The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  X cast his eyes around the lake.

  “Which of these holes do you choose for your grave?”

  Zoe’s father flailed wildly, but the ice held him fast.

  X ignored his exertions—he had seen such desperation many times—and pulled his shirt over his head. The man’s sins were so eager to show themselves that X’s back was burning.

  He had to turn off his mind, had to shut out the man’s questions, had to stop looking at his eyes.

  X’s body knew what to do. He just had to let his body do it.

  He dropped his shirt. It mushroomed briefly as it fell.

  He turned away from Zoe’s father, and stretched out his arms. The muscles in his back and shoulders were aching. The cold air stung his skin.

  He summoned up the man’s sins. He could feel the terrible images starting to crawl across his back.

  Zoe’s father let out a sob.

  “I know what I did!” he shouted through his tears. “You don’t have to show me. I know everything I did!”

  X was in such turmoil that the words cut through him. He felt more keenly than ever that—whether or not he was only doing what the lords had commanded, whether or not the punishment was just—he was piercing another human being’s heart. Ripper said they were dustmen, but that was a kindly lie. She knew better, and so did he. He was a killer. And worse: he was a torturer.

  He lowered his arms before the movie was over.

  His back went white.

  Behind him, Zoe’s father gave a grateful sob. He tried to stop crying but couldn’t.

  When X turned, the man’s chest was heaving and his face was a storm of tears. He looked raw and terrified. A helpless bird.

  “Wait, stop, please,” he said. “Talk to me for a second. Just for a second, okay? You love my daughter, right? I can see that. I saw the way you hugged her. I saw the way you looked at her. It’s the way—it’s the way I used to look at her mother.”

  X refused to listen. This man was nothing to him. He was just the 16th soul.

  “Stop your mouth,” he told Zoe’s father, just as he had once told Stan. “Or I will plug it with my fist.”

  Zoe’s father ignored the threat. He knew this was his last chance to speak.

  “But if you love Zoe—why do this?” he said. “Why murder her own father?”

  X knew he shouldn’t answer, but the words rushed out of him.

  “I do it because she asks me to!” he shouted. “I do it because you have hurt her who is dearest to me! I do it because either you or I must be banished to the Lowlands, and I have endured that darkness long enough!” It was as if X were defending the monstrous act not just to Zoe’s father, but to himself. He could not stop. “If I do not take your soul, I will never see Zoe again—never feel her touch, never hear her voice, never curl her hair around my fingers. My heart was born in winter, sir, and I will not go back to the cold.”

  Zoe’s father said nothing.

  He had run out of words, as they always did.

  But just as X was about to take the 16th soul down from the shed and plunge him into the lake, the 16th soul started screaming Zoe’s name.

  His voice was startling. It tore the air open.

  “Zoe!” he screamed. “Zoe! Please!”

  X turned frantically, and saw that Zoe and Ripper were still ascending the hill to the woods. They stopped now. Ripper held Zoe tightly, urging her not to turn.

  “Zoe!” her father shouted. “Listen to me! Zoe!”

  X leaped at him, and struck him hard across the face.

  “I showed you a kindness, damn you!” he said. “I could have forced you to behold all your sins, but I did not! And yet you beg your daughter for sympathy? She will not save you. She is not your daughter anymore!”

  “I don’t want her to save me,” said Zoe’s father, and again he began screaming: “Zoe! Zoe! You don’t have to look at me, just—just listen. Zoe, I’m sorry! Please, please, please know that I’m sorry. I was a disgrace as a father. As a man. As everything. I disgust myself. I don’t deserve to live. And life without you and Jonah and your mom—it’s not really living, anyway. I love you, okay? I absolutely freakin’ love you. If you don’t believe anything else I ever said, please, please, please believe that.”

  He was breathing so hard now that he had to collect himself before he could say more.

  “If me dying helps you somehow, then I’ll do it,” he shouted with what energy he had left. “I mean, I already died once. It’s gotta be easier the second time, right? I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I think you’re awesome, Zoe—and you’ll always be my girl.”

  Zoe’s father turned to X now.

  “If you want my soul, just take it,” he said. “Take it.”

  X was closing in on him, when, up on the hill, Zoe finally turned toward them. She walked back down to the lake, her steps heavy and trancelike. Ripper could not stop her. Together, they descended and stepped on the dead reeds, which crackled under their feet.

  Zoe was not looking at her father, but at X.

  Nearby, a cluster of wild turkeys, black and red against the snow, raised their heads to X now, too. Even they seemed to be waiting.

  X took the man’s slender neck in his hand. Zoe’s father gasped, but he did not resist, did not speak, did not look away.

  He just stared at X—stared at him with Jonah’s eyes.

  X began closing his fist around his windpipe.

  And then he stopped, not knowing why.

  He felt a kind of stirring in his brain—a wind almost, as if someone had cracked a window or pushed open a door.

  It was Zoe. She was searching his thoughts.

  She’d told him that he was never to search hers. “There will be no mind-melding—or whatever that is!” she’d said. Yet here she was trying to figure out what he was thinking, why he was hesitating.

  She was walking toward him across the lake, with Ripper following close behind. She was stepping around the holes. She seemed to know where they lay even without looking. And all the while, she was delving deeper and deeper into X. She was unfolding him—gently, like he was a piece of paper that might come apart in her hands. Surely, she knew what she would find? She’d taught him the word herself.

  Mercy.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the movement in his mind ceased. The wind retreated. The window closed. The door shut.

  X looked to Zoe. She’d stopped 20 feet away. She was weeping. Her hair was white with snow.

  She nodded to X. She seemed to want to reassure him, to soothe him, to make him feel loved.

  Her eyes said, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Let him go.

  X ripped Zoe’s father from the shed by his neck—the ice shattered, the plywood groaned and splintered—then threw him to the ground.

  Zoe drew closer.

  She knelt beside her father.

  X saw hope kindle in the man’s eyes, as if he expected his daughter to throw herself into his arms.

  X knew that she wouldn’t.

  “We’re letting you go,” Zoe told her father calmly, “because we don’t want to turn into you.”

  Her father began to speak, but she shook her head.

  “You don’t get to talk,” she said. “Remember?” She paused. “I was going to have X drown you in this lake, but I love him too much to make him do that. So I’m going to let you keep running and hiding and ice fishing or whatever, although—honestly?—it seems like you’re really bad at it.” Zoe looked at the auger, the fishing rods, the holes. Her father had caught nothing at all. “I never want to see you again, Dad,” she said. “I mean it. And that’s the last time I’m ever gonna call you ‘Dad.’ I’m going to try to forgive you—not because you deserve it, but because I don’t want you to mess up my heart the way Stan messed up yours. I’m going to try to remember the good stuff. There was some good stuff.” Zoe stopped, and stood. “Okay, that’s enough. I’m done talking to you. I’m gonna go and … I’m gonna go and
have a life. I’m going to have a life with X and Mom and Jonah. X and I won’t give up until we figure out how. It’s going to be a good life—and you won’t get to watch.”

  Zoe went to X. He put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her to his chest, and spoke to her quietly.

  Ripper approached Zoe’s father.

  “I would advise you to run, little rabbit,” she said. “X may not be hungry for your soul, but my own stomach is rumbling.”

  Zoe’s father got to his feet. He was sobbing, but he must have known Zoe wouldn’t listen to another word.

  He scrambled into the woods without looking back. The trees quaked and shed some snow, then settled once more.

  X had felt no joy when Zoe said she would make a life with him, for he knew how unlikely it was. He had let her father go free, so the lords would almost certainly haul him back to the Lowlands. He suspected Dervish was lurking in the forest even now. He could picture him gouging the bark of a tree with his nails, barely able to contain his glee.

  X listened. He waited. He looked to Zoe and Ripper, and saw that they were waiting, too. But everything was silent. There was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the tiny puffs of smoke it made, like steam from a train.

  He stooped to collect his clothes, and began pulling them on.

  No one spoke, for fear it would unleash something. Their eyes scanned the blackening woods.

  Nothing.

  Maybe the lords wouldn’t come? Maybe Regent had convinced them that X had been punished enough? With each moment that passed, X became more and more convinced that it was possible. He was still in the grip of the Trembling. He was still feverish, still dizzy. His body was not his own. But Zoe had nursed him before, and he felt sure that if he could just lay his head against her—if he could just feel her cool breath settling over him—they could defeat the Trembling forever. Her father would be free. So would X. The lords would not own him any longer.

  But then the buzzing began. They all heard it. It was faint but insistent. It sounded like a blackfly circling closer and closer.

  X whirled toward it.

  It was coming from Zoe.

  She searched her pockets. It was her phone.

  It was only her phone!

  Zoe and Ripper stared down to read what was written there. Their faces looked eerie in the screen’s yellow light.

  X was about to look away when Zoe gasped.

  The noise hit him like a punch.

  She seemed unable to speak, so Ripper spoke for her.

  “The lords are striking,” she said.

  X had known Ripper virtually his whole life. He had seen her fight and curse and flirt and sing. He had seen her tear out her fingernails and beg to be beaten. He had literally seen her in hell—but he’d never seen her afraid.

  She was afraid now.

  X wheeled around. The sky, the woods, the lake—they all spun before his eyes. But he found nothing to fear. The world was empty. He was certain of it.

  “I see no threat,” he said.

  Zoe held out her phone, as if he could read it.

  Her palm was shaking.

  “I d-don’t think they’re coming after us,” she said haltingly. “I th-think they’re going after Jonah.”

  twenty-two

  X and Ripper dove into holes in the ice. Zoe had begged them to take her with them but they left her standing on the lake—she would only have slowed them down.

  They rushed toward Jonah through water, then earth, then water again as they joined the stream that ran behind the Bissells’ house. X was a powerful swimmer. Ripper matched him stroke for stroke. Her hair had come loose. X could see it fanning out under the water—floating above her for a moment, then sinking down again. He didn’t know what they’d find at Zoe’s house, but he was glad to have Ripper with him. He felt there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Nor he for her. As they neared the surface, light began to leak down and glint off her dress. She shimmered like an iridescent fish.

  The cold water gummed up their muscles. It felt nearly solid. It seemed not to want to let them through. X had promised Zoe three things: that he would save Jonah, that neither he nor her mother would ever discover that her father was still alive, and that he himself would return to her one more time. But X felt no certainty now. He pictured Jonah in his room, surrounded by figurines of animals and elves. He pictured him on his ladybug bed, hugging Spock and Uhura to his chest, and trying to gentle them down with that quavering voice that seemed to run in the family: D-don’t be scared, guys. Because—because I’m n-not scared.

  As X and Ripper reached the pocket of air beneath the ice, their lungs were bursting. He nodded to her. Together they raised their fists and punched through the translucent ceiling. Ice fell into their eyes. It rained down around them in splinters.

  Ripper climbed out of the river first, her hair flat against her skull, her dress twisted and wrinkled as tissue paper. She helped X out of the water. The moon was already up.

  For a moment, they stood shivering and stamping. X felt a presence behind them. It seemed enormous. It was breathing and pulsing—and watching them. He wished with his whole being that he didn’t have to turn. But he did.

  A hundred lords stood in a chain around Zoe’s house.

  The house itself was so thickly coated with ice that X could hardly make out the windows, the roof, the doors. The land around it was ravaged and scarred. Trees had been pulled out of the ground and hurled like sticks. What was more, everything was frozen and glittering so that there was an awful beauty to the devastation: it was a wasteland strung with diamonds. The willow where Jonah had buried the Ninja Dad T-shirt lay on its side, broken and contorted as if its neck had been snapped.

  The lords glowered at X and Ripper across the upturned earth. They seemed to be daring them to step forward and engage. Their silky garments—purple and green and yellow and red—were sickeningly vivid against the desolation of the hill. Their golden bands shone in the moonlight.

  “Apparently,” said Ripper, “we will not be taking them by surprise.”

  X gave a grim laugh.

  “You have been a fine teacher to me,” he said quietly. “Might I ask you to recommend a strategy one last time? If it would help, I would trade myself for the boy a thousand times.”

  “Well, we could ask them nicely,” said Ripper. “But the fact that the lords have not already descended upon you and pulled you back to the Lowlands by your handsome hair suggests that they want more than merely to bring you home. They want to boil your heart. They want to watch as you listen to that poor boy scream.”

  Ripper paused. She seemed to regret speaking so bluntly, for X’s face was clouded with pain.

  “That being the case,” she continued, “I propose a simple, unornamented fight to the death. I have always rather enjoyed them—though they’re never quite as satisfying when no one can actually die.”

  Together, they circled the house at a safe distance, looking for weaknesses in the chain of bodies. There were none. The lords remained still, but even their stillness was full of menace. They were coiled and ready to strike. X peered into every face. Some were handsome, some ancient. Some were lovely, some desiccated or burned. No one regarded him with anything but disgust. X had questioned their authority. He had shamed them. He’d been offered an unheard-of chance to leave the Lowlands forever—a chance perhaps even the lords themselves had prayed for—and made a mockery of it. He’d refused to collect even one more soul. Now it was as if X and the lords were opposing magnets: the air between them vibrated with hatred.

  As the chain of lords snaked by the front door, he saw Regent in his deep blue robe.

  He was staring down at the snow.

  X felt a tiny flutter of hope, but almost immediately it escaped his body like one of those clouds of breath, for Regent would not speak to him. He would not so much as raise his head. He stood with his arms clasped behind his back, as if they’d been bound together—as if even his body was sa
ying, This is beyond my control.

  A voice, high and nasal, called out from farther down the chain: “Not even your faithful kitten will help you now—you have betrayed him too many times!”

  It was Dervish.

  He grinned at X, his pointy, ratlike countenance all aglow.

  “You even struck him in the face, or have you forgotten?” he continued. “Goodness, that was sweet comedy!”

  X ignored him. Ripper snarled in the lord’s direction.

  The ice on the house cracked and contracted, each spasm as loud as a rifle shot. Jonah was in there somewhere.

  X put a hand on Regent’s shoulder.

  “There is a boy in the house,” he said.

  Regent clenched his teeth, but did not reply.

  “You must spare him,” X pleaded.

  Again, there was no answer, though the muscles in the lord’s neck and jaw twitched violently.

  “Please, Tariq,” said X.

  At this, a gasp of shock went up among the lords and traveled down the chain like a lit fuse. Regent closed his eyes as a wave of dread passed through him. Even Ripper was struck dumb. She pulled X away from Regent just as Dervish hooted with glee and came scampering toward them.

  “The kitten TOLD YOU HIS TRUE NAME, did he?” he said. “My, what a grand romance you have had! Did you sit by a river and feed each other figs?”

  Dervish puffed out his chest, and looked down the line of lords, expecting laughter. There was none.

  Ripper, enjoying his humiliation, sneered at him.

  “Will you not shut your mouth just this once?” she said. “No one likes you.”

  Dervish’s face flushed and his wormy lips quivered as he tried to think of a clever response. Finally, he turned to X.

  “What absurd friends you have,” he said. “Yet I suppose only a lunatic would join you on an errand such as this. She shall be punished, too—as will the dim piece of meat you call Banger, for serving as your messenger boy.”

  There was another sound like a gunshot. The ice had contracted again. It was strangling the house.

  Jonah was in there somewhere.

  X remembered how they’d all huddled together during the first ice storm. He remembered how it felt to be trapped in a groaning house. He hoped Jonah was looking out at him now—he wanted him to know that he’d come for him. But X couldn’t see a thing through the ice. Jonah might have been banging on the glass with a little dinosaur in his hand. He might have been screaming. X would never hear him.