Most of what had crumbled off the building had been reduced to debris, but it was empty debris devoid of anything resembling a countenance, and for that, Kathy was glad. There was no whispering in the ruins, and there was something comforting about the stars overhead. Kathy watched until she was sure both Jose and Hornsby were asleep, and then felt herself begin to drift off as well.
When she awoke again, the sky was a deep pink, and for a few seconds, she couldn’t remember where she was. It came back to her as she sat up, her body stiff and aching from the hard floor, and looked around. She was far from home, far from Reece. Jose snored lightly nearby, his face pressed into the uneven contours of his backpack, which he had been using as a pillow. Hornsby’s coat and backpack lay in a crumpled heap by the doorway.
Hornsby was gone.
No, no, no. Not again, she thought. This can’t be happening again. “Jose!” She leaned over to shake him awake. “Jose! Hornsby’s gone.”
“Huh?” Jose rolled onto his back and blinked.
“Hornsby’s gone! Wake up.” Kathy rose to her feet.
Her words took a moment to penetrate Jose’s haze of sleep, but then his eyes sprung open and he sat up, taking in Hornsby’s things by the door. He hopped up, brushing the dust of the debris from his clothes and looking around the ruins.
“Hornsby? Where are you, man? Hornsby!” Jose started toward the door.
When Carl Hornsby swung through the doorway, he nearly collided with Jose, and both jumped.
“Jesus,” Jose said shakily. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Out of us,” Kathy said. “Where were you?”
“Just stretching my legs,” Hornsby said. “I thought my couch at home was hell on my back, but that floor…” He shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to alarm you guys.”
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” Kathy said. “Did you eat? We should probably eat something and get moving again.”
“Yeah, we should probably find the center of town, if we can,” Jose said, picking up his backpack. “I’ve been giving it some thought. When I was here last, the Wraiths only came out at night. If we could get there during the day, we might have an opportunity to look for Claire and the others safely.”
“Sounds good to me. Any idea which direction we should try?” Kathy gathered up her own backpack and slung it over her shoulder.
Jose hung from the doorway and looked from one end of the street to the other and back. He turned to them and pointed to the right. “That way?”
“Sure. Let’s go.” Kathy filed out of the ruins behind Jose. She turned back to see Hornsby reach down and grab a sharp fragment of rock. A flash of unease spiked through her. “Hornsby? You ready?”
He smile at her, holding up the rock fragment. “Just in case, right?” He put the fragment in his backpack and added, “I mean, I’d rather we do everything we can to avoid having to cut off anybody’s anything, but…just in case we need something sharp.”
“Fair enough,” Kathy replied as he joined her in the doorway. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right?” She managed to smile at him as he passed by into the street, but that unease lingered. Hornsby was an okay guy—he and Jose both were—but there was no real way to measure the effects of this place’s stresses on someone. That it changed people was without question. Was it changing Hornsby?
They started up the street together. The morning was cool, made more so by the insistent breeze that tugged at their hair and clothes as it blew by. To Kathy, the air was sharp, almost electric. The city was humming with anticipation. Something was happening, or about to happen.
The sun had made its way to the center of the sky before they reached the end of the road. It wasn’t so much that the road was that long, but rather that the sun that day was moving fast, hurrying along like it was trying to defy Jose’s plan to get to the town center before dark. When a cloud passed in front of the sun, Kathy was surprised to feel a moment of panic that dusk had somehow snuck up on them. Then the sun emerged again, its rays sweeping the shadows aside. It did little to warm the streets, though…or else Kathy’s shiver had been internal.
Kathy noticed as they walked that despite the height of the city’s protective stone wall, which the night before had remained almost constantly on their left, there was no sign of it now beyond the buildings in any direction. She hoped that meant that they were winding their way inward toward the city center. She also noticed, when looking up at the sky, that the sun seemed to have backtracked in its path. She, Jose, and Hornsby had been moving steadily in one direction, or at least Kathy thought they had, but the sun, which should have been in front of them, now shone on their backs. She pointed it out to her companions.
“Could we have gotten turned around?” Hornsby asked.
“I don’t see how,” Jose said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “It could be the city. Or the sun. Hell, nothing in this world works right.”
“I think we should keep going anyway,” Kathy said. “I don’t see the city wall out there between the buildings. I think, as impossible as it sounds, that we actually are getting closer to the center.”
“I don’t think it matters which direction we go,” Jose said. “We’ll get there when the city is good and ready to have us.” He had that look in his eyes again, the one Kathy had seen in people just before they broke. She didn’t like it.
“Maybe,” Kathy said, meeting Jose’s gaze. She needed him present, pulled together, and with them. “But we decide the direction. We can have that much control, at least, okay?”
Jose nodded. “Sure. Sure, yeah, you’re right.”
They kept moving for what felt like a very long time. Kathy’s feet hurt, and her muscles were still sore from sleeping on that hard stone floor. What kept her going was imagining how to get revenge on Dr. Carter Greenwood. She wasn’t often given to such thoughts—in fact, she probably tried harder than others to avoid them. Creative visualization and numerous schools of magic posited that thoughts given time and focus were manifestations of will, and her experience with her own family bore that theory out. She didn’t want to be like her brother; he must have thought about doing all those horrible things before he’d done them, hurting and raping, maiming and killing. She believed that when his thoughts, his visualizations of violence in all its vivid detail, weren’t enough anymore, they had become the catalysts for his actions. She had the same genes that he did, and so the same possible weak spots in the boundary between thinking and doing.
However, it felt good to imagine getting revenge on Greenwood, and as they trudged in relative silence down another city street, the revenge scenario blossomed into a bouquet of violent ends. Greenwood losing an arm seemed most appropriate. She was so lost in that particular outcome that Jose’s voice at first sounded very far away, a buzzing nuisance whose volume and insistence grew until it snapped her from her thoughts.
“Kathy! Come back to us, huh? You okay?”
She blinked, looking around. The whispering in her head and in her ears subsided…which was disconcerting, since she hadn’t realized there had been any whispering at all. Those parasite things were getting to her, and she didn’t like it.
They were in an open pavilion encircled by tall, distended buildings. The street beneath their feet was paved with uneven stone, but there was more of a sense of precision to this area than anywhere else in the city. That precision was echoed and amplified by the center of the area, a hexagon whose six points were nailed into place by massive stone pedestals. Atop each pedestal was a statue facing the center of the hexagon, in all respects identical to its five other siblings, and the nature of the statues immediately incited a kind of soul-sick horror. There wasn’t an individual feature that Kathy could point out as the reason, but the terrible culmination of every sculpted plane and curve moving one into the other, of the detailed realism of the anatomy, of the implicit suggestion that such sculptures had been carved not only from shining stone as replications from living models, but possibly from the models themselves. It was, Kathy thought with a grimace of revulsion, as if reality and art were vomiting into each other’s mouths, and these sculptures were the spillover.
The figures stood upright like angels, their shapeless bodies draped in long robes. They had immense outstretched wings, taloned on the ends, which were neither bat-like nor bird-like, but managed to exhibit features of both. Their heads reminded Kathy of flames, flames of stone and flesh whose tongues were drawn up and out behind them by the same unseen icy wind that had frozen them in place. Their outstretched arms reached for the sky above, bearing in claw-like hands inverted trapezoids of sparkling blue crystal.
Kathy and the others stood on the very edge of the open pavilion, still some distance from the hexagonal city center, but she could feel a different kind of energy coming from the space between the statues. To say that it was a breath wouldn’t have been quite right, but it was the energy of something living and breathing and aware of its surroundings. A living doorway, maybe, in a world beyond a living gate.
“Is that it?” she asked. “The city center? Are those the trapezoids?”
“Yeah,” Jose said. “That’s it. We found it.”
Kathy looked up at the sky. It was dusk already. Impossibly, the sun was already beginning to sink below the city skyline. “How…”
“I don’t know,” Jose said. “I have no idea how, but we made it.”
“Where did the rest of the day go?”
“I don’t know that, either,” Jose said more softly. “The length of days and nights is arbitrary here.”
“Possibly less arbitrary than we think. Maybe this place is done playing with us,” Hornsby said, “so it let us in.”
Kathy glanced around the city and then returned her attention to the statues. The lights had not yet come on. The Wraiths, she thought, might still be asleep. “We’re losing daylight. Let’s go look while we still can.” She started for the statues.
“Now?” Jose asked.
“Before they wake up,” she called back over her shoulder. “Come on.”
She heard them hurry to catch up to her.
“Are—are you sure we shouldn’t just wait until tomorrow?” Jose sounded genuinely scared.
Kathy glanced at him. “We’ll stay alert. We’ll be out of the city center before dark. But it isn’t dark yet. We can’t let this place fuck with us, Jose. Because you know it will; it’ll keep trying to confuse us and exhaust us and thwart our plans at every turn if we don’t just jump in and wrestle what we want right out of its hands.”
“Okay.” Jose exhaled. “Okay, yeah. Let’s do this.”
As they got closer to the hexagon of statues, that feeling of nervous anticipation heightened, and so did the feeling of being watched. Those sensations intensified further as the three explorers passed by one of the statues and gathered in the center of the hexagon.
“This is it. This is where we were.” Jose was looking at various items on the ground, the detritus of human trespassing the first time around. The Green Team’s belongings had aged and in some cases, begun to decay, although the progress of both varied from item to item and was incongruent with normal timetables. The women’s clothing was in fairly good shape, but one of the sets of men’s clothing had been reduced to fraying tatters. The other set had large holes in the shirt, but otherwise looked intact. Two watches lay on the ground next to the clothes. Both had stopped, but at different times, hours apart.
Two of the three backpacks looked like savage wild animals had torn them to pieces. Whatever contents they had once contained were gone now. The other backpack looked untouched, but when Kathy picked it up, it disintegrated in her hands. She wiped her dusty palms off on the seat of her jeans with a grimace of distaste and kept looking.
As Jose had mentioned, there was more intimate evidence of the Green Team there in the dirt and dust of the ancient city, things that unsettled Kathy far more than their variably decomposing gear. Little chunks of metals and resin—their dental fillings—had been scattered some by the wind, but lay in groupings near the clothing. She recognized the anchor-shaped birth control IUD lying near Claire’s jeans, and an oblong metal plate with an accompanying handful of screws nested in the tattered shreds of khaki pants. Perhaps most disturbing of the lot was the stent. She’d seen pictures of coronary stents before, little tubes of latticework like tiny chain-link fences rolled up. It bothered her to see a real one lying in the street. It suggested a number of possibilities regarding the fate of the Green Team, and not all of them were good. A woman could live without her IUD. A guy might be crippled but likely wouldn’t be killed by the removal of the plate and screws in his leg. And she supposed the removal of a stent wasn’t necessarily fatal, but…
If she were to assume that Claire and Rick and Terry hadn’t just been vaporized on the spot and that the blue lines on the Paragon printout sheets did indicate some kind of life, then it was possible that the three missing Green Team members had been…supplemented in some way to keep them alive. If they were being kept alive, for what purpose? And if they had, indeed, been supplemented, would it be wise to try and get them back?
The clicking of plastic against stone drew her attention. Jose, clearly frustrated, had chucked his flashlight at the base of one of the statues.
“Piece of shit,” he muttered. “You’d think a company like Paragon could afford to give us flashlights that worked.”
Kathy was about to point out that the flashlight was more likely malfunctioning due to the strange physics of Hesychia than poor craftsmanship, but decided against it. It wasn’t about the flashlight, Kathy decided. It was about fear and frustration and missed opportunities with Claire. Jose was looking for an outlet to vent through.
The men continued searching the bases of the statues, which were big, but not big enough to house doors or stairwells, Kathy noted. Seamless and smooth, they were probably solid stone with no indication of so much as an inscription. Their distortions were less apparent, but they had also been devised with the same slanted surfaces and skewed perspective as the rest of the city. Their function genuinely seemed to be just to serve as pedestals for the monstrosities on top of them.
For Kathy, it was the statues, or more precisely, the trapezoids they hoisted into the air, that held the real fascination. They were the key to discovering what had really happened to Claire Banks and her team. In a way, she wanted the night to come on faster. She wanted to see those trapezoids glow and get her first glimpse of the Wraiths and how they used the crystals.
In thinking of the oncoming night, she looked upward. The dusk had grown brilliantly red and was blending into purple while they had been searching the city center, and Kathy realized they had lingered long enough. “We should get out of here,” she said. “Night’s coming.”
As if her words were a command, the lights began to come on in the city. Jose watched them for a second, alarm tightening his features. “Move,” he said, tugging at Hornsby as he passed. “Move!”
They ran from the hexagon of faceless statues to the pavilion just as the trapezoids began to glow. A strange thing happened then—strange even by the standards of this new world. Kathy was suddenly aware of the face-things, the parasites, crowding the edges of the pavilion. She couldn’t see them but she could hear their whispering…so, so many voices whispering that it had created a hiss, a low buzz of unintelligible syllables that pushed madness around in the air as if it was its own breeze. What struck her as so strange was that they weren’t focused on her or her companions. In fact, if they noticed the presence of human beings at all, they didn’t seem to care. They remained at the outskirts of the hexagon, waiting. Their whispers were fervent, anxious, the buzz and murmur of a gathering crowd, unsure what to expect. Although she couldn’t recognize the language, she could feel the meaning of the words.
The Wraiths were coming. The eyes of the gods.
“This way,” Jose said, and she and Hornsby followed him to an odd double awning made of some sturdy-looking fabric, the Hesychian equivalent of leather, maybe. It jutted over one of the surrounding building’s doorways, its uppermost flap draping like a small tent over the lower, thicker one. Boxes haphazardly stacked along the side of the doorway gave them relatively easy access to climb up to the awning, and they slipped between the two heavy pieces of fabric.
“I hid here last time and they left me alone,” Jose whispered, peering through one of the vertical rips in the overhang. Through another, Kathy could see the trapezoids. Their formerly clear interiors had grown cloudy, and those clouds swirled within the confines of the crystal like small, contained storms. What Kathy had initially taken for veins of lighter blue had become small bolts of lightning creating an intermittent glow over the flame-like countenances of the statues.
The whispering grew as the light increased until for several minutes Kathy’s senses were engulfed by both the light and the voices. Then it all suddenly snapped off—the lights, the sounds, the churning storms inside the crystal trapezoids.
“That’s it?” Hornsby asked. “I expected…I don’t know, more otherworldly fanfare. More trouble, I guess.”
“Are they gone?” Kathy asked. She, too, was surprised. She’d expected the Wraiths to manifest as entities in some way, even if only for a moment. She’d imagined flickers of spectral things not unlike the statues that held their trapezoids. It wasn’t so much that she was disappointed by the anticlimax, but rather, she was suspicious that maybe she’d missed something vital, something necessary to finding Claire and her team members and getting the hell out of there.
Jose gestured for them to lower their voices, patting the air between them to tamp down the noise. “They’re here. Give it a minute. You’ll feel them.”
The three sat in silence, feeling the air and listening.
At first, Kathy noticed nothing, but then gradually their voices found her, like the first intrusions of wakefulness after a long sleep. To say she heard them at first wouldn’t have been quite accurate, because it was more the impression of sound, an association with sound, than anything she could actually hear. If glass had a voice, it would have sounded like the Wraiths, high and sharp and brittle, tinkling, echoing, musical but haunting. Like the whispering, the Wraiths’ language was unfamiliar but she thought she understood the sentiments behind it. She wondered briefly if the last inhabitants in this world all spoke a variation of the First Language, the language of the books in the library. The idea terrified her…but it made sense. Words that could create, alter, and destroy across language barriers, across time and space, words that could unmake people or remake them, drive them insane or change their very DNA…
Kathy peered through the rip in the upper awning again, looking for the source of the voices. She expected not to be able to see them, not in any traditional sense, and she was right. She knew about creatures whose physical bodies vibrated at higher or lower frequencies or occupied spaces between known physical matter. She’d read in old Network files about other creatures from universes where physicality existed beyond just the 3-D directional features of length and width and breadth, and so possessed an extra personal direction that human eyes were not sophisticated enough to see. Kathy suspected the Wraiths might have been of the latter category, present but more complex in structure than the physical limitations of sense could perceive.
“Can they see us?” she whispered to Jose.
“I don’t know. They can sense us, though. I don’t doubt they know we’re here.”
“But they haven’t tried to take us like they did your team members, or kill us like they did the recon team. Why?”
“We’re not blue lines yet,” Hornsby replied, thinking aloud. “Maybe we’re missing something…or have too much of something, like whatever makes us immune to infection from the faces.”
“You may be right,” Kathy said, keeping her voice hushed. “Maybe what we need to do is take a good look at the abductors before continuing to look for the abductees. Maybe get the Wraiths’ attention.”
Jose shook his head. “Are you crazy? Haven’t we gotten enough attention from the things in this place?”
Suddenly, Kathy was aware of a change in the air. It was not the presence of something new but the absence of the voices and reduction of the anxious electrical charge to a barely perceptible hum. “Are they…gone already?”
“They go quiet sometimes. It could mean the day is coming on already.” He peered out through the rip. “Sky’s still dark, though. I don’t know…it happened a few times when I was here last. I never could say for sure, but it’s almost like they go to sleep or meditate or something. They don’t do it often, but when they do, it’s eerie. Feels kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Maybe they’re praying.” Hornsby peered around Jose’s head and out through the rip. “Could be even Wraiths have gods.”
Kathy smiled at him. “You’re pretty good at this occult detective work, Carl.”
His big cheeks blushed as he grinned. “It’s pretty fascinating. Or would be, if we weren’t, you know, so close to constantly being killed by it and all.”
“You bring up a good point, though. It’s a behavior pattern to consider. In fact, there’s a lot to unpack here. Jose, the first time you found the city center, it was just as the Wraiths were coming through the trapezoids. Where were you all standing?”
“What difference does that make?” Jose looked confused.
“Because your positions might have made the difference between disappearing and remaining. Could proximity to the statues have been a factor? Were they closer than you were? Maybe those trapezoids work like vacuums, expelling one entity and then rushing to fill it with another.”
“We were…kind of all spread out,” Jose said, trying to remember. “I was standing in the middle of the hexagon, sort of near Claire…and the others were probably closer to the statues, yeah.”
“Okay, so that’s a potential factor. Maybe timing was, too. Maybe we should consider the possibility that their abduction might have been accidental or just coincidental.”
“No, I heard them, the Wraiths,” Jose said, sounding nettled. “It wasn’t an accident. They knew, Kathy. They took my team on purpose.”
“Okay, so then they were chosen. Why? Was it random, or were they looking for certain traits?”
“They never said why. Just told me terrible things in those awful glassy voices.”
“What did they say?” she asked.
Jose thought a moment. “It’s hard to remember now. They tried to fill my head with…worst case scenarios, I guess. I tried to block it out, but I couldn’t. They told me stories, night after night, of what was happening to the others, that they were naked, afraid, each of them alone in the dark—” Recollection dawned on his face. “In the dark—I’d forgotten about that! The Wraiths said Claire and the others were alone in the dark somewhere.”
“Where in the dark?”
Jose’s face fell. “I—I can’t remember exactly. A place…without stars, I think they said. Which…doesn’t help at all.” He sighed.
Kathy patted his shoulder. “Everything helps, even if we can’t see how yet. Any of the little details, no matter how strange or contradictory they might seem, could offer an answer.” Another inconsistency in their situation suddenly occurred to Kathy, and she was surprised she had only just now realized it. “Like, for example, the bodies of the recon team.”
Jose and Hornsby gave her blank looks.
“They were killed in or near the hexagon, according to the surviving member, Lt. Briggs. I heard a recording of his debriefing. He couldn’t remember much other than that he’d lost the others ‘back by the statues.’ He said the Wraiths from the trapezoids brought light and that there was blood. And Jose, you said you never saw the Wraiths leave the hexagon except to return back through the trapezoids, right? The recon team had to have been killed in or near the hexagon, and yet, there are no bodies here. Given the evidence so far of the uneven passage of time and irregular rates of decay in this world, statistically we should have found at least one body or one skeleton, and if not bodies, then clothes, weapons, dog tags, something of their having been here. But there’s no trace of them. And so again, it brings up the question of Lt. Briggs’s survival, at least until he got back through the gateway. Why him? What was different about him?”
“I don’t see how all this is going to help us find Claire and the others,” Jose said, still prickly. He folded his arms across his chest defensively, gazing out through the rip in the fabric again.
“Not that Greenwood was right about anything else,” Kathy replied, “but he was right about one thing. We need more information. We can’t find anyone or fight anything if we don’t understand anything about our situation, even just superficially. These aren’t meant to be just philosophical questions, Jose. They’re practical considerations for developing a combat strategy. If the Wraiths are lesser gods, there may be intelligent design at work here. That means guns and slivers of rock probably won’t work, but certain words and incantations may be useful in protecting ourselves or binding them from doing more harm. If they are just as physical as the library monsters or just as insane as the faces and their infected victims, we might have to consider other methods. The point is, in these situations, weapons work only within specific parameters and by understanding the nature of the beast. The wrong weapon will only make the problem worse. And to be honest, some of the behavior of the creatures who live here is outside of my experience. My usual arsenal of spells and incantations at best would do nothing at all. At worst…” Her voice trailed off.
“Okay, so you want to study the Wraiths. I get it. And like I said, I’m not a scientist,” Hornsby interjected after a moment, “but it takes years of observation and study and interaction to come to know anything about even the simplest species of animals. And those are animals we know work by the same laws of biology and physics that everything else on Earth does. But things like the Wraiths? Now, they could take decades, maybe centuries. Way more time than we have. What about them, exactly, do you need to know?”
“You’re right, Carl,” she said. “We can’t hope to know everything, but we don’t need to. We just need to know where they fit in the occult fabric of the multiverses.”
“Is that all?” Jose asked sarcastically.
“It’s far more limiting than it sounds,” Kathy said. “Look, bear with me. I told you, this is my line of work. It’s fair to say that I’ve seen a lot of shit. As a colleague once put it, we’ve experienced first-hand things about both the architects and architecture of time and space that would destroy the psychological, emotional, and spiritual constants that have kept humanity going for thousands of years. Sound like a heavy bag to carry? It is. My job is to keep all that in check. But I’m good at what I do, and I’ve been doing it a long time, long enough to have discovered certain patterns of occult behavior that stretch across multiple dimensions and the universes within them.”
“I believe you. You’ve probably seen and learned more than most can handle,” Hornsby said. “But I’m still not seeing how all that effort is going to help us.”
Jose said nothing, but his scowl softened.
“I do the best I can,” Kathy replied. “I’m not so sure I handle it well, but I’m still standing, so there’s that.” Her voice softened. “No one who knows what is really out there beyond the walls of this dimension sleeps well. Those patterns I mentioned are all we have to even the odds against us. That’s the effort we make…and it makes a difference.”
“What do you mean by patterns?” Hornsby asked.
“Okay, let me try to break it down. There are certain systems of magick, for lack of a better word, which are attributed to the greater and lesser gods of each particular dimension. They have characteristics specific to the worship or imprisonment of those gods. They also take into consideration the physics, biology, history, spiritualism, transcendence, enabling energies, and limitations of the worlds in which they originated. Yeah, I know, it’s complicated. For thousands of years, the organization I’m associated with has been collecting and collating data on those systems, studying every aspect, comparing and contrasting different systems. We master what we can, so we can protect our world from other worlds, other dimensions…and sometimes, from ourselves.”
“So if I’m understanding all this, you’re saying every universe has its own laws of physics and its own kinds of magick,” Hornsby said. “And people like you, in your line of work, try to keep them organized and in the dimensions where they belong.”
“Exactly!” Isolated in that awning-made-tent, Kathy felt that freedom from inhibition again, that release in finally being able to talk about her work without restriction. It felt good, so she kept going. “We’ve discovered that there’s an unusually high compatibility between the particular systems of our universe and those of dimensions that would otherwise contradict or negate each other. We believe this is why so many entities try to cross from their dimensions of origin to ours—dimension-hoppers, Travelers, those that make one great leap across worlds to bear offspring, those that stumble through accidentally, and of course, those that are summoned. Luckily, those who cause problems can be dealt with along the same compatibility principles by modifying our systems of magick and science to affect theirs.
“Another lucky thing is that we don’t see the crossing over of greater gods. Each stays in its own dimension, creating and destroying, just like ours. We don’t know if that’s by choice or simple impossibility, but it’s a good thing. As a race, there are few of them—likely not more than one or two in any one dimension at any one time. Except in a single case.”
Jose finally turned to her, his interest clearly piqued. “What’s that?”
“A place called Xíonathymia. It’s believed to be one of the oldest worlds in one of the oldest universes. It also has the dubious distinction of being the only world we’re aware of in all the known dimensions to contain more than one greater god. Until we learned about it, we didn’t imagine that such a thing could exist in one universe. But five of them were banished to that one world. From the stories that have been passed down through the eons, these greater gods were so powerful, and either so utterly indifferent to suffering or so actively looking to cause it, that it took the combined magick of five universes to cast them out into a sixth, far away.
“To get rid of them, it took spells crafted from the language you found in those books in the library, Jose. And even those spells only prevent them from returning to their own original dimensions; they don’t affect the greater gods’ ability to summon lesser gods and other servants who can act on worlds to which they are summoned, or cross into certain survivable dimensions themselves. In fact, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of occult keys and portals, those binding spells weaken. Many of the worst cults on Earth, like the Hand of the Black Stars, worship those five gods. They’ve tried everything to bring them across to Earth. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen their attempts.”
“Why?” Jose asked. “Why would they want something like that?”
“All they see is the potential for power. They either won’t or can’t accept that those beings would use them up, body and soul, with empty promises of power.”
The men in the small awning-tent with her looked exhausted. She couldn’t blame them. They were underfed, dehydrated, scared, and tired. She knew she had probably told them way more than they could fully process just then, knowledge she’d had time to come to terms with and still found overwhelming sometimes. It had felt good to talk about it out loud with other people, to finally frame its vast implications and catalog its cosmic limitlessness. Maybe that was selfish of her, but telling them served another purpose. They deserved to know what they were truly up against. They deserved as many answers as she could give. Kathy needed them prepared, armed with knowledge, to help her figure out how to make it off that world alive. There was something about the place, some quality to it that was, if she was honest with herself, more than she could tackle alone. She didn’t want to die there, nor did she want anyone else to be lost to this strange world, but without help, how could she expect to find lost people if being lost or being found didn’t really mean anything anymore?
“What I’ve been trying to say,” she said, feeling the full weight of exhaustion herself, “is that understanding these Wraiths is like studying a lock to figure out what kind of key you need to open it. If we ever want to get out of here, we need to make sense of this world.”
“Nothing makes sense here. You’re trying to apply logic to a place that doesn’t have any.”
“Everything has some kind of internal logic, even dreams,” Kathy said. “Even insanity. I just need to—”
Outside, the world beyond the rip in the fabric suddenly darkened. Likely, all it meant was that clouds had passed in front of the two moons, but the three tensed all the same, their breaths shallow, while they waited for the light to come back. When after several minutes it hadn’t returned, Hornsby reached around Jose’s shoulder and looked out from the rip.
He said something Kathy didn’t quite catch. When she asked him to repeat it, he said, “The stars are gone.”
“What? That can’t be possible,” Jose said. He made his way awkwardly to the edge of the awning and climbed down their makeshift staircase of boxes, Kathy and Hornsby right behind him.
When the three reached the ground, they stared up into the sky in amazement. It certainly did look to Kathy like the stars had winked out; the sky had gone black all over, and there was no cloud cover to be seen. The only light now came from the twin moons, and from both, it was a pale, weak glow at best.
Then Kathy saw the tiniest of movements up there, the faintest bruise-purple twinkling and wobbling of distant celestial bodies. Hesychia’s moons, which had picked up their pace across the sky as if ashamed by their poor light offering, reinforced Kathy’s theory by passing in front of some of those darkly twinkling pinpoints and briefly changing their color.
“No, look – the stars aren’t gone, not exactly,” Kathy said, growing uneasy. “They’re still up there, but they’re emitting a different kind of light, if you can call it light at all. Maybe it’s ultraviolet light or something. They’re…”
“Black light stars,” Hornsby finished. “I never knew…I didn’t think such a thing was possible, that stars could do that.”
“Looks like here, they can,” Kathy muttered.
Jose’s face lit up again. “Wait—that was what the Wraiths had said! I got it wrong. They didn’t say Claire and the others were in a place with no stars; they said a place with black stars. Maybe…maybe this is some kind of eclipse or something and this black light will show us the Green Team location. Or—or maybe Claire and the others were always here, but now we can get to them!” His eyes scanned the hexagon, ostensibly looking for some kind of change—a new door or opening somewhere, a mechanism triggered by the black stars.
Kathy couldn’t share Jose’s excitement. Her whole body had gone cold. That feeling of unease in looking up at the sky had become genuine horror, a sour taste in her mouth. The signs had all been there. She wanted to kick herself for not realizing it before. “Jose, are you sure? Are you absolutely fucking sure the Wraiths said a place with black stars?”
“Yeah,” Jose said, looking confused by her evident agitation. “Why?”
“Because only one world we know of is so far on the fringe of its particular universe that it is said to sometimes pass through a galaxy of black stars. Only one world in one universe—one place where rational science is skewed and ancient magick is unreliable. A first world in an early universe…remember?”
Both Jose and Hornsby considered her words, but didn’t seem to be making the connection yet.
“Don’t you see? This place you’ve been calling Hesychia…what if it isn’t a new world but a very old one, one that already has a name and some unimaginably powerful inhabitants? Think about it, guys. If this is Xíonathymia,” Kathy said, looking up at the sky again, “then somewhere on this world are the most malevolent forces in five universes, the god-monsters of countless worlds’ nightmares…and us.”