“Fight the Resurrectionist,” Matt said. “We kill him, they send us home. That’s our best bet.”
“Sloane?” Esther said.
Sloane felt the same wrongness she felt around the Needle, like all her innards were in the wrong places, like the world had turned into a nightmare and she didn’t remember falling asleep.
“Fine,” she said. “Sure. Let’s do it.”
But she wasn’t sure if she’d said it because she meant it or if she just wanted Esther to stop crying.
Part
Three
EXCERPT FROM
The Manifestation of Impossible Wants: A New Theory of Magic
by Arthur Solowell
What, then, is a desire? We may begin by stating what it is not. A desire is not a whim. It is not an idle wish concocted on a sunny afternoon. A desire is a profundity of want, a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied. It is for this reason that it is impossible to force someone to perform an act of magic one does not truly wish to do. The magic requires desire, and a desire cannot be threatened or manipulated into being.
It may become clear to us, as we watch magic develop and change in our world, that certain people are not to be trusted with the wealth of power that magic offers. This is not because they are wicked, but because they are damaged beyond repair. They may proceed through the world as if their desires conform to those of the healthy and functional among us, but that may not be the case; when they do magic, their true selves will be laid bare before them and before us all.
In other words, magic is a mirror. It reflects us back to ourselves, and we may not always like what we see.
TOP SECRET
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
TO: Director, Central Intelligence Agency
FROM: Thomas Wong, Praetor of the Council of Cordus
SUBJECT: Project Delphi Prophecy
As requested, I have included the exact wording of the prophecy of [redacted], code name Sibyl, made on 16 February 1999, verified by the Council of Cordus:
It will be the end of Genetrix, the unmaking of worlds.
Something stands between Genetrix and its twin. The Dark One will excise it, and the worlds will be crushed together, and that will be the end of all.
The Dark One of Genetrix will be hidden, but not secret, with a thirst that will never be slaked. Their Equal is the hope of Genetrix, born marred by magic and mastered by a power previously unknown to us.
Twice will Equals greet each other anew, and the fate of the worlds is in their hands.
TOP SECRET
From the Journal of Nero Dalche, Councilor of Cordus:
Essentially, in order to cross into another universe, one must simplify one’s understanding of what such an act entails. The magnitude of moving from one world to another is too much for the human brain, no matter how advanced, to handle; they will therefore not be able to summon the appropriate level of desire, as defined by Solowell in The Manifestation of Impossible Wants. However, if we simplify it so that anyone may understand it, we may be able to shuttle people of any intellectual capacity across universes.
The comparison that I have chosen is one of basic hospitality. A person’s universe is her home. The permeable barrier between the universes is her front door. If a polite guest wishes to enter a house, he knocks on the front door, and the person within the house opens it to let him in. It is the same with universes: you must reach out with your magic to “knock,” and someone dwelling in that universe must “open the door.”
What makes this more complicated, of course, is that time behaves differently across universes. You may think you are knocking on a Wednesday at the reasonable hour of ten o’clock in the morning; however, in that universe, you may actually be knocking at the stroke of midnight or twenty years later, when the owner of the house is long dead.
30
A COLD WIND FOUND its way under the hood of Sloane’s cloak, making her shiver. It was hours past sunset, and she stood at the border of Wacker Drive and the most recent Drain site, her last checkpoint before she got in position.
Even Esther had eventually come around to Matt’s way of thinking. You’ve been acting so strong since we got here, Esther had said to her, quietly, the night of the incident. Obviously your real feelings have to come out somewhere, right? It’s your brain’s way of telling you that you’re repressing something.
She had almost made Sloane believe it. Regardless of what else she had seen underwater, she had gone to a place where the universes touched. Earth and Genetrix were connected; Nero hadn’t lied about that. Which meant they still had to help Genetrix to help Earth. And they had already brought down one maniacal mass murderer. They would use the same strategy to do it again.
That meant her job was to lure the Resurrectionist into the open. She would walk along Congress Parkway until it passed beneath the Old Main Post Office, where he and his army had their lair. She would have to go alone, but the Army of Flickering would follow her after she had made contact.
She had done this before. She had gone alone to the Irv Kupcinet Bridge to be bait for the Dark One on Earth. She knew too well the feeling of numbness that took over. If not for seeing the toes of her boots digging into the rubble, she might not have known that she was still on the ground. But she kept moving now, just as she had before.
She knew the path through the destruction of the Drain site. City officials had spent the last two months clearing it, but it was still a mess of broken bricks and cracked boards and bodies retrieved from basements. People of all walks of life picked their way through the wreckage, looking for the bodies of lost loved ones. Sloane wished that she could tell them not to bother. Their loved ones were likely in pieces; Drain victims almost always were.
The cloak she wore was one of Aelia’s, heavy and dark. Flakes of snow from a late-spring cold front drifted through the light cast by emergency lamps, melting as soon as they touched the ground. Sloane’s fingers were frozen even though they were clutching the folds of the cloak. She had insisted on wearing her own clothes beneath it—her Albie-funeral blacks, the ones she had worn when she first surfaced on Genetrix.
She reached the other end of the Drain site, her boots coated in dust. She walked a block west, then started to cross the same bridge she had hobbled over with a broken ankle, weeks ago.
Ever since then, she had been dreaming, not of the Dark One, but of the Resurrectionist. They weren’t nightmares, though—just a playback of their brief conversation, over and over, the same thing every time. You aren’t being fair. You and your friends come to kill me and I’m not allowed to fight back?
She had been tasked with studying the deaths of the other Chosen Ones summoned from other worlds. Despite Nero’s promise to be more forthcoming, however, he and Aelia were still protective of the little information they had, dishing it out in small morsels. It was like having only a few pieces to a puzzle, and none of them fit together. All of them gave her questions that Nero and Aelia refused to answer.
Sloane didn’t like it. Moreover, she didn’t trust it.
This world, your world, they destroy themselves. All worlds do. They don’t need me, the Resurrectionist had said. He hadn’t seemed like the Dark One. Not a parallel version of him or the man himself.
Another piece she couldn’t fit anywhere.
Sloane stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked out over the water. She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know if the Resurrectionist was the Dark One under the siphons and the dramatic cloak or if the Resurrectionist was causing the Drains or how many Chosen Ones had died doing exactly what she was about to do.
So she needed to find out.
She started walking again.
Standing in the alley between the Old Main Post Office and the building next to it—the Chicago Central Carrier Annex; she had looked it up—Sloane found the window she had jumped out of when she’d escaped from the Resurrectionist. It didn’t look high now, weeks later. But it was too high f
or her to climb without any assistance.
She wrapped a scarf around her face so only her eyes were uncovered and checked her hood to make sure it was secure. Her cloak looked too fine to belong to one of the Resurrectionist’s tattered army, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. She rounded the edge of the building in search of an entrance.
Just off Harrison Street was a metal door with a push handle. The handle had a lock built into it—Good, she thought. Not a deadbolt. Sloane hunted along the ground for something to use as a hammer. She had to go back into the alley, but she finally found a large hunk of concrete so wide she could hardly get her hand around it. It would have to do.
Holding the concrete in both hands, she slammed it against the handle of the door. The door shuddered, and Sloane hit the handle again, and again, and again. Flecks of concrete broke off the hunk she held, and she gouged deep scratches into the metal door. Sloane kept hitting the handle until it broke off and dangled from the door by its inner mechanisms.
She forced the door open and walked into what appeared to be an old loading bay. Dilapidated equipment filled the space, all of it rusted and covered in a thick layer of dust. There were conveyor belts and chutes, rotten pallets and ladders, bins large enough to hold a grown man that rolled on busted wheels.
Sloane tried to affect the loping, shuffling gait she had seen from the undead man and woman who had first brought her here. She had gone in through the back, but the Resurrectionist’s army might still be lurking somewhere nearby. She found the inner door of the loading bay and stepped into a worn hallway with a warped floor. Broken planks of wood had burst through the maroon carpet, and chunks of wall and ceiling were piled in her path. She stepped around them like she was playing hot lava with Cameron in their living room—everything that wasn’t maroon carpet was lava.
As she walked, she tried to map out the building in her mind. She turned a corner and slipped into the emergency stairwell. So far, everything was quiet. She climbed two flights of stairs to get to the level where she had broken the window and jumped. Her ankle was still weak from that day, but the siphon had done its work, speeding the healing of her bones.
Soon she arrived at the threshold of the dilapidated office where she had found the mattress and siphon parts. The Resurrectionist’s living space, or so it appeared. She was still confused by the floral sheets that covered the mattress. They seemed comically out of place.
She removed her heavy cloak. It would only get in her way, and she didn’t need to hide who she was any longer. She took her tactical knife out of its sheath at her hip, crept into the space, and crouched beside one of the built-in desks, behind the cubicle wall.
Then she waited for the Resurrectionist to return.
Matt and Esther would be angry if they knew she was deviating from their plan. Maybe they would even hate her for it. But really, Sloane thought, they ought to have been suspicious when she agreed to be bait again. Besides, she wasn’t necessarily abandoning the plan entirely; she was just . . . changing its timeline.
She waited.
Her heartbeat still hadn’t slowed when she heard footsteps in the hallway. But no voices—he was alone. The door opened, and she heard his heavy breaths, the rustle of fabric around him. She tipped her head back just enough to see his hood over the low wall that surrounded the desk, and then she stood, stepped around the wall, and lunged—
She yanked his hood off with one hand and brought the knife up to his throat with the other, holding him by his hair—which was dark and long, for a man—and pressed the blade in just enough for him to feel how sharp it was.
“Hi there,” she said.
She could feel the warmth of him, the life in him. She had known that he was human, but part of her had wondered if he was the same as his army, more dust than man. His breaths came fast through the siphon, crackling.
“Keep your hands still,” she said. She held the knife above the siphon that covered his throat, but with her free hand, she reached down to undo the clasp of the siphon around his wrist. It was too strange, her skin brushing his as she felt for the release and tugged it; the siphon dropped, heavy, to the floor. She switched knife hands so she could do the same to his other wrist.
She was conscious of her breaths, which were just like his, fast and loud. Everything sounded muffled. He had almost killed Kyros in front of her with just a whistle. What else could he do before she could stop him? And here she stood with a tactical knife like an idiot.
“Should have known you’d come back.” His voice came out tinny, warped by the siphon. “True hero and all. Your kind do tend to go on ill-advised suicide missions.”
Sloane laughed harshly. “Your assumptions about my character are so off base, it’s actually hilarious,” she said. “I’m not here to kill you. If I were, I’d have slit your throat already. Because I’m also not here to die.”
He held his hands out from his sides. They were big and pale, with oddly delicate knuckles. “Slitting my throat immediately would have been smarter,” he said.
“As much as I wanted to, that would kind of defeat the purpose of my being here. I came for a trade,” she said. “Truth for truth.”
“Truth,” he repeated. “I’m not even sure what that is anymore.”
“Please, for the love of God, don’t be one of those villains who waxes poetic about existentialist nonsense, because if you are, I really will have to cut you,” she said. “How about we start with this: Who the hell are you?”
“You don’t already know?”
When she didn’t answer, he lifted his hands, slowly, up to his face. Sloane kept the press of her knife steady. He undid the latches of the siphon that covered his eyes and pulled it away. She saw his reflection in the windows across from them, but only faintly—just the paleness of him and his shape against the dark.
He was still as she moved around him, his hands up, palms facing forward. His wrists were scarred from siphons, the kind of marks worn into skin day after day, for years. His nose and mouth were still covered, but his eyes were dark and focused and familiar. She laughed.
“Mox,” she said. “So I take it you didn’t just happen upon me in the cultural center that day.”
He undid the latches of his mouth siphon too, then wiped his chin of sweat. He set both siphons down on the desk beside him. He looked worse than he had the last time she’d seen him—wan, dark circles under his eyes, sweaty. Young.
“I gave you your truth,” he said, and his voice was different than she remembered it from the cultural center or the Tankard, rougher. “Now give me mine.”
Sloane saw something unsteady in him that she hadn’t seen when she knew him only as Mox. A kind of agitation that would have been frightening if she had not known it so well herself. He was afraid, and for him—for both of them—fear was always anger and demand.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t ask you for your name. I asked you who you are. Are you the Dark One? In some kind of disguise?”
“The what?” Mox said, and his confusion didn’t clear up anything. Sloane was trying to keep her breaths steady, but they kept coming out in little bursts. She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she was standing across from the Dark One or someone just as bad. A murderer, a psychopath, an evil sorcerer—she had no idea what Mox was.
“I had an enemy,” she said. “I thought I killed him, but he came here instead. And I want to know—I need to know if you’re him.”
“If I tell you that I’m not,” he said, “you won’t believe me. And I’m not giving you anything else until you make good on our trade.”
She had trusted her gut before. When she had just gone through puberty and her body had taken a new shape, she had known when there were eyes on her, when a man’s kindness was a threat. When Katy McKinney had offered her a red cup of something at the one party she had gone to before leaving town, she had known not to drink it because there was spit in it. And at the end of the struggle with the Dark One, she had known to
use the Dark One’s interest in her against him.
I would know, she thought. I would know if I was standing in front of the Dark One. I would feel it.
“They’re coming for you. Nero and my friends,” she said. “I was supposed to lure you out to Congress Parkway. I came here instead.”
His eyes widened. “Nero? He’s with them? You’re sure?”
“Um, yes?”
He grabbed the siphon he had set on the desk and pressed it roughly to his face, covering his nose and mouth. Then he bent over to pick up the wrist siphons Sloane had let fall to the floor.
“Hey! We are not done with this conversation!”
Mox looked up at her from where he was crouched, reattaching one of his wrist siphons. He whistled and waved a bare hand at her, and the knife crumbled in her hands like a snowball. The pieces scattered on the worn carpeting.
“Fuck!” Sloane snapped. “Really?”
“We can continue this discussion,” he said, voice tinny again. “But I can’t let Nero get anywhere near this building while I’m still in it.”
“What?” She thought of Nero’s workshop, packed with books, and of his floppy blond hair. He must be highly skilled with magic or he wouldn’t have been able to orchestrate their summoning from another universe. But he didn’t seem nearly as threatening as the Resurrectionist.
Mox stood and attached the eye siphons, transforming again into the creature he had been. “I will tell you,” he said, offering her a metal-plated hand. “But you’ll have to come with me.”
Chosen Ones Page 28
