The Worm and His Kings

by Hailey Piper

  Monique smiled over Corene. “If it was fate, he would’ve had a bride on the first try.”

  Black glass flecked Corene’s lips. “I’d like that. But what if the Worm always meant to test the old kings, have his godly tantrum, and destroy their history so that we could rise from early mammals instead? The Worm is absolute, but he’s not picky about leaving ruin wherever he goes.”

  “No, I think he likes it. Donna acts like he’s made an example of Old Time—humans, stay in line or you’ll end up like them.”

  Two of Mimic’s sister-creatures crawled at the edge of Monique’s sight, their gowns merging with shadow. The other three crept along the walls. They didn’t belong, these creatures with birdlike legs, sickle claws, and whale cries. They wore clothes like humans, but made from what, silkworm silk? Or some animal that had only existed in their dead timeline?

  “He who cleaves time in two leaves a half-divided history.” Corene pointed over her shoulder at a pillar in the back of the chamber. “I found a king of their time here. The King of the Broken Throne, split and punished between timelines.”

  Monique looked to the Gray Maiden again and kept her distance as she circled Corene. “The one they love. Here?”

  “In a fashion. Love is a strong word.”

  Monique crept toward the pillar, Mimic slinking beside her. This was the lair of the Broken King who had brought the Worm down on two histories, founder of the nightly ceremony, the seer who sounded so great in Bouchard’s speech and Lady’s rambling.

  But Donna was right; there was nothing to fear. The King of the Broken Throne didn’t rule the underground. What remained was neither messiah nor demagogue.

  Deep in the chamber stood a shard of blasted wall where a standing body had long ago fused with stone. Sinewy black glass spread root-like from its every extremity. A fleshless skull turned upward with the snout frozen open in an eternal scream. The limbs bent backward, so overcome with glassy strands that Monique couldn’t tell their exact shape. The abdomen was a petrified broken sack. Something had been torn loose.

  “Oo-ooh,” Mimic sang, her notes long and discordant.

  Monique didn’t think guts alone had gone missing from the Broken King’s middle. “The King of the Broken Throne was a mother?” she asked.

  “I was surprised, too,” Corene said. “But the Great Pangaea Kingdoms had their own society and the people upstairs make a habit of getting things wrong. We glued the word king to men. Their kind’s equivalent must’ve spanned genders. She was the seer, after all, so she set the precedent. I wonder how many years her kingdoms lasted between the First Coming and their end.” Her shoulders slumped, the floor dragging at her. “She was the first to meet the Worm and look what he did to her.”

  Monique reached for the torn belly and then let her hand drop. Mimic did the same. To touch would not be right. “She doomed Old Time.”

  “She doomed herself and her child.” Corene halfway turned, trying to face Monique. Every movement made her wince. “According to the cult’s myths, at the Second Coming of the Worm, he demanded one of the old kings offer their daughter as bride. They didn’t say, ‘No.’ They hesitated, each hoping one of the others would speak up first. The Worm had expected them to jump at the chance, but they loved their daughters too much to let any of them become a vessel for the Worm’s offspring. In their moment’s pause, he was already reaching back in time. But he looked to her, the seer who became king, who was with child, and thought she might promise her unborn daughter to him. How could she love someone she hadn’t even met? And yet she refused.” Corene pointed at the corner. “She already loved her daughter too much.”

  Her finger aimed at the sleeping Gray Maiden.

  “The Worm took her,” Monique said. Revulsion surged up her insides.

  “He shattered the seer’s seat—King of the Broken Throne—and left her daughter to grow in an unwelcoming timeline.” Corene clicked her tongue as if admonishing a misbehaving student.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He told me.” Corene slumped deep into herself. She seemed not to want to look, but her head couldn’t help turning to one side. “I found who I was looking for, too.”

  Monique glanced over but didn’t approach. The floor bulged into a jagged lump. She could believe its glassy spines were once the scraggly beard of Professor Abraham Clarke, now sharpened and hardened by Old Time.

  “Corene, I’m so sorry,” Monique said.

  “He was still alive when the Gray Maiden put me down here. He was raving. I gleaned what I could. He was desperate to live by then, his thoughts torn apart, our every physics theory disintegrated by dogma. Now I’m the only one who understands.” Leaning her head back, Corene bared her throat as if ready for Monique to cut it. “I wonder if I’ll worship the Worm by the end.”

  The chamber’s doorway cleared of shadows. Monique had apparently seen what the creatures meant for her to see, but now she didn’t want to leave. They slinked along the walls, flesh against reflection.

  “Ooh?” Mimic asked.

  Monique reached for Mimic’s face and felt beneath her hood. Her skin was cold and clammy. Soft spines coated her neck, what Monique imagined a hedgehog must’ve felt like when stroked head to tail. “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “Ooh.” Mimic reached for Monique’s face and laid a cool hand against her cheek. Talons dug into her oily hair.

  “I think they seeped from Old Time, same as the palace,” Corene said. “And Old Time seeped from the Broken King. This chamber seems an accident, huh? Maybe the Worm meant things to turn out this way, maybe not. The machinations of we small things are beneath his mighty gaze. We might scurry unimpeded. We might plot.”

  “Even the Worm might make a mistake then.” Monique lowered her hand from Mimic’s face and stepped toward Corene. Her shoulders weighed too much suddenly, as if she had taken on the guilt of this room. “But everyone’s still afraid of him.”

  “Fear is a symptom. It happens when our old perspective breaks down.” Corene stared hard into Monique’s eyes. “Sometimes we have to break down to see things in new ways.”

  “Did Abraham teach you that?”

  “I taught myself that. And now I’m teaching you.” Corene’s chest heaved in and out. Old Time was invading her organs and killing her, same as Abraham. “Imagine synchronized wormholes across multiple star systems. The space circumvented by wormholes can only be a worm.”

  Monique knelt beside the black glass nest. The chamber’s wrong scent came strongest here, mixed with unwashed skin and beleaguered regret. “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “That kind of vast celestial movement might twist gravity and flip magnetism.” Corene raked her hair again. Patches of black glass glistened across her scalp. “A black hole is so dense that it can crush time itself. Why can’t a wormhole? And so, Abraham and I theorized that some cosmic cataclysm beyond our understanding once tore through multiple wormholes and spilled over Earth, striking present and past, shifting tectonic plates—the planet’s history was forever altered. Old Time is the seepage from a parallel present. What we’ve discovered is not the will of any deity, but the echoes of a chronologically erased culture, its pieces leaking into our universe. They paid fealty to that cosmic movement, but the cosmos has no mercy.”

  “Do you know about the people in the throne room?” Monique asked, desperate. “They’re dead and alive.”

  “If there is such a thing as a soul, why wouldn’t it be governed by the same natural forces as everything else? They sink into the gravity well. That’s what we theorized anyway.” An uneven smile split Corene’s face. “I bet Abraham told them as much once he heard out their mythology. He was never tricky like you and me. No one liked that, I’m sure, so they let the Gray Maiden drag him down here. All for a little starlight.”

  Monique couldn’t be certain that Corene was right, but she didn’t know enough about the stars to say she was wrong. All these people with their songs and m
urder might as well be bowing to Jupiter’s eye or Saturn’s rings. The Worm might be an imagined god, a cosmic power same as gravity or a supernova, but no consciousness. No will.

  Only an empty place.

  Whether he was a god or gravity, this place, these people, had taken those who were desperate or brilliant or both and turned them into single-minded zealots. They had done the same to Donna and Abraham. Corene saw it in her future. They would do it to Monique, too, given the chance.

  She turned to Mimic, just one bystander beneath celestial calamity. “I wish I knew what you knew.”

  Mimic said nothing.

  “I bet you’d tell me it’ll be okay. You’d tell me no one should worship this power. But really, I’m just pinning my thoughts to you, like my parents did to me because I was a quiet kid. You can’t tell me anything, and that isn’t any fair.”

  To entirely erase Old Time would’ve been kinder than casting its fragments to wander lost in an alien world. Time that never was, sliced from its source by the Worm’s carelessness. There shouldn’t have been a cataclysm that left echoes caught here, forever repeating. The underground was not a city, but a mass grave, its ghosts forever buried, its ghouls so desperate for a place to belong that they put their hopes of salvation in a worm of uncaring stars, as eternal and thoughtless as the empty space between them.

  Donna was wrong. There was everything to fear.

  “I have to help Donna,” Monique said. She reached for Corene. “But I can’t leave you like this.”

  “I can’t follow.” Corene’s legs fidgeted, caught in black glass teeth. “Seems the people upstairs were right about one thing—the Worm’s will is absolute.”

  “The Worm makes mistakes. If Old Time was shoved through because he couldn’t care less, I can grab Donna by the arm and yank her out, dismissed or not. And I can rip you out of this, too.” Monique offered an open hand.

  “Don’t.” Corene lowered her head to the floor. “This shit will spread into you, and you’ll die like Abraham. You’ll never save Donna. Wouldn’t that be too much like quitting for you?”

  Monique’s thoughts rolled beneath the weight of everything Corene had said about stars, wormholes, and gravity, about quitting and retaking and transcending. The only word to come out was, “Sorry.”

  “We’d tear the universe apart for the people we love, but sometimes we forget to love ourselves. It’s not your fault, kid.”

  “Monique.”

  Corene forced a smirk. “You tear them down, Monique. Run with Donna and break everything in your way.”

  Monique didn’t leave yet. She drifted toward the slab where the Broken King seeped not a dead history, but physical sorrow. No one escaped the Worm, it seemed. A survivor, smarter than most, Donna had accepted that and allowed the Worm to break her. Now she flowed with his will.

  But Monique couldn’t.

  She reached for the Broken King’s skull and ran her fingers down a glassy face. Black teeth reflected her fingertips. “Sorry,” she said again. She thought of her scars, small to the scars of Old Time, and wondered if the Broken King was like her, afflicted with anatomy that didn’t match the truth inside. There was no knowing. The culture of the Great Pangaea Kingdoms couldn’t be explained by an altar to its loss.

  “Ooh,” Mimic added.

  It wasn’t much of a eulogy for a dead mother, a Broken King, or a wronged universe, but it would have to do.

  As Monique stepped back from the pillar, her heel faltered on an uneven surface, some obstruction. She heard a familiar click and felt a sharp blade jab through the sole of her shoe, into the pad of her foot. A scream tore up her throat before she could snap her lips shut.

  Talons scraped black glass. Something large gasped, awakening.

  What had she stepped on? She lifted her leg and her fingertips crossed a plastic handle and trigger—her own switchblade. The Gray Maiden had taken it after all, curious as her fellow refugees. Blood coated Monique’s fingertips.

  A shadowy bulk rose against a separate pillar, and her sickle claws tapped the floor. “Ooh?” The questioning whale song came deep and tired. The Gray Maiden was still groggy.

  Monique spun around, stumbled, fell on the glass, and scrabbled up. A pointless accident, easily avoided. The Gray Maiden was moving. There would be no evading her this time; Monique was bleeding everywhere. Mimic no longer walked by her side. She had dipped into the shadows with her sister-creatures. They might’ve been afraid of the Gray Maiden too, so much larger than the rest of them.

  Monique limped past Corene and toward the chamber doorway. Heavy steps thudded behind her. Click, click.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Corene shouted. She clutched at the Gray Maiden’s cloak and tangled it around her arms. Black glass thorns snagged the fabric. “Leave her alone; she’s just a kid!” Her eyes flashed wide at Monique. “Run like hell!”

  Monique twisted on her good foot and stumbled out of the chamber. A wail rang across black glass, so harsh that it might pierce the universe. It throttled her nerves, but she couldn’t let it stop her from leaving or else Corene would die for nothing. She had to get back across the bridge.

  Back to Donna.

  13

  BLOOD AND STONE

  THE PALACE HALLS FELT DARKER than before, but Monique couldn’t stand in the palace entrance waiting for her eyes to adjust. The Gray Maiden wouldn’t be long.

  Corene didn’t deserve this. Old Time was grave enough for an entire people. Hadn’t it consumed enough lives? Monique guessed not. She would be next if she didn’t hurry.

  She took a blind turn and hobbled down the sleek stone hallway, her blood-slick shoe squeaking with each step. Windows glowed to one side; doorways stood dark to the other. She kept watch for any passageways that might lead toward the palace center, throne room, Donna—all the important beats.

  “Ooh!” A blaring hoot rang from outside. The Gray Maiden had finished with Corene. It would take her only moments to notice the blood trail leading over the lake’s bridge and inside the palace.

  And what could Monique do about it? Every other footstep shot screams up her leg, and her switchblade felt pathetic in her fist. Head spinning, she stumbled down the hall and slammed her shoulder into a corner. The Gray Maiden would catch up at this rate. She knew her way, and no one had slowed her down with a stab wound to the sole.

  “OOH!” She was here.

  Monique eyed the floor. Couldn’t she lie down and let everything just happen?

  No, that would be quitting. This was a new floor for her, and Mimic and her sister-creatures weren’t here to bar the way. Monique had free reign to find the throne room so long as she was quick. Once she held Donna in her arms, they could break for the elevator, and soon after that, they would escape. Monique hobbled onward.

  “—and when you’re wondering why the Worm needs kings, it’d be like if we put you in charge of running an anthill.”

  Voices filled the hall before Monique could slow down. Flashlights slashed through the black corridor. Three young men walked the palace halls, one carrying a bucket while the other two carried crates.

  “You’d be too big,” one of the crate carriers went on. “Same with the Worm. A god who cracks land would hurt—who are you?”

  Monique hadn’t realized there would be other people in the palace halls. She studied them. They were in their mid-twenties and looked sturdy, but none of them were armed and they had their hands full.

  She raised her switchblade and stamped toward them. “Out of my way!”

  The men didn’t argue. Their bucket sloshed and crates thumped as they strafed aside. She darted past, down the hall.

  “But we just did throne room duty,” one of them said, as if Monique had been sent to help them.

  She didn’t answer. All that mattered was grabbing Donna and getting her to the surface. Back on the street, they would be safe if there was daylight. No way the Gray Maiden would come out while the sun shined and reveal herself to the world. They could
make it to Jersey long before sunset and just keep running, hitchhiking, anything to get as far from the city as humanly possible. Across the country, trading Atlantic Ocean for Pacific, maybe they’d find peace where the Worm’s will couldn’t touch them. Monique had never seen the west coast. She’d scarcely left the city.

  “OOH-OOH!” The Gray Maiden’s foghorn cry swelled to deafening.

  Monique pounded the floor, half-limping, half-jogging. There was a turn ahead, one that might take her closer to the palace’s center.

  Footsteps clacked behind her as the men made to follow. One of them started to say something and then his voice cracked into a scream. Monique caught a flailing flashlight beam out of the corner of her eye as she made the turn.

  The screamer writhed between the Gray Maiden’s fingers. He could no better escape her than anyone else. Her shoulders hunched around her head, higher than usual, and her trembling limbs lit the air with hot rage. She lowered the man, as if starting to put him down, and then thrashed at the ceiling, smearing his skull across black stone. She then reeled back and threw him down the hall.

  Monique ducked just as his body hurtled past her, sending an airy gust through her hair. It struck the wall and seemed to pop. Raw fluid spat over slick stone and its residue sprayed Monique’s jeans and shoes.

  The Gray Maiden didn’t need to do that, but the man had been in her way, and that was all the reason she had needed to crush him. And it was easy.