”
Atlantis yawned, stretched, and jumped off the leather chair. He brushed up against Thomas’s leg and then used one paw to hook the corner of a book’s cover and pull it off the bottom shelf and onto the floor.
Thomas shot a look at Cass.
Cass shrugged.
Thomas picked up the book and read the spine.
“Just was I was looking for,” he said.
He cleared some room on the desk, opened the book to an elaborate diagram, and gestured for Cass to join him.
Cass stepped closer. The heart of the diagram showed three distinct levels of reality.
Thomas pointed at the uppermost level.
“As you doubtless already know, the normal, everyday world—the Overside—is the world of matter. This next level down is what we call the Underside. The Underside, rather than being grounded in matter, is grounded in mind. In the Underside, thoughts count—they are things—even as they remain thoughts. This is why the normal rules of the material world can be bent here and things like magic and seers and vampires are possible. In a lot of ways, the Underside resembles the Overside, because we tend to think about it in terms of structures we’re already familiar with—streets, stores, etc. But what makes the Underside different is that those who walk its streets understand that these things can change, and that that change can be consciously constructed through a change of thought. Knowing one can change one’s mind can be, quite literally, magic.”
Thomas looked at Cass to make sure she was following. She nodded. All this was familiar. Then he pointed at the third and lowest level of the diagram.
“But there is more to the world than just these first two levels. There’s more than just matter and conscious mind. You might think about this third, deepest level of reality as the ‘basement’ of the Underside—as the foundation of reality itself. If the Underside is grounded in the conscious mind, then the basement of the Underside is something like the Unconscious, that subconscious region of the mind that is primal, archetypal, and timeless.”
Atlantis jumped up onto the table. Cass pulled him into her arms and rubbed between his ears.
“When you were exposed to this timeless, Unconscious dimension of reality, your experiences came unmoored from the normal linear flow of time. You lost touch with the present and time got jumbled up. Past, present, and future started overlapping in confusing ways. Your experience of time got filled with crosstalk and white noise.”
Cass locked eyes with Thomas and shook her head eagerly, affirmatively. This sounded exactly like what had been happening to her. She couldn’t keep a firm grip on the present, and the past and future kept flickering into view.
Thomas tore a page out of the book, folded it neatly, and put it in his pocket. Then he snapped the book shut and put it back on the shelf.
A heavy knock came at the closet door. Cass flinched. Thomas ignored it.
“The good news,” Thomas continued, “is that I know how to heal you. We have a long way to travel, though. And for now we’ll need to stick to the world of matter because exposure to the Underside will further exacerbate your condition.”
The banging on the closet door became louder and more insistent. The door shook in its frame.
“To heal you, we’ll need to go to the original Underside location, the ground zero where it came into being. This is, of course, in Jerusalem. But on our way, we’ll also need to stop and gather some tools and materials.”
Thomas reached out and squeezed Cass’s hand.
She was filled with a confusing mix of emotions that consisted of equal parts desperation and hope.
“Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Thomas calmly gathered a couple of additional items, including a stack of yellow, banded correspondence. He kept a hold of Cass’s hand the whole time. Cass, for her part, kept a hold of Atlantis.
Thomas pulled the skeleton key out of his pocket.
A thunderous knock blew the closet door off its hinges.
A giant Amazonian woman with red hair stepped into the ruined doorway.
Her eye was bruised and her tiny feet were bare.
She didn’t look happy.
14
“YOU!” RED YELLED, pointing at Cass. “You’re coming with me.”
Thomas already had his hand on the broken closet door, which had been blasted against the side of the closet, and was inserting his skeleton key.
Red pointed to her bruised eye.
“I was going to kill you. But I’m not going back empty-handed to Maya.”
Cass glanced at Red’s mottled eye, then down at her bare feet, and then down at the boots on her own. She could imagine Maya “educating” Red in a way that involved a shot to the eye and the command to go bare foot until she’d recovered her boots from Cass.
Cass almost felt sorry for her. But not sorry enough to give back the boots.
Red grimaced as Cass caught her eye. “I know they think you’re special. But you’re not. Not to me. She’s in the hospital, you know. Some fucking complication with the medication she was on.”
Cass felt a pit of horror opening up deep inside her gut. Gertrude— She started to reach unconsciously toward Red, pulling against Thomas as he worked the lock.
“I—I didn’t …” Cass stuttered. Red’s eyes narrowed in contempt fed by an icy underlying hatred.
Thomas had managed to calmly insert the key into the lock. After a turn of his skeleton key, the broken closet door now opened onto the street below. He stepped through the space, yanking Cass by the arm so that she lurched after him, suddenly off balance.
Red growled and lunged for the door.
But Thomas had turned and quickly closed the door shut just as she reached it. Outside on the street, the door simply disappeared. Upstairs in the apartment, when Red crashed through the door for the second time that day, it opened only into the apartment itself, three stories up.
Still, even at street level, Cass had no trouble hearing Red’s roar of anger.
“Quickly, now,” Thomas said, leading Cass toward a subway entrance.
Cass looked back over her shoulder at the apartment window. Red’s head was poking out through the frame, scanning the street for any sign of them. She spotted them just as they began to descend the stairs into the subway. In response, she jammed her broad shoulders through the window frame, pushed herself through head-first, and gracefully dove toward the street, executing a backflip halfway through her fall and landing nimbly on her tiny bare feet.
At the bottom of the stairs, the subway platform was crowded. Everyone was headed home for the day. Thomas slipped through the cracks in the crowd, swiped his subway card, and deftly pulled Cass and Atlantis through the turnstiles with him.
Both Cass and Thomas were short enough that Cass dared to hope they might just blend in and be lost in the crowd. But when she glanced back again, she was reminded that Red had her own advantage on this score. She was already at the bottom of the stairs and, because she was a full head taller than the sea of people she was pushing through, neither she nor Cass had any trouble spotting each other.
Thomas stopped to check the train schedule, then made a snap decision about which one they wanted.
Red arrived at the turnstiles and hopped over them without breaking her stride. When an older MTA employee with a mustache tried to stop her for turnstile jumping, she picked him up like a sack of floor, tossed him over her shoulder, and planted him head-first in the nearest garbage can.
Cass winced for the poor guy.
Thomas angled for a train that was ready to depart. The doors were about to close when he and Cass squeaked through.
&
nbsp; They were barely on board before the train was already moving.
Red, though, wasn’t done. She shoved her way through the busy platform and caught hold of a door two cars back. She pried the doors apart with her bare hands and joined the car. It was full, but its passengers immediately pressed back against the sides of the compartment to make room for her to pass.
Cass watched with dismay as Red pulled open the first set of doors between the cars and advanced into the one immediately behind them.
Atlantis was getting fidgety, ready to bolt. Cass shared the sentiment.
Thomas, however, was still unperturbed. He took a careful look around their car and spotted a service closet on the far end.
It was tiny.
He met Cass’s eyes.
Red was halfway through the car behind them.
“No way,” Cass said. “We’ll never fit.”
Thomas sized up the closet again, wrinkled his nose, and shrugged.
“Fine,” Cass reluctantly agreed as people shouted and cursed in the adjoining car.
Thomas popped open the closet door and they tried to fold themselves inside. Arms and legs got tangled up with fur and claws, elbows were still sticking out of the closet, and Thomas’s face was squashed flat against Cass’s chest.
Red was in their car now. Passengers were diving out of her way.
Thomas was yanking at the door, skeleton key in hand, trying to get it to close.
“Exhale!” he finally yelled.
Cass tried to empty her lungs and contract her body into a smaller shape. Thomas jammed the door closed, twisted the key in the lock, and then immediately opened the door again.
All three of them spilled out onto the floor of a subway car.
Atlantis looked like someone else’s coughed-up hairball. Cass was still trying to figure out which arms and legs in this pile belonged to her and which belonged to Thomas.
However, through the window, passing at high speed in the opposite direction, they momentarily locked eyes with a Red.
She was livid. Her scream trailed off as her train sped away, fist raised.
Thomas smiled back serenely and waved.
He dusted himself off and turned to help Cass onto her feet.
15
THEY WERE HIDING behind a set of shipping containers on a pier in the city.
The sun was up and shining strong.
Cass’s connection to the present moment, though, was weakening. The past few days had taken a serious toll on her. Time was flickering and, every so often, the channels would roll between past and present like the tracking on her VCR was off.
She just had to hang on for a little bit longer. Then, Thomas promised, she could get some rest.
Suck it up, Jones, Cass thought. Keep your shit together for a few more hours.
Because taking shortcuts through the Underside would only aggravate Cass’s condition, Thomas had another plan in mind. Currently, it involved them hiding among some offloaded shipping containers on the docks in New York. A transatlantic cruise ship was making final preparations for departure, and they were to be stowaways.
Security was welcoming the last few late arrivals.
While they waited for the right moment, Thomas held Atlantis, scratching absentmindedly behind the cat’s ears. Atlantis purred and snuggled up against him. Cass was surprised—Atlantis didn’t usually take to people. For that matter, he didn’t usually take to her. The cat did as he pleased, people be damned.
Thomas held Atlantis up and looked him right in the eyes.
“The cat’s eyes remind me of someone I used to know,” Thomas said.
Cass, who’d been anxiously watching the ship and wondering when they were finally going to board, gave him a polite “uh-huh,” in return.
“In fact,” Thomas added, “looking more closely, I could swear that this cat’s eyes are the exact color as yours.”
Thomas glanced at Cass, meeting her eyes, then back to the cat.
Cass took a closer look at Atlantis’s eyes. They were the same as hers.
She’d had the cat for more than a decade now. How had she never noticed that before?
“They are the same color,” Cass admitted, “but they don’t remind me of my eyes. They remind me of my mother’s. When I was little, my dad would always tell me that I had my mom’s eyes.”
“Interesting,” Thomas said, his voice distant.
Cass frowned at this unwelcome revelation. Could she stand to rub the Heretic behind the ears and listen to her purr in response? And could she resist the opposite temptation, to use Atlantis to connect more concretely with her mother’s memory?
She couldn’t decide. As always, she didn’t know exactly what she felt. And she still was in no real condition to digest even the basic facts of what she’d learned about her mother. Instead, she shoved these questions back down into the basement of her mind and locked them in the same place where she’d put her questions about Zach and her feelings about Miranda’s death.
In response to this confusing surge of emotions, Cass felt time skip and fray. For a few moments, she lost hold of the present altogether and slumped limp against the wall of the shipping container. Locked out of the present, her body was like a car with no driver. The engine was running but no one was behind the wheel.
When she came back to the present, she found Thomas gathering their things. He smiled sympathetically, the corners of his eyes crinkling in the morning light.
“Let’s find you someplace to rest,” he said.
A utility shed was positioned near their shipping containers. Now, though, Thomas saw no additional need for staying hidden. He walked out from the behind the containers, waved to the two security guards on duty at the entrance to the ship, and slipped his skeleton key into the shed’s lock. Cass followed close on his heels. Her knees felt weak and she was tempted to lean on him a bit, but she resisted.
After Thomas had turned the key and unlocked the door to the utility shed, it opened onto the inside of a walk-in freezer onboard the cruise ship.
The air, of course, was frigid. Cass shivered. Atlantis, for his part, looked a little panicked at the cold after his recent trouble in the Alps.Thomas just kept moving.
They exited the freezer and entered a kitchen bustling with activity.
Everyone within twenty feet stopped and stared. Carrots stopped being sliced. Soup stopped being stirred. Potatoes stopped being peeled.
Thomas gave everyone a little wave, as if exiting the freezer with a young woman, a cat, and a shoulder bag was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Cass, however, was lagging.
Thomas held out his arm and waited for her to take it and they quickly exited the kitchen before anyone could ask too many questions.
In the hall, Cass leaned heavily on Thomas’s arm and rested her head against his shoulder. As they turned the corner, they almost ran headfirst into an additional pair of security guards, both young men barely out of their teens.
Time flickered for Cass and she felt her knees give way.
Without missing a beat, Thomas caught her in his arms, kissed her on the lips for the benefit of the guards, and gave them a wink. Cass’s eyes blinked open mid-kiss and went wide in surprise.
“Now, now, my darling,” Thomas said, still putting on a show, “there will be time for kissing and swooning soon enough. For now, let’s get you to your room.”
The guards looked at each other and then back at the two of them with a mixture of jealousy and incredulity, clearly wondering what this old man was doing with a gorgeous younger woman like Cass. But when Cass got her feet back under her and they stole a look at her cloudy, wandering eye, she could see them recalibrating their judgments about the situation.
As the guards continued along their way around the corner, Cass could hear them having a barely whispered argument about how to rate her. One of them argued that she was a straight up nine. The other replied that that would only be accurate if Cass kept her eyes closed.
In the daylight, with her eyes open, Cass was a wiry six-point-five at best.
Cass felt a flash of anger travel the length of her spine. Her fists clenched and her weak eye started to smoke.
I’ll give those assholes a good look at my eye, she thought. Who the hell do they think they are—those beardless, pimpled bastards? And, while we’re at it, what the hell is up with security guards in general? Why are they all such morons?
Cass let go of Thomas’s arm and turned to go after them. But as soon as she did, her knees buckled again and she grabbed a fistful of his shirtsleeve to hold herself up. Emotions flaring out of control, and a body weakening by the minute were not a good combination.
Thomas checked the hallway in both directions to make sure they were alone. Then he used his key to open a below-deck interior cabin door meant for employees.
At this point, Cass would be grateful for any room with a bed where she could lie down.
Thomas swung the door open, and Atlantis ran inside.
When Cass looked up, she found that they had entered a lavish suite of rooms on one of the upper decks.
16
BOLLOCKS! RICHARD SLAMMED his fists against his desk in frustration as he read through Red’s latest report. Maya raised an eyebrow at his outburst, and Richard knew it was just further proof to her that Cassandra Jones had, indeed, corrupted him.
“Do not worry, Richard. Red is very competent. She will bring Cassandra back,” Maya said as she turned to leave. “I will return the moment I receive the next report, of course.”
“Of course,” Richard began, then stopped. He watched as Maya existed his office, her stride brisk, sensual, and somehow simultaneously utterly pragmatic. Just like always. Damn Maya, Richard thought as he tried to focus back on the email he’d been composing before Maya had interrupted to share Red’s latest report. He knew he should be helping Maya, or at least paying attention to her as she worked with her analysts to prepare for possible scenarios regarding the Heretic’s recently consolidated power, but the fallout from the loss of the Holy Coat, important as it was, was truly the farthest thing from Richard’s mind.
