by Rance Denton
Above me there was sky, but it wasn’t sky. Like polished metal, it was a reflection of the expanse below me. I squinted my eyes, saw myself sprawled in the bottom of the boat, staring back. The mirrored sky rippled like melted steel.
A sea suspended above, the occasional light still tracing wordlike patterns.
WHAT COMES AND GOES—
It read…
—IS THE FUTURE AND PAST.
“Hello?” I cried out.
The fear set in, locking like a bullet into a chamber. Without wind, there was no way to push me to a distant shore. Standing was only a feat I managed for a few seconds before I had to kneel like a fresh-born foal in the boat. If I looked out much longer on that upside-down world, I might crack. Was this the end-goal, the Be All and End All, that thing you hollered for at church and sang all those songs for?
Hold onto your horses, Eliza.
What if the mercury sky fell down on me? Or what if the boat capsized and I plummeted into that endless expanse. This place’s wideness and endlessness corkscrewed into my brain. I white-knuckled the boatside. I was stranded here. Couldn’t swim out, couldn’t call for aid, didn’t even have a gun on my hips or a bullet to carve my name into.
A sobbing echoed out over the expanse.
Mine.
I caught my tears in my shaking palms, thinking maybe I could drink them if there were enough, and God, it seemed like they wouldn’t stop.
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “It’s alright,” I told myself. “It’s alright, boy.”
Raindrops from above began to fall on my hands. A cool wind cracked against the sail and fattened it. The boat gave a forward lurch. I cut a path through the sky. The vessel seemed to know where it was going.
Above me, the suspended ocean split in two.
Silver water peeled back like hide torn from a buffalo. With wonder I watched as a form emerged from the sky. The shape pressed out into the world, all sharp edges and perfectly-measured corners, a thing of absolute order. A great, metallic square, turned to its point so it looked like a diamond on a card-face, hovered in the upside-down sea. Must have been the size of a decent-sized house, give or take a few meters.
It hung in the air, dangling on unseen puppet-strings.
In the distance, where the mercury sky and the galaxy sea crashed against one another, a swath of pink light began to burn.
BEING BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR, said the sky, IS A NOTION RESERVED FOR THOSE WITHOUT IMAGINATION.
Compelled to look upon the cube and how it was both nothing at all and everything all at once, I turned my head. “You can speak?”
A TALENT LEARNED LONG BEFORE YOU EVER WERE, it wrote in light.
“This place don’t make much sense to me.”
LOGIC: THE LIMITATION OF FRAGILE MINDS.
“Too-shay,” I said. “Is this how it ends?”
TO BE BROKEN IS NOT AN END.
“Not unless you take one to the mouth like I did.”
WHICH IS WHY THIS MOMENT EXISTS BETWEEN BLINKS AND BREATHS.
“Am I dead?”
YOU ARE NOT ALIVE.
The chilly wind abated. The rain stopped cutting. A glittering path of sand emerged beneath the boat, a frail bridge springing across the darkness.
The boat rocked as if it’d hit land.
I disembarked. To my wonder, my heel didn’t press right through the sand. It held firm. Gritting my teeth against vertigo, I proceeded to walk toward the gleaming bauble. The path vanished behind me and emerged in front of me, like an unraveling serpent tongue that just kept going and going. I shot my hands out to my sides. “Don’t look down,” I said. “Nope, don’t look down.”
So I did my best necessary-for-survival balancing act toward the suspended cube. As I meandered closer, guided by the sandy path, details started popping out to me: cracks sprawled across the cube’s surface. One of its corners had taken a mighty blow, like a brick grazed by a bullet, or a fruit bitten into by a greedy mouth.
I picked up a fallen piece of the cube out of the sand. A little black shard, dusty as coal.
YOU HAVE BUSINESS YET TO PERFORM.
“Heavy lifting is a bitch,” I said. “What do you mean by business?”
YOUR SECOND DAWN. AND OURS.
“Getting shot in the jaw ain’t exactly a minor inconvenience.” I rubbed my face, which here, seemed surprisingly intact. I needed a shave. “I get the sneaking suspicion that I’m about to grow mighty skeptical of these riddlesome suggestions.”
THE OFFER IS SIMPLE: YOU ACCEPT IT, the sky wrote, OR YOU DO NOT.
“If I don’t?”
A LOSS. NOT OURS.
“Okay,” I said. “’Spose I find myself driven to accept. What exactly do I get?”
NOTHING.
“Then what do you get from it?”
EVERYTHING.
“Oh, so I draw the measly pair, and you get the royal flush.” I was swimming blind. But with the last few minutes still mapped out in my memory – the rush back to Blackpeak, the Magnate turning my own weapon against me – it seemed like a good bet to presume my brain wasn’t entirely cottage pie just yet. Of course, playing givesies-takesies with a floating box of magical cargo didn’t exactly increase my chances of avoiding that fate, either. “Forgive me for saying,” I admitted, “but this smacks of convenience, wouldn’t you say?”
CONVENIENCE IS A REGRETTABLY HUMAN CONCEPT.
“Look whose shit don’t stink.”
A TOOL BY WHICH SMALL BEINGS LIMIT THEIR ACCOUNTABILITY. NOTHING MORE.
“For something without a head,” I said, “yours is mighty big. What I’m going to need out of you is for you to talk to me like I’m less smart than you actually think I am. Simple questions, simple answers, you got it?” I cleared my throat. “Second dawn. You mean like, another chance?”
CONTINUATION.
“Reversal of death?”
MORE DENIAL THAN REVERSAL. IT MUST BE, it said, OR IT MUST NOT BE.
“You can make that happen?”
IT HAS HAPPENED MANY TIMES. FOR YOU.
On the surface of the cube I saw the rest of this abstract realm mirrored behind me. The pink sunlight splashed off other shapes emerging from the silvery sky: orbs, spheres, jewels, squares, whole planets, simple as cloudy marbles, some as tiny as fingernails and others swallowing up whole chunks of the skyline. Many times, it had said. The ache in my thigh came to life. And the remembrance of scorched skin smarted on my palms, burnt from the Fulton barn.
Eliza’s tear-swollen face floated into my mind’s eye.
He did what I wanted, didn’t He. He protected you. So why don’t it feel right?
I scrunched my brow and peered up at the cube. At myself.
“Banks, thieves, and con-men all got one thing in common. They don’t give out loans without interest.”
THERE WILL BE A COST. THERE IS ALWAYS A COST.
I turned to look behind me. The boat floated off, aimless and lost.
HALF-LIVES ARE LIVES OF IMBALANCE.
The boat receded to a pinpoint.
YOU WILL NEVER FIND TRUE FOOTING.
Then the boat was gone, sail and all.
YOU WILL EXIST TO DO THE BIDDING REQUIRED OF YOU.
Was this a normal thing? Was this the whole majesty of death, that you get shot, or take a tumble, or your heart gives out, and you meet this grand voice in the beyond that presents you with a choice to keep going or settle in? String yourself to a leash or shed the mortal coil? Pick one, step right up.
I knew a poor bet when I saw one. So, being pretty devoid of most sense of reason, I held out a flat hand toward the cube.
Only one way to solve this dilemma.
“You got a penny or something?” I asked.
I could lie and say I bellyached over the many implications – if I didn’t go back, people’d be hurt, people’d die, all because I wasn’t there – but this place made it simple. To be or not to be. Live and oppose, or die and sleep.
Cold metal materialized in
my palm.
On one side, in sweeping letters, a proclamation: LIVE AND OPPOSE, the coin said.
I turned it.
DIE AND SLEEP.
“If this is death,” I said, “then, say I flip this coin, how do you expect me just to start living again?”
BY FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS WE HAVE GIVEN YOU THESE PAST MONTHS.
Looking up from the coin, a pattern began to spread itself across the mercury sky: leaping out of one of the floating masses, a ribbon of light, lancing toward the others. It met another sphere, where it split off into eight directions. There were so many bullets of light, they started weaving a blanket across this strange other world.
Then one stream of light hit the cube, highlighted its cracks, and the whole beam of it flickered weakly, daring to smother out.
“What instructions,” I said.
TO BREATHE.
So I did. One last time, for better or worse.
I flipped the coin.
33
Everything was so small.
At first it was a tiny colony, a diorama drawn in front of my eyes a thousand yards away. Closer I went, until I saw a flash of fire. A figure’s head jerked back like it’d been hit with a hammer. The body fell.
Holding a smoking pistol, a robed man sucked his teeth. “End of that,” he said.
The gunshot woke up the world.
Then there were more gunshots. A sturdy figure emerged from the saloon on the corner. Maybe it was just one second, I wasn’t quite sure – time was rubber – but the man wore a bowler and spoke no words. He just raised the Yellowboy carbine he’d had at his side, racked a round, and fired. He didn’t stop firing. He advanced off the porchway, his lower knuckles trilling the lever-action as the mouth of the rifle blew out burst after burst of smoke, flash after flash of fire.
His name was Grady Cicero, and he was my friend.
One of the sand-filled shadows jerked back once, twice, then hit a trough and careened over it.
Other slugs struck a field of glassy whiteness in front of the Magnate, whose trembling fist bled from its every crack. “You don’t want to do this,” he said.
Cicero said nothing. Just fired.
Another white flash.
Fired again.
Like shuddering pillbugs, hunk after hunk of lead trembled full-stop in front of the Magnate.
Another door opened. I watched it all, slow as molasses, like they were all just figures on a stage. Doc Levinworth emerged on the street in a pair of loose pants and a half-open vest. I saw the antique in his hands: a single-barrel shotgun, rusted but ready.
One of the sandshades slipped in front of him, opening its yellow-toothed jaw, to emit a banshee’s cry. It took the brunt of a shotgun blast. But its hand didn’t stop moving. Talon-bent steel winked in the air. Levinworth’s head leaned one way while his body leaned the other. His neck opened sideways. He fell dead to the ground.
No. No!
Breathe.
A greasy, curling smoke rose up from Levinworth’s pores and spilled out of his mouth. Here, in this odd realm of sight, it shimmered like steam.
It coiled through the air and swept up into the Magnate’s mouth and nostrils.
I didn’t need to understand to know: in the living world, nobody saw that ghostly vapor. The Magnate did, maybe. He worked his work; he squeezed his gilded thorn, and more of the silvery smoke sprang like night-fog from his flesh, clinging to his forearm until it crawled up, up, and into his mouth.
Pain. The fuel for his craft. Visible in this place like desert heat.
Cicero might have had the Magnate at gunpoint, but the bullets rotated in the air and turned back to face the actor. Like wasps waiting to sting.
The rest of Blackpeak came to life around the town square. People poked their heads out and peered out from the cloudy windows. Miss Garland came darting up the street with her just-in-case leading the way. She scrambled for Levinworth.
“Doctor,” she breathed. “Doctor.”
“He’s dead, Miss Garland,” Cicero said through tightened teeth.
People congregated, forming a shadowy vicegrip around the square. God, you give them some blood, they swam in like snakes to lap it up.
A sandshade gave a rattling snarl and said, “Bitch,” as it surged toward Miss Garland.
Her just-in-case gave two flashes. The sandshade’s skull disintegrated. Sand whisked through the air.
“Marshal’s dead too,” I heard Cicero whisper tightly. “He’s dead.”
Miss Garland’s hands tried to mop blood back into Levinworth’s corpse.
The silvery smoke crawled off her, too. Drifting up into the air. Funny, because her face – stoic as a statue – never changed.
“You killed our people?” Miss Garland asked the Magnate.
“Your people made foolish choices.”
Cicero trembled. He’d been framed something mighty in that iron smoke, so greatly that it formed a crude halo above his head. He might have been quivering, but his trigger-finger wasn’t. “Are you him, then? Are you that Gregdon bastard?”
The Magnate clicked his tongue. Like a horse-cluck, giddyap. One of the several floating bullets disappeared from in front of the Magnate. A streak of white shot across Cicero’s left shoulder, biting through his sleeve. He gave out a furious hiss. The Yellowboy fell from his hands.
Breathe.
The Magnate leaned forward, like a boxer ready to deflect oncoming fists. “I wonder if he told you. I wonder if Faust even told you what he did with the body of that fellow who tracked you down to this town, runaway.”
A snap of his fingers. One of the bullets whipped toward Cicero, then stopped right in front of his face.
Breathe!
“Yeah,” the Magnate said. “Your face is familiar. I’ve put together enough about you from stories. At least, all those I ripped out of that Alabamian’s jittering brain before my shades put him down. Grady Cicero. Is that who you are here? Wish I knew all the names you went under before. Wonder how many Romans you’ve had to burn through, kid. New one for each city, I imagine. Is this living, man? Is it really living?”
“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” Cicero said.
“Dead men’s brains are poor vessels for secrets.” The Magnate jerked his hand. Cicero collapsed to the ground as his feet were torn from beneath him. The bullet bore down over him, spinning violently in the air, hovering only a few inches from his left eye. “I’d break you open like glass just for the thrill of it.
“Which goes for the rest of you.” The Magnate swept both of his hands out. The bullets fanned out like flower-petals and formed a hovering circle of bloodthirsty lead around the old man. Each one of them floated on a thin coil of silvery fumes, cast out from him, obeying him. “I find blood an entirely regrettable byproduct of irresponsibility. Of which, I presume, we’ll have no more moving forward.”
I watched, helplessly disembodied, as more cloaked beings emerged from the darkness and came forward, some wielding weapons, others handfuls of power: sparks of blue fire, globs of crackling force. Now the bastard had ten, then fifteen sandshades.
Revulsion rippled through the onlookers: some gasped, others surged back. Two – a man and a woman, curious lovers – tried to flee, but they ran face-first into a particularly spindly sandshade.
It stabbed. The man split open. The woman shrieked, covered her mouth, fell back.
“Stupid,” the Magnate rumbled. “Stupid.”
People stopped moving.
“Truth of the matter, Blackpeak, is this,” he bellowed to the town. “Who I am is a man possessed of no desire to hurt you. The problem with men like Marshal Faust and Orations over here—” he thumbed toward Cicero, “—is that they presume all people fit into bottles: the good bottle and the bad bottle. Making the assumption we all want to be water, or we all want to be wine.”
There. I thought I saw it…a spark.
Fluttering like a candlelight in the husk of my fallen body. A
breath.
“You,” The Magnate’s finger leaped out toward a face in the crowd. Poindexter. “When the Prussians took Paris, and you fled with your wife to the coast, and then to Virginia, all you cared about was safety and opportunity. How is Carlotta, anyhow?”
Poindexter swallowed, wondering how this man saw right through him. How he knew so much. And yet—
“My Carlotta, she—”
“Don’t say it,” the Magnate sighed. “My God, man, I’m sorry. Consumption?”
Poindexter’s shoulders dropped.
“No loss more painful,” he said. “But she was like you, wasn’t she? Did she fit inside a bottle, friend?”
“Non, monsieur.”
It was Aremeda De Santos he approached next, his crown of bullets still hovering while he scooped up her hand and placed a gentle kiss upon it. “Miss De Santos,” he said. “A lovely specimen. The wonder of the West, if men’s loins were the measure of piety.”
“Who are you?” she asked like a child.
“A man who needs neither a crystal ball nor a sixth sense to see a dreamer in front of me. A dreamer whose vision suffered when her quaint Ohio town, where she oversaw the finest children’s dance academy, flooded itself right down the Cuyahoga River.” In her fear, Lady De Santos flinched, seeing old ruins in front of her eyes. “When you lost everything you’d worked so hard to build, Aremeda, did you care – did you give a lick – whether you were water or whether you were wine?”
“I loved dancing,” she said.
“Do you dance anymore?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want to dance?”
She nodded. The Magnate smiled. A warm, trusting smile. The kind that built bridges, despite the bullets around him.
“You’ll dance again. We’ll dance. What dreams there are to be dreamt.”
And the Magnate went on and on, to almost each and every one of those frightened and confused folk, speaking prophecies into them as if he’d divined them right out of thin air. Like he knew their souls. Knew their desires, their secrets, peeled them open like so many cans of beans and made them feel like gourmet meals.
What a parlor trick, to win their temporary affections. Through what, force and stolen secrets? More sandshades began to appear, peppering the crowd. “Kallum believes he knows the ways to help you find these dreams—”