Chaos

by Lanie Bross

  “Only Executors can read the marbles,” the girl whispered.

  “They sent you to kill one of their own?” Ford turned on the girl. In his shock, he had released her. But she made no move to go for the knife. She was as still as one of the statues outside the garden.

  “I … I don’t know.” For the first time, the girl looked uncertain. Then she squared her shoulders. She shook her head slightly. “But it doesn’t matter. It must be done, no matter what she is.”

  One of their own?

  Did they mean her?

  “I’m not like her,” Jasmine said, feeling the desperation again beating through her body like a force. “I don’t know what she is or where I am or why I’m even here. I didn’t take some flower from this garden, I swear. I’m not your enemy.” She said the words to the girl but looked right at Ford.

  Ford looked at her with an expression she couldn’t identify. Then he whirled around to face the Executor, raising his knife so it was level with her heart.

  “Go,” he said. “Tell them they can’t have her.”

  “I won’t stop trying,” the girl said. “You know I can’t. Even if you kill me, there will be others. You’re a fool if you think you can stop fate. You can’t save her.” Her eyes flashed, turning a sudden, startling purple.

  “Watch me.”

  They stared at each other for a moment longer. Then the Executor raised her hands, very slowly, a gesture of defeat. She took a step backward. Then another.

  “Smart girl,” Ford said. He turned toward Jasmine and his expression softened. “Are you all right?” He touched her face briefly, and Jasmine could have cried; his fingers smelled like smoke and metal. He stepped behind her and sawed at the restraints around her wrists. “Did she hurt you?”

  It happened in an instant. Ford was bent over the ropes that bound her; Jasmine was immobilized, rigid, unable even to scream. The Executor rocketed across the clearing, her teeth bared like an animal’s. She snatched up her knife from the dirt and leapt.

  Then someone was shouting—Ford? Jasmine?—and pain tore through Jasmine’s body and the Executor was falling, falling, like a bird out of the sky, and then Jasmine felt the blade of the knife right below her breastbone.

  Smoke swirled and billowed through the Crossroad. It was almost impossible to see, and as hot as a furnace. The fire had spread quickly; already, it seemed to be everywhere at once. Parts of the Crossroad writhed as if in pain, and a horrific wailing filled the air.

  Luc stumbled through the darkness and the smoke. He had to get back to the tunnels, to figure out how to turn back time and stop all this. He felt a moment of seizing dread—was this what Miranda had wanted all along, to destroy everything?—but forced himself to stay calm. If the fire spread from the Crossroad into the worlds they connected, it would be catastrophic.

  Last time he had made it into the tunnels of time by accident. He had punctured the Crossroad, peeled it apart like skin. He shivered, remembering the way the Crossroad had sweated thick black liquid, almost like blood. But he had no choice. The noise of the fire was tremendous. The Crossroad screaming, withering. Dying.

  And if the Crossroad failed, he’d never make it home.

  He drove his fingers into the Crossroad’s colored membrane, the way he had before. This time, however, the Crossroad seemed to resist his attempts. Each time he broke through enough to see the darkness on the other side, the walls would mend themselves, effectively shutting him out. Thick currents of colored wind buffeted him backward, pushing him like a giant hand; each time, he had to fight his way back to a place he might attempt to break through, until exhaustion made his arms almost numb.

  The smoke had gotten so thick, his lungs burned whenever he took a breath. Even his thoughts felt smoky—he was having trouble holding on to strategies, ideas. But he knew if he didn’t get into the tunnels soon, he would die. Then no one would be able to stop the destruction.

  Suddenly, through the thick layers of memory, an image surfaced: a game against Ridgemont, tied 1–1 and down to a penalty kick. His kick. How bad do you want it? Luc heard his coach laying it all out on the line. This was it.

  Luc gritted his teeth and drove a foot straight at the wall. It was like kicking into soft dirt; there was a scattering of particles, a breach, but as soon as he withdrew his foot, the hole closed. How bad do you want it? He was coughing, tearing up, but he didn’t stop. He charged headfirst, using momentum, using his weight. He tore at the soft membrane, which felt like human flesh and made him want to throw up. But the hole widened, slowly, by increments. His vision turned blurry, then went totally dark. His fingers were numb.

  Black air compressed him from all sides. Now he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t find his lungs to take a breath. He couldn’t feel his legs to move them. He felt disjointed, like when traveling through the Crossroad. But this was different. There was no rapid falling. He couldn’t tell if he was moving at all, or stuck in a place between the Crossroad and the tunnels, a nothing place where he, too, was nothing. His eyes might be open, but he couldn’t see anything, and he might be upright, or upside down—there was no way to tell. He wanted to scream, but he had no mouth to scream with.

  The only thing keeping him connected to himself was the ache within his chest. An ache that grew sharper, like a runner’s stitch. Corinthe. He clung to her name; it cut through the fog in his brain. Luc pictured her crazy purple eyes, the way her lips turned up at the corners when she tried to fight back a smile, or the crease right between her eyes when she was trying to work something out in her head.

  A huge shudder ran through the dark and Luc felt it echo through his body, like standing too close to a bass speaker at a nightclub. Bits of light flickered through the inky air—he could see again—dancing like the fireflies he’d seen in Pyralis, except they weren’t fireflies. They were sparks dancing along the sinewy wires of the tunnels of time. They moved closer—or was he moving at last?—and tingling spread through his arms and legs. He could feel his body. He had a body.

  Luc reached up and grabbed hold of a writhing wire. A jolt of sizzling electricity went through him, growing fiery and white-hot, until Luc feared he would burst. Still, he pulled. His muscles screamed.

  At last, he was in. The last of the suctioning darkness released him, and he emerged headfirst into the tunnels as though surfacing from quicksand, able to breathe at last. There was the barest trace of smoke. He couldn’t be sure whether it was from the spread of the fire or from the wires writhing like snakes all around him, letting off showers of sparks.

  He raked a hand through his hair. He had to fix what he had done, he knew that. Had to go back in time. But there were billions—trillions—of wires. When he reached to grab hold of one of them, it disappeared, vanished under a tight coil of dozens of other wires, like an animal burrowing back in the ground.

  Was each of these wires a moment, a second, a reality? Could he follow one of these wires back to a time when Corinthe was alive?

  Or maybe all of these wires together—knotted so tightly, interwoven like threads—made up this present, this reality, where Corinthe was dead and Luc had screwed up and Jas was in danger. He felt a sudden surge of anger. He wanted to shatter the present, blast it away.

  He reached up and several wires parted and skittered away from him, submerging themselves beneath the seething mass of other wires. But he managed to grab hold of a blue wire as fat as his thumb. It was like grabbing hold of an electric fence. His teeth buzzed with electricity. His mind was full of a sizzling heat.

  Destroy.

  He gritted his teeth and pulled. There was a shriek, and flames and sparks spit. The wire split apart in his hands. Air whooshed past him with the force of a train. The blast knocked him backward, and before Luc could scream, or do anything, he was sucked into that murky black nothing between this place and the Crossroad.

  Then he was falling. The wind whipped his hair into his face and there were voices shrieking all around him and he knew he
was tumbling through the Crossroad, out of control, panicked. Corinthe had always told him he mustn’t panic in the Crossroad—that was how people got lost. Corinthe. The wind grew louder, screaming in his ears and blocking out even the memory of her name. The sound tore through his head like shards of glass. Piercing straight through his skull. Was that the wind or his own voice now?

  Stop. Please just stop.

  Everything went still. The force of the quiet hit Luc like something solid. He lost his breath and sat up, gasping, blinking colored spots out of his vision.

  Trees and a large expanse of grass. People laughing somewhere nearby and a rhythmic thwacking sound, like someone was playing tennis. To his right was a small pond. A family of ducks skated happily across it.

  He stood up, dazed. This was Mountain Lake Park, not far from his apartment.

  Somehow, he’d made it back home.

  It was a sunny day, and birds were singing in the trees. He could hear no bulldozers, no sirens wailing, no rescue teams shouting to each other. None of the usual after-earthquake sounds. As he exited the park on Tenth Avenue, he saw no damaged buildings or piles of debris. Parents pushed strollers; joggers kept pace with their dogs; the whole city looked like it had been coated in new paint.

  The streetlights worked and businesses were open.

  It was as if the earthquake had never happened. Or as if it hadn’t happened yet.

  Luc stopped so quickly that a jogger strapped with weights and water bottles bumped into him.

  “Sorry,” Luc mumbled automatically. He barely registered the man’s dirty look.

  For the first time in days, hope sprang to life inside him. What if it had worked? What if fixing the wires in the tunnel had actually moved time backward?

  He started running as fast as he could, toward home. He cut across Lake Street, not even bothering with the crosswalk. Only when a tomato-red BMW slammed on its brakes, and the driver leaned out his window and called Luc an asshole, did he slow down. Jesus. If he got flattened by some dick in a sports car on his way back to the apartment, after all he had been through …

  He waited impatiently for the light to change on Nineteenth, bouncing up and down on his toes, feeling like he did just before a big soccer game, like there were insects running through his veins. Left on California, and his heart hitched. Almost home.

  Inside his apartment building, he took the stairs two at a time, then paused for just a second to catch his breath. His heart was hammering so hard in his throat, he could barely swallow.

  “Hello?” he called as he stepped into the crappy little foyer and swung the door closed behind him. “Is anyone—?”

  The words died on his lips. All the air seemed to go out of the room at once, taking Luc’s ability to think with it.

  Sitting on the living room couch, in low-rise jeans and one of Luc’s old black concert T-shirts, was Corinthe.

  He was afraid to move, as if any motion, the slightest vibration, might make her disappear. It felt like someone had pushed the mute button on his world, and cocooned him in this moment. He wanted to stand and stare at her forever.

  But she had already seen him. She smiled at him and stood—moving, as always, fluidly, like water poured from a cup. She walked over to where his feet had become rooted to the dingy carpet. She laid her hand on his cheek. It was so warm. So real. She smelled real, too: like lilies and something else, something he couldn’t describe. The smell of a sunset. “I was worried about you,” she said, her purple eyes deepening.

  Something broke in his chest.

  Corinthe was here. She was real.

  Emotion clogged his throat and tears burned the back of his eyes. He reached up and took her face between his hands. His hands shook as he brushed a thumb along her jaw. He moved his fingers through her wild, tangled hair, then pulled her close, into his chest. They fit together perfectly. He could feel her heartbeat reverberating in his chest: an echo of his.

  “I missed you,” he whispered into the top of her head. It was all he could do not to cry.

  “I missed you, too,” she said, and then pulled away, giving him a crooked smile. “Is everything okay?”

  “It is now,” he said. When he finally moved his lips against hers, felt her respond to his touch, it was as if everything that had happened, everything that had gone wrong, was driven back by the soft pressure of her lips.

  He had done it.

  Everything was fixed.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” he said, between kisses.

  “Back?” She gave a half laugh. “You’re the one who left. Where were you this morning, anyway?”

  He wondered—where had he been this morning? In this life Luc could’ve woken up to get bagels next door, or taken a run through the Presidio. Not that it mattered now. There was so much he needed to say, so much to do and explain. It was strange—he felt as if Corinthe might vanish from in front of him at any second. But they had all the time in the world now. He took her hand and led her down the short hall. Jasmine’s door was closed. He wondered where she was—he felt a great swelling of love for her, too. She and Corinthe would be close. They were both wild, in a way. Stubborn, too. They followed their own hearts.

  His room was neat, as though someone had straightened it for him. Perfect, like everything else. He sat down on the bed and pulled Corinthe into his lap, wrapping his arms around her waist to hold her tight. He already knew the contours of her body from the night they spent together in the Land of the Two Suns.

  They’d had such little time together, a few stolen moments and then it was gone. It all seemed hopeless, but now here she was, in his arms again. All the pain and uncertainty had been worth it. Corinthe was alive. She was here.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Corinthe said gently. “You seem … different.”

  “I told you. I just missed you.” He swallowed the thickness in his throat. Did she know what he had done? Would she ever know? Did it matter?

  She pulled away and stared into his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, Luc.” A spasm of pain crossed her face. He wondered at it briefly—why pain?—but dismissed the concern. He would be nothing but happy. He tried to kiss her again, but she evaded him.

  “I talked to your dad earlier. He’s feeling better. They want him to stay another week to be sure he can handle everything. I told him not to worry about you. I told him to stay as long as he needed. Of course he’ll come for the service.”

  “Okay,” Luc said cautiously, trying not to betray how little he understood. Was his dad still in the hospital? But that didn’t make sense. Corinthe had been dead—he was afraid to even think the word when she was here, warm, vibrant—when his dad decided to go cold turkey. Had he rewound even further than he thought? But what kind of past was this, where Corinthe knew him, loved him already?

  “The florist called when you weren’t here,” she said. He stared at her dumbly. She took a quick breath, stood up, and began pacing. “Look, I know it must be awful to talk about this stuff—to think about this stuff. The everydayness of it. So I went ahead and ordered lilacs and white calla lilies. And jasmine, of course. Lots of jasmine. I hope that’s okay. They needed an answer and I didn’t know where you were.”

  There was an idea flickering in the back of Luc’s mind, like a warning signal blinking far off in the distance. Lilacs and white calla lilies. Funeral flowers. And jasmine, of course.

  He cleared his throat. “What—what are you talking about?”

  “Do you think the jasmine is too much?” Corinthe bit her lip. There were tears in her eyes. “I thought … I know I didn’t know her that well, but I thought … well, that’s what she would have wanted.”

  “Who?” Luc asked. The word seemed to take a long time to go from his brain to his mouth.

  She stared at him. “Your sister. What do you mean, who?”

  The look in her eyes felt like a punch to the gut. His chest tightened and breathing became difficult.

  Impossible. He had turned
back time. That had to mean Jas was okay, too. That meant she had never met Miranda, never been poisoned by the Blood Nymphs, never come close to dying in the Great Gardens of Pyralis. A knife of fear slid down Luc’s spine. Was she in the hospital again? Had he gone back so far that she OD’d again? And had he failed to save her this time?

  “Jas!” Luc shouted as he ran for her room. He threw the door open and it slammed against the wall. “Jas?”

  She wasn’t there.

  Her room was too neat. The bed was made and there were no clothes piled on the chair or scattered across the floor. Jasmine always had incense burning or music blasting from her speakers. But there was nothing but empty silence.

  “Luc, I’m worried about you,” Corinthe said from behind him.

  He turned slowly and saw the tears glistening in her grief-filled eyes.

  “Where have you been? I thought you went after him,” Corinthe said. “When you were so late coming back, I thought something happened to you, too.”

  It was like Corinthe was talking through a thick fog. Everything slowed down and it took enormous effort to hear her over the roaring that had started in his head.

  “You thought I went after T.J.?” Luc’s jaw was numb. The blood in his veins felt like cooled metal, thick and cold.

  “T.J. Who’s T.J.?” Corinthe frowned and shook her head. “I meant Ford.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Things were getting more and more muddled. He couldn’t feel his fingers now. He stumbled to the window, wrenched it open. He needed air. Where was his sister?

  Corinthe was looking at him as if he was crazy. “Ford. The Radical that Jasmine disappeared with. Don’t pretend you aren’t angry enough to kill him. You told me—”

  Only a few words penetrated the fog in his brain. Someone had Jasmine. “Where is she? Where did he take her?” The panic inside him turned to desperation. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He was drowning above water.