by Camilla Monk
He had. I remembered the way he’d nodded to himself and kept repeating my presence with him outside time was “new.” But he’d said he had no idea why it was happening. He’d said he had no idea it was even possible . . .
Chronos considered the Chip & Dale stickers stuck to my mom’s coffee table. “He’s a man; he lies. Get over it.”
My mouth worked in silence until I managed to ask, “Why?”
“Now we’re talking! Why? The great question! Why me? You? The universe—”
“Why the fuck are you playing with me?” I spat, cutting her off.
She smirked. “Not afraid to challenge the gods, I see. I like that.” She shoved a finger up her nose, picking it thoroughly. “I’m just here to say hi, you know, chat a bit before you disappear.”
Panic exploded in my chest, but I remained stuck to that couch like I was paralyzed. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve fulfilled your purpose. You won! Yay, you!”
I blinked over and over as if it might help me see the line between dream and reality. I was in my own head after all, right? “You mean . . . I killed Perses?”
She sighed. “Think so. He bites the dust, in about a jiffy from now.”
“A . . . jiffy?”
She pinched her thumb and forefinger together and held them up for me to see. “It’s a very small and very long amount of time.”
Perses was going to die—soon, apparently—and I would . . . disappear?
“Like I said, you won, you big winner. And now, since you’re expanding pretty fast, I’d say you’re about to absorb yourself along with everything else around. It’s gonna get nasty.”
I just shook my head dumbly, incapable of processing any of this. I was coming apart like a dandelion.
Chronos sighed, cringed. “I made him immortal, but trust me, Faust won’t survive that one. Lily won’t make it either, by the way. You’re about to suck them into a needle eye of infinite gravity and spit them out in another universe, in confetti.” She stuck out her tongue as she mimicked something being crushed in her hands. “You’re losing control, girl, I’m telling ya.”
The meaning of her words didn’t fully register: I was stuck behind in our conversation, at the moment when she’d said . . . “Faust was waiting for me?”
She looked up from the sticker she’d been busy peeling off from the coffee table’s glass top. Her head bobbed up and down. “Yeah.”
I gazed down at my reflection in the dark glass. A girl who looked completely out of it. “So . . . I was waiting for him too?”
Chronos shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe. It’s not like I was in your head.”
I didn’t know either, and I never would if he . . . died. Her words registered, at last, whipped me hard. Blood resumed flowing to my brain, pounding hard in my temples, and my legs obeyed me when I decided to shoot up from the couch. “No. No! I want out!”
I staggered around the frozen living room of my childhood. “Take me out!” I shouted.
Chronos tilted her head at me, a puzzled look on her round face. “Girl, whatcha freaking about?” She raised her small palms, to which a Dale sticker still clung. “Do I look like I’m holding the wheel here? I’m six, for fuck’s sake, and you’re the Omega. You don’t want to absorb Faust and Lily, cool; do something about it.”
“Do what?” I roared. “How do I control this?”
She pressed her lips together in a cunning grin. “That’s what I’ve been telling you for like, ten eons: wake up, Em.”
I did.
Or rather, a part of my conscience returned. It’s not like I had eyes anymore to open, but there was this tiny fiber of me that still thought like a human being, who still tried to be aware of her body, her own existence. Somewhere in this absolute peace, I remembered fear, and with it came the awareness of my body and Perses’s, merging with me. Absorbed. I felt his howl of agony as his limbs disintegrated to become part of my void, and I thought, “he’s inside me.” It was the ultimate horror, the boost I needed to fight back.
I thrashed in the dark, reached for the edge of me, the safe limits of my physical envelope, somewhere to swim back to. Pain and light returned to me, and I’d never been so relieved that every breath hurt.
My knees were the first thing I saw clearly—my torn jeans, bloodstained. I was still curled against the wall in the corner of the lab. Lily spotted Perses before I did. Her wail achieved to clear the fog in my mind. I blinked at the shape . . . the thing lying a few feet away from me. A head, half a torso with an arm still attached. Shreds of his lab coat and shirt clinging to blackened skin. Shit . . . My hands jerked to feel frantically at my chest and belly, terrified at the idea that maybe I’d feel him crawl under my skin. Inside me. Oh my God, I had absorbed him, for real. That was just sick.
Lily scrambled to her feet and ran to him. She fell to her knees, a hand clasped over her mouth in horror. She didn’t dare touch him. Her trembling fingers hovered, powerless, over what was left of the mighty Perses. “Oh no, no, no . . . please, no . . .” Her voice cracked into a sob so earnest, so desperate, it reached straight to my heart and clawed at it.
My head lolled as I tried to remember why my own chest hurt like that, and I saw Faust. I could no longer get to my feet, just crawl. I dragged my body across the bloodstained floor, my legs a deadweight. The fingers of his left hand twitched. I reached to touch them, feel him. His eyelids fluttered open.
“It’s me,” I croaked. “I’m here. I think . . . I think I killed him. With the black hole.” I crept closer and, with a grunt of effort, managed to get to my knees.
His lips quivered and curved upward. “I told you we’d be lucky,” he said weakly. Renewed panic flared in my blood when his smile wavered. “Emma, he’s . . .”
My head flipped back to Perses’s charred body and Lily cradling his face in her hands, stroking it. The arm he had left moved. Shit. I stood up on shaky legs, while behind me Faust attempted to get to a sitting position with a groan of agony. A ring of flaming signs sizzled across the floor around Perses and Lily, trapping them. She took a single look at them and collapsed over him, pressing her cheek to his. “I love you,” she murmured. “Take me there with you . . . Please.”
Faust grappled blindly for his cane with his remaining arm. “Lily, no! Don’t!”
His hoarse shout whipped me into action: I ran back to them and plunged to the ground, my hand straining for her even as a column of swirling shadows engulfed them. I felt her arm, grazed it. I could have grabbed her if I’d been just a little faster, a little stronger, but my fingers closed over thin air as the shadows vanished with a final howl.
I sat in a state of shock, shaking all over, staring at the charred outline of a few characters lingering on the floor. Once I was able to breathe, I screamed, “Where did he take her? Where is she?”
Faust let himself fall back to the ground with a gasp of agony. “In the only place he can heal safely away from you . . . In Tartarus.”
Lily’s pleas rang back in my ears as I returned to Faust’s side. “She asked him. She kept saying she didn’t mind if he took her there.”
His head turned my way, looking for me. I scooted closer, allowing him to rest his cheek on my knees. He sighed. “I’m sorry, Emma. Tartarus is a death sentence for humans. Her physical body can’t survive there.”
Pain exploded in my chest, tears building fast in its wake. “Oh God . . . she can’t be dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” he repeated softly.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “We’ll come up with something. Lady Palombara will know what to do.”
“Emma—”
The ear-splitting screech of a security alarm cut him off. I looked up to see an orange strobe blinking fast on the ceiling. Faust raised his head at me. “Would you mind helping me up? I think we need to leave. Fast.”
My stomach heaved. “Your arm . . .”
“That’s definitely a problem,” he rasped. “But my cane is a more urgent one.�
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“Okay.” I leaped to my feet and ran around the table to where I’d sent it flying earlier. It still lay in the exact same place, looking every bit like an ordinary vine staff with a purple egg encased in the hilt. Yet Chronos’s legendary table belonged in the past: all that remained was a dead slab of granite, a pretty archeological piece for a museum, and a fun enigma for the many scientists who’d try to figure out the meaning of its inscriptions. The power and the whispered secrets all rested in Ouranos’s nut now, for Faust to guard more closely than ever . . .
“I can’t touch your cane,” I reminded him. “I’ll kick it your way.” I wasn’t sure how much contact might trigger its disintegration, so I kinda toed it awkwardly a couple times, nudging it toward Faust until he was able to grab it.
The strobe above our heads stopped flashing almost instantly.
“That should make our life a little easier.” He let out a pained grunt. “I’m afraid I’m going to need more help, Emma.”
I closed my eyes briefly. Please don’t ask me to pick up your arm . . . Please—
“My arm . . .”
Oh God.
I would have done pretty much anything for him at that point of our non-relationship, but picking up his severed arm was still the second-grossest thing I’d ever accomplished in my life—that crazy shit with Lucius’s arm being the first.
“Just bring it close and try not to touch me while it heals,” he instructed. “It should do the trick.”
I did as he asked, fighting a wave of nausea as I nudged the arm closer to his body with the very tip of my fingers, until it was more or less back in place. “Now what?” I asked, a tremor in my voice.
He let go of his cane to hold the arm in place with his left hand. “We wait.”
“How long?”
Amazingly, much faster than I imagined. But then again, time had stopped, so I’m not sure how long I stared at Faust, biting my nails while his flesh kind of . . . grew back together in bloody tendrils straining for each other. Bon appetit. After a while, he declared that it was good enough for now. I didn’t dare help him up—terrified that the arm might come off again if we touched—and watched him struggle with the help of his cane. Once Faust stood on his legs, we limped our way out of Katharos’s headquarters, past frozen security guards. Gives a whole new meaning to the expression “a close brush with the law.”
Once on the street, I spotted Silvio’s red minivan and guided Faust to it. We crashed in the backseat barely five seconds after he’d released time. Silvio glanced at our blood-soaked clothes in the mirror. Nodded. And crushed the gas.
It was only when he parked in a tiny paved street near the Trevi Fountain that he asked, “Your sister?”
I shook my head, unable to form words as my eyes grew hot again.
His gaze unreadable behind his glasses, he ducked his head to remove the fascinus around his neck. He turned in his seat to drop it in Faust’s trembling left hand, and looked at me. “Be strong and get some sleep.”
Faust flashed him a weary smile. “Five stars.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come to bed with me?”
Faust’s tired voice came muffled from the general direction of his canopy bed, where he lay buried under his Spiderman duvet and approximately a hundred cats. I’m not sure how they could possibly know something had happened to him—or if cats routinely communicated about that kind of stuff for that matter—but somehow, nearly every feline from the neighborhood had gathered on his balcony as I helped him up the ladder leading to his attic, and they’d soon piled up atop of him in the bed.
“I’m good,” I mumbled from the couch, tossing under a scratchy blanket, in my underwear and Faust’s weird bible T-shirt.
It was still dark, but outside the sky was turning a deep shade of indigo, and stripes of pink peeked between the roofs. Faust and I had crashed up here and gone to sleep almost immediately because, at this point, it was the only thing to do. With dawn would come more problems than I wanted to think of anyway . . .
“Dante” and Lily’s disappearance had probably been discovered by now, along with a pile of ashes in the ruins of the lab. For Lily, the cops would call Richard and my mother—if it wasn’t done already. It wouldn’t take long before all authorities involved learned that I was in Rome and that I’d seen her. They were going to want to question me—to suspect me, even? The prospect only scared me half as much as a potential confrontation with my mom and stepfather. It was easy to imagine how things would look to them: Lily getting in trouble and vanishing right after I showed up in Rome and stuck my nose in her business . . .
Every time I tried to close my eyes, I saw her tear-streaked face, heard her screams. She’d lied to me, and she’d have let Perses use me to obtain Chronos’s power, but now that my anger was turning into grief, I could see that she’d done it all out of love for him, and maybe he had loved her a little too, in his inhumane way. I couldn’t find it in me to truly hate Lily for what she’d done. I just wanted to undo it all, see her back and safe—so I could tell her to fuck off and never call me again.
In the bed, Faust’s good arm moved to scratch one of his cats. He wouldn’t go back to sleep yet. “How’s your arm?” I asked.
“Connected to my torso,” he replied with a yawn.
“Does it still hurt?”
“It’s not that bad,” he mused, as Arrancino—or was this one Confucius?—moved to sit on his pillow and kneaded his hair with an exaggerated yawn. “I lost my head once, during the Hundred Years’ War.”
I stretched on the couch’s busted leather cushions. “Holy shit!”
“I know, right? Let me tell you, the recovery was something else.”
“Emma?” he called softly.
“Yeah?”
“I think it’d heal faster if you joined me under the covers.”
I rubbed my eyes, torn between laughter and aggravation. “Are you seriously still trying to bang me? Right now?”
“Yes,” he admitted in a small, guilty voice. “But I’m more than willing to settle for a little platonic intimacy.”
“No,” I said with a chuckle, even as my heart tightened. Definitively no, considering what had happened tonight. I rested a hand on my stomach under the blanket, swallowing back a wave of nausea at the memory of Perses disintegrating inside me. I felt monstrous, violated. I was no longer a human being, but a walking black hole, a danger to everyone who tried to get too close—starting with Faust.
“Emma,” he called again from under his duvet. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
I huffed. “Because you need to sleep.”
“Are you scared because of what happened in the lab?” he probed gently.
He must have eyes on his dick; that had to be his secret. “I’m not . . . look, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m freaked out.”
“But you’re safe, and you defeated him,” he replied, admiration tinging his voice. “I’m almost scared of you now,” he joked.
Except it wasn’t funny at all. I jackknifed up. “Faust, I nearly killed you!”
His tone grew wistful. “I know. But you didn’t.”
“And I have no idea why, how, or what actually happened. I basically felt myself drowning . . . inside myself with Perses, which is the worst mindfuck I ever experienced in my life.”
He rolled to his side, stirring the living, furry mass blanketing him. “You don’t remember anything?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “No. I know I went somewhere . . . inside my head, but it’s like I’m hungover. My head hurts, I feel like shit, and I know I’m gonna regret everything I did last night.” A thought arced through my skull, out of the blue. The rattle of the cane and the seagulls. “Faust?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever been to New York?”
“I have, a few times actually.” My pulse picked up. I squinted at his shape in the bed. “Last time was in 1978 when Queen played in Madison Square Garden. Believe me, you wish you had been bo
rn to witness that.”
I drew the scratchy blanket over my thighs, contemplating his answer with a pang of disappointment. “Okay, I just wondered.” I wasn’t about to tell him I’d dreamt of him before knowing he was the one responsible for stilling time. He’d be quick to conclude that we were fated to bang with his cats watching and Umberto Tozzi wailing ti amo in the background.
“Emma?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it still no?” he pleaded.
I lay back on the couch with a chuckle. “No.”
A heavy sigh. Some tossing around. Cats meowing weakly, until one of them jumped from the bed to go perch on a chair. “Emma?”
“What?” I tried hard to be pissed, but my lips were curving already in dawn’s blueish light. He was relentless, impossible.
“I’m hungry.”
A box of Cocoa Krispies in hand, I studied Faust’s newly reattached right arm while the pile of cats curled on his lap watched me fix our unsung hero a well-deserved bowl of faxkrispies.
He laid his tablet aside, which had been reading him an email from Silvio moments ago. “I usually have a good nose, but I just didn’t see it coming. All it’d have taken was a call to Sapienza.”
“The university where he was supposed to have gotten his PhD? It was fake after all?” I padded to the bed to give him the bowl. Faust sat up, disrupting the cats piled up on his lap and chest. They rolled and crawled out of the way, only to resettle on his legs and coil around his waist. I stole a guilty glance at the lean muscles of his bare chest while he smelled his breakfast with a blissful smile. Nothing wrong with a little eye candy, as long as I didn’t eat the whole bag, I reassured myself.
“No, and that’s the amazing part: Dante Alessandri appears in their records, but his doctoral advisor can’t remember his face, his name, or even the subject of his thesis—a copy of which can be found in the university’s archive.”
“Do you think it’s because Perses is gone and can no longer control the guy?”
He nodded and held out the bowl. “Likely. Do you want to try it?”