For a brief moment of physical near-ecstasy I forgot about Ivan, John Doe, Jacob, Shadows, and everything else outside of what I felt at that moment. As I flew through a white nonworld unlike anything I had ever seen before, even sound became washed out to the point where all I heard was my own breathing.
A small faraway voice screamed, “Stop!”
That cut through everything, and I let go.
Pain and exhaustion slammed into me like the UPS truck had slammed into the Shadow. I sucked in gasping breaths as my legs buckled under my trembling body. I barely perceived it as Ivan fell, his arm slipping from my fingers, the touch of his Mark fading from my own as he dissolved into the white mist around me.
“No!” I yelled in an agonized gasp as I pitched forward into a road of broken asphalt. I forced myself back to my feet, even as my body shook with the painful aftershocks of my exertion. I turned around to find Ivan, but the street behind me was empty of everything but the occasional weed. Above me, the gray sky was pregnant with snow, and my breath fogged. The buildings around me—the ones that still stood—were little more than empty shells. The area here was more far gone than the worst parts of East Cleveland, and what was truly disturbing was the lack of graffiti or plywood. Everything here appeared completely abandoned by even destructive human contact.
The only sound here was the screaming of a million crows that perched on every horizontal surface like a black rot in the surface of reality itself.
I felt no touch from the Shadows, and I barely felt Ivan. And I could feel my sense of his presence getting weaker. As if he was moving away. Why would he try to escape when he had come in to save me from the Shadows?
I stared at the black shells of buildings around me and remembered what he had said about Chaos, about worlds being fluid and not having fixed relations to each other.
He wasn’t moving away from me; where he was was moving away from me. And fast.
Around me, the plague of crows burst into flight with an apocalyptic burst of wings.
I ached and felt as if the most sensitive parts of my body had just been scooped out with a melon baller. The last thing I wanted right now was to feel the Mark’s touch. But I had no choice.
I pushed my Mark with a gasp and moved off toward what I felt of Ivan. It may have only been a second between losing my grip on him and when I’d stopped, but it took an agonizing three-minute run though the whiteness to catch up with him again.
I found him in an unfamiliar city park. The grass was well kept, and the trees were turning bright red. He leaned against a pedestal and above him loomed a rearing equestrian statue that looked to be, of all people, Dennis Kucinich.
He turned around and looked at me as I came up to him.
His face was flushed, and he was out of breath. “I’m slowing you down.”
Parts of me still trembled and it took me a moment before I could catch my own breath enough to talk. “We outran them,” I said.
I pulled out the keys with a shaking hand and unlocked the handcuffs from his wrists.
He looked around the park. “How can you know that?”
“I don’t feel them anymore.”
“What?” he said. “Everything I know about them says that you can’t ever sense them coming.”
“You’re saying you know everything about them?”
He rubbed his wrists and shook his head.
“Like where the hell they came from?” I said, my voice becoming harsher. I was rediscovering the anger I had been feeling earlier, helped along by the massive aches I felt now that I had stopped running.
“I don’t know.”
I grabbed his shirt, “Why should I believe you? You killed the only real family I’ve ever found. You broke in on me waving a sword and came pretty damn close to killing me. And you show up and suddenly the ground is thick with extras from a George Romero movie.” I shoved him against the base of the statue. “You owe me some explanations.”
“My Lady, I came to help you even when I still bore your shackles on my wrists!”
“You can start by explaining why you did that.”
He had saved my life from these things, and that tempered my anger, but only a bit. I still thought it was a good fifty-fifty chance that these things showing up were his fault.
“Because I serve my Emperor.”
“You better start getting more specific.”
He stared into my eyes and almost seemed ready to strike me. I might have wanted him to; a physical confrontation was more straightforward and easier to understand. I had known Ivan less than twenty-four hours, and already our relationship was way more complicated than I wanted it to be. I wanted to push things back to the place where it was only attack and defend.
“Well?”
“I told you. I wish to bring you back to my Emperor’s court.”
“Told me?” I remembered this morning, which already felt as if it had been years ago, when Ivan had me pinned behind a stove and had leveled his sword against me, “You will now surrender and return with me.”
“You expect me to surrender to you? Now?”
He shook his head. “No. But if you came voluntarily, as a guest, it could . . . ease what I must face on my return.”
“I should not only let you go, but go with you to make things easier? Are you insane?”
“Not only have I failed in my charge to recapture the escapee, I’ve lost the badge of my office, my weapon, my armor—these are capital offenses.”
“You expect my tears?”
“I expect your curiosity.”
I let go of his shirt and took a step back. I had fallen into the predictability of the argument, prodding him along as I prodded myself along. But what he said shook my confidence.
He straightened himself, regaining something of a dignified military bearing. “You want to know about the man I was charged to recapture. I do not have those answers, but the Emperor’s advisers do. You are clearly a Prince. The way you glide through Chaos tells me as much. But your ignorance tells me that you’ve had no training, or exposure to the worlds beyond your own.”
I was sure at some point I had tried to play things close to the vest, but I suddenly had the feeling that I had told Ivan more about myself than he had told me.
“You are a sovereign, even in your ignorance, and no right is granted me to compel you to perform my bidding. However, should you allow me to escort you to my Emperor’s demesne, you would have the status granted any ruler who comes in the spirit of diplomacy, and I suspect you would find answers to many of your questions.”
I slowly nodded. “And this would be a coup for you that might mitigate anything else you got screwed up.”
“As you say.”
I shook my head, wondering if it was possible for things to be even more complicated than they already were. “We need to go back home and see what kind of damage those Shadows are responsible for.”
EIGHTEEN
I SENSED RELUCTANCE from Ivan though he didn’t voice it. He was giving me a lot more deference than I was comfortable with, and I got the feeling that it was more than he was comfortable with as well. I wasn’t the type of woman who was cut out for nobility—at the very least I suspected that I was pushing the envelope of whatever respect Ivan felt duty-bound to give me.
I could see he didn’t want to return. I almost didn’t want to myself. My body still ached from the effort of running, from what I felt from the Mark.
Ivan followed me as I pushed back toward home, and I didn’t have to pull him along. As we returned, I got my first good look at Chaos.
While I’d run, it had been a featureless white blur. At a more sedate pace, I could see why. At home, passing through worlds past or future, the vast majority of the landscape had some constancy. People, cars, and the odd bit of trash would blur from one world to the next, but the stre
ets and buildings, lampposts and fire hydrants, those remained stable, giving a solid backdrop when I used my Mark.
This far away from my home, the universe lost that constancy. There was no longer a solid backdrop to my movement. Buildings and trees flitted in and out of existence, and even the road under my feet mutated with each step, crumbling and uncrumbling, changing from asphalt to concrete to brick to gravel to disappearing entirely.
And, as I used the Mark, I felt the instability around me. Before, I had been overwhelmed by the rush to escape, and then the euphoria of fully unleashing the Mark for possibly the first time. Now, as I moved slowly through universe after universe, I could feel more subtle feedback from the Mark. If walking through the worlds familiar to me was like walking down a wide concrete highway, out here it felt as if I walked across free-floating chunks of ice moving across invisible rapids.
Also, more than ever, I felt a direction to my motion—beyond us walking forward. I always felt that the Mark’s push was in some other dimension, beyond the three I could point to. Out here now I was more aware of my motion in that invisible dimension because I could feel other movements in directions perpendicular to the Mark’s, and, somehow, it felt as if there were more than two other axes of motion involved. Like walking into a headwind, I had to shift my movement with the Mark to compensate and keep going where I wanted.
I began to understand how people could become lost in this. Now that I was aware of what my Mark felt, I could feel that if I simply stopped in one of these worlds, I would keep “moving” farther away from my home. It reignited one of my first visceral fears about the Mark, that I could use it and never find my way back.
I picked up the pace.
* * *
—
IT took over an hour to make it back home. Partly because the relative motion meant we moved away much faster than we could return, partly because Ivan couldn’t move through the worlds as fast as I could. I probably could have grabbed him and pulled him along like I had during the escape from the Shadows, but I didn’t want to come that close to feeling his Mark again. It was already an uncomfortable warm presence between my shoulders, more distracting now that the Shadows were not touching me.
As we came back to my world, the buildings around us became more stable and eventually solidified. The ground seemed to firm up beneath my feet, and muscles I hadn’t known had been tensed started to relax. I may have even sighed in relief.
I stopped using the Mark once I could feel I was back on familiar ground. We weren’t quite back where we started, but I needed to regroup a bit. The road and the buildings were familiar as we walked along a nighttime street toward a Rapid Transit stop about a block east of the county morgue.
I rolled my shoulders against an ache deep in my Mark, though the ache I felt was in places that didn’t seem to exist in the same spaces the rest of me did.
“Have you ever walked in Chaos before?” Ivan asked after several long moments of silence.
“No,” I told him. “It’s tiring.”
Ivan shook his head. “My Lady, without the additional speed granted by my armor, it would have taken me days to navigate what you just blithely strolled through. And if my attention faltered . . .” He trailed off.
Now that I knew he had an ulterior motive, I had decided to take any of his deference with a grain of salt. He had some reason to exaggerate my distinctiveness, both to ingratiate himself to me and to play up my importance to his Emperor.
Cynicism was one cop thing I did right.
I walked up to a newspaper machine to see how close I actually was to home. I think I gasped when I saw the date.
“Are you all right?”
I turned to him and said, “1986?”
“I don’t understand?”
“I never . . .” I shook my head. I’d never gone more than a month or two away from home. But I didn’t even know any more if my idea of time held any real meaning. If I thought of the places I went as other worlds, it seemed natural to think of them as being five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, away in past or future. . . .
“There’s more than one direction,” I said to myself.
“My Lady?”
“I felt movement in more than one direction out there.” All my life I’d only walked in one dimension, back and forward, past and future. It began to dawn on me how far beyond my prior experience we had gone. My side trip through Chaos had displaced me thirty years from the world I knew.
The worlds I knew.
How densely packed were these universes? If I went five minutes ahead from this “now,” would I find another 1986? Five seconds? A fifth of a second?
“Are you all right?” Ivan asked me.
“No.” I looked away at a world three decades removed from my own. “There’s too much. Can there really be an infinite number of worlds out there? How can anyone not become lost in this?”
“It is not Chaos here.”
“How do you know that?” He was right, though; I felt the stability of the world around me, so unlike the fragile reality I had just experienced.
“Because it is of your realm.”
“How? If I’ve never been to this world before, this 1986?”
“You’re here now.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It is the nature of a Prince. To remain anywhere for long, even somewhere boiled up from Chaos, is to grant it permanence. We are close enough to the heart of your domain that just your act of stopping here was enough to solidify this place.”
To Ivan, it was the presence of a Walker that made a place real to begin with, and it required a powerful Walker—a Prince—to lend that reality any sort of persistence. If I understood his elaborate description—and at this point that was a big “if”—then my world, my home, would be a large cluster of very similar places, all marked by my extended presence at some time or another. Their form would be dictated by a combination of my desire—since I had used the Mark to push me toward what I wanted—and by their proximity to the more “solid” world I lived in.
One of the side effects of this “solidity” would be to make these worlds more “there” for other Walkers. Once within the fuzzy boundaries of my influence, other Walkers, even Princes, would find themselves limited to moving along the paths I had already trod.
The way he talked about it made me uncomfortable, as if this version of 1986 and all the people in it only existed because I had decided to stop here at random. And, according to Ivan, without a Walker’s presence periodically, this 1986 would eventually dissolve back into the Chaos from which it came.
What about the people who live here? I wondered. Was all of this beyond their perception? Did they exist before this place came out of Ivan’s Chaos? What about when it returned?
“When you say a place returns to Chaos, does that mean it ceases to exist, or does it just mean we can no longer reach it?”
“What is the difference?”
* * *
—
I could move quicker this close to home; there was little, if any, feeling of the world shifting under my feet. It actually made things more uncomfortable for me. Without the constant slipping and maneuvering to take my attention, I found myself focusing on Ivan’s presence. Feeling his touch on my own Mark was too intimate and there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t as if he had control over how I perceived his own mark.
At least I doubted he did.
We finally reached the morgue—my morgue—close to two hours after the Shadows’ attack. The police blockades were gone, and the parking lot held only about four police cars. I also saw two local news crew vans and a couple of ambulances.
My Charger sat by the curb, still where I had parked it.
It beeped welcomingly at me as I pressed the unlock button on my keychain. “Okay,” I told Ivan, “I need to
sort things out here. After I make sure Jacob’s all right and has things under control, I’ll take you home and pack.”
“You will come back to the Empire with me?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Half of me was screaming bad idea, but the other half told me that I had little choice. Even if I disregarded the need I felt to understand where I’d come from, who my birth family was, and what existed out there past the Chaos, the existence of the Shadows made those questions much less academic. I couldn’t ignore everything John Doe and Ivan had brought to my doorstep. Not when those things could return and wreak havoc.
Like it or not, trust him or not, Ivan was the only solid living connection I had to anyone who might be able to tell me anything. Not just about my own origin, but—at this point more important—what the Shadows were and why they were attacking here and now.
I opened the passenger door and waved Ivan in. I had planned to make him wait while I hunted down Jacob, but my partner saved me the trouble. I heard him call “Dana,” before Ivan had even taken a step toward the passenger seat.
We turned to see Jacob and Ms. Whedon from the Justice Department walking across the parking lot toward us. Jacob looked a little rumpled, but Ms. Whedon looked like she’d been through hell. She was as white as a sheet, and she gave me a stare that was half-accusing, half-terrified.
It dawned on me that she had seen me use the Mark, possibly more than once. They both had. After all I had been through in the past two hours, after nearly being killed, it wasn’t until now that I finally felt full-blown panic.
Facing death and a multi-universe-spanning existential crisis didn’t affect me nearly as intensely as seeing the carefully crafted fiction of my life crumbling within Ms. Whedon’s expression.
“Where did you go?” Jacob asked me. He drew up short and looked at Ivan. “And what are you doing with him?”
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