Illusionarium

by Heather Dixon

  “I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “It isn’t what I saw, either time. But this is your home, so—perhaps.”

  Lightning flashed, closer this time. The storm was drawing near.

  “Jonathan, I don’t have much time,” said Anna, biting her lip at the growing clouds. “Any moment now, they’ll pump fresh air into the Archglass, and you’ll wake up. You can’t let them take you away. You’ve got to find Lockwood and Lady Florel. You still have a chance to save everything. Your family, too.”

  I stared blankly at the black ocean below us.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “That all ended so well before. . . .”

  Anna kicked me as hard as she could in the knees.

  I collapsed to a bench, pain shooting up my legs.24

  “Anna!” I seethed, massaging my kneecaps. “Honestly!”

  “Sorry. Actually, no, I’m not. I wish I could kick you in the head,” she said, all innocence. “The Nod’ol—their religion—it’s lodging itself inside you. You’ve been breathing fantillium so much, you’re turning into one of them. You were trying to kill people!”

  Guilt filled me. I limped back up to my feet, wordless. I’d been turning into Constantine.

  “I—wasn’t myself,” I muttered.

  Anna pursed her lips. From her skirt pocket, she produced two gold coins. She showed them to me, and to my surprise, one had the profile of my face on it. The other coin: the hideous gold mask I’d been wearing—the one with the pointed teeth.

  “Do you remember talking about airships and compasses?” she said. “How veering just a little can send everything miles off course?”

  “Of course.”

  Anna took the first coin and inserted it into the coin slot on the first telescope. Most of the time, the mechanics on these old telescopes did not work, due to the ice and frigid temperatures. They worked now, playing a jaunty tune—Deeedle deeedle deeee-dee-deeeeeeeeeCLONK—as the blinders dropped.

  Anna offered me the first look. I peered south into the freezing eyepiece.

  The Scandinavian coastline did not appear, but a city did. Arthurise! Or—perhaps, Nod’ol without the Archglass? I recognized the Tower of London, the bridges, the buildings. But there was more: golden spires, buildings I’d never seen, and semaphore towers that lit the sky with all colors; sleek, massive airships that traveled far too quickly for their size.

  CLONK. The blinders closed and blocked the view.

  Anna dropped the other coin—the one with the fanged mask—into the telescope.

  A jaunty tune played.

  The blinders dropped again, this time revealing the same city, but in ruins. There wasn’t an Archglass; there were no airships. No people, only crumpled buildings. I pushed away from the telescope before the blinders clonked shut.

  “Was that Arthurise?” I said. “Or was it Nod’ol?”

  “It’s both,” said Anna. “Both cities. Both empires will fall. Tonight. Unless you remember which way you point. It all hinges upon you.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I said. “Nothing to worry about, then.”

  Anna took my hands in hers and gripped them so hard and stared at me with such fervency that I amended: “Anna, I honestly don’t know if I can. I’m not even sure what I can do. I’ve already bungled everything up. If I’d done what Queen Honoria had wanted, at least you’d still be alive—”

  The stupid, stinging cold air. I turned my head.

  “No, Jonathan,” said Anna, her blue eyes shiny. “What you did for me was the most noble, wonderful thing you could have done. And it’s what you should have done. If you had allowed yourself to bend to Queen Honoria, do you know what would have happened?”

  We both knew. I would have played Masked Virtue, I would have illusion-killed people, and Queen Honoria would never have taken me back, and Arthurise would die of the Venen. The compass inside me would have broken more and more until I’d become a not-human. Like Constantine.

  “You must always point north,” said Anna. “No matter what the cost.”

  She touched the middle of my chest with her fingers.

  The strangest sensation of warmth and peace gathered at her touch and solidified within me. It grew from my heart to my fingers and head, and my mind cleared completely. Suddenly, desperately, I knew I needed to come back to life.

  “Find Lockwood,” she said, her eyes glistening when she spoke his name. “He needs you, too. He’s veering. And Constantine—”

  “Constantine!” I said. “Anna, you said your brother had died!”

  “I thought he had!” she said. “We didn’t know. The masked guard destroyed everything; we thought he had been killed with Mum, not taken away to be an illusionist. And now he’s so off course, he’s . . . he’s not even recognizable anymore.”

  She wiped her face.

  “Cold air,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. She smiled, and added, “Jonathan. When you see Constantine. Tell him he has a second chance. He can still change his course. Tell him—tell him I know he’s still Jonathan.”

  Thunder shook the platform. Lightning flashed. More thunder.

  Anna embraced me so quickly I barely had a chance to hug her back before she’d slipped away and was running back to the Compass Rose.

  “Until we meet again, my good brother,” she said.

  “Anna, wait!” I called after her. She stopped and turned, her coat twisting around her, hail popping at her feet. I stammered, hundreds of questions rising from my chest. Where would I find Lockwood? Forget Lockwood, where would I find the cure? And how would I get back to Arthurise? I garbled what came to my lips, surprising myself: “What did Queen Honoria see? When she died?”

  Anna smiled.

  “What you just saw, actually,” she said. “All around her. Queen Honoria was trapped in the abandoned world. The one the Writing on the Wall had foretold.”

  And leaving me with that odd answer, Anna ran back to the Nod’olian ship. The hull door and loading plank were open and extended, and in the bright rectangle of the doorway stood my father. My—Nod’olian father. He lacked the glasses and apron, but everything else about him was the mirror image of my own father. He smiled and raised his hand, hailing me.

  I raised my hand and bowed.

  The falling ice around me intensified, growing thick and pulling a curtain of hail around me, until the Compass Rose disappeared and Fata Morgana faded, and I only saw shadows of the telescopes and benches.

  White flashed through me. Lightning poured itself through my soul.

  I gasped anew, and rose from the dead.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was what the pain of being born probably felt like—each piece of your body clinging to your soul with sticky agony. I gagged and gagged and then balled up in a thousand needles of sharp pain.

  The rain had disappeared. The alleyway and the Archglass above was no longer thick with storm clouds or the mist of fantillium. The citywide hissing of pipes pumping out fantillium had ebbed. I was breathing untainted air again.

  I took everything in with one glance. Constantine and Divinity stood a length away, next to Queen Honoria, clothes dry once more, all of them flanked by the crimson of the masked guard and a few spare miners. I sensed they were preparing for the second round of Masked Virtue.

  Behind the masked guard stood Edward, looking crestfallen. Behind him, docked at the top of a vertical dock, loomed Queen Honoria’s scarlet airship. I’d be taken back to the theater.

  I lay on the grit of the stone, gathering my wits. Then, calmly, I pulled myself to my feet, pulled off my mask, and shoved it in one of the large pockets of my coat, and then offered myself to the masked guard. They hesitated before gripping my hands and shoulders and escorting me to the dock’s lift.

  “Well done, Divinity,” I said as I passed her, burying my pride in a deep grave and placing a vase of flowers on it. “I wouldn’t have thought of harnessing the lightning.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have,” she said smugly.

>   This didn’t inspire one iota of anger within me.

  “I’m sorry about the airship ticket,” I said, and I meant it. “What’s in Sussex?”

  “Her mum,” said Constantine lazily from behind us.

  Divinity colored pink.

  “I haven’t seen her since I was six.” She brushed the words away with a careless wave of her hand. “I hardly even care.”25

  Constantine and Divinity disappeared with their miners into the winding alleyways, making their way back to their ships. I stepped onto the lift with Queen Honoria and the masked guard, and we rose to the dock platform.

  Queen Honoria. She still wore the hsshing fresh-air mask over her face, which meant that almost every bit of her was covered. She shifted nervously, adjusting little things: tugging her gloves further up her wrists, pulling her collar up higher, adjusting her mask, hiding whatever she was schisming into.

  I remained in the corner of the lift, thinking.

  Trapped in the foretold Nod’ol . . .

  The abandoned city skyline, utterly bereft of life, passed through my mind. Trapped forever, in a place like that. Alone. No wonder she was so dead set on fixing Nod’ol. It wasn’t because she cared about the city or anyone in it. It was because she was afraid she’d die and spend eternity there if she didn’t do something about it.

  But even I knew a person couldn’t fix something by breaking everything else. Queen Honoria was making Nod’ol even worse. I almost felt sorry for her.

  We boarded the ship without a word, the propellers blurred to life, and I peered over the railing at the snarl of the city below as we rose higher. Already the Archglass rumbled and mist was pumping through the maze of pathways and alleys below us, beginning the second round. It reminded me of the cloud canals on Fata.

  “You’ll speak to the reporter when we reach the theater. After you awake, of course,” Queen Honoria was saying, the masked guard a length away. “Do make your fight to the death exciting; the miners live to read those things.”

  My head was calculating gravity vs. height vs. impact fall of a 174-pound human.

  “Did you hear me, Jonathan?”

  “Yes, quite. After I awake.” My brain did a double take. “Awake?”

  I couldn’t see Queen Honoria’s smile, other than her eyes squinting through the holes in her mask. One of the guardsmen next to her wetted a cloth with a medical bottle full of clear liquid, and I backed away against the railing. Trithyloform. Probably even from the same bottle Divinity had tried to use on me earlier.

  “I am sorry,” Queen Honoria said as the guard drew near. “But really, after your abysmal behavior at the opening ceremonies and then on Edward’s ship, we can hardly have you illusioning out of turn anymore. When you speak to the reporter, I do believe you should apologize for that.”

  I glanced below, the brown and decaying gray of towers disappearing into layer after layer of mist, and the buildings of Old London just a brush away from the hull as we sailed past.

  “No, no, I don’t think I will,” I said heartily as the masked guardsman with the cloth grabbed my wrist.

  “What?” said Queen Honoria.

  “Good-bye!” I said, and pulling yet another page from Lockwood’s book, yanked out of the guardsman’s grip, twisting away just as he brought the cloth to my mouth. I leapt onto the railing—

  —and threw myself over, plunging gracefully into the mist.

  I’d died once before. . . .

  I slammed onto the roof of a tower that jutted up out of the white, grabbing the iron weathervane before sliding down its dome to a brick ledge. I regained balance, dazed and impressed with myself. Not even a broken bone! Shame Lockwood hadn’t seen that!

  Growing mist encased me, filling my lungs with frigid air and brightening everything to an unbearable white. I inhaled, determined to keep the infuriatingly calm chemical from dashing my resolve. In the distance above, Queen Honoria’s voice yelled.

  Scarlet forms of the masked guardsmen leapt onto the roof after me, descending out of the white like demon angels. With dexterity to impress even Lockwood, I half slid, half climbed down the tower, gripping the crumbling ledges beneath broken windows. Craggy brick scraped my hands. The masked guard climbed down after me like crimson spiders.

  I recognized the decaying yellow brick as I slid to the ground, falling into knee-high weeds of a hilly courtyard. The Tower of London. I always managed to end up here.

  The masked guard seized me, dropping from the sky. I pulled together a hot wind and threw them off, knocking them against the brick of the White Tower and throwing them across the courtyard, top hats tumbling. They leapt to their feet and dove for me again with indefatigable stamina. And then, just as suddenly, they stopped.

  Frozen, as still as red-painted statues.

  A new sound, among the silence, rose up from the old stone walls.

  It sounded like someone sucking foam.

  A lot of someones.

  The masked guard fled. They scurried back up the White Tower, they made for the wall, they climbed through the windows of the towers around us. I frowned at their receding backs and turned around, face-to-face with a mass of creatures.

  Riven.

  They poured out of the abandoned doorways, down the walls of the stone towers, over the hills of weeds, and from the mouth of the White Tower. They leapt from broken windows, a gray mass of torn clothes, too many arms and noses and elbows and teeth—far, far too many teeth—dragging one another down and crawling over one another to get at me quicker. Their many-fingered hands clawed at my throat and chest, throwing me to the ground as they pounded me into the earth.

  Numbers! my mind yelled uselessly as they buried me. Illusion numbers! Any numbers! You’re good with numbers! Illusion, Jonathan! Aaaaah!

  A memory immediately flashed through me.

  A classroom, in the Fata Morgana Academy. The glaring lights above us, the long rows of tables, and the rumbling of the city generator nearby. Sitting at the front table of my physics class, Professor Stromberg speaking of the force of gravity and writing in bony chalk on the wall:

  And then another memory of him standing in the same place, drawing the imaginary element:

  —and explaining how the square root of negative 1, if applied to certain equations and graphs, has the property of turning it, in fact, ninety degrees. I sat there, doodling on my slate and thinking, I am never, never, never, never going to use this in real life. . . .

  Real life overtook me in the form of Riven. Feverishly I formed the sheer i within my head—it slid around my thoughts like a glimmering wisp—harnessed it, molded it, and pressed it to the G in the formula, imagining all the numbers taking upon themselves the burden of the impossible and melding with gravity.

  My brain turned first. My organs next, and then every individual blood cell and heartbeat inside me turned ninety degrees. I shook as the immensity of the illusion took over. Every piece of me struggled to hold it together. I couldn’t breathe.

  And then, I released it. The world balanced precariously.

  Mist rolled past me. I grabbed the support beam of the White Tower’s stairs at my back, bracing myself. Riven held back, hissing and recoiling as the world turned . . .

  Sideways.

  The weeds bent downward.

  Water flooded from beyond the wall, rushing through the abandoned Tower of London windows and pouring down the hills of weeds in the courtyard. The current drenched me. The water took the Riven with it, and they slid across the steep incline of ground and then fell into one another, hitting the stone wall below, jutting out beneath us. One remained, dangling from my foot, his grip breaking and sending him down the length of the courtyard as well. He smashed onto a window of one of the tower walls. They all hissed, a mass of torn clothes and limbs as they tried to maneuver their way with this new center of gravity.

  Moat water coursed its way down the courtyard in streams of black. I pushed myself onto the sideways wood beam and climbed the crisscross
ing beams to what was once the wall of the White Tower—now a brick floor with windows across it. I ran along it to the far end, near the dome and weathervane.

  Here I took in the entire expanse of the city I’d illusioned on its side. Towers and houses and buildings jutted out beneath me from the perpendicular landscape. The dome of the distant theater lay far below. Above me, the shadows of the decaying city rained debris and dust through the Tower courtyard. In front of me, now in a vertical sky, the sea of airships had remained upright in the ninety-degree turning, innocently bobbing, unconcerned with this new center of gravity.

  O-kay, I thought. I’m not entirely sure how to turn this back upright.

  Well. It would catch Lockwood’s attention, that was certain.

  I ran back down the tower, jumping over windows, to the grass that extended up in a wall before me, mapping out my course. I wasn’t actually running up and down the side of a tower. The fantillium was only making me think I was. In actuality, I was most likely walking next to the foundation of the White Tower, knee deep in weeds. I had to be careful. I could step somewhere in this illusion that seemed perfectly safe—the edge of a bridge, or the side of a gate—and my real self would tumble down stairs or fall into the moat and drown.

  I pressed forward. I had less than two hours, if I had any time at all. Anna’s words of hope echoed in my head. I still had a chance. Lockwood had to be near here, in this old part of Nod’ol. It was the closest thing to Arthurise. I carefully climbed down across the courtyard, grabbing weeds to slow my sliding descent. The Riven had disappeared, though I could hear them in the distance. Another ruckus sounded further away. Airships. Constantine and Divinity, I guessed, re-navigating themselves. Hope you love it, I thought, and pushed off from the weeds, landing on the stone wall below.

  I carefully made my way to the stone entrance of the Tower, crawling, sliding down the courtyard bridge, air rushing through my coat and hair, faster and faster, until my feet hit a jutting gate. Out of the tower fortress, I commenced running and climbing my way through the city. Across walls of buildings. Sides of stairways. Stumbling through alleyway sides and leaping from storefront to abandoned storefront. If I were a fierce-as-blades, over-keen, rifle-bearing one-eyed soldier, where would I hide?