by Jen Ponce
“Tytan is like me. I replace Ravana and he replaces Amara.”
“You were the one to remove Amara from this plain. Her death ripped a hole through our numbers, and you dealt the killing blow.”
I didn’t know wood could sound like a shrieking of alien weapons or ancient musical instruments, one or the other. “Two Originators are gone, two are here to take their place. Me and Ty. I’m assuming that’s cool with you because, as you told me before, there are no rules.”
The branches swung lower, one whipping past my cheek so fast it blew back my hair.
“Easy now, Baow. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Because it’s happening.”
“Devany,” Ty said. “Stop it.”
A branch hit me in the gut and sent me flying backward. I crashed into one of the creatures cavorting around, and we both smashed into the purple glass. Luckily, we hit a flat spot and not a sharp edge. As it was, it made my head ring. I heard a crack of sound and looked up in time to see Tytan smashing a fist into Baow’s side. I winced. Hitting trees was dumb. The bark. The solidity. Of course, it was Ty and when he yanked his fist back, there was a hole in Baow’s trunk.
“Get you gone from me and learn your duties,” Baow shrieked, its branches slashing through the air as it tried to hit Ty. It missed.
The second Ty got to my side, I put up a bubble of protection and then hooked us back to Ty’s manse. He had a cut on his face and I was wheezing, my lungs not quite convinced they knew how to function. “That sucked.”
“What were you thinking?”
“He’s not the boss of me. Or of you. Fucker.” I twisted carefully, wincing when a muscle shrieked in painful protest. “Stupid tree. I forgot to ask it what its pronouns are, too.”
“I don’t want to be an Originator.”
“Why not?” I eased onto Ty’s couch, turning so I could lay on it, propping my feet on the arm. “Ah. Ow.” When Ty didn’t answer, I said, “Ravana never meant for you or me to survive her. Yet here we are, and she is dead. Right now, you are doing everything she never imagined you doing. You being an Originator is like dancing on her grave. Or peeing on it.”
His warm hand wrapped around my ankle and he pushed power into me, healing my bruised and aching muscles and ribs.
“Thank you.” And he hadn’t even tried kissing me. I moved an inch so I could look down toward my feet. “Ty?”
“I’ll think about it.”
I wasn’t sure it was an optional thing, but I didn’t say that out loud. Certainly, I hadn’t had any choice when Baow had announced I was an Originator. I wasn’t sure why it had gotten so touchy when I said Ty was one. Maybe it liked being the one to declare things. Who knew? “If you don’t want to come with me to Ravana’s Reach, I understand. I can take Nex or Kali, maybe, or both.”
“I’ll go.” He sounded grim, his expression telling me not to pry.
I managed to keep my questions to myself as I sat up without pain and held out my hand. “Take us there?”
“I can’t. Only Ravana can enter … or her replacement. Do you still have her papers?”
I nodded. I did, actually. I yanked them from my pocket and spread them flat. “Is there a map or something?”
“Ask for it.”
“Ask … the paper?”
He nodded.
This place was just getting weirder and weirder. “Can I get directions to Ravana’s Reach?” I asked, feeling stupid. Sure enough, nothing happened. “Well?”
He shrugged. “Maybe you need to be touching it.”
As soon as my fingertips touched the paper, something oily and malevolent wrapped around my wrist and pulled me through a roiling black hook.
Ravana’s Reach was a large, black tower seated on blood red rock in the middle of a tarry sea. I knew this because I was dangling outside of the double doors, a tentacle wrapped around my waist. Tightly. Very, very tightly.
“You are not Ravana,” something said. The tower? That was silly. The tentacle monster? It looked like the damned tentacles were part of the tower. Without pausing to let me answer, it said, “You are in Ravana’s place. How strange. Show me your power.”
I didn’t know what it wanted to see, exactly, so I pushed a gout of energy from the Source into the tentacle around my waist. It shrieked and the tentacle loosened. Right as I slipped through its grip, I made a hook below me, focusing on the small platform in front of the doors. It caught me before I could vanish.
“What was that? Rude, you are. Ruder than she. You must be her. But you aren’t her.”
“I killed her.”
A shiver of awareness shuddered through the tentacle, through me, through the ick below me. After a moment, I was placed gently on the front stoop and the doors swung inward. “Enter, Mistress.”
Everything was dark, gruesome and smelled like death, though a fresh breeze blew in behind me, cleaning out a bit of the odor. There wasn’t a living room or staircase or really anything that looked like a home. The doors opened onto what looked like a lab. There were three tables with thick straps, counters with countless cupboards beneath them and more above. There were sinks and stoves and beakers and burners. There were anatomy sketches hanging on the walls, several skeletons on slender poles, some human or Skriven, some unidentifiable.
I really didn’t want to be there without Ty, but looking around, I was glad I’d been zoomed over without him. No way he needed to see any of this. “Anyway we can change the decor, Tower?”
“I am not Tower. I am Reach.”
“Okay, Reach. Anyway we can—” Before I could finish my sentence, the tables were gone, the counters, everything. There was empty space where the lab had stood. “Can you make it—” Again, before I could say anything, the room was pink. Super pink. Fluffy pink. “Uh. Could you let me finish?”
“I pulled this from your memories,” Reach said, sounding hurt.
“Wait. Are you a girl or a boy or something else?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
I sighed. “Should I call you he or she?”
“I … do not understand.”
“Okay, you’re a girl. Congrats. And this? No.” I pondered for a moment as the pink vanished as suddenly as the lab. “How about a Better Homes and Gardens style living room? For now.” White carpet, floor to ceiling windows, orange couches and green chairs appeared. It was festive. Art appeared on the walls, giant nudes of … “No!”
“It is what you were thinking,” Reach said, sounding hurt.
“Sorry. But no.” My face was hot, and I looked away from the canvasses before my hair caught on fire. “Let’s just do abstract art, shall we?” I prowled through the seemingly endless room, wondering where the hell the stairs were or elevator or whatever it was that got people from floor to floor.
“Are you sure you are an Originator?” Reach asked. I was getting the impression she wasn’t too impressed with me.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I snapped. “I’ve never seen this place, remember. It’s hard to hook when you don’t know where you’re going.”
“Ah,” the tower said. “I will make stairs.”
“Thanks.” I went up first, not at all eager to see what Ravana kept in her dungeons. Whatever it was—whoever it was, if anyone—would piss me off. Upstairs was more of the same torture-themed madness. Reach changed it all for me as I went, creating room after room of magazine-perfect scenes until I ended up at the top. A balcony led outside and overlooked the black sea stretched in every direction. Cliffs rose far in the distance, too far to swim. “I don’t suppose we can change the view.”
“No. Why would you wish to?”
“It’s ugly.” I didn’t like the looks of that water, or whatever it was. It looked hungry.
“It keeps enemies out.”
Right.
I went back down the stairs, down past the first floor I’d seen, wishing I had company. The stairs curved around the tower, circling a black pit, the bottom of whic
h I couldn’t see. “What’s down there?”
“Cells.”
Oh god. “How many are occupied.”
“All of them.”
“And how many are there?”
“Three thousand and one.”
I stopped dead. “What?” I asked, sure I’d misheard.
Reach repeated the number and I sat on the step, my stomach roiling. “Who are they?”
“Humans, Skriven, witches, chythraul, Wydlings, fleshcrawlers, gruewen,” she said, continuing on with the names of things I’d never heard of until, “and one Originator.”
“Wait. She has an Originator imprisoned here?”
“Yes. Gaius Regulus. He worked with Ravana for centuries on their soul hook project. Then Ravana found out Gaius was helping one of her Skriven try to find his soul. There was an epic battle Gaius lost. Ravana threw him into the oubliette.”
I grimaced. “I need to ask the Skriven to come here. Will they be able to get here if I ask them?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Will you let them in if I call them?”
“Yes, but I don’t understand why you would ask them?”
I tugged on the strings connecting me to my Skriven. “I’ll need help releasing the prisoners.”
Reach didn’t answer and soon I was too busy to wonder why. Skriven packed the main room, Kali at their head. Most of them were looking around the room as if they’d never seen it before and I wondered if any of them had been Ravana’s torture toys like Tytan and Ellison. “Hey. So sorry to bug you all, but I have a favor to ask. First though. Any of you freaked out by being here?”
Many, many eyes turned to me. No one spoke.
“I mean, I know Ravana was an asshole, and I don’t want to put any of you in a situation where you feel uncomfortable.”
Silence.
“Okay, then. I asked you here for your help. The cells below us are full and there are over three thousand of them. I want to find out where the prisoners came from and then get them back to their homes.”
More silence.
“I’m going to get a complex here,” I said, shifting awkwardly.
Kali said, “What if they no longer have homes?”
“Well, to their towns? Swamp. Whatever.”
Another Skriven, one whose name I didn’t know, spoke up. “What if the time they lived in is gone?”
“Huh?”
“The cells break prisoners’ time belts.” At my blank look, Kali said, “The time belt holds the way open. Your time belt holds you to the second you left Midia. If your belt were to snap, you would lose your spot in that moment of time. Those prisoners could have been here for days or centuries or eons. Would it be fair to loose them on the world?”
I’d had no idea how the time thing worked. All I knew was I could leave Earth or Midia, travel to the Slip and not lose time. I had no idea it was because of a time belt. I’d had no idea they could be severed. “Are the cells the only things that can break the time belts?”
“Of course not.”
Of course not. Crap. Well, I’d worry about that later. “So, what we’ll do is this: whoever wants to help can talk with the person in the cell and find out when and where they’re from. If they don’t want to leave, let me know. We’ll figure out something.” I didn’t know what that something was, but hell, life was an adventure, right?
Reach spoke up. “You are a puzzling creature.”
“Me?”
Kali smiled at me, her bone-white fangs flashing. “Ravana wanted to make monsters. She didn’t realize the monster she would make would kill her.”
I was torn by my pride at the compliment and the annoyance at being called a monster. Although, I guessed I had been a monster in Ravana’s eyes. I dicked with her system, foiled her plans, and killed her. For sure rude, if not monstrous. “Thanks. I think.”
“We will begin this work. Come,” Kali said to her fellow Skriven.
“Wait! Just one more thing. There’s an Originator in an oubliette somewhere far below. Don’t let him out, okay?” I hated the idea of someone rotting in a dungeon for eternity, but I also didn’t want to release a potential enemy. Who knew if he’d hold a grudge and take his anger out on me?
The Skriven scattered and I headed down after them the old-fashioned way: via stairs.
CHAPTER THREE
It wasn’t as horrible as I’d expected. Sure, there were cages as far as I could see and people and things trapped against their will, but it wasn’t like Ty’s torture basement. At least, not the first floor. I gazed into the first cage at the foot of the steps. A young man squatted in the middle of the floor, his eyes crazed, his hands shaking. Long, red weals marked his back and his wrists were raw. I pressed my hand against the barrier, and it fell—no bars were employed here. I wondered exactly how the cages severed the time belts and decided I wouldn’t step over the threshold until I had a chance to pick Kali’s brain further on the subject. “You’re free. I want to take you home.”
He blinked up at me, his eyes bigger and rounder than normal human eyes. They were black like Nex’s, but his skin wasn’t pallid like a fleshcrawler. “Home?”
“Yeah. Where you come from. Where Ravana stole you from.”
He puzzled this for a moment. “I don’t have a home.”
I studied him closer, eying his webbed fingers and his teeth, which were white and long but not pointy like Nex’s or Queen Angyang’s or Nephele’s. He had gills on the side of his neck. He had hair. Crap. “Did she … make you?”
“I was born here. I will die here, at least according to She Who Made Me.”
There really needed to be a way I could bring Ravana back from the dead so I could kill her slowly. “Do you have a name?”
Almost shyly, he said, “I gave myself a name. Jack.”
I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Jack. I’m Devany. I’d like to help—” before I could say more, he was in front of me, having moved too fast for me to track him. His eyes gleamed as he sniffed at my throat. For some reason, I didn’t blast him back with my magic. My heart was hammering, sure, because his sudden appearance in front of me freaked me out, but I wasn’t getting warning signals from him. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it was part of his lure-magic. Ty had done something to me once to make me think kissing him was a good idea. At least, I blamed him for me not moving away.
“You smell like me, but not like me,” Jack said finally, moving back a few steps. “Fleshcrawler and Wydling and witch and Skriven. You smell like Her, but you also have your soul.”
“Yes. I’m one of her experiments too, you might say.”
He nodded. Considered me. Then he threw his arms around me and squeezed. “Sister!”
“Would you like me to kill it?” Kali asked behind me.
Jack didn’t stop hugging me and so I awkwardly hugged him back. “No. He’s not hurting me.”
Kali snorted. “It looks awful, what he’s doing.”
Jack smelled awful like fish and sweat and the stench at his nearness made my eyes water. “Apparently, we’re long-lost relatives, so …”
He stepped back and barred his teeth at Kali, who flashed fang back at him. “I remember you. You brought me food when She Who Made Me was angry.”
She didn’t answer, just inclined her head.
I regarded her with a greater appreciation than before. Kali, like all Skriven, didn’t have her soul. It was stored in a vault in the fleshcrawlers’ domain. She didn’t have any reason to be kind to Jack or any of the others trapped here and yet she’d brought Jack food. Had she done it for all of them?
She dared me to ask her with glittering eyes.
I didn’t have to. Instead, I said, “Thank you.”
“This floor houses Ravana’s creations. None of them have ever known a home beyond the Reach. Some of them refuse to leave their cells. I wish to start on the lower levels and work our way back up. Perhaps we will figure out what to do with the homeless ones once we’ve released some of the o
ther prisoners.”
I nodded. What else could we do? “Jack, you want to come with me?”
“Out?”
“Not out of the Reach, not unless you want out. I thought maybe you’d like to go down with me to open the other cells. Carefully,” I added, not wanting to unleash some pissed off ugly by accident.
“Can I stay here?” he asked, his fear-bright eyes darting to the stairs and back to me.
“Yeah. Of course.” I turned to find the stairs down and felt a timid touch at my elbow. Jack was beside me, looking overwhelmed. “You don’t have to come.”
“That’s why I want to come,” he said.
We walked to the stairs leading downward, the other cells’ doors opened but only a few of the prisoners had ventured far from their cells. I didn’t blame them. Had I been a captive of Ravana’s for even a short amount of time I would have trusted no one. I could imagine her bag of tricks was full of pain and misery.
The next level was filled with Wydlings, from toddlers to elders. I couldn’t imagine why Ravana would have wanted kids—and yet I could imagine and that made me cry. Jack was good with them, cooing at the scared littles who screamed when we got close to them. Some of the adults screamed too, some fought. My Skriven, soulless though they were, handled them well. More than a few of them had the same type of calming power Ty had and helped subdue some of the more hysterical Wydlings.
Not all were in human form. Some were in the shapes of their animals. Worse were the ones trapped somewhere in between. Those who could or would speak, helped us figure out where to take the ones who couldn’t speak for themselves. It was heartbreaking and exhausting work.
I didn’t take people home and screw up my place in time. My Skriven did the work, dropping the Wydlings off near Banishwinds if they didn’t know where their home was anymore or as close to their villages as possible. The Wild magic affected hooks and “close enough” was the best they could do.
How long it took, I didn’t know. It felt like years. Years for a single, solitary floor. And there were hundreds more.
I’d never stayed in the Slip long enough to know if I’d get tired there or not. Okay, I’d been there once for a long while recovering from some serious injuries both physical and mental, but I hadn’t been in any shape to analyze how I was feeling at the time. Now, I realized I was soul sick and tired mentally, but I wasn’t feeling that dragging sensation of someone who needed to crash.