by Ryan La Sala
He felt every interlocking fiber of Sophia’s world—and then he felt Sophia herself as she turned to face him.
She was terrified. Her memories boiled through Kane in complete color, with complete sensation. Her triumphs and her abuses, her guilt and grief. Her love. Her loss. The scorching exposure caused her to scream, and Kane screamed with her, for they had reached a point of synchronicity as their minds intertwined in the teacup’s bowl. Together, they felt Sophia’s soul open, peeling back so that the teacup might implode her dreams with impartial authority, crushing her down into something cute and quiet that Kane could command.
Sophia felt this, and yet she looked at Kane with relief. With love so simple and inexhaustible that it stalled even the teacup’s onslaught.
“Kane…” she mouthed. “You came home.”
This was not right.
This was not right.
As though sensing Kane’s reluctance, the teacup’s power turned upon his own mind, breaking through him with a vengeful annihilation.
Kane let the teacup go. He heard it shatter, and then he heard no more.
• Thirty-Eight •
SWEET DREAMS
Kane couldn’t move. Or he could, but there was no point. The teacup’s shards were scattered before him, cast across the carpet like petals. Kane looked past them, at where Adeline lay on the frozen stage. Her eyes were dark, her chest barely rising. Closer, Kane saw Sophia’s ankle. She had collapsed on the stairs.
The reverie still stood.
He had failed.
“Harder than it looks, isn’t it?”
The crushed form of Poesy sat up on the stairs, a zombie of the queen’s usual glamour. The charm bracelet snapped from Kane’s wrist and returned to her, orbiting the bloody stump of her arm. The arm, feeding magic from the starfish charm, rebuilt itself nerve by nerve. Poesy’s other damage shed from her, too, like a dingy husk, and when she stood up she was brand new. She wore a sleeved dress of thick white fabric embroidered in gold, its scalloped hem brushing her toned thighs. The belt cinching her waist was a braid of thick rope ending in belled tassels that jingled merrily as she swayed. A cape peeled from the air and clasped itself around her shoulders, and a wide-brimmed hat spun down and onto her head. Her makeup shifted on her face like a Rorschach test, finally settling on a look of pure, Hollywood glamour.
Poesy was back, and she was dressed for a finale.
“We are alike in many ways, Mr. Montgomery. But that teacup takes a certain ruthlessness that you have always lacked. You should have known better than to think you had earned its power.”
Kane barely heard these words. A profound fatigue had climbed up through the void in him, and it clasped lovingly at the pieces of his broken mind. It whispered for him to follow it down and away, and to leave this evil queen to do as she pleased.
But he could still see Sophia’s ankle. She was crawling away from them, toward Adeline.
“I’m not completely critical, of course,” Poesy went on. “I am rather impressed you made it back here, all by yourself. But then again, that was my intention. I figured your sister was good enough bait to draw you out, though I never thought you would actually attempt her unraveling. I figured you would be inclined to let go of your old reality if your own sister served as the foundation for my new one. Your cruelty toward her surprises me.”
Poesy’s words were the articulate edge atop the actual sound of her voice, which was the drone of cicadas.
Kane pushed himself up through pure spite. “You’re not human.”
Poesy curtsied. “Thank you.” Then she bent over the shattered teacup, finding the curved handle and plucking it up. The rest of the pieces swung after it like a marionette, joining together so that it rested, whole and healed, in her palm.
Steam rose from it a second later, and Poesy sipped casually.
Like lightning, Kane directed a snap right into Poesy’s face. The shot glanced sideways, but the deflection sent tea all over Poesy’s perfect, white dress.
“That was”—she looked over Kane with unmasked disdain, her painted face dripping—“your last act of indiscretion.”
Her clawed nails crushed the air, and a psychic grip closed around Kane. He slammed onto the throne, pinned there by Poesy’s invisible hand.
“It’s time to summon the loom,” she said, dabbing her face with her cape.
“I can’t,” Kane said, for once proud of his ineptitude. “And even if I could, I’d destroy it before I let you use it!”
Poesy paused in her dabbing to give Kane that same dazzling smile she’d served him in the Soft Room of the police station. She was laughing at him this time.
“I suppose it was too much to hope the loss of your memories would change your fundamentals,” she said, sobering herself. “I see now you haven’t changed at all. Such potential, yet so little interest in the act of creation. A fascinating apathy that I hoped to manipulate into loyalty after Ms. Bishop dubiously erased your memories. That was an accident, you know, but I thought it was good fortune for me. It provided me a chance to work with you directly. Your power, my creativity. But I can’t work with an instrument that’s developed intention.”
“I’ll never work with you,” Kane sneered. “Not willingly. You tricked me.”
She swept a hand over the front of her dress, and the tea stain bleached away.
“Well, it is a tricky business, creating a reality.” She gestured at the convoluted reveries around them. “But clearly I’ve figured that one out. What’s harder is maintaining it. One can’t hope to do it all alone; one must resort to delegation. And so I sought to create gods from worthy mortals. People like your friends. The Others!”
This last part Poesy said with mocking jazz hands.
“And that went well, too. But I needed more than a pantheon. I needed power. I needed to summon a loom, a source of infinite energy to produce my creations. And I needed to summon this loom in a form I could control. Manipulate. That’s where you come in.”
She dipped over Kane. Her skin glittered like cold gemstones beneath her dusted makeup. She made sure he watched as she removed the opal skull from her bracelet. It flared in the ballroom’s low light, assembling a wreath of spindles. A crown, made from bone.
Kane’s scars burned with recognition. She has the loom. She’d had it all along.
“You recognize this, don’t you?”
The invisible grip holding him to the throne tightened.
“Would you like to know how to summon the loom?” Poesy twirled the crown innocently. “It’s easy. First, you build an environment that can withstand an immense output of power, such as a reverie. Second, you neutralize every competing party with small feuds and love affairs, so they occupy one another completely. Third, you wait for the perfect moment, in which the very fabric of reality has grown threadbare, right before it’s about to tear open. That provides you with your opportunity to destroy the old reality and begin the new.”
She dragged a nail down Kane’s jaw to clutch his chin.
“And finally, you reveal that this loom is not a thing, but a person. It is you, Mr. Montgomery.”
Kane stopped struggling.
“You are my vessel,” she continued, “my instrument, my own little DIY big bang. And to think! Ms. Abernathy nearly ruined everything by throwing you away from me. It’s a good thing I had the sense to let your sister keep me captive, knowing you’d come for her. You see? I’m not just beauty. Beneath it all, I’m everything else, too.”
Kane heard the words, but he did not understand them. They slid through his head like little silvery fish. Poesy’s breath cooled the tears pushing down his cheeks, the sweat prickling his temples.
“I’ll admit I miscalculated before.” Poesy swept behind the throne. Kane couldn’t look anywhere but forward, at the crowd of stilled onlookers. All of the ballroom’s
motion strained against Poesy’s titanium will. “Teasing open the loom in a human boy always risked that he may one day turn his power against me, and so I created this device.” She returned to block Kane’s view of Sophia, who had finally reached Adeline. “It’s a crown, yes, but it is also a prison. This crown does not give power; it takes it. It accesses a person’s deepest potential, focuses it thousandfold, and allows me to use it however I please. I hear it is very painful, losing your lucidity this way. The last time I put it on you, you made quite the mess, swallowing whole the entire watercolor world of Maxine Osman, and Maxine within it. And then Ms. Bishop had the audacity to try and remove it! I wasn’t counting on that, either. Kudos to her. But this time your friends cannot help you. So long as you wear this crown, you are mine. My Pandora’s box. My grail. My muse. Mine, Mr. Montgomery, to imagine into reality anything I demand.”
“I won’t,” Kane said. “I won’t do it.”
Poesy pouted. “It’s a shame you won’t create for me willingly. I think you’d quite like what I have in store for this sorry world.”
She kissed his cheek, then sunk the crown onto his head. It fit like a charm, the pressure against his scalp tracing his scars perfectly. It felt familiar. It burned.
“Sweet dreams, my loom.”
Kane’s mind went a blistering white, like the heaven-hot edge of a cloud about to uncover the sun. And then he was elsewhere, cast into the crown’s oblivion. His body, his mind—his everything—no longer his. Whatever became of him, it belonged to Poesy now.
•∞•
BEYOND
Kane stood in the river, beneath a pale sky awash in drifty, pastel clouds. The low sun stretched over their dimpled banks, giving them the distinct impression of watercolors on canvas. The water, too, was stippled with light as it brushed sweetly through the slashes of green reeds where Kane stood. He grazed the water with his fingertips, watching a fleet of silvery fish wreath his ankles.
Dread flashed through him, sudden and strange. He wasn’t supposed to be here. His hands snapped to his temples, an urgency rising in him before melting back into the river’s slow chill. Something important, something he needed to remember but couldn’t, floated just out of reach.
A pine cone struck his head. It bobbed into the water, scattering the tiny fish.
He turned to the shore, spotting the old mill. It was a majestic building, framed in a lovely court of trees that bent to hide its noble face from East Amity’s judgment and curiosity.
Kane’s sister Sophia watched him with imploring, white eyes.
“Come on, Kane,” she called. “It’s time to go now.”
Kane trudged toward her, then stopped. There was someone else with him in the reeds. An old woman staring at the mill, trapped in a spell of rigorous focus. She held a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and a small easel jutted up from the water a few inches to her right. From where Kane stood, he could make out the rich reds and browns of the mill on her canvas. They matched the deep color of the old woman’s eyes as they slowly zoomed out from the mill and took Kane in with dawning annoyance.
“Oh, you again,” said Maxine Osman.
Kane had no idea how she knew him. He had no idea how he knew her. He wanted to unknow her, because even just thinking her name brought back that sourceless, flashing dread, like he was supposed to be doing something else. He rubbed at his temples again. Why did they feel tight?
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Maxine as she dabbed at her canvas. “This isn’t your world. Stay here too long, like me, and you’ll get stuck.”
“I’m sorry, we were just about to leave.”
“And go where?”
Kane shrugged. East Amity glimmered like a tumble of buffed coins in the afternoon sun, all piled up on the opposite shore. The day before him felt infinite.
“See?” Maxine swiped a gnat from her ear. “You don’t know, because even though the crown wants badly for you to belong, you don’t belong. I didn’t, either. Got dragged in here, I think, but now I’m a lifer.”
“What does that mean?”
Maxine peered at the small mill taking shape on her canvas. “It means you ought to go if you’re going to go at all.”
“Go where?”
“Not where. You need to wake up, dear.”
“Kane!” Sophia called from the shore. “Come on! Everyone is waiting.”
Kane glanced over his shoulder. She was right. Everyone he knew was waiting in the dim forests of the Cobalt Complex. A cascade of pale, white eyes asking him to step from the water and come on, come along, get going. Kane felt that once he stepped out of the river, he wouldn’t come back for a long time. Maybe never.
Kane turned back to Maxine.
“I feel a little lost,” he said.
“That’s okay. You are. I told you, you don’t belong here.”
“I’m not sure where I belong, though.”
“That’s okay, too.” Maxine swirled her brush on her palette. “That’s the thing about a big imagination. It’s hard to belong anywhere when you can always imagine something better. I wouldn’t worry about settling just yet, though. You’re very young. Lots of time to figure out what you want, and then make it happen. But not if you stay here.”
Again the dread flashed in Kane, and for a split second everything about the scene looked wrong. Fake.
A pine cone struck Kane’s shoulder. He turned in time to catch the next one.
“My sister—”
“That’s not your sister,” Maxine said.
“She—”
“She is not your sister,” Maxine said firmly.
Subtly, the river began to simmer. Steam bled up into the golden air in shredded arcs.
“See?” said Maxine. “Look, now the scene’s all upset. My colors are going to smudge.”
Kane dropped the pine cone into the bubbling river. It floated against the current and off into the gathering mist, leaving fragrant sap on his palm. He smelled the deep forest, and it reminded him of Dean.
But who was Dean?
“I think…” Kane reached after the unfathomable depth he had just glimpsed, where the forgotten behemoth of an entire life loomed behind this world’s candied veil. “I think I need to go,” he said, hardly breathing.
“Yes, I know. I’ve already told you that.” Maxine brushed smudges of steam into her depiction of the mill. This all seemed to be a big inconvenience for her.
“What about you?” Kane asked. “Are you going to go or stay?”
“Oh, I’ll be here.” Her pursed lips gave way to a hopeful smile. “I’m waiting for someone. I’m sure she’ll find her way here, eventually.”
Kane turned from Maxine and gave his back to the shore, and his sister upon it, and all the other figments that had gathered at the reverie’s edge to entrap him. He waded out into the gathering mist, off to the waking world beyond.
• Thirty-Nine •
UP AND ABOUT
Kane awoke in a kiss. He gasped, breathing the air right out of the other mouth as though inhaling back his life.
“There you are,” said Dean. His Dreadmare armor branched and bristled on his hips and shoulders, but his arms were as gentle around Kane as they’d been on the dance floor of the Starship Giulietta. One of his eyes flickered sea foam.
“You woke me up with a kiss?”
“No, you kissed me while I was trying to pull the crown off your head. It was very surprising.”
“Where is the crown now?”
“You’re still wearing it. It’s keeping us afloat.”
Kane realized they were, in fact, floating. He prodded the snug grip of the crown, and his fingers brushed through the incandescent light surging from his skin. Etherea soaked the air in neon twilight and rendered the two boys weightless. Light curled around them, protecting them, blurring out th
e chaos of the world collapsing below. Faintly, Kane could sense it all. Past their haven, Everest was a blitz of every reverie mashing together in hurricane-force pandemonium. Six worlds brawling for dominance as they each came undone, tangling tighter and tighter in their wild unmaking.
Kane tasted the violence and withdrew back into the light. He remembered the moments before Poesy forced the crown onto him now.
“Where is she?” he asked, panicking.
“Far below. Ursula and Elliot are distracting her, for now. I was the only one who could reach you.”
“I’m the loom.” Kane whispered it like the confession it was. “It’s all my fault. The reveries. Poesy targeting my sister so she could use me. I figured it out once, and that’s why I told Adeline to destroy me. Because I am the loom.”
Dean considered this, careful and loving. He exhaled, and it played in the tight hollow between them.
“And what will you do this time?”
Kane’s vision blurred with tears. “I don’t know. I ruined everything by coming back here. It all went according to Poesy’s plan.”
Dean ducked down to catch Kane’s eye. Kane still had on his backpack, and Dean curled his fingers under the straps so he could give him a little shake.
“Not all of it.”
“What?”
Dean traced infinity symbols through Kane’s shirt, onto his skin. “Poesy gave you a crown that focuses your power, a plan that only works if you’re under her control. But you’re awake now. You’re still lucid.”
“But Poesy said I wouldn’t wake up.”
Dean shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what Poesy says. This isn’t her reverie. At least not yet. A part of this world still belongs to your sister, and I’m sure in no way does Sophia’s reverie allow the twist of your loss.”