There was a cassette player in front of him, and Sibyl’s voice, raspy and dry, played for the third time that morning: It will be the end of Genetrix, the unmaking of worlds.
“What do you think?” Nero asked him.
“ ‘Marred by magic,’ ” Micah said. He tapped the corner of his left eye. “Is that what this spot is? Magic?”
“I believe so,” Nero said, and though he despised sitting on floors, he sat across from Micah, just beside the siphon fortis. The cold from the stone seeped through his clothes, chilling him. “My theory is that the Tenebris Incident sent a few small pieces of magic flying, and one of them landed in your eye.”
Said eye narrowed at him. “The Tenebris Incident was ages ago. I’m only eleven.”
“Do you know what a wormhole is?” Nero said.
Micah shook his head.
“Let me explain it this way, then,” Nero said. “A wormhole is like a tunnel. At one end of the tunnel, things can be moving very slow. At the other end, they are moving very fast. So if you go through the tunnel, you can get somewhere far in the future, but you can get there very quickly. Understand?”
It was how he had lived for hundreds of years, though his own Earth had been in the same century as Genetrix’s when he was born. Time did not cooperate between worlds.
“So the magic exploded and went through a tunnel,” Micah said, “and landed in my eye.”
“I don’t know. It’s a theory.”
“And that’s why I have so much magic,” Micah said. “Why my parents were so scared of me.”
“Perhaps,” Nero said. “And perhaps there is a way for you to keep it under control until you are ready for it. Would you like that?”
Micah nodded.
The poor child, Nero let himself think. Teeming with magic, and not a single person in the world could understand it, not even Nero himself.
“Let me tell you,” Nero said, “about a particular kind of siphon that goes on your spine.”
The spine, they thought.
Claudia tapped the vertebrae that stuck out from his shirt when he hunched over. Tap, tap, tap.
The fire was low. He had forgotten to add logs to it, and now the air was so cold, he could see his breath. It was difficult for him to remove himself from these preparations. He had been waiting so long for this night, the night when everything was finally ready. The objects of power in a wide circle in the courtyard, connected by a line of salt. He had gathered them over the past five years, following legends to dead ends, whispers to treasure.
The real treasure, though, ached in his chest. Only an x-ray had revealed it. The doctor had suspected a hole in his heart, and that was, in a sense, what he had found. But the hole had been plugged by something. A piece of shrapnel, he had pronounced it, but Nero had not been near any explosives. There was no immediate danger to his health, so Nero had gone on, short of breath and easily tired, with the fragment in place.
He straightened and pulled his suspender straps over his shoulders again. His sister, Claudia, stood behind him in a smart blouse with a bow in the middle, right above the dip between her collarbones. Her hair was parted on the side and curled at the bottom.
“You look pretty,” he said to her.
“Don’t I?” She stepped away and swayed her hips so he could see her long skirt shift back and forth. “I thought I’d dress up for your first day of eternal life.”
He scowled at her. “You’re dressed for the train and nothing else,” he said.
She gave a small smile.
“And you’re sure you want no part of it?” he said.
“I’ll have an eternity in heaven,” she said softly. “Though I am sad my brother won’t be there to join me. You will still be here on Earth.”
“I don’t believe in heaven,” he replied.
She nodded. “So you’ve said.”
She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. She smelled of floral perfume. When she pulled away, she still wore that small smile.
The fire crackled in their fireplace as the last of the kindling broke.
The feeling was fire.
When a birch log burned, the papery bark peeled away from the wood and turned to ash. That was what he felt was happening to his skin. Every layer of him—skin and sinew and bone—peeling apart and burning to cinders.
That was only the beginning. Later, in another universe, when he found the words for it, he would call it plunging headfirst into the sun. Hotter than lava, hotter than any heat he knew, and the sensation of twisting away from it, yanking one’s hand off the stove or smacking the ember that had fallen on one’s clothes, was there, but he couldn’t move. He had become a cloud of dust, a loose association of particles, and he couldn’t scream.
It took its own eternity. He had used the piece of something in his heart to dig deep into the earth without lifting a finger to form a connection with purest magic. He had not merely sampled it; he had drunk from it as through a straw, drawing in as much as he could bear, and then more. The connection, having formed, could not be broken—though he was desperate for it to.
Not until the pool had drained.
When he woke, seconds later, years later, he was alone, and everything that had been alive, every weed in every field, every flower on every tree, every insect that crawled and snake that slithered and bird that flew, and every single human being that had once walked the ground, was gone.
They had destroyed their world and would have to find another.
From the Journal of Nero Dalche, Quaestor of the Council of Cordus
It is a strange thing, to bear the weight of a world. I never thought I would have so much in common with Atlas. For his mistake, for siding against the gods, he spent an eternity with the heavens on his shoulders—not the Earth, as the misconception goes—and for my mistake, for delving into the secrets of the universe, I must carry my wasted, dead planet around with me forever.
But it’s not the flowers and the animals that haunt me most, or the trees and the wonders of the deep ocean, or the children whose faces I never saw and names I never knew. There are so many of those things that they fade into abstraction. Specificity, not scope, is what makes a thing meaningful.
And so, in the end, it is the woman down the street who gave me a slice of bread with butter on it every day on my way to school because she said I was too thin, and the alley cat who wove an infinity sign around my legs when I went outside to smoke, and our upstairs neighbor who taught me how to tie a secure knot—they are the ones who haunt me.
And, of course, it is my sister, Claudia.
Sometimes I hate the Resurrectionist for the magic he possesses, for knowing how to raise the dead. I have tried.
43
THE DARK ONE had tortured Albie with both brutality and delicacy; sometimes, paradoxically, with both at once. Sloane remembered an array of polished tools: wrench, knife, needle-nose pliers. They had looked like they were new, just purchased from the hardware store.
He had wanted something from her, and he had hurt Albie to get it. She had not given it to him.
The Dark One had seemed impressed.
“He wants to die,” Sloane said, and she had almost said we—We want to die—because they had been so intertwined in his memories. A moment later she felt revulsion. Her stomach turned. She stumbled to the edge of the grass and vomited.
“What just happened?” Esther said. “What did you do to her?”
“I answered her question,” Nero replied. “You need not concern yourself with how.”
“If you wanted to die, you could have just said so,” Matt said darkly. He was hunched over, in pain, his crushed hand cradled against his chest. “Any one of us . . . would be happy to oblige.”
“No!” Sloane straightened. Her mouth tasted like acid. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Genetrix and Earth are on a collision course. He is what’s been holding them apart. Kill him, and we all die.”
She struggled for breath. He h
ad to die. But he couldn’t die. But if they didn’t kill him, as he wanted, he might stop holding Earth and Genetrix apart and move on to another universe, another set of victims. And then they would all die anyway.
There was no way out.
Sloane looked at Mox, bowed under the siphon, his hair hanging in his face. From the beginning, Nero had wanted to shape Mox’s desire in order to shape his magic. Nero had formed him like a statue from clay.
And he had formed her too. Not over the course of years, but over the course of moments. Offering her the choice between herself and Albie. Walking into the trap she set on Irv Kupcinet Bridge. Beckoning her toward Genetrix with Albie’s voice. But he had never had to change her desires, because what she wanted and what the Dark One wanted had always been the same.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” Nero said to her, “for you to soften toward me.”
“I haven’t,” she replied.
She walked, slowly, toward him.
“Give Micah the Needle, Sloane, so he can do what he was made for,” Nero said, and he didn’t sound malicious; he sounded tired. “Or I will have to motivate you.”
She knew his version of motivation. He had tortured Albie so that she would tell him where their weapons were—where the Needle was. He knew the softest parts of her, the most vulnerable parts. He knew that, above all else, she was lonely.
Mox was hunched over, his face streaked with tears and sweat. He had been used all his life, she thought. Sloane couldn’t let him be used to end the world.
“Mox wasn’t made for this,” she said. “I was.”
“Sloane, no!” Matt screamed, and it sounded like he was shouting into a strong wind. Perhaps he was, Sloane thought. Her hair whipped across her face, obscuring her vision for a moment as Esther lunged and grabbed the throat siphon that rested a few feet in front of her. She held it against her throat with one hand, stuck a whistle in her mouth with the other, and bit down hard. Before she could make a sound, Nero waved a hand at her, hurling her to the ground.
“Not everything must be lost, you know,” Nero said to Sloane. “The energy that my death produces could be used to save something. Micah has a well of untarnished good within him, and he might want to save the world enough to preserve part of it. But you . . . you have only ever wanted destruction.”
He was right, of course. Mox had said that magic was an expression of a person’s deepest desires, which meant that when she eviscerated the crew during the Deep Dive mission, when she worked a gale instead of a magical breath in the Hall of Summons, when she blasted a crater into the side of the Dome, she had wanted it. She had never done a piece of magic that was not in service of ruining something. Somewhere inside her was a thing that wanted to take and take and take, until there was nothing left to give, just as Nero had done in his own universe, his thirst for power and magic not slaked until the well of magic under his Earth’s crust was dry.
She lifted her hand, and Nero’s body lifted high in the air. His cape snapped in the wind, pulled sideways over one shoulder, the pin up against his throat. The Needle sang inside her, sang her revenge. She dropped her hand, and Nero fell onto the pavement, his legs crumpling beneath him. Both broken, she assumed, from the snapping sound they’d made. She didn’t care.
“Something stands between Genetrix and its twin. The Dark One,” he said, and he laughed a little, grimacing with pain, “will excise it, and the worlds will be crushed together, and that will be the end of all.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m told the line between a Dark One and a Chosen One is hair-fine.”
A part of her did want destruction—but that wasn’t all of her. She wanted other things too: justice and mercy, drinks with Albie, kisses with Matt, laughter with Esther. She wanted to wake early in the morning, when the light was pale and new, and run to the lake’s edge. She wanted to sit in silence in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute and look at the Frank Lloyd Wright windows and think of Cameron. She wanted to teach Mox how to drive. She wanted to read the entire Unrealist manifesto. She wanted to watch an olive dance in a cocktail shaker.
She would just have to hope that those wants outweighed the others.
Sloane raised the hand that contained the Needle and imagined herself deep in the ocean, a teenager, and, at that time, an expert on the legends of Koschei, the man who could not die, who had hidden his soul away in a needle. The pressure of the water was all around her, and so was the fire of magic, so painful it made her thrash against its hold. But beyond the pain was something else—a hunger pang. She had written in her journal that it was like wanting something so much you would die to get it. An acknowledgment of how deeply and how desperately she did not want to be empty anymore.
She imagined herself at the center of a Drain, her vision obscured by a wall of swirling debris. The dust marked the path of the air, tight around her shoulders, and flecks of rock, bits of flesh, fragments of bone, embraced her. Her hair whipped around her face, found its way into her mouth, and still her magic beckoned for more. More.
More.
She focused on Nero, her hand outstretched. It was the one with the Needle, the one with the web of scars from when she had turned animal, biting at her own flesh to free herself from a trap. And if desire was what fueled magic, then in this case, all she wanted was Nero’s life, every minute of it. His eyes bulged, and he brought his hands up to his throat—or he would have if he hadn’t at that moment risen into the air, held high above the river.
She was in the monument, the light of dead names glowing around her, and—
She was sitting with Albie at the bar, the line of empty shot glasses in front of them, and—
She was walking along the road barefoot, a piece of glass buried in her heel, and—
She was standing on Genetrix’s river walk.
She wanted all the things the Dark One had taken. She screamed, the sound scraping out her insides, hollowing her out even further, and she filled herself with his life. The losses he had heaped up like chips at a casino. The magic he had hoarded from the worlds he had walked, possibly hundreds of them, so many he had forgotten their names.
She devoured him.
Nero’s body ripped apart all at once, hovering eviscerated over the city, guts tumbling loose and dangling, heart still pulsing, attached to the threads of his blood vessels and veins. She saw a tangle of white nerves and the strict lines of his bones, and blood was everywhere, spattering. Perhaps he was screaming, and perhaps he wasn’t, couldn’t anymore, with his teeth pulled out of his skull and his tongue adrift on the wind.
And then she was on fire with magic, as she had been in Nero’s memory, diving headfirst into the sun. Disassembling into a cloud of flesh and blood that could not scream. There was no exertion of will, just an extraction of want, as water crashed down from above, the thin membrane between the worlds breaking.
Water rushed over the river walk, flooding the terraces with their trees, swallowing the cars that drove on Wacker and the pedestrians on the bridge. Sloane rose, or perhaps she fell.
She fell down through the water again, up into the rubble of the tower they had destroyed, and slammed—
—impossibly—
—into the ground next to the Ten Years Monument, where they had sprinkled Albie’s ashes.
44
SOMEWHERE NEARBY, a car alarm was going off. But it was muffled; Sloane felt like someone had packed her ears with dense cotton. She brought a hand up to touch one, found a sticky—but clear—ear canal.
There were more alarms now. A chorus, all bleating at different intervals; a few security systems chanting about intruders, and sirens coming from all directions. Sloane blinked up at the clouds. It seemed strange that she should be looking up at clear sky, though she wasn’t sure what else she had expected to see.
She probed her head and neck with both hands for signs of injury and then, finding none, sat up. One ear was ringing, and everything in front of her tipped and spun. Which only made
it look more unreal.
In one direction was the river and the Dark One monument that stood beside it, a modest bronze block with a gap of an entrance. And in the other was the undulating steel face of Genetrix’s Warner Tower, looming over the skyline. Across the street from her was half of 300 North Wabash, a simple black structure of steel and glass. On its eastern face, its innards were exposed, as if the building had been sliced like a block of cheese. Sloane watched as half a couch, cut clean through the center of a cushion, tipped back and plummeted twenty stories to the pavement.
Sloane’s mind had gone blank. Her body ached down to her fingernails. She tested her legs, found them shaky but mobile. The others, something whispered in her head. Find the others.
She crawled on all fours over the concrete for a moment, then lurched to her feet and stumbled toward the river. She felt like she was drunk. She saw a dark head surface and ran toward the bridge, where there was a set of stairs leading down to the water. In front of her, a boxy Genetrix taxi collided with a sleek BMW. The drivers both got out and started yelling at each other, one of them waving a siphon on his left hand that looked like a metal glove.
She sprinted down the steps and slid to her knees at the river’s edge, where she had seen the man in the water. Mox spluttered, shoving his hair away from his face, and Sloane threw her arms around him, half plunging into the river, her hips flat against the concrete.
“Your ear is bleeding,” he said.
“Perforated eardrum,” she said.
He crushed his mouth against hers, graceless. She tasted river water and dust from the monument site and blood. He was alive.
She heard coughing and tore herself from Mox to see Esther a few yards away, braced on the edge of the river on her elbows, hacking up water. Sloane stumbled over and pulled Esther out of the water by her arms.
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