The black pool engulfed her, gulped her down. She tumbled into it, no chance to prepare for the panic, for the horror. Phantom hands groped for her, hauling her deeper, deeper. The darkness was absolute, and when she could hold her breath no more and she finally opened her mouth it flooded inside like cold poison.
But she’d been here before, so many times.
She pushed the panic away, studying that darkness until it began to part. Clouds, then sweeping, awful figures half-drowned in the shadows—and there, a mountain of flesh and bone that sat a million miles away, and yet somehow right next to her, which studied her with the festering rot holes in its face.
What is it you desire? it asked, not a sound but a feeling that pulsed through the dark water. She shivered with the force of it—not disgust, not fear.
Excitement.
This place, right here in the heart of the Engine, is where she belonged.
I want the truth. She fired the words upward, toward the thing that sat there. I want to know who is trying to bring the Engines together, and who is trying to destroy them.
The easiest request in the world, why had she never asked it before?
I want the truth, she said again. And again, and again, a mantra hurled out into the Engine.
That is all? it asked. And suddenly Night was standing right beside her, utterly real. She reached out to Pan, her face wet with tears.
“Please,” she said. “Just bring me back. It’s so hot down here. It’s so lonely. Please, Pan, you can bring me back.”
No, Pan said. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t Night. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I want the truth, that’s all. The truth.
It is done, said the creature inside the Engine, with another pulse of sound that could only be laughter. And the price is your soul. Then she was rising, out of that uterine quiet, up, up into the heat and noise of the world.
She burst from the pool, clawing in a long, desperate breath. She kicked at the water, reaching for the rim and not quite finding it. She plunged under, those hands grabbing her again, trying to haul her below.
Then a hand on her wrist, pulling her up. She let it, flopping out of the water and over the lip of the pool onto the beautiful, solid ground.
Mammon was there, his face a boy’s face and yet also a hundred different faces, like his flesh couldn’t hold him. He held on to her for a moment more—and in his touch she saw his story in a heartbeat, a child who lived inside the Engine, whose brothers and sisters played among the moving parts; a child who was betrayed by one of his own, and who now wanted to destroy the Engines, always to destroy them—then he let go, holding his fingers like he’d been burned.
“You know,” he said.
“Oh God,” she groaned. She coughed black water from her lungs, the droplets squirming across the stone as they tried to make their way back to the pool. “Oh God, you were telling the truth.”
The awful, unbelievable, soul-ending truth that her life was a lie.
She would have cried if she could remember how.
The world trembled again with the force of another explosion. She sat up, grimacing. What’s done was done. She had to think straight.
“That’s Charlie out there, right?” she said, using the lip of the pool to get herself to her feet. “What’s he doing?”
Mammon wasn’t looking at the Engine, though, he was looking up, and he was looking scared.
“Too soon,” he said, shaking his head. “Too soon.”
Noises were rippling through the open vault door, distant screams. There was another dull crunch overhead, like a giant was jumping on the floor up there. Rocks pattered down around her, some bouncing off the liquid surface of the pool and clattering to the stone. A section of the wall high above them bulged and cracked.
The elevator shaft, she thought. Something was on its way down.
Something big.
Mammon turned to her, his eyes full of tears. He had opened his mouth to speak when a section of the Engine close to the platform burst into flames, so bright that Pan had to screw her eyes shut. When she looked again a mushroom cloud of smoke was billowing up, the mechanism beneath reduced to a collection of molten parts. Somebody was walking through the chaos, somebody crafted from fire. Around him the Engine whirred and roared, almost in a panic. She swore she could see parts of it withdrawing from the heat like a snail’s eyes, pulling into itself.
“Pan,” said Mammon. “I—”
The wall above the vault door split further, a booming howl rising even above the noise of the Engine and the roar of the fire. Mammon glanced over his shoulder.
“I thought we had more time,” he said, then he turned back. “You have to get out of here, you have to survive.”
“But—”
“I won’t be able to hold him back, Pan,” Mammon said. “You need to go, I will distract him as best I can. When you’re clear—”
Another pillar of flames to the side, and more dull explosions from behind the wall. Pan felt like she was caught between a forest fire and a minefield. The concussive waves coming from both sides were enough to pulverize her. Mammon took her head in his hand, gently, and drew her back to him. He looked even younger than before, just a boy.
How had she gotten it so wrong?
“I got it wrong, too,” he said, plucking the thought from her head. “I didn’t see what he was doing. I thought I had outmaneuvered him. It was all part of his plan.”
“But he’s, he’s just a man,” said Pan, picturing Ostheim with his old clothes and his comb-over.
“It’s a clever man who plays the fool,” said Mammon. “A strong man who plays the coward. And only the very worst of us can pass as human.”
“Wait, what?” said Pan.
A wave of blast furnace heat rolled over her, another section of the Engine melting into molten puddles. The figure on fire strode from it, followed by another. She could barely make out the second guy in the blazing light, but then he darted forward, clambering up the side of the platform.
“Marlow,” she said, and it took everything she had not to run to him, if only because he was somebody familiar, an anchor to stop her flipping upside down with the rest of the world. He stood there, staring at her, then at Mammon. For a second she thought he was going to charge at him and she had her mouth open to tell him to wait when he spoke.
“I know,” he said. “Charlie told me.”
He turned, ducking onto one knee and offering his hand. Then Charlie was there, no longer on fire. He scooted onto the platform and Marlow pulled his hand free, yelping.
“Dude, you’re hot.”
He was also completely naked.
Something crunched from behind the vault door, a cloud of dust erupting through it.
“He is here,” said Mammon. “Pan, do as I say. Get out. Ostheim will open the gates, but it doesn’t mean the end. There is another way.”
“Another way?” said Charlie as he and Marlow joined them by the pool.
“Find Meridiana,” Mammon said. “She is the only one who can defeat Ostheim, the only one who can end this.”
“Meridiana?” said Marlow. “The evil one?”
“Not evil,” said Mammon. “Her mind has gone, but she is not evil, she was never evil. Find her.”
“Where is she?” said Pan.
“Hiding,” said Mammon. “She has been in hiding for years. Look for her in the spaces between, it’s all I know. Look for her in yourselves. She’s hiding in time, somewhere clever. Somewhere he could never find her.”
“So how are we supposed to?” said Marlow.
“Because—”
The vault door spun off its hinges, flying out into the Engine like a cannonball. Something was moving in the darkness beyond. Mammon glanced up at it like a child waiting for a punch to land.
“Because she will feel the change,” he said. “She will know that Ostheim has the Engines. She will want you to find her.”
“And if she doesn’t?” said Pan. Her heart was trying to crack her ribs on its way out, her whole body shaking.
“Then we are all worse than dead,” said Mammon. “Go to Venice, to Castello, the old town. All I know is that the last we saw of her she had a shop, a mirror shop. You will find her there, somewhere, if she wants you to. It’s our only hope. It’s— No!”
Ostheim walked through the vault door and stood at the top of the steps. He looked exactly the same as he had that morning, drowning in baggy clothes, his lank hair falling over his face. Only his expression had changed. His eyes were bulging, his mouth twisted open into a rictus smile, one that seemed too big for his face. He looked out into the Engine and that smile split even further, a deep, unpleasant laugh spilling out.
“Go!” said Mammon. “And do not look back.”
Ostheim heard him, his head twisting to look down the stairs. The smile fell away, replaced with a look of fury that was as far from human as anything Pan had ever seen. Something throbbed out of him, a pulse of evil that made her want to reach inside and pull out her soul, to trample it to dust.
“Go!” Mammon yelled.
No.
Her anger was demonic, was forged from fire, from all those years of blind loyalty. How many people had she killed for him? How many lives had she ruined for him? How many people were being torn to pieces in hell because of what she had done for him? She was going to murder him. She was going to end him.
She took a step forward and so did Ostheim.
And he changed.
His head flipped open like his jaw was hinged, his mouth a gaping black hole. Something pushed its way out of it, something oil black and too big. It might have been a lamprey eel, its tip ringed with teeth, its body slick and black. It kept coming, exploding up from Ostheim’s maw—ten yards long, twenty, thirty, too long and too fat to have ever fit inside a human body.
Oh God.
It split into two, peeling from itself like a cheese string. Then again, and again, stretching into long, wet fingers. They all punched earthward, sliding down the steps so fast they were just a blur. Some cut to the side, feeling their way into the Engine.
The rest came right for them.
Pan ducked, feeling one of the huge black limbs thunder over her head. Another followed, the air growing dark and cold as their bulk blocked the firelight. They thumped into Mammon like charging bulls—two, three, six, ten of them now—one after the other, pounding him into the stone.
“Pan, we gotta go!” Marlow yelled, cutting between them, making for the stairs. Charlie was screaming Mammon’s name, his body erupting into flames again. He stretched out his arms and released a plume of fire that cut across the platform, engulfing the squirming mass of shapes that hid Mammon.
Above them, Ostheim roared. His body was torn in a dozen places, dark, clotted blood splattering the stairs. Pieces of his flesh were dropping away like old clothes as more shapes forced their way from him, tapeworm-thin. They whipcracked through the air in a frenzy, one punching through the stone floor inches from Pan, showering her in shrapnel.
It is mine.
The voice was everywhere and nowhere, echoing around her skull like a cathedral bell had been rung in there. She felt a hand on her arm, Marlow dragging her across the platform. Some of the limbs had embedded themselves in the floor, stuck there like ivy as they grew over the edge of the platform. The Engine seemed to be welcoming them, grinding to a halt to let them in.
It is mine.
“No!”
The nest of snakes next to the pool blew like it was packed with explosives, showering the platform with rancid pieces of black flesh. Mammon rose from the carnage, his body shifting and glitching like it was trying to pull itself out of the universe. He opened his hands and a wave of black light burst from him, so impossibly dark that it seemed the world there had been erased.
Ostheim screamed again—although he no longer had a mouth to scream from. The last of his body split away, shedding muscle and bone. Beneath was a mess of sinew shot through with what looked like copper and bronze, an insane union of organic and mechanical parts. It moved, fast, scuttling onto the wall like a spider. Its countless limbs whirled through the air, a hurricane of impossible flesh. Then they darted down toward Mammon again, scorpion tails trying to punch their way through him.
Mammon vanished into thin air, appearing again almost immediately on the other side of the pool. He scooped a hand through the air and hurled another missile of nothing, an antimatter bomb that burned into the wall where Ostheim had been. The creature was already on the move, the stone splitting and dissolving where it was struck. More rocks fell from overhead, some as big as cars.
“Pan, come on!” Marlow was screaming at her.
She tore her eyes away from Mammon, focused on getting across the platform. They were at the stairs now, Marlow stumbling up them, Charlie behind her and pushing her forward on a wave of heat. A crunch from the platform and Pan couldn’t not look. It was like her head was on a string, somebody else tugging at it.
Ostheim propelled himself from the wall, his immense insect bulk landing on Mammon. Those limbs rose up as one, then stabbed down—so hard that the platform groaned, cracking away from the wall. One side tipped, water slopping out of the pool and hissing as it poured into the fires that raged there. Mammon fought back, waves of negative light pouring off him, each one ripping away some of Ostheim’s skin, gouging out chunks of flesh, sending limbs flying.
But for everything that Mammon cut away, something else grew. Things were pouring out of Ostheim now, liquid-quick but as solid as obsidian. The limbs pounded the rock with industrial speed—so fast that Pan couldn’t bear to look at them. The noise of them was like a thousand pneumatic drills at once, a cloud of smoke pouring from them, smoke and blood, misting into the ruptured air.
“No!” Charlie raged, burning so fiercely that the stairs were melting around him. He fired out another jet of molten heat, right into Ostheim’s back, but he didn’t even seem to feel it. The noise of it, of Ostheim’s attack, of the howling Engine, was too much. Pan felt deaf from it.
And yet something still rose from the madness, a voice whisper-weak and haunting.
Go, Pan. And find her. You do not have long.
“Come on!” yelled Marlow from the top of the stairs. Pan turned, tripped, sprawling. She climbed the rest on all fours because she couldn’t trust her legs to hold her. Marlow grabbed her, helping her up. He ducked through the door but she couldn’t bring herself to follow, not yet. She looked down, the view from here like the boxes in a theater, everything perfectly clear.
Ostheim was a hulking mass, the body of a vast spider but at least thirty limbs snaking from him. Only a couple were still pounding at the ground, because there was nothing left to pound. Mammon was a scattered mess of parts, a butcher’s waste bag scattered over the ruined platform. Pan could make out half a skull, a flap of face still attached, one eye roving madly. It seemed to see her, or maybe she just imagined it.
Find her.
Then a pincer-like limb skewered it and the skull shattered like glass. Ostheim lumbered off the remains of Mammon, each of his limbs darting over the edge of the platform and plunging into the smoking mess of the Engine.
“No!” Charlie yelled, a voice made of heat and fire. He loosed another strike, one that melted rock, that made the air burn bright. Ostheim’s head—just a tumorous lump on the bulk of his body, the vague shape of a face there—twisted up, the flames washing over it like they were nothing but water. He dismissed Charlie with a snort, then crawled over the edge of the platform, the Engine opening up and welcoming him like a mother bear welcomes a cub.
Charlie looked up at Pan, and even though he was an inferno she could see the emotion there, the grief pouring off him.
“There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “Come on.”
For a moment he burned even more fiercely, the metal staircase squealing in the heat. Then the flames snapped off and he ran up the last few steps, the heat ebbing from him. Together they took one last look at the platform, at the remains of Mammon, at the shape that scuttled into the Engine, that stretched out its limbs into the smoking chaos and began to mend it.
Then Marlow called to them and Pan turned away, Mammon’s voice still echoing inside her head.
Find her.