The king rolled his eyes.
“And isn’t there a chance,” Kyle said, “that, if we leave it open, it will suck in our kingdom, too?”
The king sighed and flopped his head back on the mattress.
“All right, what do you suggest?”
“Let me resize the Wall,” Kyle said, “bring it to the mouth of the Vortex, and use it to plug the hole. It’ll stop the wind and lock our enemies inside all at once.”
“No! No! Absolutely not. It is one thing to leave a remaining Ghelm population of questionable intent alive in this world, but it is quite another thing to remove our only proven line of defense and send it to another land!”
“It’s not your only line of defense anymore,” Kyle said, sounding hurt. “You have me.”
“I know, Kyle, but . . . things one relies on . . . if one relies on them too heavily, they have a way of . . . disappearing.”
“I’m not going to . . .” Kyle said, “Look, if it’ll make you feel better, that barrier I put up around the castle after I teleported everyone inside during the attack? I’ll put up a bigger one of those before I leave for the Ghelm mountain, okay?”
The king lay silent for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. Finally he said: “Optimism does not come easy to me, Kyle.”
“I know,” Kyle said.
“Trust does not come easily to me.”
“I know.”
The king sighed. “The plan is altered.”
“Thanks, Your Majesty.”
“But not the part that will send him,” the king said, pointing to Tom without looking at him, “to a mysterious void. That part remains the same.”
“I understand,” Tom said.
“I’ve read him,” Kyle said. “He doesn’t want to hurt us.”
“I suggest you think back to what I said a moment ago,” the king said. “About trust.”
He turned over on the mattress, facing the wall. He was snoring before Tom and Kyle were all the way out of the room.
They walked through the throne room. Tom turned to go back to his cell.
“There’s an extra mattress in my room,” Kyle said.
“You sure?” Tom said.
Kyle nodded.
27
TOM AND KYLE were standing in the crater at first light.
“Normally you fall backward,” Kyle said. “This one, you fall forward.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I mean,” Kyle said, “there’s other magic stuff going on that I have to do, but as far as what you have to do that’s different, that’s it.”
“No problem,” Tom said. He was tremendously scared. He had no idea what was going to happen, what the void would be like, but he didn’t want to let Kyle in on any of this fear. He wanted to bear it silently. Heroically, even. He wanted to bear it like someone who, standing in this very crater, had cursed his friend and his friend’s kingdom and ended up trying to destroy them, and now wanted so, so badly to make up for it.
“Let me know when it’s done!” the king shouted from over the ridge. “I’m ready to greet my old friend!” The king wanted to be there when J took residency in Tom’s body, but he didn’t want to see Tom off.
“Is there anything else? I mean, anything else you need to know about the Ghelm, or their kingdom, or—” Tom said.
“No,” Kyle said. “I mean, maybe. But either way, we have to start now. This thing’s going to take J the whole day to build, and we want to attack in the dead of night, when they’re sleeping.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “Tell him to take care of me, okay? I need this body.”
Kyle didn’t laugh or acknowledge the joke. He just frowned, looked down, and started sweeping the sand Tom would land on in a very specific pattern. “You’re not your body,” Kyle said. “Your body’s on Earth. What you are right now, what J’s going to inhabit, is a copy of you.”
“So, let’s say J dies here . . .”
“You shut up!” the king shouted from over the hill.
“The you that’s you lives on in the void forever. Your body on Earth continues on with that temporary soul inside of it.”
“Okay,” Tom said. He wished he hadn’t heard that. The thought of his body going about its business on Earth, filled with an impostor living out the rest of his life, was far scarier to him than the prospect of actually dying.
“Don’t worry,” Kyle said. “He’s not going to fail. You ready?”
“Yes,” Tom said, and he realized he had just created another alternate lie-world, one in which he was ready.
Kyle stood behind Tom.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Kyle’s hands hit Tom’s back. Tom flew forward into the sand, then through the sand, into the world between worlds that was not a world at all.
28
WHEN A MEAN kid in second grade had told Tom that there was no heaven, Tom had spent that entire night in his bed with Pokémon sheets trying to think of what else there could be after you died. Did you just float in nothing? he thought. And if you were supposed to spend eternity in heaven, did that mean you instead spent eternity in that nothing? He had closed his eyes and tried to imagine that, that blackness, forever. And then at a certain point he stopped even thinking about the nothingness and got stuck thinking about forever. Forever. The craziest thing about forever is that it went on forever. Thinking about forever there in bed in second grade, Tom felt like he might break his brain. And floating in the void after the double soul-swap, he felt like he had taken up residence in that scary broken-brained place he had imagined was “forever” when he was very small.
A long time passed before anything happened. It wasn’t forever, because it ended. Something happened. The void stopped being just unlimited black. There was the vaguest red tint appearing somewhere. That meant he could see, even if he didn’t have actual physical eyeballs.
Then the redness started to drift to one side of Tom’s eyeless vision and then to the other. Something came into focus. A light. The light got bigger and brighter. Something like a jellyfish made of light floated up to Tom. Tom was relieved because something floating up to him meant that there was, in fact, a him. And he could begin to see, within the light-jellyfish, faces. Human ones. Not physical or real: just flashes, images in the pulsating mass of light. They darted around inside the thing like a string of Christmas lights wrapped in a ball and set to “chase” mode. On the third or fourth rotation, Tom realized it was the same face. And then, coming from everywhere, an echo that slowly became a voice.
“Youyouyouyouyouyououoouuooou’re not Jason.”
Tom didn’t know how to answer without a mouth or a body.
“No,” he answered. Oh, so that was how. His voice didn’t have the strange reverse echo, and it didn’t come from everywhere. It just came from him.
“Youyouyouyouyouyouyouyooooou’re in Jason’s spot.”
“You guys have spots?” Tom said. “Even in a void?”
“Sususususuuuuuuuuure,” the thing said. “And this is a good one.”
“Oh,” Tom said.
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII was joking.”
“Oh, sorry,” Tom said. “Ha.”
“Yoyouoououououououou don’t have as good of a sense of humor as Jason,” said the thing. “Where is he?”
“Who’s Jason?” Tom asked.
“Hihihihihihihihihis soul is usually here,” said the thing, “except recently sometimes it’s not. He’s been getting to go to his home world, a place called Earth, and act as this boy.”
“Did he say the boy’s name?”
“Tttttttttttttttim.”
“Tom?”
“Tttttthhhat’s it. Tom.”
“You mean J,” Tom said. “You’re talking about a man named
J, like the letter.”
“Iiiiiiiiii’m talking about a man called Jason, whose spot this is. I’ve been here for as long as I’ve been here, and one day, he appeared. And I come by when I come by, and we share stories from being alive. He’s had lots of new stories since getting to go back to this Earth. It’s nice to hear about life in a world. We don’t even talk about what he does sometimes. We just talk about how nice it is to feel like you have a body, or to feel how an object is heavy, or very light, or how nice it is to feel time pass. I miss him when he goes, but I’m glad he gets to go and bring the stories back. I was getting pretty tired of the old one.”
“What was the old one?” Tom asked.
“Ssssssssssssssso he came from this place called Earth, and when he was a boy, he stumbled upon a portal to another world. We know about these things in my world, and in many other worlds, but Earth doesn’t know they have them. He says he found it playing in a ‘rubbish heap.’ And on the other side was this kingdom without a name, and they were very poor and very scared, because they spent all of their time fighting off attacks from a much stronger kingdom. Their existence was defined only by survival. The king of this kingdom without a name had a son, and this son befriended the newcomer, Jason, and convinced his father to let him stay. He taught Jason what little ancestral magic he knew, and Jason took to it very quickly, and had soon broken those spells down into their component parts to figure out the very fabric of magic, and was able to build grand spells of his own design. So that the kingdom might for once worry about something besides its own destruction, he created an invisible barrier around it, which their enemies could not penetrate. Contained within this sphere was a lake, and contained within that lake was the portal that took him back and forth between Earth and his new home. By night, he and teams of divers would bring ‘rubbish’ from Earth and make glorious things out of it, much the way he had taken the native magic of the nameless kingdom and made it into something better. Safe from harm, the kingdom experienced a golden age of peace and prosperity.
“The king of the rival kingdom extended a message of peace to the kingdom without a name. Jason went abroad as the rival king requested. Once there, he told Jason of a master plan to conquer the All-Worlds, if only Jason would share with him the magic he’d developed. Jason refused. He fled. But while there . . .”
“He developed a plan to destroy the other kingdom once and for all.”
“Yyeeeessssssss,” the thing said. “How did you know?”
“What’s your name?” Tom said.
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIII’ve forgotten,” the thing said. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Tom,” Tom said.
“Tththththththe famous Tom,” it said. “Jason has said, from what he has seen of your life, being inside of it, that you are very much like him. He is reminded of himself by you.”
“Really?” Tom said. Tom let himself feel proud of the comparison for just a second.
“Ssssssso then, you know the rest of the story?”
“He was killed trying to pull off his plan,” said Tom.
“Nnnnnnnot just killed,” the thing that had forgotten its name said. “Captured and tortured and then killed once he still would not give up his secrets. And he says he knew he was dead, and then he was pulled up. Pulled up, he says. Pulled up to here. And the first time he said that, I was glad to hear it, because it means I am not truly dead. I am just between places. Now, I am not so sure I am still glad. I grow weary.”
“You might get pulled out into a world,” Tom said. “Like Jason.”
“The idea is appealing. I would also settle for my friend Jason returning here. It’s good to have friends.”
“It is,” Tom said.
And then, he was no longer in between places. He was pulled up and up and up, out of the void, and into life.
He was flat on his back. His head was wet, like when he’d awoken in the nameless kingdom soaked in thinkdrink. But it wasn’t a cold wet this time. It was a warm wet.
He reached up with one hand and touched the wet spot. He looked at his hand with the eyes he now had back, the way he’d done when he was brainwashed and fighting Kyle and he’d thought there was blood on his face but it was actually tears.
This time, it was blood. Lots of it.
29
SOMETHING HAD GONE very, very wrong.
Tom was staring at the ceiling. He seemed to do a lot of that everywhere he went. It was kind of his superpower. But this ceiling was glass, with multicolored gas swimming behind it. He was back in his body in the Ghelm kingdom and he knew that something had gone wrong.
He looked to his left. There were bloody animal footprints leading across the glass surface of the floor and out of the arched doorway. He had run afoul of an Elgg, it seemed. Maybe he’d played dead. And he was bleeding, and soon he might really be dead.
He was wearing the frayed clothing they had placed on him before he’d awoken in Crap Kingdom, jeans and an old black T-shirt, not entirely unlike what he might have worn on Earth. In place of a belt, a crude rope made of tied-together plastic shopping bags was strung through his belt loops. On his right hip, hanging off the rope, was another plastic shopping bag with something inside of it. It was small but extremely heavy. He reached inside and pulled out an old water bottle with its cap taped shut thoroughly with duct tape. Inside of the water bottle was what looked like a tiny self-contained galaxy. Its center burned brightly, throwing off little whorls of blinding light. This must be the grenade J needed to build, Tom thought. The Reverse Worldflow, the spell you couldn’t just cast, but actually had to hurl into the Vortex. If it was here in a plastic bag tied to his jeans, it meant the mission had gone only as far as J breaking into the Ghelm kingdom before he got Tom’s body mauled by an Elgg.
There was a significant chunk taken out of Tom’s shoulder and distinct claw marks in the black fabric of his shirt. The Elgg must have figured him for incapacitated and gone off to alert his master, which meant there wasn’t much time. And his shoulder didn’t hurt that much. Tom didn’t know if that was good or the worst thing imaginable. No, it couldn’t be the worst thing imaginable, the worst thing imaginable was that he was here, in his own body, and the mission had gone awry. He was the last person in any universe who should be doing this. The very last person.
Tom cleared blood from his eyes and looked around. He was in some sort of armament room. Suits of Vapornaut armor lined the walls. So this was where it would end, and some soul, be it J or some other anonymous placeholder soul thrilled to be freed from its luminous jellyfish form and given a place in a body in a world, would rattle on in Tom’s body for the rest of that body’s life. Him, the being that really was Tom Parking, would end here, on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, which was pretty much all he ever did.
Something thundered up from inside of his soul or his mind or his heart and spoke to him. And it didn’t tell him to be brave. He wasn’t suddenly clever or magical. He was still himself. He was not supposed to be in his body right now, but, by accident, he was himself, and now something was speaking from inside of him.
It said: get up.
Be stupid, be weak, be confused, be scared, but GET UP.
He breathed in and exhaled. There was blood in his nose, too. That was fine. He’d had bloody noses all the time as a kid. This part, the bloody-nose part, life had prepared him for.
He tried to sit up. That part was hard, but only because he was out of shape. It would have been hard for him to do a sit-up even if he wasn’t bleeding to death. In his physical prime, halfway through freshman PE, he’d been able to do thirty sit-ups in a row with minimal complaint. He could squeeze out just one right now, couldn’t he? He did it.
As soon as he was upright, he started to feel the shoulder. The pain was impossible. He hissed and whimpered the way he’d seen an actor playing a Civil War soldier do in a movie t
hey’d watched in history class. The soldier was about to get his leg amputated above the knee. That guy had had a belt to bite on. Tom didn’t. He only had a rope made of shopping bags, and he probably needed it to hold his pants up. He’d spent too much time in this world without pants already. Also, he needed it to hold the grenade. There wasn’t time to bite down on anything. It was time to stand up.
He had shoes on. That was exciting. They didn’t match, but they were both sneakers, and the one on his left foot was a left shoe and the one on the right foot was a right shoe. It was remarkable, really. It was a golden age of correct clothing in Crap Kingdom. He got his correctly-shoed feet underneath him.
Now that he was standing, the pain had gone beyond impossible to somewhere in the neighborhood of super impossible. He could actually hear blood coming from the wound. He was sure that wasn’t good. Right now, finally on his feet, Tom’s right hand was numb. His whole arm, in fact. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need his arm to walk. He walked through pools of his own vital fluids to the nearest suit of Vapornaut armor.
This part would be easy, he thought, because he remembered putting on armor back when he thought he was Doondredge’s right-hand man. This kind was a little more complicated, because it was designed for flight, but it was mostly the same concept. He kicked off his shoes and stepped into the spiked diamond boots. They locked on automatically once they sensed there were feet inside of them. The legs came next. He untied the plastic bag containing the grenade from his jeans and placed it gently on the floor, upright so it wouldn’t roll away, or get all bloody, or worse. The leg pieces also clicked on automatically once he had them in the general area of his legs. The codpiece—it was it a codpiece, wasn’t it?—went the same way, and Tom realized it was the most supported he’d ever felt in that area. Maybe codpieces were the real long-term solution to his underwear dilemma.
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