by Hailey Piper
“You missed Marigold & Cohen, huh?” Monique swatted Donna’s hand away. “Mon Amour this, Mon Amour that—you were climbing the ranks, and I dragged you down. Now you’ve dragged me down, and you’re climbing again. Did they hand you a crown on the street, or did they wait until you got here and told them you’d hand me over?”
“I love you. Don’t you know that?” Donna looked incredulous. “I never meant to abandon you. I just went for a walk that day, raging over Samuel Reinhart.”
Monique’s skin felt too tight. “Why?”
“That’s the question I asked myself. Why would the world let him do that to you? Why were you even put in that position? Why any of it?” Donna spread her hands to the wall of stars behind the throne. “And the Worm answered. Something wondrous happened for the first time in decades—the Worm chose a new king.”
“The Worm changes you,” Monique recited. She’d heard that too many times since this began and now it dripped from her own lips.
“He did. And he’ll change you, too. Want to know how?” Donna’s fresh grin looked eager to tell. “Because we’re not wandering the darkness anymore, and that makes us better. You can’t stay lost and cynical once you learn there’s a purpose to life. I worried you might miss out, but then I realized you’d make the perfect bride. You care, you fight, you love hard and never stop. A king fills each seat once more. The Worm is coming to demand again, and this time he’ll have the mother of his children. Soon there won’t be people like Doctor Sam to hurt the people I love.”
“Because you’ll hurt me yourself.” Monique tried to stand again. Her legs wobbled. One foot screamed until she fell back into her seat. “If you still love me, drag me out of here. The Worm wants more than my damn kidney, Dee.”
“The Worm gives more, too.”
“You be the bride then.”
Donna scoffed. “I don’t have what it takes to be the bride. I have the soul of a king.” That was true. Self-righteous, selfish—at Marigold & Cohen, her confidence and ego had been charming. In the Sunless Palace, she was a monster.
Cold fingers tapped down Monique’s vertebrae. She glanced past the throne at the wall of stars. The fungi inside its holes seemed to glisten.
“We must be arriving,” Donna said, standing from the table. “For us, it’s a matter of creeping across time and preparing for his return, but for the Worm, it will have been less than an instant. He’s just smashed the continents. Now he’s slipping across millions of years to see his work. In a way, he is constant, and time revolves around him.”
Monique thought of Corene. “A worm through a wormhole.”
“See? You understand.” Donna reached for Monique’s face. “I would’ve made you my queen if I could, but the Worm demands, and a world without hate awaits. I’m sorry—”
Monique clamped her teeth down on Donna’s hand. A copper taste flooded her mouth.
Donna wrenched back. Teeth marks cut a semi-circle through the meat of her palm, beneath her smallest finger. She smiled as if this proved a point.
Monique spat blood on the floor. “What if there is no he? That cosmic energy screwed up history, but that doesn’t make it a god any more than the sun. You’re kowtowing to a stellar freak accident. You’re killing me for nothing!”
Donna’s regal façade slipped to a snarl. “Transcendence, at last, and you shirk it. Do you know why? Because you’ll bloom, and you can’t handle that. When you lived with your parents, you pretended to be what they wanted for survival. Once they kicked you out, every day was a new struggle. The best you’ve ever done is survive. You’ve never thrived.”
“I did. With you.” Monique felt petulant and hated it, but what choice did she have?
“Not even with me.” A gloom fell over Donna’s eyes. “It was irresponsible to fall in love with you, Monique. I’ve had a lot of time to myself in this room to reflect, and I was never really fair to you. I was desperate for love and wanted someone who wouldn’t turn her back on me. You had your challenges, but you dogged after me, my loyal sweetheart at half my age. We were never on even footing. Anyone else would’ve given up long before now, but you tracked me down here yourself. Too young and inexperienced to know better.”
Monique gritted her teeth. “I don’t quit.”
“And look what that’s done for you. You’re on the verge of starving.” Donna’s cold shadow crossed the bridal seat. “But I think living on the edge keeps you fighting. You’re so used to survival that if you had a loving home and everything you needed, you would lose your mind, tear down your life, and bite the hand that feeds you.”
Monique looked at Donna's bloody hand. It wasn’t true. She’d been happy when they lived together. But then, her standards for happiness had never been all that high. Her parents had seen to that. Was Donna right? Monique didn’t have months in the throne room to contemplate her place in the universe. She had moments, and they were ending.
Donna’s eyes focused into a kingly gaze. “Wild Monique, at last your struggle is over. You’ll become the vessel of the universal future and find peace through your children.”
“I don’t want to be a mother!” Monique shrieked.
Donna leaned into Monique’s face and slammed lips against lips. The kiss brought too much teeth, but Monique didn’t shy away. She tasted Donna’s blood again. A warm ripple spread through her nerves. She sank into her bridal seat.
Donna tore away before she could catch another bite and turned toward a wall to the throne’s right. A slender doorway hid between shadows in the stone. She reached a hesitant hand ahead as if searching for an unseen doorknob.
Monique forced herself to stand. Her foot begged for mercy and the gown tangled around her ankles, but she had to try. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’ve worked the Worm’s will. And now—” Donna slipped through the doorway. Shadow covered her black suit and dark hair, and she vanished from the throne room. “Now I’ve been dismissed.”
Bones clattered at Monique’s back, drawing her gaze to the table.
The skeletons wriggled. Their hands twitched at their sides, a rattle against stone. One head fell forward, slamming its silver mask against the table. The skull caved in on impact and sent a tremor down the skeleton’s spine, shaking loose limbs and ribs. The ribcage collapsed into a crumbling pelvis, and a bowler hat dropped to the floor.
The rest of the silver masks crashed. Down the table, the skeletons crumbled against their seats, spraying bone dust into the air and pearly fragments across the floor. Their clothes crumpled. Whatever force once held the bodies together at last let them fall apart.
They were dismissed.
“No, no, no.” Monique darted for the wall’s slender doorway. She spun without meaning to, nearly tripping on her gown, and faced the table. She turned around once more, tried another run, and swiveled toward the table again. “That can’t be right.”
She marched back and forth twenty times, her foot pleading for her to stop. Her legs groaned, every step an effort against gravity, as if she were trying to fly. Blood seeped through her bandage, leaving dark splotches on the floor. When she could hardly walk anymore, she drifted back to the bridal seat and glanced at the throne. This was like trying to step inside the empty place. Anyone who wanted to cross the line would always be dissuaded.
She had not been dismissed.
The rest of the seats now sat empty, every regal hopeful to come before Donna freed of his burden. Monique was alone. Even dead men had more freedom than she did.
Iron doors clanged open and echoed off the dark stone walls. Donna appeared over the balcony railing, her face beaming with pride. This looked more her style, her standing above and Monique below.
Bouchard joined the watchers in the viewing dome windows. His hands remained at his sides. He only conducted ceremonies on the surface, but now they were in the realm of kings and he was just another of the Worm’s humble servants. His face said he didn’t mind. He was calm and complacent, as Lad
y might have been had she lived to see this long-awaited moment.
Several more faces joined King Donna on the balcony. Monique recognized Israel and other members of the Worm’s choir. The rest had to gather behind them where she couldn’t see them. Each wore a crooked line of red dots across their forehead—the constellation of the Worm. Blood seeped in uneven red streams down their faces and necks. All stood naked except Donna. Wrinkled, scarred, pockmarked, insect-bitten, tattooed, pierced, striped with stretch marks—they were beautiful flesh and blood. They could choose to stop this.
Something glinted in Donna’s hand. She pressed a trigger, and Monique’s switchblade popped free from its handle.
Monique clenched her teeth. “Don’t,” she hissed.
The blade’s point pressed to one side of Donna’s brow and then carved across her forehead. Seven stars for the Worm. She didn’t flinch once.
The balcony’s heavy doors jostled against their hinges as the Gray Maiden ducked between them. She stopped at Donna’s side. Her talons glistened in the throne room’s fungal glow.
“Long ago, in a time now dead, one note changed our world forever,” Donna said.
The Gray Maiden wrenched her head back, revealing hints of leathery skin. “OOH!” Her hoot was a foghorn again, harsh and booming.
Monique felt the wall of stars squirm behind her.
“That note began a song in the seer’s lone throat,” Donna went on. “That first singer summoned our greatest blessing—the Worm. And tonight, the last song stirs through a throng of throats. Where there was one, there are now many. The way will open. We sing the song that pierces the universe and bring the world to its knees.”
Donna smiled, that Doctor Sam this won’t hurt a bit lie of a smile that Monique had seen in Bouchard, too. King Donna then let loose a long, eerie note. It was unsure, unpracticed, but she only sang to get the choir started. Her lips shut as theirs stretched open.
And the world trembled.
15
THE SONG THAT PIERCES THE UNIVERSE
AN OCEAN OF DISSONANT VOICES filled the throne room. They began in the ceremony room’s familiar hum, but new layers joined it—a deep bass, arias that climbed and fell like waves, a bright crescendo that brought all voices into momentary harmony.
The notes took on the Gray Maiden’s talons and punctured Monique’s skin. She covered her ears, but her skull pounded a rhythm of its own. A melodic bridge beckoned her to cross. Her head lolled onto the soft thatched back of the bridal chair.
In her upside-down gaze, shadows crawled across the wall of stars, its surface a starlit puddle that now trembled with waves of sound. She thought of Phoebe, who’d died to a lesser choral cry. Hers would be a gentle whisper to Monique’s death, a triumphant anthem of celestial chaos, the Worm’s song beautiful and complete.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been put in the wrong position and handed the wrong expectations. Her parents used to tell her she would become a man someday, a meaningless word to a child. She’d been ambivalent until she learned that it meant becoming her father or something like him, and then came horror and emptiness.
She once fantasized tragic deaths. Only later did she dare fantasize tragic lives. If she’d known more, she could’ve found help. Better places, better people to hand her heart than Donna. Other women had stability and support, but Monique never knew how they managed it. There was a lot she didn’t know, and now she wouldn’t even learn how it felt to grow old.
The choir was going to kill her. Was their song a frequency that bent dimensions or a loving call that summoned a god from the stars? They would either end her life by filling her with unwanted cosmic worm eggs or an interstellar force would pour through a wormhole and tear her to shreds. Maybe the difference was as hair-thin as when Phoebe had been stretched across time and disintegrated. Healing and harm could be a matter of perspective. Monique knew what it felt like to watch; now she’d learn what it felt like to die.
If she did nothing, didn’t fight, wouldn’t she become a thing the Worm wouldn’t want? Nothing special; just Donna’s sacrifice.
Monique doubted that. Even if the Worm was more than a non-sentient series of wormholes, he had never shown concern for the character of his bride. He had asked for any daughter from the old kings. It was on the kings to volunteer someone they loved, and only King Donna had stepped up. The Worm didn’t care who mothered his children so long as his kings showed supplication.
Monique looked to the jagged end of the table where once sat the seer turned Broken King, a forever screaming skull and torn abdomen, frozen in black glass and stone. The Worm had shown no love for mothers. This moment, this song, would be Monique’s only ceremony. Beyond that, she would become the Worm’s fertile earth, nothing more.
“Ooh?” A high-pitched cry snuck under the wavering song.
Monique looked to the Gray Maiden, but her songs were too deep. Higher then, near the viewing windows where Monique had first glimpsed this horrible room.
Mimic clutched the ceiling above one window, her talons clinging to its frame, her gown draped against the wall. Her sister-creatures appeared above neighboring windows. The Worm’s followers didn’t seem to notice; they gazed only at the wall of stars. Mimic and the others stuck to the shadows and descended into the throne room.
Pitiful daughters of the old kings. None were offered to the Worm, but he kept them in his own way. Now they were here to see Monique off, bridesmaids to the Bride of the Worm.
She sat up from the chair. No, he hadn’t kept them. They had leaked through from Old Time by accident, his wrath giving a window from their dead time to this one. Even the Worm could make a mistake.
If the daughters had survived, then Monique could, too. She had never meant to do more with her life than keep living and she wasn’t going to drop it without a fight. Donna was at least right on that count.
The Gray Maiden turned her head from side to side. “Ooh.”
King Donna was too high on victory to notice. Her choir carried on.
“Stop singing,” Monique hissed. She grabbed the box of Pop-Tarts off the table and flung it at the balcony. It struck the railing and burst, raining shiny packages over the floor. “Stop it!”
That caught Donna’s eye.
Monique grabbed an old book and threw it hard as she could. It tumbled over the balcony railing and landed in front of Israel. If he wavered, she couldn’t hear it in the song. She grabbed bowls, cups, spoons, one of the silver masks, still coughing up bits of dry skull, and chucked them, pelting balcony and singer alike.
Mimic reached the floor but clung to the edges of the room. Her sister-creatures kept climbing the walls.
Monique’s legs wobbled again, but she grasped the table this time and stood. She could manage this. Mimic reached ahead as if balancing herself, too.
“I’m not alone,” Monique whispered.
Soft wind tugged at the hem of her gown and drew her eyes back to the wall of stars. A draft seemed to flow into the dark patches at its edges. There were maybe a dozen holes still glowing with fungal light. The rest had gone dark.
She grabbed the back of the bridal chair and dragged it alongside the table. Mimic pretended to do the same on hunched birdy legs. It was a hard, hobbling journey, but Monique reached the jagged end of the table. She set the chair where the Broken King’s throne must once have sat and dropped into it.
Mimic didn’t squat beside her. Her head cocked.
“There’s room for both of us.” Monique scooted to one side of the chair. “Don’t leave me alone.”
But Mimic wouldn’t sit. Something wasn’t right. Taking the place of the Broken King wouldn’t help. It would only give the Worm another victim.
Donna leaned over the balcony and peered into the darkness. “Who’s down there with you?” she asked. She glanced at the Gray Maiden and then into the throne room again. “They can’t help you. They aren’t even human. Their time is over and ours has come.”
Not huma
n? That was fine. Humans hadn’t done much good for Monique so far. “Maybe in Pangaea, they thought their time had come,” she said. “Look at what the Worm has done to see what he’s going to do.”
“He gave them kingdoms.”
“How did he do that, Dee? What exactly did he give them, a constitution to live by? Sunless Palace blueprints? They had their own culture and language before they ever found him. He gave nothing. They built kingdoms themselves to worship him, and he crushed them.”
From the far side of the room, Monique counted maybe eight stars left on the wall. Darkness seeped across where their fellow fungal holes once glowed. An amorphous shape wavered in the spaces between.
Donna patted the balcony railing and crooned another awkward note. “More feeling! Put your hearts into it!” Her choir obeyed.
Monique stood on shaky legs. Two of Mimic’s sister-creatures reached the floor and began to skulk the room’s perimeter, yet they kept their distance from the shrinking wall of stars and the Worm’s brass throne.
Seven stars left on the wall. Its dark edges took on faint light, the wisps of a faraway nebula. The empty place was reaching for it, and for Monique.
She needed to get out. The balcony was full of people. Someone had to be willing to help her. Everyone was convinced Donna would abandon her—even Donna herself believed so—but they could be wrong. Monique needed them to be wrong.
She shoved the bridal chair up against the table and tried to lift it. Her arms could handle it, but her wounded foot groaned beneath the strain. The chair’s back struck hard against the table’s edge. If she broke it, she’d be throwing away her only boost.
Mimic helped lift the other side. She seemed in the mood to imitate again. Monique wondered if she had been this way in Old Time, always parroting one of her sister-creatures or whichever old king was her parent.
“Ooh,” was all she would say.
Monique’s foot shrieked bloody murder, but she and Mimic heaved the chair onto the table. Monique climbed after it, Mimic at her side, and they dragged it down the stone surface so that it rested beneath the center of the balcony’s lip.