by Elise Kova
Which meant she could ignore all the symptoms and focus on the problem: herself.
“I’m going to give it a try anyway.” Jo went for nonchalance but her voice was a high-pitched, desperate sound.
“J-Jo, Eslar’s right.” Samson’s tiny voice joined the fray. “The Door isn’t right. I don’t know why, but I can see something amiss. I wouldn’t go near it.”
It hadn’t been right from the very beginning. From her first wish, she could force the Door to do things no one else could, not even knowing it was unique until it was already too late. She’d seen the button stick as she’d gone to Florence with Nico. She’d felt it groan and shudder under the weight of her rage as she’d returned following their failure in Japan.
“I wouldn’t—”
“What are you trying, Jo?” Snow interrupted Eslar.
Jo was frozen once more under the weight of his stare. She took a deep breath through her nose, let it out through her mouth, but it did not pick up sound anywhere along the way.
“Go back,” he said, gently. Then, as if she were some kind of wild, panicky creature, he took a slow step for her. “Don’t do this, please. We can talk this through.”
“Trust me,” she pleaded softly. “I broke your wards and she’ll come for it. I’m going far from here and will come back when I have my magic to dismantle this and free us.”
“Go back.”
“It’ll be fine,” she insisted.
“Jo, please.” Snow took another step toward her, speaking kindly when she knew he wanted to be yelling—and had every right to do so. He was almost close enough to touch her and close enough for her to feel his magic. The Door on one side, him on the other, an impossible choice under her feet.
“I—”
“Come now boys.” If words could slither, that was the sound of them doing so.
All eyes landed on the woman leaning against the door frame. Pan stood, arms folded, fingers splayed against the door she was propping open. She had the look of calm, but the air of energy. Writhing, wriggling, pulsing madness washed over Jo from the suit-clad demigod.
“I think its time you stopped interfering with women’s matters.” Pan’s eyes dropped to Jo’s hand’s, seeing the same thing that had commanded Snow’s instant attention. “Especially you, Snow. It’s time to end this stalemate.”
Jo took an involuntary step back, away from Pan, toward the Door.
The room was filling with magic, like an illusionist’s water chamber. But Jo’s hands were shackled and no one had the key. The only thing she may have that could even remotely help her fight back was locked in a box. But setting it free was likely to do more damage than good.
But as she stood in the cross-hairs, Jo wasn’t given a choice.
“You made a deal with me.” Pan’s voice seemed to echo, as though they were in a giant cavern and not the briefing room. “Now, Josephina. Show me your magic!” Pan screeched. The sound seemed to reverberate through the very foundation of the Society. Distant windows rattled and the walls groaned.
Jo’s mind could no longer make logical mental pathways as she was plunged into utter chaos. Without her consent, her hands began to move, pulling out the box.
She was going to open it.
It was now or never; Jo pushed on the Door handle, and three things happened at once.
The first was the feeling of the Door giving way. As Jo gave it a monstrous tug, the handle came free and with it, a part of the Door itself. Light streamed through the cracks as though it had always been trying to hold back the dawn of a new age. Steel groaned like a slumbering giant coming awake, and it split down the middle.
Magic flooded the room, knocking them all back. Jo rolled, head over heels, knocking against spinning executive chairs left and right. Her hands flew, knuckles pounded against the ground, splitting but not releasing the box they held.
The second thing Jo registered was the sound of Snow rushing for her, and a smaller set of feet pounding the floor at her back. Chaos and Creation, battling it out over Destruction. The notion would’ve been almost poetic were it not for the fact that Jo was fairly certain everyone she’d come to care about would be killed in the fallout.
Jo let out a scream as she struggled against her own body. Her legs thrashed, her spine twisted, and her inner voice was drowned in the chaos of her mind. She fought for as long as she could—a second that felt like a millennium. She just had to hold out; Snow would reel her in once more.
But she couldn’t.
Jo flicked open the box, triggering the third and most vivid thing of all—a sharp intake of breath, and then the word “Finally” falling from Pan’s lips.
Chapter 26
The Clock Reaches Zero
“What. Did. You. Do?”
Jo thought the question might have come from Eslar, but all she could really process was the sound of abject horror laced beneath the words.
“N-No. . . We can’t, we—How will we get out? How can we—If we don’t have—We’re t-trapped, we’re—Outside was all w-we h-had, I—” That was most certainly Samson, a dull pull in Jo’s chest letting her knew that he was falling head first into a panic attack. Where she would normally jump to his aid, she remained frozen in place. It was as if, in the first seconds of opening the box, she’d become paralyzed beneath a wave of something her mind, body, and soul couldn’t yet comprehend. All she could do was listen in distant objectivity to the sounds of her team falling apart around her. Blaming her.
“Josephina, no . . .” Snow?
“The hell?” A new voice—Takako? Wayne? Any of them really.
“Finally! Finally!” That word rang loud and clear, a redundancy from only seconds ago, but with more glee, more jubilation. Even if her ears weren’t buzzing with static, even if her heart hadn’t stopped beating to make way for the pulsing waves of the magic in her blood, she’d have known that voice. It was a part of her, after all.
The moment Pan’s enthusiasm registered, so did the feeling coursing through Jo like the devastating latch of a taser to the spine. This was her magic in full, returning to her and clinging with a vice-like grip. She’d known what she was doing, had known what was in the box, but there was no way to prepare for how it felt. So much more potent than the magic she’d come to call her own, so much more fierce and alive.
Part of her, the part named Josephina, the part that grew up in the Lone Star Republic and started hacking to provide for her family, instantly recoiled from the sensation. It wasn’t hers, this magic—not like her hacking magic had been. It wasn’t what she wanted.
But another part of her, a part whose eyes might be slitted like a cat’s, saw everything unseen, all the little lines that made up the schematics of reality itself. A woman whose hair might glisten in fragmented colors like the iridescence of an oil spill. A woman who had seen the birth of time and the dawn of man with eyes that were her own but not, who had preached oblivion and reaped destruction. . . that part of her was thirsty for it. Jo had never felt such a craving, but Destruction had. And it would be so easy to give in. Her eyes landed on Pan for a brief moment. So, so easy to—
No.
No more than a few seconds could have passed; Eslar was still trying to pull Samson out of his panic attack, Takako was staring at the Door like it might be lying, and Wayne stared at Jo with every emotion conceivable but abject concern prevailing. Jo saw each of their faces in half time before finally picking out Snow’s.
She couldn’t take on Oblivion’s power if it meant losing him, if it meant putting everyone in danger. She couldn’t, but now that she’d opened the box, she didn’t know how to make it stop. Snow had said this was the moment she was most vulnerable—as she was absorbing her full power. She couldn’t have imagined him to be so right, but Jo didn’t have a clue how to expedite the process even if she wanted to.
With far, far too much difficulty, Jo opened her mouth, lips working with more energy than she’d ever had to expel in her life—only to have her line of
sight broken by a blindingly red, cat-like stare.
Jo gasped against the impact, her back colliding with the splintered Door. Broken edges dug into her spine, the light pouring out around her almost bitingly cold against each piece of bare skin it touched. She could barely breathe beneath the impossible pressure Pan was forcing against her ribcage, and when Pan raised that hand, lifting Jo a good foot off the floor, she stopped being able to breathe at all.
Pan was saying something to her, something to the room at large, but Jo couldn’t hear it, the blood rushing in her ears only adding to the deafening waves of her magic. Their magic, Jo couldn’t help but notice, because as Pan loomed below her, the waves of both their magics had begun to coalesce, weaving around them both and inching into the core of it. The magic that had been set free from the box was drawn as much to Pan as it was to her. If it went to Pan, not her, then Pan would no doubt consume her next with easy and careless disregard.
In a panic, Jo’s eyes searched frantically about the room, not quite sure if she was asking for help or begging for them to go, run, find another means of escape somehow. But it would seem that, in the wake of Pan’s attack, they’d momentarily dropped their fear and blame, rushing to her aid without a second’s hesitation.
No! Stop! Jo tried to yell, but her vision was already going hazy with a lack of air. All it took was a single, dismissive wave of Pan’s hand, as if she were shooing them away, and the whole room exploded backwards on a wave of energy. The briefing room table collided violently with the double doors, knocking them clean off their hinges; the rest of the room faring nearly as badly. The only one left standing in the onslaught was Snow, but solely for as long as it took Pan to use that same hand to pin him to the opposite wall, magically chained and out of the way before he had a chance to help.
Jo could do nothing more than play spectator as her magic began to give way to Pan’s and her world fell apart.
“You have no idea,” Pan was speaking to her once more, the first recognizable words she’d been able to hear for what felt like hours. Pan inhaled deeply, and Jo’s stomach churned at the sight of their magic winding together like tendrils of ivy, filling up Pan’s lungs like she was desperate for the smell of them. When she exhaled, bright sparks in an eternity of colors escaped through her clenched teeth. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment. Your little ploy with Creation here making me be patient, orderly. You know how much I hate that.”
Pan dug her fingers into Jo’s chest, nails breaking through fabric to skin as if she wasn’t wearing anything at all. The pressure continued to build into something painful, mere fractions away from a proper puncture, and for a maddening second, Jo thought that maybe Pan would rip out her heart. But instead, she just eased in closer, rising up off the ground to meet Jo eye to eye once more. The pressure never eased and Pan appeared not to notice she was levitating, too busy running her lips up Jo’s jaw to her ear on a hungry whisper.
“We will become one, my darling. We will be Oblivion once more and you will remember what it truly means to have power. You were always the immature one—no more of your obstinate, child-like games.”
When Pan’s magic pulsed around them, spinning like a typhoon of overwhelming sensation, Jo didn’t scream. She didn’t have enough air in her lungs to try. There was a darkness from deep, deep within Jo’s magic that was creeping up on her, like an animal stalking its prey. She could sense it on the periphery, the shadows lingering in sinister anticipation, and as much as she tried to fight them, there was no denying how much her own magic craved that release, that embodiment. It was what she was made from, it was what she was.
In a last-ditch effort, Jo’s eyes darted about the room, taking in the scene before her with a steadily breaking heart.
Wayne lay before the double doors, unconscious, a mildly injured Takako at his side. She wasn’t sure what knocked him out, but it didn’t look fatal. Despite how she cradled Wayne’s head in her lap, Takako stared down the scene before her like a soldier waiting for orders. Jo didn’t have any to give.
Compared to Wayne, Eslar seemed worse for wear, no more than a crumpled heap in Samson’s arms. Enough blood had fallen from whatever head wound he’d suffered that it almost completely obscured his face, dripping onto his clothes and smudging the lengths of Samson’s arms. Jo couldn’t explicitly process what Samson was sobbing into Eslar’s hair, but she could almost make out the words on his trembling lips.
“Don’t leave me, Eslar, please!”
When Jo managed to drag her focus away from the sight, it was to Snow, her own sob heaving at her chest. A sob that lodged itself in her throat at the look of pure fury on Snow’s face. Much like Pan’s, his magic was radiating off him in visible waves, thrumming with the sort of power Jo had only seen from him twice: once in the room where he’d “died,” and the other in a barn in the Lone Star Republic, surrounded by Rangers and guns.
It was a magic that managed to wreak havoc upon the room as much as it filled Jo’s creeping shadows with soothing light. It offered comfort despite the rage marring Snow’s beautiful features. It whispered in her ears, against her skin, almost as clearly as the words Snow mouthed in her direction. Jo had never seen anything so clearly.
“A new age. One more time. Revert us back.”
With her eyes locked on Snow’s as they were, she could only see Pan’s shock in her periphery, but the ripple of confusion/disbelief/anger that traveled between the lingering bond of their magic said it all.
Jo turned her face to set her eyes on the Door. She craned her neck so far that her tendons felt like they would rip. As though she was now part owl, she twisted to look into the void the Door had held back all this time. Beyond it, she saw. . . light.
She saw light and life and a world as it could have been were it not for meddling demigods. She saw the foundations of a pillar that had been erected outside of time to house two divinities locked in stalemate. She saw, and she understood. For like hacking a server or destroying the stars, once Jo saw something, she knew how to dismantle it.
Snow had been right: dismantling the Society would bring about an end to everything.
They had destroyed the world once and ushered in a new age—her magic and his. The only difference now was that Jo wielded her power. She would not walk into this new dawn as a mortal, but as Destruction, as what she was meant to be. So Jo pushed herself through the doorway and into that blinding foundation where she landed like a time bomb whose clock had finally reached zero.
Chapter 27
Fragmented Data
The end was a beginning.
There was the sensation of unleashing her magic on the cornerstone of the world—pulling it out from the foundation with violent force. This compounded the feeling of falling, further than she ever had before. Jo thought she might fall forever until, as if by a sudden explosion, the light around her shattered and she hit the ground.
For what seemed like a brief moment, everything went dark.
Jo’s eyes fluttered open.
The world around her seemed to glitter, sparkle in a way that it never had before. She saw every leaf of the shrub near where she lay. It picked up the sunlight and cast it off with emerald perfection, far too vivid to be real.
Reaching a hand, Jo ran her fingers over the waxy leaf, confirming it was, indeed, real. She tipped her head back into the grass that tickled her ears and looked at the sky above. It was bright blue, crisper than she remembered, with large white swaths of clouds floating across the canvas at a surprising speed.
Between two clouds, she saw a shadow of what looked to be like some kind of large winged creature. It was a brief blur that happened so fast Jo couldn’t be certain it’d been real at all. An airplane, likely.
Airplane.
Airplanes needed skies. Leafy shrubs and grass needed sunlight. For everything around her to be real it meant that the world itself was real.
Jo bolted upright and took in her surroundings. It was a fa
miliar street—quintessential suburbia. In front of her stood Charlie’s house. Or at least, it had been Charlie’s house. This was a new reality, after all—a new age, built by Snow.
She stood, dusting off the yard clippings that clung to her clothes. Her clothes—they were different, too. A long, flowing skirt was tied at her waist, the hem pooling around feet strapped into a gladiator-esque sandal. Above was a loose fitting tank top. Sort of. The two straps were leather capped and braced together at the shoulder, leaving her arms bare.
The clothes were comfortable, familiar even. Jo turned left and right, feeling the skirt float around her ankles. She’d worn this before.
It was what she’d worn when she’d split herself into Destruction and Chaos, ending the Age of Gods.
“I guess I look the part, now,” Jo mumbled as she made her way quickly toward the front porch. While nothing about her getup screamed “legendary divinity,” she certainly felt far enough from the norm that she didn’t want to draw anyone’s attention.
Jo raised her hand to the door, pausing a brief moment. If it was a new world, then Charlie wouldn’t remember her. She knocked anyway. If he didn’t remember her she’d apologize, excuse herself, and move on.
A blurred outline appeared behind the rectangular pane at the top of the Craftsman-style door. There was the sound of a latch being undone and the door opened. Jo never thought she’d be relieved to see a serial killer.
The feeling wasn’t mutual. Charlie looked her up and down, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Can I help you?”
“Do you know who I am?” Jo asked outright.
He froze at the question, ceasing his assessment and bringing his attention to her face. Charlie’s eyes scanned her and Jo hoped that it wasn’t the only thing scanning her. Even if he didn’t remember her, she’d dare to ask him what his readings said. What was the worst that could happen? He would get upset? Jo felt the ripple of magic underneath her skin reassuring her that if that happened, she would be just fine.
