by Scott Hale
“It’ll be easier to explain later, but I was born here.” She worked her way to the front of the group and veered them past a gurgling ravine. “The Night Terrors have been running experiments. They’re not a fertile people anymore. They’ve been trying to fix that for Holy Child knows how long.” She slipped on a patch of wet leaves but quickly caught herself.
Hex was talking so freely, the Skeleton assumed she’d filled the others in on her history. “You’re one of the experiments?”
“Yeah,” she huffed.
Lacuna wasn’t far now. Another thirty seconds, at best.
“They mate humans with their kind. Those that come out like them, they take to their villages. Those that come out Corrupted like me, they convert to their cause.”
“You’re a Night Terror?” The Skeleton didn’t want to sound judgmental—after all, who was he to judge anyone?—but he did.
“In a way,” she said. They stopped at the outskirts of Lacuna. Hex made a motion. The Marrow Cabal fanned out, flanking the center from all sides.
Catching her breath, she added, “Don’t have a mask. At least, not one you can see.”
“It don’t matter,” the Skeleton said. He touched his cloak to make sure the Black Hour’s heart hadn’t fallen out. “Why’d you come back here? You said in your message you finally figured out how to get back? Did you forget or something?”
“Sort of.”
She reared up and took off. The Marrow Cabal had searched enough of Lacuna and were moving towards a large tree that sat off to the side of the village. Its front had been carved out, and a tunnel ran through it, and then down into the island itself.
“It took me a long time to tell them, Atticus. But you… you’ve seen some shit, so I’m not going to sugarcoat it. There was something living here. I don’t know how they made me forget about it, but all of us, all the children born here, we are telepaths in some way. We share thoughts, and that’s how we stay connected to the Night Terrors, to receive orders.”
They ran across the village center and regrouped with the Marrow Cabal at the passage that ran underneath the tree.
“The thing living here, they call it the Blue Worm. I remembered seeing it when I was a little girl, and then here and there, off and on. I put it together over the last year, from fragments of my family. And Mara dropped a few hints, too. She runs this place, you know?”
“They went down here,” Warren interrupted. “We’ll go on ahead.” He led the charge down the passage, into the bowels of Lacuna, leaving the Skeleton and Hex topside.
“The Night Terrors can’t reproduce right,” she said.
She was shivering so hard she looked like she was going to pull a muscle. The Skeleton thought about comforting her, but couldn’t see how something that looked like him could be of much comfort to anyone.
“They woke up this creature, this Blue Worm, years and years ago. It taught them how to have children. I think it put a little bit of itself in each of us, the offspring. That’s why we’re telepaths, why we’re all connected.
“I thought I’d come here and get its help. Get its help to save your family and save the Heartland. Took forever, Atticus, to get in. The Widening Gyre is a real son of a bitch. Then we saw Mara and two other Night Terrors, a woman and a girl, while we were out to sea. And after they got on the island, everything went to shit. The Gyre calmed its ass down, but the Blue Worm was gone. We went into its chamber and it wasn’t there. Whatever they did, it’s gone. Have you heard of the Red Worm?”
The Skeleton shook his head, even though it did sound familiar.
Hex said she wasn’t surprised and headed into the tunnel, down the ramp that followed after. It was almost impossible to see where they were going or who was waiting at the bottom besides the Marrow Cabal. But it was nice to get out of the rain.
“Geharra’s dead,” Hex said. “We think Penance killed everyone there. I heard talk of a Crossbreed.”
The Skeleton stopped and fell against the side of the passage.
“What is it?”
He shook his head. “Go on.”
Eying him curiously, she continued. “Penance went into the city, took it over. They used a Crossbreed, an ancient plant, to brainwash them, and then they killed them. All of them. Thousands.” She caught her breath. The sounds of the storm outside thudded down the passage. “It was a sacrifice. They summoned something called the Red Worm with all the dead.”
“Any relation to the Blue Worm?” the Skeleton asked. He was trying to focus on what Hex was saying, but all he could think of were King Edgar’s threats in Ghostgrave’s torture chamber.
“Hex,” he said, before she could answer. “When I was being tortured, King Edgar brought someone in named Alexander Blodworth from Penance. He promised… he said… because he knew Geharra was running the rebellion, he promised Blodworth could take a Crossbreed to Geharra to… to ‘change their minds.’”
“Atticus,” Hex said breathily. “Holy shit, Atticus. That’s… that’s huge.”
“Wait, no, wait. Can’t be right, though. Blodworth said it would take years to pull it off. It’s not possible. It took me awhile to get to the Nameless Forest, but not long enough for them to pull something like that off.”
Hex cleared her throat and mumbled, “Atticus. Atticus, you were gone a long time.”
“No.” He crossed his arms, shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“The last message you sent me, outside the Nameless Forest, that was a year and a half ago.” Softly, Hex took his hand and rubbed it, the way she did in Cathedra, that night when he bared his soul to her. “You were gone so long, we thought you’d finally died. We came here to get your family out of the Membrane, anyways. It seemed the right thing to do.”
The Skeleton couldn’t stop shaking his head. “A year and a half? I was only in the Forest for a few days at—”
“The Night Terrors who did this to the Blue Worm are getting away,” Hex said. “They’re down there, in the dockyard. The others already sailed out of here. We need to stop them, Atticus.”
Hand in hand, the Skeleton and Hex hurried down the rest of the ramp, until it went wide and curved around and into the dockyard she’d mentioned moments before. The dockyard wrapped around the cove, and had been built into the exposed rock. The storm hadn’t been kind to it, though. Most of the boards and walkways were torn off and were now resigned to the piles of driftwood congesting the ocean below. The Marrow Cabal were meandering around the edge of the area, rifling through some of the supplies that had been left behind.
A year and a half? The Skeleton let Hex lead him to the others. A fucking year and a half? How long had he been staring into that god damn heart? A year and a half? Were Clementine and Will even still…? No, they were. They were. They understood these things took time.
“Oh fuck,” he said, dropping Hex’s hand. He dug his fingers into his skull. “I don’t even know what the fuck these Worm things are, but are they my fault? Did I make those happen by helping you?”
Hex shook her head. “No, Atticus.”
Gary noticed his breakdown and came over to comfort him. “Hey, man,” he said. He pulled the Skeleton’s hands away and looked him in his glassy, bloodshot eyes. “We’re going to get them back. As soon as we get off this island. If anyone knows about guilt, it’s me. It’s not worth it. Don’t worry about that, right—”
“A year and a half!” the Skeleton screamed. “Look at me!” He showed off his bones the best he could. “This happened to me up here! What do you think they’ve had to go through down there?”
James chimed in, saying, “Gary’s right.”
Elizabeth and even Miranda nodded in agreement.
“My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” Mr. Haemo said, ignoring the Skeleton’s outburst. “But our ladies haven’t gotten far.” He pointed to where the dockyard opened to the vast ocean beyond. And he was right: On the edge of darkness, a small boat floated, an emerald orb of light at its bow.
/> The Marrow Cabal converged at the furthest point of the dock they could. The Skeleton hung back, alone, the Black Hour’s heart beating as fast as his would’ve been if he still had one.
A year and a half? I led a rebellion and… how could they kill a whole city? The tempest up top blew the last of its rain into the cove. Red Worm? Blue Worm? What the fuck happened to the world? Oh god, did I take too long?
“Want me to chase after them?” Mr. Haemo asked from the back of the Cabal. He started shaking his shoulders, as though to let loose his wings. “As long as the storm steers clear—”
“You can still save us,” the Skeleton said, speaking on Clementine’s behalf.
The rest of the Marrow Cabal were watching him now, watching him speak to himself, like the schizophrenic skeleton he’d slowly become.
“We’re okay, for now, but you have to hurry, Dad,” Will pleaded.
“I will,” the Skeleton said. His hand drifted towards the Black Hour’s heart. “I swear to god I will save you. Just give me a few more…”
The emerald orb from the bow of the Night Terrors’ ship arced through the sky. At its highest point, it exploded like a firework, bathing the dockyard in nightmarish green light.
As the Marrow Cabal lowered their hoods, probably to let their escapees see who exactly they were fucking with, the Skeleton pushed his way to the front of the group.
“You want them?” the Skeleton practically spat the words into Hex’s face. He needed something to fix, something to destroy.
He limped gracelessly to the edge of the dock, his legs suddenly remembering the snake bites they once bore, and threw back his hood. As the emerald gems of light cascaded across the cove, he raised his hand high and started to wave.
“I’ll get them for you.” His other hand went to the Black Hour’s heart inside the cloak. “I’ll get them for you good.”
Black ice. Darkness. Dunes of death in a desert dream. Chitin taste. Old World sewers coughing up infants, rats in their eyes. Crystal shards. Crystal spires. Crucified orphans. Clementine in bed. James in the graveyard. Carpenter Plantation. Skyscrapers looming high. Winter in Gallows.
They were trying to get his attention, but they weren’t going to have it. His mind was swamped with images, from the past and never. Like an architect, he built his tribute to insanity, cobbling the disparate objects together in his mind. Skyscrapers here, snow there. He imagined the ocean a sheet of frozen ice to grind their boat to a halt. Shadowy figures kept cropping up in the corners of his creation, so he let them flock beneath the ice, for good measure. They wouldn’t get away from this, he thought. Blue Worm? No, Hex, the heart is enough. Let’s just kill these Terrors and be done with it.
“Atticus?”
“Is he okay?”
“Mr. Haemo’s headed back. He doesn’t have them.”
“Is he okay? It’s been like an hour.”
The Skeleton pulled his hand away from the Black Hour’s heart and, with it, willed what he’d conjured into reality. The Marrow Cabal gasped as the ocean froze over in front of them, long fields of snow-dusted ice growing across the water at an impossible rate. Further in the distance, red lights began to wink below the frigid landscape.
The Skeleton started to laugh, started to laugh until he cried. With every passing second, the laughter rose in pitch, until it warped into something like an infant’s wail. It was high, piercing, loud enough to be heard clear across the sea. He laughed endlessly, because he had no lungs to stop him. When the skyscrapers started winding through the ice, blowing massive chunks of it across the sky, he stopped. He stopped and looked out upon the sea, upon the great, frozen, dead city of his imaginings. He looked upon it, proud as any father would be, and said that it was good.
CHAPTER XXX
Warren’s hands wrapped around the Skeleton’s neck and flung him into the dock. “Atticus, stop!”
He tried to get up, but Miranda and Elizabeth were quick to hold him down. The heart had come over him. He expected the temptation, but hadn’t expected to fold to it so quickly. After he opened the portal to the Membrane and brought Clementine and Will through, maybe he’d toss it to the Abyss. Let nothingness have its way with it.
“Cut it out, yeah?” Elizabeth said, giving him a slap across the skull.
Miranda shook her head at him and mumbled something under her breath.
“I’m sorry,” the Skeleton said. With his hand off the heart and his mind no longer holding the images, his temporary Black Hour was over. Nothing broke, nothing collapsed. It all just ceased to be.
Hex leaned over him, planting her foot on his ribcage. “Appreciate the help, Atticus.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He felt like laughing again, but thought better of it.
“It’s great to see your new fancy tool works and all.” She outstretched her hand, and he took it. “But we’re leaving the old fashioned way. By boat.”
He nodded and set aside ravenous considerations. The new recruits were terrified, but Hex did a good job calming them down.
Mr. Haemo flew in from the ocean and landed on a pole, pleased as punch with the Skeleton’s work.
Warren, Elizabeth, and Miranda joined together and moved in a pack, as they always did, towards the back of the dockyard, to talk badly about him.
But James and Gary, they didn’t budge. They didn’t speak. They hardly even blinked. Instead, all they did was stand there at the edge of the dock and stare absently into the distant dark. The Skeleton felt bad about what he’d done, but he felt even worse about it when he saw their faces. They had a look about them, a look he’d known and mastered. It was an absent gaze, an absolute indifference to the events around them. They looked empty, because they were empty. Their thoughts, their feelings, they were many miles away, back in Gallows, both the place and its memory, with the Atticus they remembered and loved. This flayed thing that stood before them, it wasn’t Atticus, not to them, at least. Not anymore.
They left Lacuna not long after by way of the three boats they’d brought there. The storm had beat them up bad, but they were sailable. It was always a risk going out into the Widening Gyre, especially at night, but Hex had been able to convince the others that, because of its unusual, prolonged calmness, it was a now or never sort of situation.
Like the loser picked last at recess, the Skeleton had found himself sitting in his boat alone, on the beach, while the others drew mental straws to decide who would be stuck with him. Unsurprisingly, he ended up with Hex, Gary, James, and Mr. Haemo. But now, as they rowed through the dead of night, he found the other boats crowding his, Warren, the Deadly Beauties, and the new recruits eager to hear what he had to say. They were like his farm outside Gallows: close enough to see if something went down, but far enough to get away, if need be.
He’d spent awhile listening to the waves lap against the boat. The rock of the boat and the sounds of the water calmed him considerably. He could still feel the Black Hour’s heart calling to him, but the weight of his guilt over what he’d done kept his hands firmly planted on the seat.
“After Nyxis,” he volunteered, “I was captured and tortured for weeks.”
With everyone’s attention on him, he told his story, starting from the back of Captain Yelena’s wagon to the Dread Clock’s island in the Nameless Forest, although he left out the bit about possibly freeing the creatures who live there. No one interrupted. No one questioned him. They just sat there silently, rowing mindlessly, all eyes focused on the spot in his cloak, waiting for the Black Hour’s heart to make its big reveal.
“There’s a cost to using it,” he said. With the hand that wore Bon’s glove, he reached into his pocket, and closed it around the heart. He waited for the images, but none came. It needed direct contact.
James twisted his mouth. “Atticus, I don’t know if you should take it out.”
“That’s what she said,” Gary said, grinning. He looked around, but no one was laughing. “Sorry. Old World joke.”
The
Skeleton ignored James and brought out the heart for all to see. Everyone leaned forward, transfixed. The boat tipped, their curiosity almost capsizing them.
“I didn’t realize how much time it took to use it. You said I was on the docks for almost an hour? Was only seconds for me.”
He paused, noticing that the heart looked different than before. It appeared harder. Parts of it were crystallized. The gears weren’t the same, either. They had undergone a metamorphosis of their own; the metal pieces appeared as though were decaying into some kind of bone-like material.
He quickly put it away and started to row quicker. Without a vessel, maybe its life was limited.
Mr. Haemo adjusted his human suit. “We got to find a way to get rid of it when you’re done, you know that, don’t you?”
“Plan to.” The Skeleton cocked his head. “Surprised to hear you say that.”
The mosquito in disguise shrugged. A bit of his wing broke through his flesh. “Don’t feel comfortable around it. That thing is a myth for monsters, too. If you’re using it, it’s because it’s letting you. That thing has history hidden inside it. Better off letting it terrorize people than letting people use it.”
Warren said from the boat beside them, “If the bug doesn’t like it, then it’s got to go.”
James went forward. “Atticus, you’ve been through hell. Literally. Are you… how are you…?”
“How are you not absolutely insane?” Hex asked, matter-of-factly. “You know you’re not right, right? In the jungle, you were like yourself. On the docks, you were something else.”
“I know that,” the Skeleton said. “I recognize that. But that’s something, right?”
“You do know you’re only bones, yeah?” Elizabeth asked.
The Skeleton snapped his skull to the Deadly Beauty. An irrational anger told him to drown her in the sea. “I know,” he said, focusing on the waves to cool off. “But I’m still me.” Changing the subject, he said, “Hex, you going to introduce me to the new recruits?”