Lucy toppled off the bed in surprise. She pulled herself up by the duvet to see Alex at ninety degrees, looking around wildly as if suddenly jabbed with adrenaline.
“What? Where? What is—?” He caught sight of her and shook his head a few times. “Lucy? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Well, this is my bedroom,” she replied bemusedly, sitting fully upright.
Alex did another sweep of the room, actually taking in its features this time. “You’re right, it is . . . But how did I—?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to answer that. You just fell out of a portal on the hillside—the same place the Cult tried that ritual. You were out cold. I brought you back here.”
Alex didn’t reply. He seemed to be having trouble understanding what was going on, which wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting. Given that she had spent the last weeks on Earth, cut off from everything, and particularly considering he had been missing for months, she hadn’t thought she would be expected to provide answers. Now she felt at a bit of a loss.
“So where were you?” she prompted him. “Have you seen Jack?”
That seemed to have an effect. Alex leaped to his feet, duvet sent flying, and began turning on the spot in a state of disarray.
“Jack—the Sage—the Darkness—Isaac, Icarus—all a lie—”
He staggered and collapsed onto the carpet.
Lucy caught him around the shoulders and eased him into her desk chair. His breathing was shallow, and the whites of his eyes were visible all around the pupils.
After a moment, just about satisfied he was going to remain conscious, she darted out of the room and returned with a dry bread roll and a glass of water. It occurred to her that he may not have eaten in days, possibly even weeks, given his condition.
He downed the water in one gulp and began picking at the roll, sliding it around in his mouth before swallowing. He seemed to have forgotten how to eat normally. Lucy waited until the bites had gone down and his breathing had evened out a little before trying again.
“Alex,” she said softly, kneeling in front of him, “what happened to you?”
His eyes were still glazed, but he had heard. “I don’t know where to begin. I’ve done terrible, terrible things.”
Slowly, joltingly, he began to tell her everything that had happened since his abduction. In a dead voice, he explained how he had been imprisoned on Nexus, how he had been visited by the Emperor and, on striking a deal, been moved to the Cathedral. How, while he had initially resisted the Emperor’s so-called lessons, he had eventually succumbed to anger. How he had murdered Archbishop Faustus in brutal revenge for the crimes of the Cult, and how, when Nexus had fallen into the abyss, he had followed a grey figure through Light and Darkness to a still shore.
“And then,” he spluttered, his shoulders shaking, “I gave in.”
He bent forward, his skeletal frame rocked with tears.
Lucy put a comforting arm on his shoulder. “Gave in to what?”
“To Him. The Grey Sage. It’s all a lie—the Light, the Darkness, the Apollonians, the Cult—everything. He’s been behind it all from the beginning.”
“I don’t understand . . . What do you mean you gave in to Him?”
“I let Him in, and I hurt them . . . Jack, Ruth, all of them. And here I am, fine . . .”
“I’m sorry, but you’re not fine. But I still don’t understand . . .”
Through his sobs and fragments, Lucy managed to decipher the rest of the story. How the grey figure, the same being that had hollowed out the Emperor, had gained a foothold in Alex’s mind and how, in a blaze of vengeance, he had obliterated the group of Apollonians in single combat. How he had struggled against the Sage’s influence and how the attempt to reunite Him with the Shards had been disrupted by the spirit of a white fox. How Jack had been carried off into the clouds, and Alex had fallen into Darkness.
Shakily, he halted. For at least half an hour, they sat in silence, Lucy cradling Alex’s shuddering torso. She was trying to make sense of all the events that had gone on in her absence. So the quest for the Shards had been something like a wild-goose chase; it had all been a plot to assemble them in one place. But by her count, there was one missing. The Fifth Shard they had failed to obtain in the Sveta Mountains presumably remained unclaimed. And now Jack was held prisoner in some unknown realm, captive of this Grey Sage. It was a lot to take in.
Finally, Alex’s body steadied, and he was able to speak.
“But what about you? Why were you up on the Beacon? Why weren’t you out there on Chthonia with the others?”
Lucy braced herself. She knew this question would be coming. She hadn’t properly admitted to herself or anyone else what an unmitigated mistake it had been to come home. Now, she supposed, there was no point hiding it.
“I left. After Nexus, after everything had happened, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. But wait—you don’t know about any of that, do you?”
It was her turn to speak at length, relating everything from their departure from Earth right through to the discovery of Nduino and her decision to leave the Apollonians. When she had finished, Alex no longer looked distraught. He was amazed.
“You managed all that? You and Jack?”
“Yep,” she replied, and felt an odd swell of pride. “I don’t know how Jack came to end up with the others on Chthonia, but I can make a pretty good—”
The bedroom door flung open. Framed against the landing, mouths set in twin shocked Os, were Lucy’s parents.
None of the four moved. Lucy had a sudden sense of nothing having changed at all: she was hit by the same mingled sense of embarrassment and defiance that had always characterized any crossover between her parents and boys her age. In her parents, too, she could see the last months evaporating away as they geared up their stock reactions. Her dad looked as if he would happily have invited Alex for dinner—and then prepared him as the main course. Even worse because of its precision, she knew that her mom’s encyclopedic knowledge of Birchford’s young men, and all their indiscretions, was kicking into gear. Alex’s face was now being matched with a name and was clocking up a very bad record: orphan, smoker, possible history of drug use, mysterious disappearance, potential psychiatric sectioning . . .
It didn’t help that he currently seemed on his way from an epilepsy ward to a soup kitchen and a thrash metal concert.
“I didn’t realize you were home, sweetie,” Lucy’s mom said witheringly, addressing her daughter but with her crosshair gaze firmly fixed on Alex. “Or that we had a guest.”
There was a pause. Alex made no effort to introduce himself. He looked even more stricken, if possible, than before.
Lucy found herself slightly hysterical. The two of them had fought off demons and sorcerers, and yet here they were, both quailing before her parents’ disdain. She was seized by a sudden audacity.
“This is Alex, and actually, we were just off to save the universe. If the sky starts caving in anytime soon, you’ll know we won’t be coming back.”
And smiling cheerfully at her parents’ stunned expressions, she grabbed Alex by the wrist and hauled him out of the room.
“But that flies in the face of everything we’ve been told . . .” Ruth said slowly.
“And that’s exactly why you—we all—have been getting it wrong for so long,” Anubis replied. “The Darkness isn’t the enemy at all. We’ve been waging the wrong fight all this time.”
Ruth’s mind was spinning. As if she didn’t have enough new information to digest already, the jackal had just thrown the intellectual equivalent of a three-layer trifle into the mix.
“And you were trapped in the Shard all that time?”
The jackal nodded. “Yes. We all were, sealed within our own respective weapons. Or at least what we thought were our own weapons, naïve as we were. We had no sense of what they truly were—the very building blocks of the universe, far vaster and mightier than we possibly could have comprehended.”
“For two thousand years?” Ruth said incredulously.
“It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, I must admit.”
“So there are more like you?”
“Seven. Well, six remaining, if you discount the one who was absorbed into the Darkness. He can’t be said to exist in the same sense anymore. One for each Shard, bar the Sixth. You’ve come across Inari, I take it.”
“You were a bit like us, then? There were only five of us—plus Alex, I guess—on that island on Chthonia, each with a Shard . . .”
“Very similar indeed, but of course, that’s no accident. The Sage had a plan that almost worked perfectly the first time around. There was no need for Him to alter it too much. Despite Inari’s attempts to ward Jack off, you walked into the exact same trap we did.”
“Couldn’t he have tried a little harder? I mean, it’s not as if he were stuck inside a crystal, as the rest of you were . . .”
Anubis frowned. “And who was it that saved your skin out there? Ensured you got back here with nothing but a glorified scratch?”
Ruth thought back to the agony of having her life drained out through her spine.
“Okay, fair point. So what happened to him? And Jack? And all the others?”
“That’s where you come in.”
“That’s not going to work anymore,” Alex said, panting, as Lucy produced the egg from her bag.
They were running through the back alleys. The sun had set, and amber streetlights now flickered around them. Lucy wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened. Her parents had proven themselves to be unpredictable in unexpected situations, and she was fairly certain they wouldn’t face the embarrassment of calling the police. She could imagine, even now, her dad formulating a way of somehow pinning everything that had gone awry with her over the last few months on Alex, thereby exonerating the entire Goodman clan of scandal. She didn’t care. It all seemed so petty now.
For the first time in months, she felt truly exhilarated. They had a plan.
“Why won’t it work?” she demanded, shaking the egg as if to demonstrate its worthiness.
“It’s complicated,” Alex replied. “The ritual at Chthonia might have been disrupted, but things have been set in motion. We’re in the middle of a cosmic realignment, and things are going to get very messy. We won’t be able to communicate or travel in the ways we could before.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
They rounded a corner and reached a dead end. A blank brick wall spread out in front of them.
“This’ll do.”
Alex stretched out his right arm, palm facing forward, and the surface of the bricks began to change. The dull terracotta bubbled and distorted, and the multitude of tiny holes oozed black energy. Soon, the blank space had been replaced by a tall oval of obsidian, a threshold wide enough for them both to step through.
“Are you sure about this?” Lucy asked.
Their plan had been hastily cobbled together, but Alex had skimmed over this part.
He turned to her, fixing her with his emerald gaze. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his eyes still burned as brightly as ever. “Trust me. I understand so much now, after that dream. I’ll explain on the way.”
When she still looked uncertain, he reached out a hand. “It’s okay to be scared. I’m terrified. But we have a job to do.”
Lucy hesitated for a moment longer, then took his hand.
Together, they stepped into the Darkness.