Chapter 20 #2
“Founding member of the DNR,” Bas supplies, grim. “He did some kind of soul weight experiment that started this whole mess.”
Mom’s basement lair. All her metal equipment with its flaking paper labels—property of this godforsaken place.
“That’s it then.” I grip the pilot. “Follow it.”
He shakes his head. “I told you, I can’t get any closer—”
“To the big glowing gate, we heard,” Bas snarls. “Fine, whatever. Bitch baby out, we don’t care. Just set us down here.”
“Bas,” I start, but the way he looks at me, the words die in my mouth.
“I can’t sit here anymore,” he admits, so quietly I almost don’t hear him over the roar of the engines. “I have to get out. Have to get him out.”
I nod, sharp. I tell the pilot, “Bring us down.”
He obliges faster than he should, landing so quick his skids skip on the chucked-up pavement.
We bounce to a stop, rotors slowing outside a four-lane truss bridge.
Yellow paint flaking, the steel structure frames the unfinished spires of the ghost gate like a suspect Emerald City at the end of an extremely disreputable yellow brick road.
My stomach churns. Clamping fear between my teeth, I jerk my chin at Bas, gesturing for him to get out first. I can’t move, can’t quit threatening this awful man until we’re all out safe, but staring at his father’s body, Bas hesitates.
“We’re already taking the important part with us,” I tell him gently. My voice still rings wrong, too loud after the helicopter roar—a slap when I meant to soothe. “We don’t need the rest.”
Jaw hard, Bas nods. Bundling the soul tight to his chest, he leaps outside. Freed from the flying iron box, Cain manifests in a wash of summer mist, blue light billowing to stand beside his son. Aware, his memories intact, his eyes find mine across the distance.
And I didn’t love him, didn’t know him—didn’t have the chance—but he remembers himself younger, and it hits me across the face like an open palm. His unlined brow, his wry mouth, his gray eyes and black hair—
Like buried archaeology uncovered by a storm, I find a bitter history.
In his face, I find pieces of myself.
“We gotta run,” he urges when I hesitate. “This asshole made sure everybody saw the direction this bird went. They’ll be on us in under a minute.”
He’s right. I shake it off, swallow it down. It doesn’t matter now.
Reluctantly, eyeing the pilot’s hands in case he goes for his gun, I back out of the helicopter, hand outstretched and threatening every step.
He watches me go, his eyes cold behind his visor, but doesn’t so much as twitch until the second I clear the runner board.
Immediately, his hands fly across the dash, flicking dials, jamming the controls.
The bird spins up and away so fast it knocks me over, leaving me behind on my ass in the dirt.
I watch him go with teeth bared, glowering. Scared of me? Or outrunning his own people’s trap before it springs?
Reaching down a hand, Bas drags me distractedly to my feet.
Alone now and so close to the wreckage of the city, a weird noiselessness swallows us.
Not true silence—even gaining altitude and speed, the sound of the helicopter’s motor still peppers us—but a kind of grasping emptiness.
A city without movement, without life, an in-drawn breath muffled on the dampening bodies of the dead, the endless blanket of asphodel.
Distinct in the eerie silence, several car engines start in the distance.
We need to move, need to get off this stupid road, but we…
don’t. I feel the presence of the others at my side, all of us struck still and staring up at the dome, but I can’t move.
My soul dangles from my empty hands, hanging like the sleeves of a ragged sweater.
My feet feel a hundred miles away. My eyes fix on the giant gate glowing at the end of the bridge.
An inexorable riptide grips me by the throat; I can’t tear myself away.
An electric push-pull. An irresistible beckoning, cold and empty and…
familiar. Why do I know this sensation? Why do I recognize the way every cell in my body screams to back away and to touch it?
It speaks to me, urging in wordless whispers.
I hear a music in it, like it knows my name, knows the answers to all my questions, the balm to all my hurts.
It’ll give me everything if I go to it. It sings to me, promising—
Pain.
Animal instinct sears me awake.
“Gotta get off the road,” Cain whispers, but his voice fragments, distant, his eyes also drawn unerringly to the eerie, emerald light, summoning us like a fishhook in the gut.
For the first time, I notice the scene before us: leading down the bridge, ghost lights flicker in a terrible parade, marching toward the glowing wall, caught in a tide. They don’t see us as they pass—don’t see me when they have always seen me. Unable to stop.
My mouth opens but I can’t make my throat work, can’t scream a warning, can’t make myself heard.
The drowning silence steals every gasp from my lungs, devours meaning from my dry lips.
Lurching forward, I seize Cain and Bas by the hands, shoving their stricken outlines sideways.
I throw myself toward the exit ramp sign, straining against their inertia until all at once, the magnet releases and we go stumbling, falling headfirst over the far side of the embankment.
Gravel skinning my palms raw, I curl around my bag, belatedly protecting my head.
The bone-jarring thumps go on forever, knees and elbows flying until at last we end in a heap at the bottom of the hill.
Bas stirs weakly, one hand lifting—toward the fence?
Toward his father? I don’t stop to check.
Scrabbling in my bag, I rip out my tangled headphone cord and jam an earbud in his ear.
“Don’t listen to it,” I manage to croak.
Knees aching, blood trickling down my shin and palms, I snag Cain by his fragmenting ankle.
“Listen to me—look at me. If you touch it, it’ll suck you in.
I’ve seen this before. My mom had one in the basement.
She…” Stricken, I stare up at the spire of the distant gate, this wound in the world, still bleeding and barely bandaged. “She must have built it. Built this.”
Fresh horror swallows me.
Why? Why would she do this? Surely, a daughter whose whole life she spent ignoring couldn’t possibly be worth breaking the world this badly? And maybe she tried to patch it after—but did she really?
Trusses jut up into the sky, scaffolding supporting missing pieces that were never installed, glassy edges gone green with age and algae, buzzing with that same sick kind of electricity.
All that genius, spent on this—on becoming something monstrous, a tormentor to, what?
A hundred thousand souls? A million? And for what?
What did she buy with all this suffering?
What could possibly cost so much?