by Mur Lafferty
“We need to keep moving,” she told Marcus as he stopped to drink from his canteen.
“You go on ahead, I need to take a break,” he said, sitting down on a rock by the side of the path. He peeled the fabric from his face with an air of distaste. “They want you, anyway. What are they going to do with me?”
Julie scrubbed her hands over her face. “I’m sure they won’t do anything to you. It’s not like Amadeus kills people for the crime of winning a race. I’m sure his followers are completely sane too.” He didn’t rise to her sarcasm, and drained his canteen.
Julie tried another approach. “And you realize I have no idea what this lens is for, or how you’re going to use it. I need you.”
“I’m not going to use it, you are,” he said absently.
“They’re coming,” Julie said. Despite her new confidence, her eyes
widened as the sun’s power aided her in seeing what Amadeus was using to catch up with her.
It was a chariot, a relic she hadn’t seen, drawn by a huge mechanical horse made from hammered black and gold plates. Its eyes burned with green light. Amadeus stood tall, two of his guards behind him, and the horse thundered over the sand, columns of dust streaming behind it.
“Get up, we have to go. The white sand is over that dune, we’re nearly there.”
They struggled up the dune, black sand falling away from their feet and slowing their pace. Her one hope was that Amadeus’ horse couldn’t run up the dune. Maybe he’d be forced to pursue them on foot; she was a runner, she could escape.
Maybe.
Julie panted. She burned to demand Marcus to explain his revelation about the lens, but they had more pressing needs.
The dune plateaued at the top; the black sand marked with a still—perfect white circle the size of a temple in Meridian. Julie stopped in awe. She had been here once before, but it hadn’t looked like this. Now the white sand shimmered with untapped power; an almost malevolent air hung above it.
“Gods died here,” she whispered. Marcus came up behind her, puffing.
“Can you see it?” she asked, pointing.
He stopped short, his panting ceasing abruptly. “It’s burning,” he said.
“Is that what you see?” she asked. “I only see the power.”
“I can’t go in the circle,” he said. “You have to go and I’ll focus the lens on you. The sun will go through it and — I don’t know. I guess we have to trust the gods.”
Julie wanted to scream. She glanced down the hill. Amadeus had indeed dismounted his chariot and was scrambling up the hill, murder on his handsome face.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, and ran into the white circle.
The power was so strong it nearly slapped her to the ground. She struggled through it, and turned to face Marcus, who had pulled the lens off his back and was squinting at the sky, his face cloth hanging free. He propped the lens in the sand and angled it.
He is going to focus the sun on you, Kate said in her head. It may burn.
Then what? Julie asked, eyes fixed on Marcus.
I don’t know. I’m sorry. Daniel doesn’t tell me everything. I think it may open a door. You and Marcus go through, taking us with you.
“How does Marcus bring Daniel through if he is the one focusing the lens?” Julie asked out loud, and then Amadeus reached the top of the dune.
Julie shouted wordlessly, but Amadeus was too fast, Marcus too focused on the lens. In one moment it was over, Amadeus was on Marcus, bringing a knife around Marcus’ neck and slicing deep.
Then the world caught fire.
The lens caught the sun and focused it straight on Julie, who screamed as the beam seared through her. She felt her hair shrivel, smelled the acrid scent as it singed away. Pain rippled over her skin as it blistered and then peeled away. Her nerve endings were seared to the point of failure, and she fell. The sand underneath her had melted into glass, and she hit the ground hard.
Her last thought concerned two topics.
I’m sorry Marcus.
At least Amadeus didn’t catch us.
• • •
Julie didn’t so much open her eyes as have her eyes come into being, along with the rest of her. One minute, she wasn’t there, and then she was: flesh knitting around her, becoming whole. When her eyes began to work, she opened them to see branches above her, and then a dusky sky.
She sat up. She had been lying on a mossy bank of a river that flowed sluggishly by, but it was clearly nothing like water. This liquid was pearly white.
She touched her face where she expected to feel burns, or scars, but the flesh was smooth. Her hands, brown and small, were also unhurt.
“Am I dead?” she asked out loud.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” came a voice, the same voice she had heard in her head. A figure stepped from the trees, a young woman with white skin, like Marcus’. Her hair was brown and long, and her eyes sympathetic.
“It’s really the only way to get you here,” she said. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve died too. More than once, actually.” She screwed up her face and thought. “I guess you can say I’ve died three times. It never got easier. Sucked every time.”
“How – wait, what about Marcus? We have to go back for him, Amadeus was—” she paused. “Killing him,” she finished.
“That was necessary?” Marcus’ voice came from the trees, outraged. “Getting a knife in the throat while my friend caught fire in front of me? I couldn’t have just had a nice peaceful drowning, gotten to the afterlife with less drama?” He stumbled into the clearing and knelt beside her. His pale skin was no longer caked with sand, or burned by the sun. “Are you all right?”
“I’m dead,” she said. “But beyond that, I think I’m okay.”
“Sorry, dude, you’re not in the afterlife,” said a male voice. A man walked from the trees wearing dark leather and a long, thin sword at his belt. A worn white rag covered his left eye.
“But you said we were dead,” Julie said, getting to her feet.
Kate ignored her, running to Daniel’s side. She touched his face, and they embraced, kissing fiercely.
“Um,” Julie said, and looked away. Marcus was staring at the ground,
his face red.
“Are you all right?” Julie asked him in a low voice.
“As you said, dead,” he said. “But I was a lot worse a few minutes ago, with a severed head and everything.”
“He severed — oh no,” she said.
“I think he did. I didn’t stay around long enough to see him finish the job,” Marcus said, rubbing his throat.
“Did the gods do the same thing to us that Amadeus was going to?” she said. “I knew Amadeus wanted us to die to find the lost gods, but I didn’t know it would work.”
The reunited gods separated at that moment, pulling apart reluctantly. They focused on Julie and Marcus again.
“Sorry about that. We hadn’t seen each other in a while,” Daniel said. “Anyway, yes, you’re dead. Totally dead.”
“But if you had died normally,” Kate continued, “you would have gone to your afterlife. This is someplace new.”
“Then how did we get here?” Marcus asked.
“That’s what the lens was for,” Daniel said. “You needed to focus it onto the battleground, and that opened a new door. It was the focusing of the power in a place of power. Kind of like putting a bag of holding into a portable hole.”
Kate poked him in the shoulder. “I don’t think this place has invented D&D yet, dude.”
Daniel smiled at her. “All right, fine. Think of it as too much power in one area. Something had to give. Julie, you died when you got hit with the blast, and opened the door. Marcus and I fell through after you when he died.”
“So now what?” Julie said.
The gods looked at each other. “We’re not entirely sure,” Kate admitted.
“Let’s start with this place. What is it, if not the afterlife?” Julie said, reach
ing to dip her hand into the river.
“No, wait,” Kate said, by her side in an instant and pulling her back. “Don’t touch that. It’s the river of tears, the river of forgetting.”
Marcus crossed his arms over his chest. “But you said this wasn’t the afterlife.”
“It’s an afterlife, not your afterlife,” Daniel said, crouching by the river. “It’s a new one. But all afterlives have things in common. This river runs through all of them. We just opened a new branch.”
“What about the trees?” Julie asked. The trees were made of very hard wood, and reached their leafless branches high into the sky. No sun or moon shone there. This place resembled the dusk, the in—between time of the day.
“A lot of what is created from divine energy just is,” Kate said, sounding apologetic. “We can often control what happens, but not the details of the
outcome.” She trailed off, as if remembering something.
“Anyway, we opened this door for a reason, let’s get moving,” Daniel said.
“I have so many questions,” Julie said. “Why we did this? Why did you need to be with us to reach this afterlife? Why did you want to go here? And how are you any better than Amadeus, since you had to kill us to get us here?”
Kate and Daniel glanced at each other again, and then she took his hand, as if for strength. “We’re sorry about that,” she said. “Honestly. But we couldn’t create this place on our own; we needed the energy that lay within your world. And since we took our place as the sun and moon, we couldn’t affect as much on the world.”
“Things usually got really fucked up when we tried, to mess directly with people,” Daniel said. “So we stopped.”
“But when you and that other guy got the sand, Julie, we found we could see through your eyes.”
“Adam…” Julie looked down and bit her lip. “He died. Is he here?”
Kate and Daniel shared another look. “Most of the kids Amadeus killed ended up in your afterlife, I’m sorry,” Daniel said.
“I won’t see him again,” she said, her voice hollow. “Not even in death.”
Kate and Daniel were silent, and when Julie looked up, their faces were twisted with guilt and anguish.
“This is why,” Daniel said softly, “I said we are very, very bad at what we do. Every time we try to do something good, we mess it up for someone else. So we want to stop being gods.”
“That’s why we came here. We think you can help us,” Kate said. “We want to go home.”
• • •
Although all four of them were souls at this point, with no desire for warmth or food, Kate suggested they stop to rest, build a fire, and talk. Sticking to the basic human needs often calmed a mind, she said. She and Daniel wandered off to find wood for a fire, and Marcus and Julie sat on the bank of the river Lethe, as the gods called it, and watched its thick pearly water crawl by.
“How will they find dead wood in a new place?” he asked.
“They’re gods,” Julie said flatly.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m dead,” she said. “And I’m not with Adam. I wanted to escape Amadeus and reunite with him. I’ve only done one of those things, and it sounds like I’ll never do the other.”
Marcus was silent for a moment. “Sorry,” he said finally. “Daniel said you loved him very much.”
Julie laughed. “Daniel. Kate got to reunite with Daniel,” she said, ashamed at the bitterness in her voice. “They got what they wanted, but we don’t. They’re using us to get him, and then what?”
“I hate having to say I’m sorry over and over again,” Kate said softly from behind them. “But as he said, we’re very bad at this. We don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.”
They both got to their feet abruptly, Julie’s face burning. “I didn’t— I mean—”
“No, you did, and you had every right to,” Kate said sadly. “Come on. Let’s talk.”
They followed her away from the river’s edge. Further on, a fire was burning cheerily in the never—changing dusk. Daniel pointed to some metal cylinders nestled in the coals. “Look! A trick I got from Ashcan Harriet! They’ll be done in a bit.”
Julie and Marcus both looked at Kate, who shrugged. “Ashcan Harriet was an angel,” she said. She gestured to the ground around the fire. “Sit.”
“We could take all night, or what passes for night, telling you all the details,” Daniel began, “but it’s probably best if we give you the short version. We were human once, like you, and then we died. Then the world ended, although we were pretty sure that wasn’t our fault –“
“But it could have been,” Kate interrupted.
Daniel shrugged, not arguing. He continued. “Then we became gods, tried to make a new world, fucked it up big time, made an even newer world — that’s your world, by the way — and fucked that one up too. We had accidentally imprisoned all of the gods. When we tried to free them all, we ended up killing the moon goddess, and then we made the sun god an addict. When the rest found out how we fucked up, they weren’t really in a place to trust us.”
“I can’t blame them,” Kate continued. “The incident your people know as The Fall had the god Chaos leaking into this world, and Morrigan helping it. Barris sacrificed himself by knocking her into Chaos, killing all three of them, and that made the sun and moon go out. So we took those places to keep the world from ending.”
“—Again,” Daniel added.
“Yes, again,” Kate said. “Killing Chaos stripped most of the power out of the world, which caused Meridian to fall and Leviathan’s dome to fail.”
“Since then, we’ve had time to think about stuff, and we realize it’s time to stop this god stuff,” Daniel said. “So we’re trying to find a place to go.”
Julie shook her head, trying to clear Adam’s face from her mind. “Why not just come to Lathe as humans?”
Daniel shrugged. “We tried. It didn’t work like that. We can inhabit special humans, like you two, but that’s the most we can do. And it seems unfair to push out an existing soul just because we want a new place to live.”
“We needed to die, if only metaphorically,” Kate said.
Marcus stood suddenly. “But, what about our home now? Did the sun and moon go out again when Julie and I died?” He looked poised to run, anywhere, to check on the people they left behind.
“Sit down, dude,” Daniel said, frowning. “You don’t think we thought of that? The first time was during a battle; Morrigan and Barris hadn’t put in any safety nets in place to keep things going. They didn’t know they could die. Kate and I set things up so they would keep going just fine.”
Marcus sat down, still tense.
Julie thought for a bit, something nagging at her. “But if you’re not powerful enough to give yourself new bodies, and you said your world ended, how do you plan on fixing that?”
Kate thought for a moment. She spread her hands apart. “Okay, how’s this. You know the machines they used to build Meridian? Cranes? You’ve seen them in your ruins, correct?”
They nodded.
“They were very powerful machines for lifting, holding, moving huge things from place to place. But if you tried to remove a splinter with one of them, you’d fail miserably. The power we have, the power that still lives wild north of Meridian, that’s all untapped power you can use as a tool. But it’s much better for moving the heavens and earths than for removing a splinter.”
Marcus and Julie watched the flames. Kate and Daniel looked at each other again, and then back at them. “So, uh, any more questions?” Daniel asked.
Julie shook her head, but didn’t speak. Something still bugged her.
“What happens to us?” Marcus said. “Let’s say you succeed, we get you wherever you’re going. Then what about Julie and I?”
The gods didn’t say anything.
“You’re right,” Marcus said, after a pause. “You’re not very good at this.”
• • •
Julie wasn’t paying attention. She knew they were talking around her, but it sounded very far away. She felt as if she could sense something in the woods, something with newly created eyes, watching them.
I’m not a person anymore; I don’t have a person’s limitations. This is not a body. It’s just an idea of a body. I didn’t die like this; I was burned alive. So this is my perception of what my body is. Should I even have a body? Is it just here to give the others a sense of me?
The others didn’t notice her at all. She looked down at her hands and was unsurprised to find them not there. She stood and jumped experimentally, rising into the air as if she had no gravitational limitations. She flew up into the tan sky and looked down at the new afterlife — what had Daniel — or Marcus, through Daniel — called it? The Reach?
The Reach had borders, Julie was surprised to see. It seemed to only stretch a mile in any direction, thick, leafless trees on either side of the River Lethe. But there was a dark spot to the south of their little party.
She investigated.
Flying was simple. She just thought, and she went in a direction. There was no sensation of air on her face, or a delicious dip in her stomach the way she sometimes felt when running down a hill. She was vaguely disappointed this wasn’t as fun, but as she neared the darkness, the light wavered around her, and she forgot about thrill seeking.
When she saw what the darkness was, she stopped her ascent immediately, suddenly feeling very much as if she had a body, and as if it could get sick with nauseated fear. She blinked, and was back at the campfire. She stood up, and this time the others could see her. They stopped arguing.
“Julie?” Marcus asked. The concern in his voice was palpable, but surprisingly, he sounded as if he were ready to address any threat she voiced. He’s on my side, she thought. I’m not alone here.
“The door we opened. How long was it going to stay open?” she asked, looking at Daniel, whose eye widened in shock.
“Why?” he asked, but she could see by the shock and guilt on his face, he already knew.
“Someone else came through,” she said. “Amadeus is here.”
