GIDEON

What had once been a fairy-tale castle looked more like antebellum ruins now. The trees were overgrown in clusters, blanketing what might have been a sky. The labyrinth of thorns was smoking, overgrown like moss at their feet. The air was thick with choking fog, a noxious gloom that clung to them like perspiration.

Beside Gideon, Parisa Kamali looked more like death than ever. Her expression was gruesome with loveliness, exquisite as always, eyes flat and emotionless as she surveyed the landscape in silence.

“You let them in,” she said without looking at him.

She wasn’t wearing her usual armor. Also, technically, that wasn’t the same sword she’d once conjured for herself. Their powers weren’t identical, so it couldn’t have been. Her magic was theoretical, Gideon’s was imaginary. Funny, then, how the ends were functionally the same.

Funny, yes. Very funny. All Gideon could do now was laugh and laugh.

“Yes,” he confirmed, and she sighed, adjusting her grip around the sword. “And you lied to me about the Prince.”

The smoke coming from the castle was a lure in its way. There were only two things to do with fire: run from it or put it out. He wondered which she would choose. They were her wards, after all, and this particular consciousness—this realm or astral plane or whatever it was—it was hers in some way, if Gideon’s previous contact with her was any indication.

She looked at him sideways. “Whose side are you on?”

“I didn’t set a trap for you, if that’s what you’re asking.” He was too exhausted for that, hadn’t known or guessed that she would come. It wasn’t as if the world had ended, but certainly a large part of what mattered was gone.

Where would he go now, who could he be without the evidence of Nico de Varona? What was left to run from if his mother was gone? Gideon felt suspended, nothing to push him forward, even less to hold him back.

Though, perhaps there was an element of personal responsibility. “I didn’t actually want them to get in,” Gideon clarified to Parisa’s silence. (He didn’t hate Dalton Ellery, didn’t hate the Society, didn’t hate anything. Was not, ultimately, capable of hating something that Nico de Varona had loved.) “I don’t want to destroy the archives, but they were going to force me to let them in either way, and I just wanted—”

To stop. To rest. To grieve.

“Yeah,” Parisa said as if she understood, the sword suddenly blazing in her hand. “Well, come on, then. Let’s go.”

She stepped forward as if she’d always known he’d follow, and possibly that was obvious. He was, after all, just standing there. He’d handed her a weapon, which was basically like saying he’d specifically come to help her hunt the thing he’d brought down on their heads.

The Accountant who’d visited Gideon again the night prior had been lying in wait near Gideon’s subconscious, just as he had threatened to do for the rest of Gideon’s unnatural life. Waiting, expectantly, as the Accountant had promised to be, until Gideon’s mother’s debt was paid, the Prince relinquished, and—because Gideon was not an idiot—the archives and their contents ultimately stolen. Gideon, who was still flimsy by nature, always one foot outside this realm, knew that it had always been more work to stay awake than it had ever been to fall asleep. He had only ever tried so hard for one specific person, who was no longer breathing, no longer laughing. No longer capable of dreaming.

So, in the wake of Nico’s loss, with nothing but rage and emptiness inside him, Gideon had come to a very simple decision: Fuck this house. Just let it burn.

At the first glimpse of haziness between consciousness and dreaming—in the usual pulse between asleep and awake—Gideon had thought simply the Prince you’ve been looking for is here, and then something had materialized for him. The telepathic ward, the one he’d once plucked like a guitar string for Nico, to show Nico the kind of prison he’d chosen, the opulence of security that Nico lived within.

Gideon found it then, again, and tiredly he’d thought okay, gigantic fucking scissors, and then he’d cut it like a cartoon mayor at some political charity event. He hadn’t even seen the Accountant materialize. Hadn’t seen the sound of the Accountant’s voice take shape. It was more like a slither, a poison slowly seeping through the vents. The door to his telepathic jail cell swung open, and then Gideon could have walked through it. He could have left it all behind. He saw his window of opportunity to go, and thought with a sigh: Nico will be so disappointed.

Then, after the house’s wards had been breached, he’d heard the distant screaming from the archives and forced himself awake.

But now Gideon was back in the realms, trudging silently behind Parisa, ambling in her wake while she surveyed the broken landscape of the erstwhile Prince’s castle grounds, mouth growing tighter with disquiet the farther in she went. The thorns made no indication of giving way, the trees largely apathetic to her presence. She stopped for a second to let out what seemed a long-suffering sigh of annoyance.

“Why am I doing this?” she asked the empty air, or possibly Gideon.

“Dunno,” Gideon replied dully. Then, because he might as well have an answer for himself, “What is he? The Prince. Dalton. Is he a necromancer?”

“An animator.” There was another scream. “I don’t know the difference.”

Gideon did. He had studied theoretical magic, after all, since there was no opportunity to major in Probably Not Human Studies or whatever Nico would have joked. Gideon was not as quick as Nico, not as funny, not as anything, except potentially more informed in this one (1) specific area. “A necromancer is a naturalist for dead things. An animator is more like a manufacturer of alive things.”

He could feel Parisa looking at him but didn’t meet her glance. “Meaning?”

“Naturalists take from nature. Animators don’t take anything, they make it.” Something like the difference between a ghost and a zombie, or the definition of pornography. Easy to point to while it was happening but hard to legally define.

There was an explosion from somewhere in the distance. Another scream. It was obvious there was a battle taking place somewhere, which Gideon realized now they were simply witnessing, not partaking in. As if Parisa had yet to decide.

Reading his mind (probably), Parisa shaded her eyes. “When you let the Prince out of his cage, you changed him.”

“From what to what?”

“From a lockbox to a bomb.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

She nodded but didn’t move. “I imagine Rhodes must have thought so.”

Gideon’s head swam with residual badness at the mention of Libby. Not hatred. Nico had not hated her and Gideon wouldn’t, either. Still, an element of bitterness was there.

“You agree with her,” Gideon observed, sensing that Parisa was not in a rush to save Dalton, nor to rescue the Society. They were both simply watching the fall of Rome. He pondered whether he should make popcorn. Nico liked his the same way he liked his elote, which was neither relevant information nor any longer a useful thing to know.

“The world,” Parisa commented factually, “is full of dangerous people. I struggle to rob Dalton of his right to be destructive when so much of what’s out there is so worthy of being destroyed.”

“Still,” Gideon noted. “Probably a bad idea to let him become someone else’s weapon.”

Parisa grimaced, and Gideon realized that she was thinking. Planning, more like.

“We could try to put him back inside the castle,” she said aloud, testing the theory. Gideon realized they were meant to be brainstorming, which was, again, quite funny. Overhead the storm was growing increasingly real, with what little they could see through the canopy of trees streaking with lightning from time to time, thunder groaning from afar.

“You want to put the contents back inside Pandora’s box?” Gideon asked doubtfully.

“Just because it’s futile doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try. Life is futile. By definition, its only outcome is failure. Invariably it ends.” She looked at him. “Does that make it less worthwhile?”

“Grim,” said Gideon.

“And as for the archives…” Parisa was wrestling with herself now. “I don’t know if the Society deserves them.”

“Pretty safe conclusion,” Gideon confirmed. He had trouble unseeing what he had already seen of the Society’s reality, perhaps because he had never been offered what Nico had been offered. Greatness, glory, that had never been on the table for him. Just the micromanagement of an unpaid internship by a bunch of faceless people under hoods.

“But whoever this is is probably worse,” Parisa sighed.

“Also a valid point.”

Parisa looked at him with an obvious grimace of resignation. “Do you know who it is? Whoever you let inside?”

“Best guess is some associates of the person my mother called the Accountant,” Gideon said. “He bought her gambling debts and consolidated them into one impossible price.”

“Oh, cute,” said Parisa. “Like a metaphor for poverty.”

“Yeah.”

“So probably not a good idea to let his friends into the house.”

“No.” He paused before adding, “Sorry.”

“You’re good at this, though, aren’t you?” She inspected him for a second, hand tightening around the sword. “Better than Nico led me to believe.”

The mention of him hurt, but Gideon had known pain before. “I’m … proficient to a certain degree. With significant limitations.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning…” He shrugged. “This, my magic, it’s not real.”

The tiny quirk of her brow was like a chorus of disdainful accusation. “Does it work?”

“To some extent.”

“Then what about it isn’t real?”

Gideon opened his mouth to say everything, then considered altering his response to nothing, and then he simply stood there.

If he had known the answer to that question, would Nico have joined the Society?

Would they, either of them, be standing there now?

“Well.” Parisa correctly read the insignificance of Gideon’s knowledge on the subject and sighed again, stepping forward with a sense of reluctant acquiescence. “I can’t say I’m suited to heroism but my head fucking hurts, so let’s give it a try.”

She lifted the sword to the thorns, slicing through them, or trying to. It wasn’t working very well, probably because swords were not made to cut through thorns. They were made for slicing down humans, and thorns were apparently made of stronger stuff. Well, this was Gideon’s fault, technically. Parisa had initially produced a sword because she was a telepath who had thought-magic, but thoughts were only made of things that people had borne witness to before. There were other kinds of thoughts, obviously, like ideas and creation, and certainly she could create something different if she really tried, but this was Gideon’s expertise.

What was designed to get through thorns? Probably a thorn-specific chainsaw.

It materialized in Gideon’s hand. He looked down at it, then set it on the ground, engaging the trigger switch to start the motor. It roared to life, chomping eagerly at the bed of thorns before them, and Gideon looked up at a waiting Parisa.

“Well, it’s not aesthetically appropriate, but it’ll do,” she said amiably, motioning for him to go ahead.

Right. Well, walking would be slow. Gideon dreamed up a convertible, the kind Nico had told him that Max’s father had just bought. (Max, Gideon thought with a sudden warmth. The world still had Max in it, so it wasn’t over. It wasn’t ending. It hadn’t yet been destroyed.) Parisa slid into the driver’s seat and Gideon, still holding the active chainsaw, jumped into the passenger side as she revved the engine, expectantly holding out a hand.

“What?” Gideon asked her over the roar of the chainsaw before dreaming it into a quieter model.

“Sunglasses, please,” she said. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well make it look hot.”

He shrugged and handed her a pair, dreaming up another for himself. Hers were aviators, his were the fifties-inspired model that Nico had loved and subsequently lost. He’d thought they made him look dapper and he was right.

Parisa took off as Gideon leaned out the side of the convertible, slicing through the thorns and overgrown branches that swung from the trees. Bigger chainsaw, he thought. Two chainsaws. Chainsaw hands.

“Looks dangerous,” commented Parisa with a sidelong glance. “Better swap those out before you have any weird fantasies.”

“Just drive,” sighed Gideon, realizing that Nico had probably liked her a great deal and deciding that, actually, he did, too, even if she had nearly killed him once. Especially for that, in fact.

She was a very good driver, or Gideon had dreamed a very good car. Excellent suspension. Her control over it was magnificent, and he realized she was using a gear shift. He had made her a manual car?

“No,” she answered his thoughts. Then, after a moment, “Someone taught me this way.”

“Who?”

She circumvented a tangle of trees. “My husband. He’s dead now.”

Gideon swiped madly at a particularly dense thicket, accidentally toppling a tree that fell into their path. (Convertible maybe a bad idea. Bulldozer with racecar engine.) They shot upright, their imaginary scenario rearranging itself, and then Gideon swapped the chainsaw hands for his regular ones, nudging the sunglasses up on his nose.

“Did you love him?” Gideon asked. “Your husband.”

“Yes,” said Parisa. “But life goes on.”

In that moment, Gideon abruptly recalled his suspicion that the telepath who had crafted the Society’s wards was a sadist, and realized that perhaps people who underwent the most pain probably knew it most skillfully. He felt a piece of his old self come back to him, a piece that wasn’t broken even if Nico was gone. It was the piece that knew the hardest thing about existence was having a talent for causing suffering and declining to use it because it was bad. The piece that understood that success was not quantifiable by any form of capital. That it was most admirable to walk around in the world and choose not to break things just because you can.

“Yeah,” Gideon said, because if he knew only one thing about life, it was that. “Life goes on.”

They made it through the woods of the castle grounds, coming upon the rubble at the base of the castle itself. This was a dreamt bulldozer and thus it was very effective, but there were other things now to contend with; glimpses of spectral things, half-human. “There’s Dalton,” Parisa said, slipping out of the driver’s seat and pointing. She glinted as a bolt of lightning struck; clad again in armor, the sword back in her hand. Gideon hadn’t realized she’d brought it with them. He leapt down from the passenger side, circumventing the bulldozer’s blade to join her on the left side of the push frame. Then, for fun, he conjured himself a bow and arrow, which Parisa looked at with a wrinkle of her nose.

“Be practical, Drake,” she said, and he sighed. He was actually very competent with a bow, but she made a good point.

“Fine. But I’m not happy about it.” He dreamt up an automatic crossbow with an enhanced scope. Practically driverless, on the off chance he had to go up against a telepath who was anywhere near her skill level.

“Better,” she said approvingly, hefting the sword upright and forging ahead.

Dalton, the Prince, stood in what might have been a central courtyard, the remains of his castle splayed on either side like the graveyard of his personal cage. There were three—no, four—other men present, all converging uniformly on Dalton. If they were telepaths, their time here was limited before their corporeal limits failed and their magic ran out. In these numbers, though, telepathic combat would be easy.

A puzzle, however, was not.

“Keep them inside the courtyard,” Gideon said to Parisa, who looked at him quizzically for a moment, then nodded. “All of them,” Gideon clarified, including Dalton that time in his assertion of who their enemies were, and she nodded again, more certain that time, as if she understood his plan. Which she likely did, though he wondered if she was pleased taking orders from Gideon, or anyone. Didn’t matter. He knew how to do some things, which included solving a problem without any more damage than necessary. Gideon had lived a hunter-gatherer kind of existence, one that looked starved to others, but it had kept him alive this long. It had given him Nico, so whatever anyone else thought of his survival was irrelevant. It was a life of abundance. He had had more than anyone strictly needed—so much so that he could give it away now and still have plenty to spare.

Which was not to say magic was wholly unlimited. It was a good thing he was no longer the subject of Parisa Kamali’s ire, because she had not grown less talented over the course of their brief acquaintance. She dropped into the center of the courtyard, resplendent in black armor, and Gideon understood at least enough to know that what she was doing—the game she was playing—had slightly different rules. For her, just being here was an effort. Lucid dreaming, astral projecting, they were diametrically different even if they felt precisely the same. Gideon could be trapped here forever whereas Parisa could disappear, disintegrate at any time.

It was an issue of time, as everything always was. A question of mortality. The thing that made them fallible, the only true separation from the divine—for them, there would always be an ending.

Gideon wasn’t here to be a hero. He was here to be a foreman, to oversee the construction of a simple but impenetrable thing, which was realistic and impossible at the same time. Luckily the others, the intruders, whoever they were, were no better off than Parisa—worse off, probably, for not having her natural skills. Gideon wondered, in fact, how it was possible they were doing this, breaking into a telepathic fortress that even he had not been able to successfully penetrate, until he noticed something about each of the attackers. They were all wearing glasses.

Not just glasses, obviously. Glints of something flashed from the temples, the place where a fashion brand’s logo might have been. A small W. The equivalent of wearing their team’s sponsor across their chests.

Well, Gideon thought with a mix of resignation and disgust, which was what he mostly felt toward epiphanies about humanity. So. This was what James Wessex—the Accountant—had done with a billion dollars. Feed the hungry? Preserve the earth’s resources? No, why would anyone do that, who would it help besides, um, everyone? Developing impossible telepathic weapons, on the other hand—something that surely cost as much as a space program to fund—was clearly the better choice. How else to stick one’s flag in something and call it theirs?

Focus. What would help the situation? Nico, probably. Nico always knew what to do. Nico was the kind of person who looked at something and saw it differently than everyone else. He saw what things could be. It was his problem with the things he had problems with, what he loved about the things he loved. What had Nico seen in Gideon? His potential? Something to fix? No point dwelling on that now, but the lens was significant, because Nico would look down and not see a broken courtyard or a morally questionable telepath fighting alongside an animator with the power to destroy the world—he would see a solvable puzzle. A winnable game. He would see the broken pieces of the simulation and make them whole. He would look at the problem and fix it. He would do it with a blink, but Gideon wasn’t a physicist, so he would have to see it differently.

Parisa had taken Dalton’s side, correctly recognizing that the easiest way to keep him within the scope of Gideon’s plan would be to face the library’s intruders all at once. The four attackers were using weapons the equivalent of sci-fi blasters, no doubt also of Wessex Corporation funding and design. Hm, how to gauge the danger level of a weapon whose parameters Gideon did not know? Presumably they could be used on just about anything, walls of a ruined castle included. What kind of fortress could be strong enough to withstand any amount of telepathic prowess, previously imaginable or not? Almost everything in nature eventually broke down. No shape was wholly impenetrable. Boxes got opened—it was what they were for.

But why make a box when he could make a dream?

This was his expertise, the types of dreaming. Searching for something impossible to find. In that sense, Libby was his inspiration—the constancy of her searching, the painful labyrinth that was her subconscious mind. At the reminder of Libby and her nightmares, Gideon understood two things.

One, that he would forgive her. It would take a long time and it would be difficult, but it would happen all the same.

Two, that everyone had something from which to run.

Gideon sighed. Time to make a monster, then.

The creature of Gideon’s worst imaginings would not be clawed. It would not have sharp teeth. It would have charisma, the warmth of the sun, but also the sense that his entire significance would be erased if that affection was ever dimmed or withdrawn. Gideon’s monster was part obligation. It was unearned, helpless loyalty to someone finned and flawed. Gideon’s monster had hunger, it had fear, the primal ones of survival and pain, but it also had a sense of rightness. It had the fear of wrongdoing, fear of harm, fear of some inner fatality, some internal corruption. It contained Gideon’s sense that he was not, and would never be, completely whole.

Gideon’s monster was not without some goodness. It had enough sadness to suffer, but not enough that it could give up. It had tenderness that was wasted, love that was selfish, love entirely unlike his own because it was rationed and conditional, transactional, tit-for-tat. Gideon’s monster had no home, no reason for existence. It was lonely but tireless, cursed to know the exact shape of its vacancy, to perennially seek its other half. It had only one driving quality, which was a desperate need for validation that would never come.

Gideon’s monster was shapeless and changeable, identifiable when it stood within the shadows of his periphery but unable to be faced head on. Gideon’s monster was tiny and unavoidable, like a bee sting or an embolism, a bubble trapped inside a vein. Gideon’s monster was enormous and indefatigable, like bigotry or climate change. Gideon’s monster looked like the barrenness of the realms he would never be able to map and the horizon of the ending he would never be able to reach. He made his monster out of familiar things, bits and bobs that he could find, an eyeball made of his pointless virtues, the tendons of his reigning vice. Gideon took the sorrow he would never escape and tied it to the monster for a shadow, something to follow it around. It was filled with the feeling of crisp autumn air, the first bite of an apple, a startled kiss on a Parisian bridge. It wore the unbreakable chains of the fleeting joy that Gideon had won and lost.

When he opened his eyes, his monster was already moving. It was ambling through the courtyard, swallowing everything up like an eclipse. The gray sky that had been raining was dark now, dark enough to see glints of unreachable starlight—comedy with a tragic ending, peace that wouldn’t last. He saw Parisa pause, sweat slicked along her hairline, her eyes softening with understanding that was also fear. She spotted him from afar, eyes wild, nearly swallowed up, and so Gideon changed her weapon. Instead of a sword in her hand, she now saw an object of Gideon’s imagining: a Magic 8 Ball, which, when shaken, would give her the answer she needed to whatever question lived tirelessly inside her soul. A thought to keep her alive, to keep her armed and fighting. Whatever thought she needed that to be.

It was enough to clear a path for her, a mad scramble up the side of the castle’s broken walls. She was bleeding, her armor was oxidizing, the castle was disappearing. The dream was swallowing itself up, an inescapable, infinite trap. She was struggling to pull herself out, the Magic 8 Ball clutched in one tight fist, and Gideon thrust out his hand for her free one just as he heard a sharp scream of rage that pierced the oncoming night.

Something had caught onto Parisa’s ankle—a hand. A hand that became an arm. Out of the disappearing castle came something, someone—

Parisa kicked at Dalton Ellery’s hand, her grip on Gideon’s weakening. Gideon gritted his teeth and dreamed himself an anchor to keep him steady, but Parisa Kamali was not an object of his dreaming, so whatever she did next wasn’t his to control. Dalton’s head emerged, gasping, swearing, something spectral and equally nightmarish rearing up from the dissolving nature of Gideon’s dream like a noble steed, a set of open jaws. Parisa’s grip slackened again, her resolve tiring, or perhaps her corporeal self was fading. The Wessex intruders were gone now, swallowed up and powerless in this realm and the next. Parisa and Dalton, and whatever hold they had on each other, were all that was left. If Gideon pulled her up, he also pulled up Dalton. And then all of this would be for naught.

It struck Gideon with bruising force: he wasn’t going to be able to save her. At the thought, it dazzled him slightly that he still had it, more sadness left to feel, even after he’d used it to make his monster. Even after Nico had been lost. The reserves of his pain were an ocean, rising higher and higher, into which poured the melting ice caps of regret and frustration and shame. Gideon’s pain was eternal, a time loop, back and forth between meeting Nico and meeting Nico’s fate, and he wanted to save Parisa—he wanted to save someone; he wanted, for once in his fucking life, to be of some use, not just to someone but to her—to be what he couldn’t be for Nico.

But wanting things was not enough. Loving someone was not enough. You gave and you gave and you gave and sometimes, as was the way of things, that love did not come back, or even if it did, it died young. Sometimes you couldn’t save things, and the knowledge of it, the finality—the odd, horrifying satisfaction of the conclusion that nothing was in Gideon’s control except himself—was like a falling blade of certainty. Yet another heartbreak. Another goodbye.

Parisa’s fingers were gradually unclenching from his, one by one. Dalton had one hand in the tangles of her hair, dragging her backward, pulling himself forward, and Gideon realized that letting go would be the sacrifice; the thing it would take to end the apocalypse that Libby Rhodes had been trying to prevent. The thing that Nico had unwittingly died for was now ironically Gideon’s to prevent.

He realized it, locking eyes with Parisa, who nodded. Yes, do it. Let go. She tossed the Magic 8 Ball at him, her free hand hanging loose, and—

Gideon grabbed on to her, pulling her up with both hands.

Dalton, too.

“What are you doing?” Parisa gasped, Dalton spitting triumphantly into the circling drain of his kingdom of consciousness. Gideon opened his mouth to answer when Dalton lunged forward, hand outstretched, and then—

Then Gideon woke on the floor of an unfamiliar room.

Blink.

Blink.

Above him, the air hung heavy with smoke.

A circle of gold hovered overhead, the barrel of a pistol smoking. A vaguely human shape cocked its head, peering at Gideon, before a hand lowered the pistol carefully, letting it rest in the center of Gideon’s forehead.

Gideon closed his eyes, exhausted. A voice spoke from the back of his mind, like something half-remembered from a dream.

It is decidedly so.