by Ted Sanders
Horace waited for Chloe to say something, to ask the obvious question. He realized she was waiting for him to do the same. “And where did the portal lead?” he said.
“Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean,” Falo said. “Far out to sea, as far as one can go. A thousand miles from the nearest point of land.”
The room fell silent. Horace tried to picture it—the round gate of the portal, hanging above an endless reach of churning water, as far from anything as could be. A long body tumbling through the portal, plunging into the cold water.
The portal shrinks to nothing, vanishes.
And then: only the empty sky, and the sea.
“You killed him,” Horace said.
“Oh, yes,” said Falo pertly. “Killing him was never not an option. But the way it happened . . . I sometimes think of it. He fell into a distant sea, with no hope of rescue. He drowned there, far from everything. It was a bitter end for Ja’kathra Sevlo.”
Horace startled. “Wait, Ja’kathra . . . Sevlo?”
Chloe had caught it, too. “Like Ja’raka Sevlo. You’re saying this rival of yours was related to Dr. Jericho?”
“His brother,” said Falo.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Chloe said. “So the instrument that Joshua is carrying now, while he’s held captive by Dr. Jericho and carting Isabel around the world, is the same instrument that was used to kill Dr. Jericho’s brother?”
“Yes,” Falo said.
“And it was the Fel’Daera that revealed the plan to kill him,” said Horace. “The same instrument you only made in order to prevent Kathra from taking the Starlit Loom in the first place.”
“Yes,” said Falo. “And in that sense, the Fel’Daera ended up doing precisely what I meant it to the day I forged it. It kept Hiraethel safe.”
“More tangles,” Horace murmured, trying to digest it all.
“Why are you telling us all this?” Chloe asked Falo. “One Mothergate is already gone, and the other two won’t last the week. In a few days, none of this will matter. Most likely, we’ll all be dead.”
“If we succeed,” Falo pointed out.
“But even if we fail, we’ll die anyway,” Chloe said. “So again, why are you telling us these things—about the box sending objects into every future, about the reasons you made the Fel’Daera, about Kathra—if death is so close?”
Falo seemed to consider the question long and hard. It was a question Horace didn’t really need the answer to. He wanted to know these things, needed to know them, even if he only had a few more days to live with the truth.
When Falo spoke, the words came out slowly and cautiously. “Despite my confidence—my belief—in what the next few days might bring, our futures are not yet forged,” she said. “No one will play a greater role in forging those futures than the two of you. And I cannot place our history’s end in the hands of those who do not even know that history.”
“But there’s a part of the history I still don’t know,” said Horace.
“Indeed,” Falo said. “The most vital part. The part that will be the hardest to hear.”
“Samuel.”
“Yes.” Falo sighed. “In time, Elizabeth grew older and faded. Other Keepers came and went, friends and companions. But then Samuel came through the Find, and his thinking was clouded from the start. He learned about the Wardens’ true purpose from Dr. Jericho himself, before he was ready. When I told him the full tale—a tale he only half understood, or believed—he became convinced that the Fel’Daera could save us. He reasoned that if the problem lay with the tangles between universes, the solution was self-evident.”
“Remove those universes,” Horace said.
“Precisely. Although utterly without merit, Samuel’s plan was simple: witness a single future through the Fel’Daera, thereby eliminating all other possible futures, and then walk the willed path. He believed that by rigorously obeying the Fel’Daera, he could eventually forge a path upon which the Mothergates could remain. He thought if he could force the single universe he witnessed to walk that path with him, all would be well.”
“And the astrolabe?” Horace asked.
“Samuel was obsessed with sending the astrolabe through the Fel’Daera. He insisted that if he could manage to send it, it would be proof that he had achieved what he most desired. A single future, unalterable. Uncluttered by the messy possibilities of the multiverse. But his aspirations were pure madness.” Falo gestured at the walls around them, at the sprawling, branching tree that crept along them. “No one can contain the unrelenting spread of the multiverse. Not even the Keeper of the Fel’Daera.” She looked pointedly at Horace. “Not even a Paragon.”
“You don’t need to warn me,” Horace said.
“Which is why I have not spoken to you of Samuel before now,” Falo said with a kind smile. “His is a cautionary tale you did not need, Horace Andrews.”
“But all that trying he did,” said Horace. “It messed with the multiverse even more, didn’t it? He made the tangles worse.” He fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’ve heard a lot of bad things about the Fel’Daera. Isabel said it’s done more damage than any other ten instruments combined.”
“It depends on what we mean by ‘harm,’” Falo said. “The more tangled the multiverse becomes, the more quickly the Mothergates will close. Remember that the multiverse is self-correcting—it will not destroy parts of itself unless it is forced to, and we will only force it to if we prevent the Mothergates from closing as they should. It is true that no other instrument has done more to disturb the multiverse than the Fel’Daera—with or without Samuel. But those disturbances have only hastened the necessary death of the Mothergates.”
Horace leaned in. “Did you know that would happen? When you made the Fel’Daera, did you know it would create more tangles?”
“Yes.”
“But it didn’t stop you,” said Chloe.
“Far from it,” said Falo, sounding surprised. “In fact, I considered it a benefit.”
Chloe blinked. “So the dark sides to the Fel’Daera—Samuel, thrall-blight, all the rest . . . you think these are actually good things?”
“If they bring us closer to that which must occur, yes.”
“Closer to our own deaths, you mean,” said Chloe.
“Closer to a place where countless other lives are saved.” Falo turned her golden eyes to Horace. “I knew what Samuel was doing. I could have stopped him, if I chose. But I did not choose to do it.”
“So what happened to him?”
“He died,” Falo said simply. “Through the Fel’Daera, he witnessed his own death at the hands of the Altari.”
“Which Altari?” Chloe demanded.
“It does not matter,” said Falo. “That particular death did not come. For the first time since becoming a Keeper, Samuel refused to walk the willed path. He rejected the path utterly, fleeing his own foreseen death. He opened the Fel’Daera again and again, seeking a different way forward. But in every viewing—hundreds of them during that final day—death came for him, in one form or another. Each time, Samuel took steps to ensure that that death could not occur. And that is how he died.”
“Thrall-blight,” Horace whispered.
“Yes. We felt it as it was happening—all of us. So desperate was Samuel’s fear that his struggles to disobey the Fel’Daera shook the very foundations of the Mothergates. The multiverse itself felt the tremors, and the Medium roiled with poison. Indeed, Samuel’s last day as a Keeper set in motion the Mothergates’ final death throes. A day that we thought might not come for another century was now no more than a couple of decades away. A blink of an eye.”
Horace hardly knew what to say. Thrall-blight was a sickness like no other, one he had only experienced a couple of times. It brought such horrible, novel pain that he could easily imagine dying from it. But he could not imagine what that death would feel like.
“And so the Council told you to destroy the Fel’Daera,” Chloe said to Falo. “You lied
and said that you did, but really you took it to the Warren. To Mr. Meister. Not long after that, my mom tuned it—getting rid of all the Samuel goo—and twenty years later, Horace came and Found it. And now here we are.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not sorry that Samuel did what he did,” Horace said.
“Not remotely,” said Falo. “If I were, I would have destroyed the Fel’Daera just as I claimed.”
There was one more thing Horace needed to know. “On that final day, did Samuel know he was only bringing the deaths of the Mothergates closer?”
Falo face crinkled, looking pained. “I am not sure. He should have had the means to know, but also I . . . I did not truly want him to know.”
Chloe snapped up straight. “Why not?”
But Horace was way ahead of her. “Because then he might not have done what he did,” he said.
Chloe gaped. “You kept him in the dark on purpose,” she said. “Just like the Wardens have been doing with us all along.”
“Understand, please,” Falo said. “Samuel was a Keeper. He went through the Find and was set loose with his instrument, as all Keepers are. If his later actions, however ignorant, suited my needs—the needs of us all—then who was I to interfere?” She bowed her head and ran a long hand down her ivory face. “Or so I thought at the time.”
She looked sadly up at them, full of hope and remorse. “You have been a pawn in a struggle whose rules you did not know, Horace Andrews. I freely confess it. Every time you opened the Fel’Daera, every time you contemplated the future, every time you failed to walk the willed path, you brought us closer to the end of days.” She shook her head. “But you are a pawn no more. You know everything now. If I’ve held anything back, it’s only because there is so much to tell. It’s easy to overlook a pebble in a rockslide.”
A pawn. Ignorant. Horace knew he should have felt sick, angry. He should have been filled with a righteous rage, having been used this way. He felt that anger boiling off of Chloe now like a cloud.
But he felt none of his own.
He looked up at Falo, not at all sure what he was going to say. But then the words fell out of him, simple and right. “I forgive you,” he said.
Falo clasped his hands in her own, swallowing them. Her skin was as thin as leaves. “Thank you, Keeper, but I do not ask forgiveness. I only ask that you continue the fight we dragged you blindly into. Tomorrow is another day. One of the last. Take the Fel’Daera into battle. Show the Riven what it can do—what you can do. There is nothing they might attempt that you cannot foresee.”
Horace nodded. He would do these things, yes. He and Chloe both. Not in spite of the lies they’d been told, or the truths that they hadn’t, but because these little lies and truths didn’t matter anymore. Only the one truth.
The world was in danger. All the worlds imaginable, the worlds he’d barely glimpsed inside the Mothergate, seen flickering on Chloe’s unspeakable face there. And maybe there was a world where Chloe had never found the Alvalaithen, or him the Fel’Daera, and for those distant beings—and for his mother, and his father, and everyone who might survive, he would not worry about the past, or the wrongs that had been done to him there.
Only the future.
Chapter Sixteen
A Refusal Refused
JOSHUA WAS COLD. COLD IN THE BODY, YES—IT WAS COLD HERE in the nest beneath the concrete silos in Chicago, in his little room underground, with its thin mattress on the hard stone floor. But he was also cold in every other way—in his head, in his heart. He’d done terrible things. Made every wrong decision, even when he was trying to do right.
He rolled over on his mattress, hugging the Laithe. The Mordin guarding him watched him warily, but Joshua wasn’t going anywhere. There was nowhere he was wanted. Not after what he’d done.
The trip to Crete the day before had been easy. A small island off Crete, actually, where there was an ancient fortress on a rocky hill by the water’s edge. Only he and Isabel and Dr. Jericho had gone. Dr. Jericho had waited while he and Isabel found their way through the Nevren and into the Altari sanctuary below. Nlon’ka, it was called. Isabel had been full of fire, leading them through the vaulted hallways, following a call only she could feel, into the great striped ocean of the Veil of Lura.
Sitting by himself in the Veil had been frightening, waiting for Isabel to come back. She was supposed to be fixing the Mothergate, fixing everything. But then after a long time, when Joshua was just beginning to wonder if she would ever come back for him, she’d torn down the Veil in a tornado of golden light. Joshua had seen the Mothergate for the first time. And maybe he didn’t know any better, but what Isabel had done didn’t look anything like fixing. Stretched sheets of the Medium, yanked out of the black gate and covered in stitches. It looked like more torture, or a kind of prison. It wasn’t what the Mothergate wanted, or needed. Anyone could see that.
And the Wardens knew it. They’d been right all along, telling the truth all along. They’d come to stop Isabel—Horace and Chloe, somehow arriving there in Nlon’ka. Joshua knew now that they’d come through the Mothergate itself, something he hadn’t known was possible. And when he first saw them there, he wanted a chance to do it all over again, to take back the things he had done, even the things he hadn’t meant to do. But he knew that nobody got that chance, not even Horace. Even the Fel’Daera couldn’t change the past.
And so Joshua wouldn’t do anything else he might regret, even if that meant doing nothing at all. Isabel couldn’t weave her terrible stitches onto the next Mothergate if she couldn’t get there in time, and she couldn’t get there in time if Joshua didn’t take her.
And Joshua wasn’t going to take her. Not again. Not ever.
He had no idea what time it was. The room was lit with the same dingy light, night and day. But he knew that soon they would come for him and ask him to open yet another portal. Isabel had been exhausted after the first Mothergate, even though she’d failed. She wasn’t ready, she claimed, still weary from Grooma’s weavings. Dr. Jericho had promised her only another day, because the Mothergates would fail soon. Had it been a day? It felt longer, and as the time slipped past his nervousness grew. The moment would come.
And then, an hour later or maybe many more, it did come.
Dr. Jericho stepped into the room. “Ah, there is our young traveler. And his trusty Laithe. How sweet. Are we quite rested?”
Joshua didn’t answer.
“How silly of me,” Dr. Jericho said after a moment. “Whether you are rested or not, the circumstances call us forward. The next Mothergate beckons, and Isabel is ready.”
“I don’t care,” said Joshua.
“Time is short, Joshua. The Wardens have already allowed one Mothergate to fail. Only two remain.”
Joshua shrugged. “Maybe they should fail.”
It was brave to be talking this way. Brave to say these things. And if it was stupid too, he wasn’t sure he cared.
“Come, Joshua,” Dr. Jericho said, his voice still mild but threaded with a bit of steel now. “Come and open the portal for us. We must get to Ulu’ru, and repair the Mothergate there.”
Ulu’ru. That named seemed weirdly familiar, and his brain started ticking, trying to place it—literally place it, on the great atlas he carried in his head. But no. He wouldn’t take the bait. “I won’t do it,” he said. “I’m not opening any more portals.”
He thought Dr. Jericho would try to convince him. To tell him yet again that the Wardens were liars and fools, that Isabel’s horrendous weavings at Nlon’ka hadn’t been horrendous at all, but necessary. But Joshua wouldn’t listen. He promised himself he wouldn’t listen.
“Poor Joshua,” Dr. Jericho began. “Poor boy. You poor, foul Tinker.” He bent down close, down between his knees like a bug, his eyes glinting evilly. “We do not need you to say yes.”
And then he grabbed Joshua around the waist, as if he were a toy. He hauled Joshua into the air, knocking the wind out of him. J
oshua gasped for breath as Dr. Jericho carried him swiftly from the room, the Laithe following obediently behind.
Dr. Jericho barked a harsh order at another Mordin as they passed. Joshua only caught one word he recognized—“Quaasa.” He’d heard that word before, a word that filled him with dread, but his panicked brain wouldn’t let him remember where or why.
They sped through the hallways, dirty corridors so low that Dr. Jericho had to half crouch. He took great lurching strides, his knees brushing the ceiling, laying his hand on the floor now and again like a massive, hairless paw. They descended a flight of stairs in two huge, swooping steps, making Joshua gasp again. He heard voices in the darkness ahead, many voices, the slithering murmur of many Riven speaking.
They emerged into a large square room. It was brighter here, and Joshua realized they were at the bottom of a deep shaft that rose high overhead, into open air far above. A sickly gray light trickled down upon them. Dr. Jericho deposited Joshua onto the rough dirt floor, and the hovering globe of the Laithe swooped in beside him, spinning silently.
Riven stood all around, gruesome shadows in the sickly light, turning to look—Mordin mostly, but also an uncountable number of Ravids, fizzling in and out of sight. One small figure stood alone, in a clear space of her own, as if the Riven didn’t want to get too close.
Isabel stepped into the light. She seemed ablaze with power, a golden light flickering in her eyes.
“Are you ready to open the portal?” she asked him. “We mustn’t fail again.”
“He refuses,” Dr. Jericho said, before Joshua could even think of replying.
Isabel frowned down at him, like she felt sorry for him. Or maybe sorry for herself—like she could not understand why he didn’t want to help her. “You’re confused,” she said. “It went badly last time, I admit that. I told them I wasn’t ready. This time will be different.”
“This time won’t happen,” Joshua said. “I’m not going. I’m not taking you there.”