She opened her eyes, ignoring the sting of the water in search of light.
Nothing; there was nothing.
With both hands empty, it was easier to swim. Cameron had taught her to swim when they were children, at the park district pool. One summer, they had gone there every day. They had competed against each other for the biggest splash, cannonballing into the deep end.
She pulled herself up, and up, and up.
Ahead of her was a glimmer of light. Just a hint, at first, and then a circle of bright teal, blurry. She swam toward it. One of her shoes fell off. She kicked harder, legs, arms, and chest burning.
She broke through the surface with a gasp. She tilted back to float, her heartbeat sounding in her ears.
Above her was a waning crescent moon, thin as a toenail clipping, surrounded by a sky purple with light pollution. She could have sworn the moon had been waxing when she was walking toward the Dome with Needle in hand. It was as if almost a month had passed in a single breath. She slapped a hand over her eyes and rubbed them to clear them.
Not to mention the fact that Albie’s funeral had been in the morning.
She knew where she was. The smell of river water rotten in her nostrils was familiar, as was the irregular outline of the corncob building in the distance, partly obscured by the strict lines of 330 North Wabash. But in place of the monument to the Dark One’s defeat was a tower. Not Trump Tower, gleaming blue and scratching the sky with its needle, but a building unlike any she’d seen before—half straightforward glass cylinder, half undulating steel panels, like a breath of smoke spilling down the western side.
No longer desperate for air, Sloane straightened up and noticed, for the first time, a line of people standing on the shore. In the light cast by the old-fashioned globular fixtures along the river walk, she saw clothes in dark, rich colors and heavy fabrics, artfully draped. Sloane kicked to keep herself afloat as she pushed her hair away from her face. Every muscle in her body ached, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to move closer to the edge, closer to them.
“Who . . .” She spat, her voice coming out rough and guttural. It carried across the water and echoed off the concrete walls on either side of the river that held the streets back from the water. “Who are you?”
A woman—dark, thick hair, light brown skin, dressed in green—stepped forward and seemed to be about to speak when Esther burst through the surface of the water, mascara streaking down her face. Matt followed, his head emerging right at the edge of the river. He grabbed the barrier to steady himself as he vomited water at the woman’s feet. She hopped back. Her shoes were shiny and came to a point.
“What—” The woman turned to someone else, a blond man standing away from the river’s edge cradling a thick book against his chest. “Why are there more than one?”
“I don’t . . .” The man was gaping at Sloane, Esther, and Matt in turn. “I don’t know.”
“Where’s Ines?” Sloane asked Esther and Matt.
Esther shook her head. “I didn’t see her.”
Sloane gave up on treading water, swam to the edge, and hoisted herself up, her arms trembling under her weight. She fell, almost cracking her head on the sidewalk, but got her knees under her and stood. She was taller than the woman, but not by much.
The woman stepped back.
“I asked you a question,” Sloane said. Unfortunately, some of the menacing effect was lost because she had to bend over to cough up more water. It tasted like moldy peach.
“Calm down, please,” the woman said. “We—”
“The fuck she will!” Esther said from the water. She was fighting to free herself of her coat. Sloane saw the white trails of her breath in the moonlight.
Matt had managed to haul himself over the side and sat with water leaking from his pants legs. Esther made it to the edge and pushed her hair away from her face.
Sloane scanned the line of people now just a few feet away from her. Their styles of dress were varied, but they had one thing in common: a gold pin about the size of a mandarin orange fastened to their chests. Several of them also wore elaborate jewelry, somewhat mechanical in style, around their throats or on their hands. One woman had a piece covering her left ear, red-plated, like it was made of rubies.
“Where are we?” Matt asked them in the low voice he used when he meant business. He thought it was intimidating, but to the rest of them, it just sounded like a Batman impression. They had all agreed not to tease him about it, since he seemed to enjoy it.
“Which of you is the Chosen One?” the woman said, scanning each of them in turn.
They made a dignified bunch, Sloane thought. Esther was on the edge of the river now, rubbing her hands over her face to get rid of the mascara streaks. Matt was yanking off one of his soaked leather gloves with his teeth. And Sloane’s pants were so heavy with water, she was sure her ass was showing.
“You don’t get to ask questions until you answer some,” Sloane said, pulling her pants up by the belt loops.
Matt raised his hand. “Me. I’m the Chosen One.”
Esther snorted.
“What?” Matt shrugged. “She asked a simple question.”
“I mean, we were sort of all the Chosen One,” Esther clarified. She had managed to smear the mascara tracks sideways, toward her ears. Sloane realized that she hadn’t seen Esther without a thick layer of makeup on since the last battle. She looked . . . tired. As tired as Sloane felt.
“One of us is missing,” Sloane said. “Where’s Ines?”
The woman frowned at her. “We were expecting one of you, not three. And certainly not four. And to answer your previous question, you are in the exact same place you were a moment ago, with the notable difference that you are now . . . one dimension to the left. So to speak.”
“Like an alternate universe?” Esther said. “Are you high?”
A long time ago, Sloane had learned about parallel dimensions, about string theory and infinite possibilities branching off from one another into an eternity no human being could comprehend. Ever since, she had avoided thinking about it, not wanting to consider that for every decision she made, there was an identical Sloane on another Earth making the other decision, the universes branching off forever. Who was she, really, if there was no stability in her identity, if there were that many Sloanes walking that many paths, nudged this way and that by minor alterations in circumstance?
“Who are you?” Sloane said again.
In any universe, in any dimension, her first concern was always people.
“My name is Aelia,” the woman said. “I am praetor of Cordus and tribune of the Army of Flickering.”
“Did she just say words?” Esther asked Sloane. “Did you just say words, lady?”
They were old words, and strange ones, with the lights of a modern city glittering behind the woman’s head. But Sloane caught the meaning of them. “She’s Aelia, and she’s in charge,” she translated.
“Another dimension,” Matt said. “How is that possible?”
“Your people are not aware of other dimensions?” Aelia said, frowning. She wore stiff fabric draped around her shoulders, narrow trousers tapered at the ankle, and a shirt with a short, upright collar. Styles Sloane recognized, but also didn’t. The gold pin on her chest stood out against the gray and green of her clothes, and she wore an apparatus on her hand that looked like a mechanical, bejeweled glove.
“In the abstract only,” Matt replied.
Aelia looked again at the blond man, scorn in the scrunch of her nose. “Then this must be quite a shock,” Aelia said.
Sloane snorted.
“I know you have questions, and I promise to answer them,” Aelia said, narrowing her eyes at Sloane. “But in order for me to do that, you will have to trust us enough to come with us somewhere.”
Matt twisted the hem of his coat in both hands to squeeze out some of the water. He had the casual air of someone shaking out an umbrella after coming in from the rain. “Okay,” he said.
“No!” Sloane glared at him. Her pants were slipping down her hips again. “We’re not about to just . . . go somewhere else. Not until we know what the hell is going on.”
Matt’s lips quirked at the corner. For a few years, while they hunted the Dark One, that was the only smile he had ever worn. But after the Dark One fell, she had seen it less and less often as he softened and relaxed, no longer responsible for any life but his own.
The return of that smile meant he was working Aelia, and Sloane was getting in the way.
You must let them play to their strengths as they let you play to yours, Bert’s voice told her from her memories. They each had a place in their small platoon, and though it grated on her now that she and Matt were engaged, Matt was the leader. He made the calls. They had to trust him or the system would break.
“I intend to tell you,” Aelia said, “but some things are better explained by seeing them for yourself.”
Esther, coming to stand beside Sloane, looked just as wary as Sloane felt. But she caught Sloane’s eye and nodded, lips pursed.
“Fine. Show us,” Sloane said.
Sloane stayed in Aelia’s shadow as they climbed the wide steps of what was, on Sloane’s Earth, the River Theater, a wide, minimalist staircase made of polished stone. Here, however, the space was arranged into terraces, like steps, but with trees growing from each flat area, giving the impression of a forest right in the middle of the city. Aelia wove around the trees, and Sloane, Matt, and Esther followed her up to street level.
The other observers fell into step behind them. Their silence unsettled Sloane, their presence behind her pricking at the back of her neck. She felt like she was being herded.
She was almost afraid to lift her head, to be confronted with the wrongness of the place. But Wacker Drive, at least, was the same street she remembered, with cars careening around the bend ahead of them, and there was the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, which looked like a grounded spaceship, standing where the two branches of Wacker separated. There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, and it wasn’t until the group of people behind her fanned out that she realized why. One of them lifted his hand and let out an inhuman trill. A wall of iridescence appeared in front of him, forming a barrier across the walkway one hundred yards from where Sloane stood.
Aelia cleared her throat. She stood beside a boxy, wine-colored limousine with chrome wheels. Aelia opened the wide back door, then pulled the center panel open from the left so she could slide inside. The blond man waited beside the car. He raised a hand, and with the sleeve falling away from his wrist, Sloane got a closer look at the apparatus he wore. It was simpler than the one Aelia had, but no less beautiful; it looked like a glove, but it was made of copper, with articulated joints. Dense organic patterns—vines of tiny leaves—were carved into each plate, and unlike a bulky gauntlet from an old set of armor, it was streamlined, clearly made to fit him and him alone.
“I can dry you off, if you like,” he said.
Sloane glanced at Esther.
“We would not have brought you here simply to harm you a moment later,” he said. “My name is Nero. Who wants to go first?”
It took a few seconds for Matt to volunteer, though he had been the one insisting that they go along with this. He stood in front of Nero, fidgeting a little. “What do I do?” he said.
“Stay still, please,” Nero replied. He held his hand up, fingers spread, palm facing Matt. He hummed a low note, and Matt’s shirt shifted, almost imperceptibly, as if hit by a breeze.
Nero hummed again, and droplets of water pulled away from Matt’s head and dangled in the air. He stared at them, dazed. Sloane looked around, just to make sure time hadn’t frozen and kept the water from falling. It would not have been the strangest thing to happen that day.
Nero hummed the same steady note as he moved his hand down to hover over Matt’s shoulders, abdomen, and then pelvis. Water tugged free from the fabric of his coat and shirt and hung suspended in the air.
When Nero finished, he hummed a different note, moving his hand in a circle. All the droplets that had been hanging in midair around Matt’s body flew toward him and coalesced into a sphere of water. He ushered the ball of water forward so it hovered over the street, then dropped it into the gutter with a gesture. Once it hit the ground, it collapsed, becoming shapeless liquid again.
Sloane had seen magic before: a force like a hurricane that tore people apart from every direction; an unstable leap of flames in Albie’s hands; even the strange light that had emanated from Matt’s Golden Bough. But she had never seen it manipulated with such delicacy, such magnificent precision.
Matt was dry now, his shirt crisp. Nero turned to Esther and Sloane.
“Who’s next?”
Matt, Esther, and Sloane crammed into the back seat of the limousine. Sloane pinched the burgundy velour between her thumb and index finger and looked out the window. They were driving around the bend of Upper Wacker toward Lake Shore Drive. Moonlight rippled on the lake. The jagged skyline was mostly unfamiliar but with some touchstones Sloane recognized: the vertical white lines of the Aon Center; the glass slant of the Crain Communications building, like a carrot cut on the bias; the Ionic columns of the Field Museum.
“What are those things?” Matt said, pointing at the apparatus on Nero’s hand and then Aelia’s. Aelia’s hand rested on her kneecap, so Sloane could see in better detail the thick cuff wrapped around her wrist, with delicate chains attached to it that followed the lines of her fingers, finishing in a thimble-like cap at the end of each fingertip. Red beads were scattered along each chain, and a red jewel was set into the middle of the cuff.
Aelia held up her hand. “These are called siphons,” Aelia replied. “They channel magical energy.”
“Magic,” Matt repeated. “But they look like tech.”
“Actually,” Esther pointed out, “they kind of look like jewelry.”
“They are all three,” Aelia said, looking puzzled. “Magic, technology, and adornment. Are these things at odds where you are from?”
“Our technology doesn’t use magic,” Matt said. “We’re some of the only people who have ever wielded it, and even we were only just beginning to understand how to manipulate it.”
And it had killed Albie, Sloane thought bitterly.
Aelia turned to Nero and arched an eyebrow at him. Nero ducked his head.
“Fascinating,” Aelia said. “Our integration of both elements is not seamless. There are some who insist that technology should advance without magic in case magic proves to be a finite resource. And there are even some who view the use of magic as the work of the devil. But this is a siphon, a triumph of technology and magic both.” She turned her hand over, made a fist, then unfurled her fingers. She whistled, and sparks danced in her palm.
“Originally invented by Liu Huiyin in Xiamen, China, in 1980,” Nero chimed in. “Magic was not widespread on Genetrix until 1969.”
Sloane stared at Aelia’s hand. The sparks were already gone, but they had left her with a crooked afterimage.
“What happened in 1969?” Matt asked.
“The Tenebris Incident,” Nero replied.
“We’ll have time for history lessons later, I’m sure,” Aelia said.
“You call your planet Genetrix?” Esther asked. Her hands were in fists on her knees, her knuckles white.
Sloane looked out the window again. She knew enough about architecture to understand that some of these buildings didn’t fit the usual categories. The modernist structures that had become so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable to her were gone. In their place were strange shapes lit in an array of colors. Before she could comprehend any of them, the limo had already driven past. They exited Lake Shore Drive and plunged into the South Loop.
“When magic became common, we began using two names for places, one for the mundane and another to refer to the magical aspects of those locations,” Aelia said. “We use the names Earth and Genetrix bot
h, just as we refer to this city as both Chicago and Cordus, which means ‘second.’ ”
“Right—the Second City,” Matt said. “Rebuilt after the fire.”
“I feel like I’m dreaming,” Esther said in a low voice to Sloane. “Like the first time I saw footage of the Drain.”
Sloane nodded. They drove past the yellow arches of a McDonald’s, unchanged from the ones Sloane knew.
“You weren’t holding hands with Ines when we . . . came here?” Sloane said.
Esther shook her head. “I had just let go. I don’t remember her being in the water with us.”
“She’s probably back on Earth, then,” Sloane said. “Maybe there’s a way to contact her.”
They stopped at a traffic light, and Sloane peered into the car next to theirs. There was a woman behind the wheel, a siphon on her left hand, her right hand twisting the radio knob. The glow from the dashboard was orange, analog instead of digital. There was a clock between the air vents, with hands pointing at 10 and 12. It was 10:00 p.m.
“What can you do with that thing?” Esther asked Nero. There was still a smear of mascara on her temple.
“Siphons can be attached to most parts of the body, and their placement affects what they do,” Nero said. “Wrist siphons, like this one, tend to be used for the practical—electrical manipulation, as well as water, air—”
“Fire?” Sloane asked.
Nero nodded.
“So it’s a weapon, then,” she said.
“Anything can be a weapon,” Nero replied. “If you’re trying hard enough.”
“I’m just trying to figure out to what extent we’re being held hostage,” Sloane said. She was surprised that Matt didn’t jump in to chastise her for sounding so harsh, but he kept quiet. Maybe he wanted to know the same thing.
Nero’s mouth twitched into a mild smile. Mild was a good word for him overall, Sloane thought. His voice had a silky quality, not persuasive, but delicate. His movements, from his footsteps to his smallest gestures, were careful, as though he were consciously selecting each one. He turned his hand over and unfastened a clasp on the underside of the siphon glove. A light flickered between the metal plates as he undid it. He slid it off his hand, set it on the floor of the limousine between them, and showed her his palms.
Chosen Ones Page 13
