Chapter 22 #3
“Not me. I was… naive. For my research… my actual research—not the farce I used to gain access to government equipment—I needed a vast amount of power. More electricity than any extant grid could supply. More… spark. Something closer to the nature of life itself. So I took the government funding, I told them what they wanted to hear, and I built a machine—a hexeract of magic and mad science—to harness that power.”
Teeth gritted, she sucks a deep breath through her nose.
“I gave them what they claimed they wanted. Clean, infinite energy. Enough to power every electrical grid in the country for pennies, forever. In my arrogance—my… distraction—I was so fixated on why I needed it, I didn’t question what they would do with it.”
Mom bites down hard on her lip. She glances away, breathing heavy through her nose.
“My superiors”—she sneers the word, phlegmy with disgust—“had the unmitigated audacity to consider my work a ‘mixed success.’ They weren’t interested in clean energy.
At least, not to waste on the masses. They used my prototype to power the facility only begrudgingly.
Later, they took my research and perverted it, built the ward-wall you saw around the city to test the scale at which it could effectively be wielded and found a way to use the ley lines to power that too.
They got the technological breakthrough they wanted.
They only got as far as using it to power the campus, but they were exploring further applications when”—she turns her head away, can’t face me, a muscle jumping in her jaw—“when I finally used my device for what I’d always intended. ”
“Further applications?” I press. “You mean a weapon of mass destruction, right? Cain said they were trying to make a weapon, that I am that weapon—”
“You are my daughter,” Mom snaps, a furious reflex so fast I wonder how often she’s sat up at night repeating it to herself.
She swallows hard and shakes her head. When she speaks again, her voice is so soft I barely hear it in the echo of our footsteps.
“But yes. They were trying to weaponize the tech. I knew—and knew better—but I was desperate. Foolish, maybe. At the time, I didn’t care about how they used it if it meant I got you. ”
The ocean in my chest thrashes, stomach clenching on the pain of every word.
But my mother is not the only one hurting.
This place doesn’t run on electricity anymore; it runs on ghosts and ley lines—and ley line power can’t be cut.
This awful machine can’t turn off. It will never turn off.
And every day, it draws in more wandering dead with its bastardized magical science.
They come like moths to a flame, seeking a death they can’t find, a death Mom inadvertently broke.
It’s hurting them, trapping and torturing them—maybe beyond repair—and no one cares.
No one but me. I’m responsible. I have to be responsible. It’s my nature, vast and undeniable, swelling at my mortal seams.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I croak, the knot in my throat catching my voice before it rises into something loud enough to get us caught.
“You told me that constantly growing up. So why spend seventeen years running from ghosts, buying yourself time to build a new accidental maybe-weapon in your basement and bring it here? Did it not do enough damage the first time?” I demand, throwing up my hands.
“What, are you trying to just blow the place up or something?”
Mom glances at me and the guilt/fear/determination on her face admits everything. She turns away—at least she doesn’t lie—staring at a small, unassuming door built into the rock face. Her badge trembles in her hand. Her boot shifts forward, then inches back. Glittering, her eyes squeeze shut.
“When I pulled you out, I ripped a tear in the fabric of life and death,” she whispers.
“It’s leaking—anyone can see that. By subverting the natural order, I—I must have rewritten it.
Like a bad line of code. I just need to patch it.
This machine is a refined version of my hexaract, far more sophisticated than the prototype in operation here.
If I deploy it properly, I can stop the dead from leaking out and getting stuck up here. Then you…”
Her eyes open, tears spilling down her cheeks. She looks at me, pleading, and with a sickening churn in my gut, I know what she meant to do here. I know why she tried to warn me away.
“You can’t,” I breathe.
Gun dangling from its strap, Mom seizes my hand, tearing it from Bas’s.
“It will work,” she urges, ignoring how he bristles at her theft. “I know it will work. Persephone, I’ve spent the last seventeen years researching this. I’ve run all the tests—”
“That’s the problem! Don’t you get it yet?
The asphodel, the ghosts, the truth—you’ve been running from it all this time, but you can’t keep closing your eyes.
Hell is where Bas and I are.” I squeeze her hand, grab her elbow, shake her.
“Listen to me, for once, please. As long as the living keep dying, their souls will never stop looking for us. And you’re right—you’re right.
If you deploy that ghost bomb, you’ll close the gap.
But once it’s closed, you’ll only trap hell here. ”
“So I trap it here!” Her fingernails dig into my arm. “So I buy you another fifty years! Don’t you deserve that?”
“Do they?” I demand, wrenching away, flinging an arm out at the abyss, into the distance, all my sorry souls so battered and bloodied by the world, the monstrous wall, the sharp edges of the lives they left behind. “They’re suffering!”
Mom doesn’t understand. She slaps my arm down, shaking her head.
“They wanted this! The world wanted this—the government paid for this—well, fine, I made them the bed they begged for, and they can goddamned sleep in it. They owe me this!” She bites every word, voice rising. “They owe me my daughter.”
In the distance, something booms against the locked door. The chains rattle hard. Bas brings his sun sword to hand—his light flares in the corner of my eye but I can’t look away.
Here it is—one last choice. One last step.
Boots planted in the mouth of a crossroads, I can still turn back.
I can give my mother what she wants, return to the living world with earbuds too loud to hear, eyes locked to the ground so I don’t have to see.
I could drop this massive burden down the chasm and walk away, go back to school on Monday—
And good god, it’s still only Saturday.
“No,” I tell her, choking down the tightness in my throat.
Extracting myself from her grip, I step away.
“Nobody owes you that. I don’t owe you that.
The people that are hurting—hell, maybe some of them are the same people that hurt you—but most of them are just…
Grandpa ghosts and accidents and roadkill.
People who were sick or old or sad. They just want to rest. They’re hurting every second of every day, and I feel it.
I suffer with them. It’s who I am. I’m responsible.
” I choke on the word, swallowed by its enormity.
Another step brings me back to Bas’s side.
He reaches for me like a habit, ancient instinct drawing us together until our hollow chests kiss, my fists clenched in his singed hoodie, the glowing brand of his fingers spanning my cheeks.
His forehead dips to mine. With burning hands, he welds my cracked and breaking body together, calloused thumbs brushing the corners of my eyes, steaming away the blur of tears.
“I’m sorry, Jenny. Time’s up,” he murmurs, hot breath misting in the gap between us. “We have to get moving. The soldiers are almost here.” Bas smiles, fingers trailing my half of our red thread of fate. Gently, he presses my MP3 player into my hand.
“You were right, you know,” he says, stepping away.
“There is no back to normal. There’s no road trip that can fix this.
No pancakes or meat mountains. Only us. It’s time to stop running.
” He swallows hard, shoulders firming, Cain’s words bittersweet in his mouth.
“We’re weapons. It’s time we aimed ourselves. ”
A battering ram crashes against the distant door again. Metal squeals. Shouting blares through the crack, orders, another wall-shaking crash that sends stalactites shattering to the iron grating around us. Water pours down a swiftly widening crack, a trickling creek blazing into a river—
And swimming like salmon in its current, dozens of gleaming ghost lights.
Ghosts climb the walls. Will-o’-the-wisps kite through the unsteady fluorescent dim. A misty hand claps Bas’s shoulder. Cain boils up around him, his young-again face so devastatingly proud despite the pain, the ghost fence still gnawing at him every second he remains.
“Hey, kid,” he says, tapping a knuckle to Bas’s chin. “Whatever you’re gonna do, might want to do it quick. That door won’t hold out much longer. How are we gonna play this?”
Mom’s face cracks. Grief scores her raw. But something in the pain urges her on. At last, she breaks into motion.
“We have to go,” she blurts, reaching for my hand. “Come on.”
She drags me after her. Sword drawn, his father bolstered on his shoulders to keep from burning on the iron floor, Bas follows. We plunge into a final room and my ocean—the unused heart shriveled in my chest—shivers into something like a beat.
It’s the room.
It’s the room. And it’s all still here. The table, the runes scratched into the stone floor, the blood, the back wall fallen away to stare into a deeper cave, the heart of the earth—my heart, my true heart—a funerary drum beating home, home, home.
And in the corner, a cassette player hisses, stuck at the end of a tape.