MELANIE
Two years previous
Melanie and Leiwood returned to the inn with sacks of minerals, chemicals, and dried herbs. As they walked, Leiwood seemed to drag his feet, which she found galling. Her impatience from earlier was restored posthaste.
Was he trying to exasperate her? Did he not see how important it was to restore the equilibrium? The asymmetry fed on her nerves, tore at her muscles, weighed heavy in her chest. There was a struggle going on in every fiber of her body, demanding she cure the problem.
An image of a dead cat and a weeping, disheveled girl came to her mind, unbidden. It frightened her, and she vehemently shooed it away.
Back at the inn, Melanie didn’t want to wake her mother, so they went to Leiwood’s room instead. “Mortar, pestle,” she demanded, snapping her fingers at him. Obediently, he drew the tools from one of the bags. While she worked, he set out the rest of the gear: a small burner, some test tubes, a beaker, and the syringe.
Into the crucible went sulfur, calcium, and dried reishi mushrooms. She topped it off with a liquid catalyst that glowed an eerie, subtle green. “It has to rest for several hours,” she declared after thoroughly mixing the substances. “This cure demands time.”
Leiwood sat on his bed, giving her a sideways look. He’d been staring at her strangely since they’d gone out to get the ingredients. It worried her. Annoyed her. Disturbed her.
Just like his father, she thought harshly. Brutal man … killed my daughter’s cat.
Melanie pulled up short, confused by the thought—she wasn’t a mother. Within an instant, that confusion turned to fear as she tried to tell Leiwood about her wayward thoughts, tried to ask him if that was how it started—if this was, in actuality, what he’d meant.
Her lips parted, but her throat closed. She was shoved down in her own body, pushed, compressed, torn away from her own hands, her own voice. Something else was taking control.
She watched herself wander over to the fireplace and look deep into the red coals. “They say I’m a great healer,” her voice said.
No, no, no. This wasn’t happening—couldn’t be. It was a Magnitude Zero mask. Magnitude Zero. Third Tier. Harmless, useful. A healer’s mask.
Leiwood’s answer came tentatively. “Master Belladino was, yes.”
“I could cure any ailment,” her voice continued. “Save the dead from dying.”
“Melanie?”
My unfinished work. The thoughts weren’t her own, but they filled her brain, pushed out whatever she might be thinking. She was on the verge of panic, except her body didn’t think so. While her mind reeled, her body remained calm. She struggled with it—with him? with Belladino?—but their thoughts were sticky, mixing, intertwining. She didn’t know where the echo of this man’s life ended and where she began. I died before I could finish my work. “But there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to balance. One illness I couldn’t find a cure for.” Cat. Dead cat.
“You mean August Belladino. There was something he couldn’t cure?” His tone was wary.
It’s not me, she tried to yell. Leiwood, it happened! In the blink of an eye, it happened! I’m, I’m—
I’m Master Belladino, she thought firmly. Calmly, with certainty.
The cat. Victor killed it. Then he … Then he … She …
“Cruelty.” She picked up the iron poker and thrust it into the hearth. “It resides deep, somewhere most medicine can’t reach. And I never could figure it out.” She whirled around. Leiwood’s eyes were wide, and sad. His expression made her angry. “Did you know that a lot of sickness stays in the family? That it passes from parent to child?”
“Melanie…” There was a warning in his voice. A tension in his spine.
She raised the poker, pointing it at him. There he was; she could see Victor Leiwood hiding under that shocked expression. Sick man.
“Do you know what he did to her?” she screeched.
Leiwood was on his feet in an instant, arms out, imploring. “What? Who?”
“My daughter!” Melanie ran at him, swinging and thrusting the iron. Clawlike fingers sought to curl around his collar and draw him in. She wanted to impale him, to open him up. “Let me see it!” she shouted. “Where is it? Where does the abuse live? Down in your belly? In your spine? Show me, Victor!”
“Melanie!” he shrieked, jumping back. “It’s not you. Fight the mask. Fight it! I didn’t do it.” He launched pillows and oil lamps and a table in her path—anything to stop her. “I’m not my father! I’m not.”
Wrath blurring her vision, she plunged the poker forward, barely missed Leiwood, and embedded the point in a plush chair.
This isn’t right, she realized, backing away, terrified. Leiwood has done nothing but help me. He’s a good man. But an image of his father flashed before her eyes, and the hatred returned with a vengeance. She fought it, trying to keep separate from the feelings. “Leiwood,” she said, distress pervading her voice.
“Melanie? Take off the mask!”
She curled her fingers around the edges and pulled with all her strength. The mask wouldn’t budge. It had fused to her face, holding on like a leech. “It won’t—It—” Her heart beat radically in her chest. Panic filled her limbs, making her hands shake as she scrabbled at the wood.
In the next instant she was flying after him again. Deep, rumbling accusations spewed from her mouth. She didn’t even sound like herself.
She tried to force the duality, to separate herself from the echo once again. There was Master Belladino, enraged, hell-bent on tearing Leiwood apart—and Melanie, who wouldn’t hurt a thing. Especially not someone who had been so good to her.
“Help me!” she cried. And in her next breath, “You filth.”
Melanie wrestled with herself, desperate to escape the essence that possessed her body. “The fire!” she yelled, and moved in its direction. But she tripped on her own feet and fell short.
“What are you doing?” He didn’t flee, but he kept away.
“Burn it,” she urged. “Burn!” Inch by wavering inch, she crawled across the floor toward the fireplace. Melanie urged him to hurry, and Belladino damned him the whole way. She felt sick, insane. She wasn’t worried about the flames—about burning skin. She just wanted to be alone again.
Leiwood rushed forward, grasped the mask, and pulled. It didn’t come loose. Melanie grabbed his wrists and growled.
“I can’t get it off,” he said, defeated, searching her eyes—half-hidden behind the wood—for another idea.
Melanie pleaded, “Put it in the fire anyway.”
Melanie’s words said do it, but her body writhed, desperate to escape. “No,” Leiwood said. “You’ll—There’s got to be something else.” But the memory of his father’s mask—then the hatchet, which Leiwood had swung toward his own face—his own brush with death … Perhaps fire was the only answer.
But then he thought of plunging her face into the coals. It made him sick, and he knew he couldn’t do it.
Leiwood backed away, leaving Melanie to grapple with herself. She clawed at the neck of her blouse, tore at her hair. One moment she looked like she was strung out on an invisible rack, her spine pulled taut, then it snapped loose again like a band of rubber.
Trying to think fast, he spun toward the heap of apothecary items. With shaking hands, he picked up each substance and read label after label. At a loss, he thumbed the syringe, then the burner. None of the items provided an answer.
He heard a scraping of wood on wood and looked up. Melanie was dragging herself toward the fire once more, facedown, mask grating against the floor. She didn’t look as if she could stand much more.
“Wait!” he shouted, bounding over to her. Heart pounding, he grasped one ankle, stopping her progress toward ruin. “Fight it. Give me a little time, I’ll think of a better way.”
“Son of grime,” she raged, reaching forward and grasping the hearth’s hot grate. The rancid scent of charring human skin wafted into Leiwood’s face.
With a hefty yank he hauled her in reverse, simultaneously scanning the room for something to restrain her. The only things that seemed reasonable were the drape cords.
The cords were tied neatly around wrought-iron window hooks. He struggled with the knots—distress made him clumsy. He bumped the nightstand that held a lamp and his pocketbook and they tumbled to the ground.
His purse burst open, and bottles of time went bouncing across the room.
Stunned, he watched one roll to the foot of the table. His gaze went back to the apothecary items. An idea struck him.
Scooping up one of the time vials—a fiver—he leapt over Melanie’s twisted form, then skidded to a halt beside the medicines. In the next instant the syringe was in his hand, poised above the cork that kept the time contained.
It was illegal—and nearly impossible—to release time without a tax collector present. The time was kept in by enchantment, and only things designed to contain enchantment could break the magic seal.
Average people rarely saw the needles. The time tax was taken before they could talk, and unless you were a tax taker or someone else in the upper echelons of control, you might not have a chance to see one again until you were elderly, and that was only if you were cashing out.
He should have flashed on the needle before—he’d only seen one other like it. Leiwood remembered the needle from when he was young. From when they’d made him pay the time tax.
It was special, and rare, something you had to have a license to obtain, and looked dramatically different from the syringes that took the emote tax—each of which was tiny, made of glass forged of sand and crushed gemstone. This was large, substantial, the glass thick and clear.
Had Melanie taken it from the apothecary? She couldn’t have known before the mask how to obtain such a thing, or likely even what it looked like. That was all Belladino.
What would happen when the time was let go? He’d never heard of anyone setting it free before. It was pulled from people, stored in vials, and put back in people again. All he knew was that he needed some—time, real time—more than what he had. Time to think before Melanie threw herself into the flames.
He jammed the needle deep into the spongy cork and pulled back on the plunger. As the barrel filled with a swirling pink-and-turquoise essence, the bottle cracked. Once empty, it turned to dust.
Without another thought Leiwood pointed the needle in Melanie’s direction and shot time into the air.
Everything stopped. There was a stillness to the room, like on a winter’s morning after a heavy snow. When he noticed even his breathing had stopped, he started to panic, but quickly focused.
He was seeing double—as if two stained-glass images were superimposed. But not quite, because the images weren’t identical.
There were new things in the room—wispy, ethereal things, the same color as the essence of time. There was a new plant in one corner, a handprint on the windowpane, and smoke—as from a pipe—over the bed.
Melanie was frozen, her rigid, burnt fingers outstretched for the grate once more. He was grateful that the mask hid her expression, because surrounding her head was a creature. It was something between an amorphous blob and a tentacled monster. The bulbous body grew out of the center of the mask, and the translucent arms reached out behind her, like streamers caught in a high wind.
He wanted to lunge at it, but wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do.
What were they, these newly revealed things? They couldn’t be physical objects; he’d stood right where the new plant sat.
Perhaps they were things that existed in time only, separate from space.
A faint pulsing drew his attention to the ceiling. Splayed across it were symbols, constantly shifting. They weren’t words, or astrological signs. The speed at which they changed reminded him of a countdown.
There were five minutes in the bottle—that was all the time he had to decide what to do.
The fire. First he’d put out the fire.
He moved to put the syringe down, but caught sight of what it had become. The superimposed version of the needle was bigger—almost like a dagger. And the two metal circles of the finger grip now extended up and over his hand to his wrist in a partial gauntlet. Things that looked like spiny vines wound up his arm from there, all the way to his shoulder, where a protective plate with moving—living?—parts rested.
The syringe let him interact with time without being caught in it, like Melanie was. It was the key.
And the cure. Never mind the fire.
Leiwood ran at her. Diving forward, he plunged the dagger-needle between the frog’s eyes—Melanie’s eyes—and pulled on the plunger. A small drop of blood entered the barrel with a faint fog of time. He’d pushed too deep, failing to consider the softness of the balsa. Lightly, he scaled back, pulling the needle out just a tad.
When he pulled on the plunger again, the creature on the mask suddenly moved. Its tentacles clamped down around Melanie and its body quivered. The bulbous portion shimmered and resolved into an ugly caricature of a human face—Belladino’s face, tainted and twisted with hate. It bit and howled at Leiwood.
“I’m sorry, I—” But there was no use in Leiwood apologizing to a half-formed time-specter of a man for things he had never done.
He struggled with the creature, sucking at it, more desperate to separate it from Melanie than before. His arm shook as he applied force to the plunger. Soon the thing began to shrink, absorbed into the mask and then drawn up the needle and into the barrel.
The last airy bit of the creature caught, Leiwood withdrew the needle and backed away, examining the syringe. The mass inside swirled like an angry, bottled storm.