by Ryan La Sala
Kane’s heart felt cramped yet powerful, as though a second heart beat within it. Out there, among the chaos, he could hear a solemn ringing. A hope, as clear as bells and as bright as lightning. His sister’s grace and strength. She was still fused to the fibers of this collapsing world, still alive and defending him. Even after he’d tried to hurt her.
Kane gave himself fully to his tears, but then remembered one by one the strengths of the people who had fought for him. He couldn’t return their sacrifices with only tears. He had to show them he had always been worth it.
“Where is Sophia?” he asked Dean.
“Below, somewhere. She and Poesy are vying for control of the reveries. Your sister must be very strong to have lasted this long.”
“And Adeline?”
“With Poesy. We need to help her and the Others. Adeline is…fading.”
Kane’s breath caught. The last time he’d seen Adeline, her body was broken. How long could a person last like that?
“Listen,” Dean said, focusing Kane. “If you have the chance to kill Poesy, you have to take it. I have lived my lives in worlds built by the pain and misery of other people. Poesy has a dream, and even if it is a lovely one, it is only hers. You can’t let her make it come true for everyone. You have to stop her.”
“But what about—”
“You have to stop her.”
Dean held Kane in his stare. Dean, the mystery personified, the paradox made man. Kane could see clearly how Dean might have been his whole world once upon a time. He thought maybe if they survived this, they could build something better after all. Kane hugged him tight. There was the scent of ash and sweat, and there beneath his armor, his cologne. Pine, or something close. Kane kissed him—their lips brushing only long enough for Kane to feel his breath pulled up from his lungs—and then it was time to make his choice.
Evade? Or interfere?
“I have an idea.”
Kane told Dean, and between the two of them, his idea formed into a plan. Dean gave him a stoic salute, then teleported away.
Alone in his nebula, Kane had space to breathe. He observed the unraveling world. Planets exploding and stars falling. Horizons fracturing and oceans boiling. Earth breaking and air rending. The city of Everest, rocked by its slow demolition, peeling apart in drowsy chunks as big as mountains.
Kane was small within the chaos. A simple pinprick of glittering defiance, all the way at the top of a busy, senseless oblivion. It was scary as hell, but there wasn’t any room left in him for fear. All his worst nightmares had come true, one after another, yet here was he was—exhausted and scared, yes—but alive. Hopeful. He had survived, and he would keep surviving.
Kane let his powers unfold, stretching out like great wings, and the full discord of the reveries bombarded him. It was easy to locate Poesy; the reveries were imploding toward her, like some great wound around which flesh bubbled and bone sagged.
Also, she was cackling. Because of course she was cackling.
Breathing deep, Kane let himself fall, etherea streaming after him. He found Poesy upon the pale stage, now strewn with shattered pillars, strutting through the aftermath of battle. Elliot and Ursula were still standing, but barely. Adeline, gray dust plastering her bloodied tutu, lay collapsed over Sophia in her ragged red dress. Poesy sipped from her teacup, savoring the implosion of Sophia’s world.
Kane snapped his fingers, sending ethereal blazes into Poesy’s billowing cape. The teacup spun from her grip and shattered on a pillar, and she turned to him with the first authentic fear he had ever seen on her beautiful face. Then it was gone, replaced by rage. She reached for her charms without a word.
Seeing him, Ursula let out a weak cheer before falling into Elliot.
“Go!” Kane called to them as readied another attack. The power of the crown was immense, so hard to control that Kane knew with certainty that even a stray thought could destroy, transform, or create. This was the power he needed to defeat Poesy, but he needed his friends as far away as possible. “Run!” he screamed, the flares from his hands amplified to glaring beams of rainbow that cut the air itself.
Poesy twirled between them like a darting fish, her cape undulating behind her. Her charms flashed open into fragments of reveries that crashed over Kane in tidal waves of texture, sound, and sight. Kane was overtaken by a misty forest, its humidity clingy in his throat, its babbling streams tickling under his ears. Kane tore it apart with a clap of his hands and entered another reverie: a colonial battlefield mobbed with zombies. Rotting teeth sunk into his shoulder, his wrist, but the power of the crown told him this world was immaterial and his to destroy. He let his glow burn bright, eating through the hordes of zombies, and punching him into the next reverie. And the one after that. And after that. Kane flashed through them, as brief as an angel falling through the film of every new world, until finally he surfaced back into the collapsing void.
Poesy was waiting to face Kane upon the stage. She wrenched a glowing palm down, dropping a deluge of acid rain out of the cracked sky. Kane let his own consciousness rise to meet the rain, unfolding each drop into a cloud of butterflies.
“Your precious Others have fled, and your tricks are catastrophically clichéd.” Poesy sneered, and the butterflies turned to scorpions. Kane blinked and the scorpions burst into confetti.
“Look at us!” Poesy’s laugh rang like a siren as she slit reality into a cloud of snakes. They ribboned toward Kane, but he turned them into arrows and fired them back. “Look at our power! We do not belong to this world. We belong to something better. Something with integrity that only we can create for ourselves! That has always been our way. That is our only fate!” The arrows splintered into lightning, which Poesy gathered along her painted nails and whipped at Kane. He returned it with a rainbow blast, and the two were locked into a dual for life and death, for the fate of not only Kane’s world, but every world hiding in every person. For the fantastic realities people lovingly created for themselves, in danger of being subjugated by the whims of a madwoman and her teacup.
“Why do you fight for a world that does not fight for you?” Poesy spoke through the maelstrom, right into Kane’s mind. “Why do you fight to save a reality that fails so many, so often?”
Their dual collapsed into a sucking silence. Lightning and etherea threaded the vacuum between them as they landed back on the stage.
“I’m not fighting to save reality,” Kane said. “I’m learning to change it.”
“The loom is an instrument,” Poesy said. “It cannot learn. Your righteousness is pretty poetry and nothing more. It’s time to end this.”
“That’s right,” Kane sneered. “Dean, now!”
The Dreadmare formed around Poesy, its bladed body shearing together like scissors and slicing her white cape into strips. Kane felt the thrill of success as the first spray of blood met the wind, but then the grinding halted. There was a great ripping noise, and suddenly Poesy was back. She had Dean in a headlock with one arm while the other hand clutched the Dreadmare’s flailing body. She had torn the armor right off him.
“Kane,” Dean whimpered through clamped teeth. Poesy squeezed, and his jaw cracked.
Kane’s powers failed. Sick gravity brought him to his knees, and his backpack slid from his shoulders. He fought for the exquisite control he’d had a second ago, but it was gone.
“You know, I was wrong about this, too.” Poesy smiled wickedly in Dean’s ear. “I figured conscripting the brooding love interest assured me unregulated access to the loom’s every desire, but you were never the agent I needed. Ms. Bishop, however, does possess the rigor I require. Would you like to live, my dear?”
Poesy flicked her hand, and like a flock of sparrows, golden magic fluttered apart to reveal a huddle group sneaking into the battle. Elliot at the lead, stumbling as Poesy easily dispersed his illusion, with Ursula at his side. Behind them, A
deline slouched with Sophia, and then suddenly Adeline was alone as another blast from Poesy’s hand threw everyone else away, into the whirling unraveling.
“No!” Kane cried.
Adeline swayed as Poesy pulsed power into her. Like leaves rustled up from the ground, her wounds peeled from her body. She choked and twitched, resisting the warm glow that spread beneath the deep color of his skin, reviving her. She had freed herself of those awful pointe shoes and cradled one blade in her arms. She looked alive and powerful; she still looked ready to fall apart.
“Ms. Adeline Bishop,” Poesy purred. “The smartest. The most cunning. I was careful when I curated my pantheon to only invest power in those wronged by this reality. But even so, all the others refuse to see this reality for what it is: a failure. But you can. You know. There is a position of power for someone of your caliber in the reality I envision. At my side, you would be everything.”
“Why would I help you?” Adeline asked, but her voice was a faint and blue echo of her usual searing wit.
“Sophia Montgomery will die if you don’t. But I can save her, like I’ve saved you. I can save your friends, too. I can salvage any soul you value, but only if you purge every last thought from Mr. Montgomery’s head. Our world will never be safe so long as he possesses the will to undo it.”
Adeline wouldn’t look at Kane at first. When she did, it was with open wonder. She was thinking about this. He wanted to reach out to her, but he felt like his hand would pass through her like a ghost. They existed in two different planes. More than distance separated them now.
Poesy’s voice swelled upon cicada song. “Every life you value for a life Mr. Montgomery has thrown away twice. Finish what you started. Wipe every memory from his head.”
“Do it,” Kane said.
Adeline’s wonder turned to shock, then disgust. “What?”
“Do it, Adeline. Take my memories,” Kane repeated, looking at Sophia. At everything he was fighting for.
“I can’t.”
“You have to,” Kane said. Then, quieter: “Believe in me one last time.”
By the thrust of her jaw, Adeline understood. She wobbled toward Kane, and her eyes flared their storm-cloud gray as they peeled Kane’s mind open. There was no pain to Adeline’s telepathy, just the whistle of memories as they faded beneath her corrosive gaze. His fingers curled around his backpack strap. It was impossible to remember what he’d just been doing, but if he kept going, kept trying, maybe there was a chance he could…
Adeline’s eyes darkened, her face bright with a smile. She had found the memory Kane needed her to find. She adjusted her grip on her blade and in one, elegant dash, she crossed the stage and drove it deep into Kane’s chest.
Kane got the red journal up a moment before. He had no idea if his plan would work, but he never felt Adeline’s blade touch his skin. It had instead stabbed into the creases of the journal’s magic pages with only a brief, jittering resistance, its lethal tip plunging through the journal’s portal and far, far away from Kane’s heart.
“Did it work?” Adeline whispered.
They turned to Poesy just as she began to scream. She threw Dean away from her, revealing a shock of red spreading open on her stomach. The other red journal, which Dean had been holding open behind his back, had directed Adeline’s ivory blade away from Kane and right through Poesy’s glittering guts. Poesy pitched and twisted, gripping her new death with clicking, breaking nails, and Adeline gave the blade one final shove.
Kane’s plan had worked. Elliot would be so proud.
Poesy reached for her bracelet and the charms that could heal her, discovering too late that Dean had snatched it from her wrist while she held him.
“Impossible,” Poesy screamed.
“Improbable,” Kane said, and before Poesy could summon back her teacup, Kane clapped his hands. The bright tension of his full focus exploded against Poesy’s ringing domination, atomizing the teacup’s shattered pieces and slicing through the reverie’s curdled atmosphere. The Cobalt Complex shimmered through the gaps, the edges between the two words glowing neon as they ripped over one another. Reality itself was going to be torn apart if Kane could not overcome her.
“I am your worst nightmare,” Poesy promised.
“Not anymore.”
The sickening, dizzying power of Poesy’s control faltered, and Kane knew what to do. He curved his power around where Poesy stooped, imprisoning her bristling magic. Then he turned his mind toward the rest of the reveries. He knew that Poesy’s power came from manipulation, but without the material of others there was nothing for her to bend, to break, or to borrow. This was her end.
Kane drove his consciousness up and out, into a surreal maelstrom like so many silver needles slipping through thickly knitted knots. First he found his sister and his friends, battered but alive in a pocket of Ursula’s magic. Reassured, he focused on the rest. The crown he wore opened a dimension of omniscience within him that felt, for just a few seconds, fathomless. Limitless. He felt—no, knew—how simple it would be to destroy these worlds entirely. Instead, he set himself to the impossible task of feeling for their edges. Their breaks and seams. Every story had a beginning and an end. Every sky had a horizon. Every tale had its twists. Kane combed himself through it all without flinching. He felt first resistance, then the utter bliss of separation, and finally the relief of their lovely unraveling.
But one knot remained.
“You…” said Poesy—a buzzing in the back of Kane’s mind as he began to unravel her—“and I are…not so different, you know.”
“I know,” Kane said.
The unraveling must have hurt Poesy greatly. The sound she emitted was unlike anything Kane had ever known. Ancient and inhuman and so much more than simple sound. It was ferocity made sonic.
Then Poesy was gone, and there was nothing left but the polyphonic roar of the reveries as they spooled, one by one, into Kane’s open palm.
• Forty •
RESOLVE
Kane could have returned the reveries directly to the Cobalt Complex, but there was one more thing to do before he took the crown off for good. As gently as his bruised mind could manage, he set himself down on the manicured grass of the garden, near where Dean lay huddled.
First, he needed to apologize. Gently, he knelt by the boy and did what Dean had once. He traced an infinity symbol into the boy’s back, whispering, “Dean. You can open your eyes now. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Dean blinked at Kane, and at the strange recurrence of the gardens from Helena Beazley’s reverie Kane had created around them. He seemed unsure of his own weight as he stood, like he expected to just float away.
“I’m…not gone?”
Kane squeezed his hand for reassurance. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“But you unraveled Poesy.”
“You never belonged to her, Dean. You’re as real as anyone. Trust me. For once, I know stuff.” Kane tapped the crown and tried out a smirk. Dean gave a sly grin back.
“Kane?”
Adeline cut through the milling guests, the grime of one reverie drifting away as her costume from the Beazley Affair wrapped around her. Trailing after was Sophia, her red dress exchanged for her golden ensemble.
“It worked!” Adeline said, wrapping around Kane. “I can’t believe you let me read your memory like that! I can’t believe that worked!”
He hugged her back, as hard as he could.
Sophia pushed toward Kane. Her eyes were sharp. She was lucid now. And of course she had questions. Kane waved them off, just happy to see his sister, but she wouldn’t let him hug her for long before asking: “Just tell me what’s real. Like, did you just murder a magical drag queen sorceress using two dream journals and a sharpened ballet slipper?”
Kane looked at Adeline, then Dean. They both shrugged. They were going to need a lot of ti
me to debrief all this.
Kane gave his sister a playful punch to the shoulder. “Just gay enough to work, right?”
Sophia’s serious interrogation cracked into a familiar grin, the old refrain bringing relief to her confusion. Adeline let out a wry groan, and Dean looked very embarrassed about it all.
“But why are we back here, Kane? You have all this power, so why are we in Helena’s reverie?” Adeline asked.
“Because they deserve a second chance.”
In the fresh, white sunlight, Elliot and Ursula were easy to find. They rushed through the crowd in a mixture of celebration and confusion. Ursula reached Kane first, embracing him over the wide hoop of her grand pink dress. Elliot, because he was Elliot, immediately started scheming about how they would outsmart the reverie.
“I saw Helena. She’s here. But she’s not young anymore. She’s just wandering around in her normal clothes.”
“Relax, Elliot. It’s okay. I’ve got this,” Kane said. He closed his eyes and let his mind hover over the depths of the crown, holding himself away from its evil entrapment. Careful as he could, he coaxed out Maxine Osman.
Like a sun rising right before them, her reverie came forth as Kane ushered her from the crown’s prison. The lush garden and the gazebo turned vivid in her watercolors, accepting the shift without resistance. If anything, the two reveries merged in a way that made them impossible to imagine separated.
“We’re righting a wrong,” Kane said. He moved them back as the crowd gathered around Maxine, murmuring about her strange clothes and the watercolor brushes she still held. Then the crowd parted, and there was Helena, in the gazebo. She wore her little yellow sweater and her orthopedic sneakers. She blinked at the bright colors, as though her vision had just been restored to her after a long time in darkness.
“Max?” Helena whispered.
Maxine clutched her brushes. Her aloof confidence from Kane’s brief conversation in the river was gone. She was fully present now, shaking as she looked at the person she had been waiting for.