by Ryan La Sala
Adeline was breathing hard. “Any day now. Just take your freaking time.”
Kane shook off his stupor, ready to attempt another snap.
“Not you.” Adeline pushed his hand down, drawing them into a retreat as her eyes searched the crowd. “Save your energy. We’ll need you fresh.”
“For what?”
A chorus of cries broke out from the crowd, and Kane saw entire bodies tossed upward in the distance. Adeline grabbed Kane’s wrist. “Get ready to run.”
Whatever it was, it was getting closer with amazing speed. Something burrowed through the crowd, and it was heading right for the altar. Just before it reached the rim, Adeline dragged him into a protective huddle, but he couldn’t look away.
The crowd split open and admitted, by force, a dashing bolt of magenta, a girl swathed in pink. She hurtled into the air, her rosy dress splashing around her hips as she contorted into a flying kick.
Kane heard himself laughing. It was Ursula!
Her heels were the first things to land, and they struck the throat of one warrior. He went down without resistance, and Ursula leapt off without hesitation. If it wasn’t for the sparkling leather of her shoes it would have been impossible to see her leg sweep out and slam sidelong into the next warrior’s ribs, forcing him down. A blink later, Ursula was on him, his neck caught in a two-arm choke hold while his legs kicked wildly. Then there was a crunching noise and the man dropped. Lifeless. Ursula’s punches just kept coming, each hit sending a shock wave of magenta light crackling into the super-heated air of the arena.
“We should back up.” Adeline said, pulling Kane toward the hearth. He watched, transfixed by her speed. Her power. The fact she was zipped into a housewife costume and the further fact that it didn’t stop her in the slightest. If anything, the costume helped. Now Ursula was atop a pile of bloodied, wriggling men, beating them in turn with one of her shiny pumps. And through all this, her hair didn’t move. Not even a little. Kane thought that whatever hairspray she used deserved as much credit as Ursula herself.
Adeline’s hand wrenched Kane’s face away from the action. “The reverie is collapsing, which means it’s about to get even worse. I don’t know how you got in here, Kane, but since you’re here, you’re going to have to do your job.”
“My job?”
“Yes. You need to unravel the reverie.”
Adeline might as well have told Kane he needed to drink the Caspian Sea. There was no sense to that phrase. No action Kane could even conceive of taking.
An especially loud crunch drew them back toward the fight. Ursula had gotten hold of a spiked bludgeon and was using it to block the simultaneous attacks of two more warriors. In unison they brought their immense blades down onto her, and the stone beneath her feet—one heeled and one bare—fissured.
Adeline pulled Kane back. “Now, Kane. You’ve got to unravel it now.”
“How?” Kane screamed. The cracking stone and the heat from the blaze dizzied him. More warriors were spawning from the crowd, all of them lumbering toward Ursula.
“Usually you clap your hands and—” Adeline was cut off by a sudden belch from the mouth-shaped hearth. Something within the inferno was moving. Something solid and slithering. Something worse than anything they’d encountered thus far.
The chants of the crowd suddenly synchronized. It was not the sound of a demand, like before. It was the sound of celebration as they cheered, “Bloood sacrifiiice!”
Adeline’s face twisted. “Kane, where’s the dagger?”
Kane searched his memory. “I kicked it into the fire!”
Adeline’s eyes widened. “You threw the ceremonial dagger with my virginal blood on it into the fire?”
“But you’re not a virgin.”
Adeline’s face twisted. “Oh, God. Oh my God. Kane, it doesn’t matter in this world. You fulfilled the sacrifice!”
At the lips of the hearth, the flames shaded a deep scarlet, pulling into a smoldering mounds. Then, like a bloated tongue, a gargantuan beast slithered forth from the throat of the earth and out into the arena.
Its body was a composition of blazing plates sliding over thousands of undulating legs. From beneath it, Kane could make out serrated mandibles large enough to chew apart a bus, and beady, ancient eyes that scanned the empty altar with hunger, then outrage. Whatever it was, it was furious to find its meal escaped, and it manifested its fury through an inscrutable language of clicks and squeals.
Elliot was wrong, Kane thought. There is a glowing lobster.
A new chant cut through the din, quickly gaining momentum.
“CY! MO! THO! AH! EX! I! GWA!”
The fiery crustacean craned back and let out an earsplitting screech in return, then turned its laser gaze upon Kane and Adeline. Its antenna twitched, then swung away as sparks gushed forth from its glowing mandibles.
They ran, but before they’d made it halfway across the altar the creature snapped open its great jaws and let forth a neon tsunami of fire.
“I got it! I got it!” Ursula shouted. She sped between them, toward the fire, her arm drawn back as though she meant to punch her way through it.
And, in a way, she did. Her fist rocketed forward just as the wave of fire converged upon the three and—absurdly—the deluge split apart. It flowed around them, the heat tremendous, unbearable, all-encompassing, and like nothing Kane had ever felt, but they were alive. They were preserved upon an island of black tiles as a shimmering shield of magenta light cupped over them. Ursula stood at the front, fist thrust forward and her whole body trembling as she pitted herself against the crustacean’s breath.
And still her hair would not move.
“Do it, Kane!” Adeline forced Kane to stand up. Her hair whipped wildly as the inferno began to bleed through Ursula’s force field. “Unravel it!”
Kane didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what she meant. But such an earnest belief shined in her eyes—belief in him. And what could he do in the face of such raw, unwavering faith? He dove into himself, searching for an answer, but all he could feel was his own stuttering heart, his own fear.
His own limits.
The fire let up, and Ursula slumped to her knees. All around them the floor was a desert of molten glass. There was nowhere left to run as the crustacean began to recharge its breath.
“This can’t be real,” Kane whispered.
Adeline eyes bore into his. “It’s real, Kane, but only until you say so.”
Sparks tumbled from the crustacean’s jaw as it slid through the shimmering heat. It was right over them. Kane squeezed his eyes shut, hugging Adeline.
He had denied this world—its power and its reality—but there was no denying what would happen if he failed. He would die. They all would. This reverie was not a dream. This reverie was not a story. There were no more twists, and there were no more chances. Just the reverie’s desire to see these interlopers annihilated. And, fueling this desire was a powerful rage, as though the reverie knew what Adeline knew: that Kane had come to unravel it. Perhaps it was Kane’s fear-addled imagination, or maybe it was a sense he hadn’t known he possessed, but in that moment he felt as though he could commune with the reverie’s core. And what beat in that core was more than desire or rage; it was fear.
The fear of being taken advantage of.
And the fear of being invaded, of being taken apart from the inside out. With new eyes Kane saw the screaming hearth and the parasite that had wound up from its molten guts. With an open mind, he understood the reverie’s pattern. What lay beneath the plot. The metaphor or the thesis or the marrow that unpinned everything. Even though he did not know the mind that created this world, he at least knew the heart.
And he thought he might know what to do next.
“Remember, Kane,” Adeline whispered into his ear.
He reached for the wisp of intui
tion, and it reached back, blooming bold and brash in his chest. The blooming sensation manifested around him, rivers of color coursing from Kane’s skin and carrying him upward. Buoyed upon nebulous rainbows, he faced down the awestruck crowd, then turned to consider their god.
It considered Kane back, unimpressed, before releasing its deadly breath over him.
Kane clapped his hands.
The arching fire stopped. Time stopped.
It was an instant of unmoving.
From Kane’s hands erupted a day-bright brilliance, washing the cavern in every color, as though Kane were a prism through which light split to spectrum. In this unmoving instant Kane knew the reverie for what it was: a living tapestry of memories and thoughts and dreams, sewn together with the desperation to be real, to be realized.
The reverie resisted Kane’s control, searing his mind as he fought to hold it in his head all at once. But it was lethargic, its energy waning, and Kane gritted his teeth through the pain. He was able to pin its corners wide and pick at its center, which was the fearful creature frozen before him. Its hideous body sagged beneath Kane’s concentration, sending out a shock wave that turned the arena to liquid. Colors and textures bubbled together. Pieces of the cavern broke apart to float unmoored in the vibrating air. Below, the floor scattered like dry leaves so that Ursula and Adeline floated in a white yawn of nothing as the reverie tore itself apart, whirling toward Kane, colliding into a knot of light gathering between his flexed palms.
The unraveling intensified, its rush growing into a thunderous riot. The pain in Kane’s head was beyond even the agony from the fire, but he stayed focused on his purpose, knowing he would feel the pain later.
He held the knot of light up, a white star dragging everything toward it.
He forced himself to stay strong as the weight of the world collapsed upon his shoulders.
• Twelve •
THE S WORD
Kane had a new empathy for punching bags. For crushed cans kicked down the road. For the focal points of incessant force.
His thoughts rose slow and blurry, like bruises on his brain.
He was floating. He was sinking. The aurora was dissipating, depositing him onto stiff, plastic grass scored in white symbols. His head hung over his streaming hands. He might have fallen asleep there on the football field if it hadn’t been for the unsure murmurs of the many people who had just watched him fall from the sky.
“Excuse me, excuse me.”
Adeline pushed through the crowd of stunned players, getting real low and in Kane’s face.
“Hey. Dream boy. You all right?”
Kane blinked at her. The cave was gone, the arena evaporated. Behind Adeline, dusk had come to East Amity, and the stadium lights blazed white against a ruddy sunset. She helped him up, and he saw that they stood before the congregation of rapt spectators, arranged in a minimized version of the reverie’s crowd. He saw the football players he’d recognized as barbarians. And farther back he spotted Mikhail and Ethan with the rest of the pep band, no longer dressed as guards. Off the side huddled the cheerleading team, as though caught mid-escape.
Kane swung around to face where the giant lobster god had been; he now looked up in the vacant smile of the empty goalposts.
“Hey! Everything okay?”
Off to the side, Ursula waved at them from the locker rooms.
“Elliot’s getting his car,” she called. She was dressed in her field hockey uniform (still charred). Kane saw that Adeline was transformed, too. She wore shorts and a loose mint shirt. Both girls appeared completely free of the wounds they’d sustained. Kane ran his hands over his own body.
He was unhurt and alive, and the only burns that remained were the ones around his head.
“Kane, hurry up and give it back.”
Adeline motioned upward.
Hanging in the air was the knot of light, glinting like a cut-crystal ornament. Kane reached out and it floated to him with noncommittal buoyancy, stopping just above his palm. It emanated the memory of fire, of blood, of bones ground to dust. It had a sound, too. Susurrant and gentle, betraying none of the violence it held.
“Take this part easy, okay?” Adeline said. “You have to give it back slowly. Freely.”
Kane looked at her, then back at the knot. “You’ve done this before?”
“Not personally.”
Luckily for both of them, the knot knew what to do. It drifted over the confused crowd until it found was it was looking for: a player on the bench. It sank into his helmet.
“I told you it was Ben Cooper,” Adeline called.
“What?” Ursula threw her hands up. “He seems so nice! I never took him for the misogynistic, tomb-raiding type.”
“More like womb-raider. He’s the one who tried to get with me at my birthday last year. He’s a creep-o, Urs. He just hides it well.”
“I thought you suspected John Heckles.”
Adeline threw out a mocking laugh. “Heckles? That idiot doesn’t have an imaginative bone in his body. He’s a refrigerator.”
“Refrigerators hold wonders!”
Kane didn’t understand the joking mood. All around them people were panicking, the vanishing of the reverie having dumped them back into their home reality. Someone began an unsure chant. Others cowered, as though the summoned god still loomed.
“You better go with Urs,” Adeline said. “Unless you want to lose your mind, too, no pun intended. I’ll be right along as soon as I clean up these memories. Can’t have that mess respawning again, can we?” She propped her hands on her hips and began counting the people around the field. Kane understood he was being dismissed and slipped through the crowd to where Ursula waited. She shushed him before he could ask her anything.
“I know,” she said. “We’ll explain everything. But first, are you hungry?”
Kane was incredibly hungry. He’d missed lunch, after all.
Ursula smiled. “You always are.”
“So what about werewolves?” Elliot asked. “Twice for werewolves, right?”
The Gold Roc Diner was a narrow, kitschy diner on the edge of East Amity, buzzing through all hours of the night like a neon satellite. The quartet sat at the back-most booth. Ravaged plates spread across the table, covered in streaks of ketchup and grease, except for Adeline’s; the crusts of her dissected sandwich had been stacked in a small tower. Kane stared at the tower. It was all he could do to keep himself from passing out from fatigue.
He had barely talked since they sat down. It was like he’d been jostled in a fundamental way, his mind falling out of alignment with his body by a fraction of an inch, and nothing was lining up. Perhaps alarmed by his silence, the Others just began telling him things. Right now, they were discussing all the past reveries they’d encountered.
Reveries, Kane thought. Plural. These have happened before, and often.
“Yeah I remember two werewolf reveries,” Ursula said.
“Three,” said Adeline, “if you count Barbara Weiss’s last year, during the school play.”
“Those were just giant wolves,” Ursula said.
“No, she’s right,” said Elliot. “It was still people turning into wolves. That’s three werewolf reveries.”
Kane absorbed this. He was way beyond doubt, by now. He was beyond everything, spinning in some elliptical orbit around the conversation.
“This wasn’t the first giant bug, right?” Ursula asked.
“Isopod,” Elliot corrected, but the girls ignored him.
“There were those giant lunar spiders,” said Adeline. “The ones that crawled out of the eclipse in that one reverie.”
“Spiders are arachnids, Adeline.”
“Elliot. I swear to God if you don’t cut that out.”
Ursula steered the conversation into a recounting of her favorite reverie, which was a
story about rare dragons raised in ponds who were determined to make hats from lily pads. This devolved into a discussion of the merits of mermaids, a topic that deeply embarrassed Ursula for some reason. Elliot and Adeline smiled, and Adeline made as if she were telling Kane a salacious bit of gossip.
“You should have seen Ursula in a shell bra. You wouldn’t know it because she’s always in baggy hoodies, but Ursula has got great—”
“Adeline!” Ursula’s face went as scarlet as her hair. Adeline shrugged, still grinning.
“The point is, we’ve seen it all,” Adeline said. “And I do mean it all.”
The orbit of Kane’s mind returned to the dark star of his world, the gap in the night sky where something should have been. In their extensive debrief, the Others hadn’t brought up Dean Flores once. They didn’t know about him. It was as though he didn’t exist to them.
“What about ghosts?” Kane asked.
The table was silent in the face of Kane’s first words in an hour.
“Often,” Ursula said solemnly. “Especially around the holidays.”
“So what you’re saying…” Kane cleared his throat. His tongue buzzed with questions now, so many he thought they might race out of him in an unruly swarm. “Is that these reveries just happen? They just burst out of people, every few weeks, unannounced? And you guys just deal with it?”
“Who else?” Elliot shrugged.
“The police?” Kane offered. “The FBI? The Vatican?”
Ursula scoffed. “Nah, basically everyone except us becomes useless once they get caught in a reverie. We tried to get the police to help once but they just got brainwashed, too. When you’re in someone else’s reverie, you’re whoever they want you to be.”
Kane thought about the glazed expressions of all the barbarians, the football players, the pep band, the cheerleaders. For them, the reverie was the only reality they knew.
“I remember that reverie,” Elliot said. “Science fiction. Bouncy house space station. Super campy.”