by Joe Ducie
“This feels so normal,” Annie said.
“Heh. Wait until we get outside. It’s a bit more majestic and otherworldly out there.”
“How so?”
“You’ll see. Crystal everywhere. Forget has a bit of a thing for crystal and marble. Are you sure you’re doing okay?”
Annie chuckled nervously. “I’m sure when I stop and let this and all you’ve told me sink in, I’ll need a stiff drink, but until then, I’m keeping it together.” She smiled, and I was dazzled. “For Sam.”
“Well, when we’re done, you, me, and that fiancé of yours will drink McSorley’s dry.” If you’re still alive, I thought but didn’t say. “For Sam.”
“You’re on, Mr. Hale.”
She watched the crowds, which, I have to admit, were fascinating. Easy to forget how diverse the multiverse was, and what better place to see diversity than an arrivals hall. People dressed in robes and gowns mingled with folk in business suits and old, steel armor. People wearing masks, with strange and colorful haircuts, laughed and strolled along the large hall hand in hand. Small children, some with skin as blue as the sky and eyes as purple as lavender, ran in circles around their parents, giggling, squealing and having an altogether good time.
“I thought everyone would be staring,” Annie said. “Especially at you with that sword. But here I’m the one staring. Goodness, does that child have a tail?”
I gripped the hilt of the weapon and smirked. “You shoulda seen my last sword. Pure light with white rose petals set into the blade. If I’d had that sword when Emissary attacked, we wouldn’t be here right now, and Sam Grey would still be alive.”
“Are there weapons laws here?” Annie asked. “I guess this is a question I should’ve asked sooner, but will I get in trouble for carrying my firearm to Ascension City?”
“No, you won’t get in trouble for that.” I chuckled. “For traveling with me, on the other hand... Well, let’s just see what we see when we get there.”
Sophie and Ethan returned, having fought their way through the crowds, and stood above Annie and me, forming a loose circle around our seats. Ethan had gotten himself some marvelous concoction of sugar and cream resting in a wafer cone.
“Thought you’d want to see this,” Sophie said, tossing me a newspaper.
“What’s this now?”
“Read the headline,” she said grimly.
KING FARADAY MOVES CASCADE FLEET TO WAR FOOTING
“Shit,” I said and read an excerpt from the front page article aloud. “It’s been five good years since the Renegade Dynasty sued for peace following the Degradation of Atlantis by the exiled Knight, Declan Hale, yet today Ascension City awoke to measures not implemented since the darkest days of the Tome Wars... Blah, blah, blah... abuse of power... blah, blah... The Knights have failed to disclose just why these measures have been taken, leaving the United Worlds of Forget to question just what the increased military presence in our streets... Huh, now that’s encouraging.”
“How is this encouraging?” Sophie asked. She was fiddling with her Polaroid camera and retrieved a fresh cartridge of film from her shoulder bag and slammed it home.
“If he’s worried, if Forget’s on edge, I’m more likely to be received without them leveling a death sentence on my head.” Still, grim news across several worlds today, it seemed. “I used to command the Cascade Fleet, remember.”
“It’s in English,” Annie said, surprised, scanning the newspaper. “Have we really left Earth, Declan, or is this some sort of joke?”
“Why’d you say that? Just because it’s in English?”
“Well, yeah. That’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “English, a rough dialect of it anyway, came to Earth from Forget, not the other way round, Annie.”
Annie played with that thought for a moment and then threw up her hands. “I guess I’ll keep taking your word on these things.”
I read the rest of the article in silence, as Annie watched the crowds and Sophie snapped pictures of Ethan making weird poses and eating his ice cream. No doubt he was planning his next status update or whatever in the seven hells he and Sophie did on those damned computers.
Nothing of much use in the rest of the article. The weather in Ascension City was a sunny but humid eighty-two degrees. Shorts and T-shirt weather.
“What are you up to, brother?” I said, putting the paper aside. “Family, huh? Come on, team, let’s find a vendor and get this over with.”
I kept my head down and shoulders hunched. Again, this place was a thoroughfare of every culture under every sun, but I was still worlds-famous for all the wrong reasons. The last thing we needed was a brawl. So Sophie and Ethan bought us tickets on the next train to Ascension City while I hung back with Annie and explained a few more things about the Lexicon.
“Next train leaves from Platform 47 in fifteen minutes,” ’Phie said, handing us each a ticket. “Almost at the point of no return, Declan, you know?”
I gave her my most reassuring grin and squeezed her hand. Her concern, her long loyalty, was always a source of warmth and strength. “You see me doing anything silly, make sure you tell me,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.
We stepped out of the station and into a mini-city.
A wide, redbrick promenade stretched from the terminal and away into the distance. Silver skyscrapers, home to the hundreds of technicians that kept this place operational, and part of an intricate system that powered the thousands of doorways linked to the Lexicon network, ran parallel to the promenade. The Pillars of Creation, as they had become known. Three skyscrapers on either side of the inter-dimensional highway, standing tall like sentinels guarding the way between the worlds.
“Oh my,” Annie breathed, a hand on her chest. Her mouth hung open, agape at the wonder, and her jaw nearly hit the floor when she looked up.
In the sky overhead spun a globe reminiscent of Earth—a blue and green marble, turning softly. But the landmasses were wrong. Golden sparks leaped across the surface of the globe as if they were shooting stars. A similar globe, miles across, hung in another corner of the sky, among the clouds, wreathed in golden sparks. Another claimed the western horizon, and shimmered in the sun from on high. The globe faded away, and another took its place. Then another.
The Atlas Lexicon—a living, breathing network of worlds, flaring and dying, as gateways between them were utilized for travel.
Most of the globes spun in the sky for only seconds before being replaced with another, often stranger, world. Worlds as red as Mars or ringed like Saturn. Small worlds, large worlds, worlds of pure diamond or of smoke and starlight, and worlds devoid of water. The globes constantly changed, sometimes faster than the eye could follow. Only one world remained constant—unchanged and unmoved. Countless golden sparks danced across the surface of this particular globe, and I smiled softly at the sight of it. So did Sophie, as she gently squeezed my hand. We were looking at our old neighborhood. The home world of the Knights Infernal.
Ascension City.
“Oh my,” Annie said again, a touch breathless. “It’s like there’s a dozen moons in the sky. Are they... they’re not real, are they?”
“They’re real projections,” I said, “of people traveling between worlds using the Atlas Lexicon right now. Hovering in the sky above us are dozens of crystal spheres, and the Lexicon projects the pathways onto the surface of the spheres. Rather pretty, I’ve always thought.”
“That’s freakin’ beautiful,” Ethan said and finished his ice cream. He raised his smart phone and snapped a quick pic of the Globescape, as the crystal spheres were known.
Our train to Ascension City was leaving in ten minutes, Platform 47, which was on the left side of the promenade and down a flight of steps into the network of subway tunnels running beneath the Lexicon. We shuffled through the crowds, swiped our tickets at the turnstiles, and mingled with the throngs of daily commuters just as though we were in any train station back on True Earth.
Annie was still marveling at how absurdly normal the process was when we boarded the train—a steel carriage with comfortable velvet booth seats—and sat. Not five minutes later, the train pulled away from the platform and picked up a great deal of speed.
“So how does this work now?” Annie asked. “Like the portal at McSorley’s?”
“Not quite, no. The most amazing thing about this world, the world of the Lexicon, is that it exists as a sort of nexus point for hundreds of pathways through the Void. Natural pathways, really, that we built train tracks on. The Pillars keep them constantly cycling and from... crossing over.”
“What would happen—?”
Sophie drove her fist into her palm. “Splat,” she said. “But this is no more dangerous than a normal train.”
“It’s just up ahead,” I said, craning my neck to get a look alongside and down the darkened tunnel. “See that light? That’s the path through the Void.” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “On the other side is Ascension City!”
The train slowed as it approached the barrier, enough so that we had time to watch the forward compartment of the train disappear over the horizon of the wall of light. Annie gasped as the rippling puddle raced toward us, swallowing the train whole.
“Does it hur—?”
When the barrier of light struck Annie and me, the brand on my arm flared to life with sickly, red flame. I cried out in pain, and Annie grabbed my shoulder. Strange, ethereal light shone in her eyes, but she looked afraid and uncertain, and then the cabin was plunged into darkness. Something went wrong.
The train—Ethan and Sophie—disappeared, and Annie clung to my wrist, dug her nails into my skin, and gasped as we were wrenched back, as if hooked through the navel, and sent tumbling into the black, endless Void.
Heading home, indeed.
THE SECOND ACT
You used to be someone...
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
~Anna Quindlen
Chapter Eleven
Dream a Little Dream
Pulled across the Void, I gripped Annie’s hands hard, lest we spin apart and lose each other forever.
Annie’s eyes did a strange thing. They changed color.
Jade-green blurred to sapphire-blue, to ruby-red, and finally settled on amethyst-purple. She seemed to have no idea this was happening as we fell through white nothing. Only moments had passed since we were on the train, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we were sliding across the outskirts of the Void. Caught between worlds and universes and left stranded—two sailors thrown overboard without a life jacket.
Annie gasped and blinked rapidly. A trail of luminescent smoke bled from her ever-changing eyes, and we were jerked to a sudden halt in midair. A bright flash of cerulean light later, reality reasserted itself.
My brand flared and spiked with pain, and the white nothing disappeared. Annie and I hit the ground hard, gasping in warm air, blinking against the glow of the mauve sky, and listening to the gentle swash of a tide moving in and out.
I took a deep breath and choked on a mouthful of sand. Spluttering and cursing, I managed to stand and helped Annie to her feet. As unexpectedly as we’d been thrust into the Void, we had escaped. But damned if I knew the how or the why of it.
“How did you do that?” I asked. “We were unanchored, spinning through endless nothing. You found us a port in the storm. Everything I’ve ever known about the Void tells me that should not have been possible. And your eyes...” were jade-green again, back to normal. Did she even know what had happened? I’d known a girl once before with ever-changing eyes. Sweet Clare Valentine. Just a quirk of Will, we’d always thought, but Annie had done something. She was not Willful; before my brand, I would’ve sensed her power if she’d had any. What had I sensed in Kings Park two days ago?
“Declan, you’re staring at me,” Annie breathed. “Look at this place...”
Putting aside my concerns for now, I did just that, and my jaw dropped.
We stood on a beach of purple sand. Gentle waves of lime-green water lapped calmly against the shoreline. About a hundred billion stars shone overhead, caught in bands of fiery interstellar cloud. Three moons hung in the sky, one as red as a ripe cherry, and two a soft amber, like runny honey.
Annie found my hand and clasped it tightly as we stared at our surroundings, utterly at a loss for words. I’d seen a lot of amazing sights in my life—worlds of such beauty and splendor, horror and tragedy—but never anything like this. I didn’t know who or what could dream up such a sight, but it was more than that. Something was different about this place.
This world, wherever it was, felt… soft. Intangible. Like a dream or somewhere in between. Yes, that was it. This world felt in between. Like the first few seconds after waking.
Paper lanterns of warm candlelight were strung underneath the leaning boughs of tall palm trees away to our right, and looking what felt like north with the ocean on our left, we saw some strange things. An astronaut, garbed in his spacesuit and holding a surfboard, appeared on the edge of the shore and disappeared. A three-headed dog the size of a minivan galloped through the sand and into the thick palm trees, chasing after a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and bowler hat. Spheres of wraithlike light danced along the surface of the water, and as the spheres drew close, riding the swash, I saw that they were alive—little tiny people, fae creatures, riding glowing dragonflies. They dipped below the surface of the water and were gone.
“Where are we, Declan?” Annie asked. “This is…”
“… absurd.”
“Yes.”
I gestured vaguely with my free hand. “But wonderfully so.”
Annie squeezed my hand and let it go. “Oh, yes.” A black woman with no arms appeared half-buried in the sand. She smiled and faded away. “Is this… is this Forget?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and that was the truth. “There’s True Earth, the Void, and Forget. Three states of existence, but this doesn’t feel like any of them. We’re... off the map here, sweet thing.”
“So how do we get home?”
I barked out a rich and genuine laugh. “I don’t know. Isn’t that something?”
Annie mulled this over for a few seconds. “So what do we do? What happened to us?”
“We were thrown from the pathway through the Void. When the barrier at the Atlas Lexicon hit us, we were... knocked back, for some reason.” I massaged my forehead and sighed. “I think this damn brand on my arm had something to do with it. What I don’t understand is how you got dragged along with me.”
“What about Ethan and Sophie?”
“They’ll be in Ascension City, by now. Alone. With any luck ’Phie will reach Aaron, an old friend, and lay low until we can catch up.”
Annie nodded, a hand on her hip. “Okay. So that brings us back to the start—what do we do?”
I looked up and down the wondrous beach as more wraithlike people and creatures disappeared. Something was... routine, about how they were appearing and fading. I watched a man in a lounge chair, smoking a pipe and reading the paper, get dragged out to sea. When the tide washed back in, he was gone, but in his place was a large, stuffed monkey clapping symbols.
“They come and go with the tide,” I said. “How odd.”
“Declan?” Annie waved her hand in front of my face. “Concentrate. Let’s keep moving, okay?”
“Right, yeah.” I blinked and nodded. “That’s a plan. North or south?”
“North feels like moving forward, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Surely does.” Given that we had no earthly idea which direction was north, as the moons in the sky, strewn amidst the distant interstellar clouds, were both rising and falling, Annie and I took off left up the beach, toward a curve in the shoreline a few miles away.
We walked, admiring the alien scenery and marveling at the gentle absurdity
of this world. I strained my memory back to the world lists—tomes I’d been required to study day and night at the Infernal Academy—but could not for the life of me put a name to this beauty. A true gem of the Story Thread, hanging pristine and shining against the dark.
“I don’t know where we are,” I said to Annie. “Perhaps a world created after I was exiled from the Knights. Somewhere new. But the Degradation…”
“Maybe,” Annie said, “and I know I’m new to all this, but I get a feeling of... of old, from this place. Do you?”
I shrugged and pointed at a young boy squatting in the sea. He waddled a few feet into the swash. As the tide receded, I expected the little fellow to disappear. But he didn’t. He stayed. “I don’t think he’s... whatever the rest of these people are. Illusions, or whatever. He’s not disappearing.”
“Well, let’s have a chat with him,” Annie suggested, and stepped over to the edge of the swash, crunching squeaky sand underfoot.
The boy sat in the surf, wearing what looked like an old toga, Ancient Roman style. A golden brooch, shaped like a rose, held the cloth together at his shoulder. He had his face stuffed nose-deep in a mango the size of a football. Sticky, yellow fruit clung to his cheeks and dribbled down his chin under a mop of unruly, jet-black hair.
“Hello,” Annie said. “Um... what’s your name?”
The young boy looked up and frowned. He put his thumb up, stuck his tongue between his teeth, and squinted at us. “You two don’t rightly belong,” he said, tossing his half-eaten fruit into the swash. “Watcha doin’ here?”
“We’re lost,” I said, wishing I had even an ounce of power so I could extend my senses toward the boy and see, among other things, if he were human. He looked human, but then so did Emissary until he breathed hot-pink fireballs. “Wondering where we are. Do you know?”
The boy nodded and stepped up onto the beach out of the surf. He wore loose leather sandals on his feet. “You’re on the shore, aren’t you? Same as me.”