The gushing water wends through a huge cement pipe, then plunges out to deposit me with a thud onto a muddy bank, black with sludge. Soaked to the skin and aching all over, I cough to clear my lungs of the vile liquid I swallowed. Yet even that doesn’t ease the irregular rhythm of my heartbeat.
Overhead, the orb that watches over Mystiquiel—the Motherboard’s eye—comes into view. It’s now bloodred and cloaks everything in rusty shadows. Blotting muck from around my zippers and piercings with the back of my wet glove, I squint at Dad’s watch; I’ve only thirteen minutes left, but I’m almost there.
I’ve landed in a shallow drainage trench, a few feet away from my destination. I crane my neck to make out the top of the structure. The electrical flashes lighting up the billows of smoke are dissipating, and what I see breaking through the haze floors me.
The steel structure is shaped like a giant head, with embossed features that are painfully fresh in my mind after the final illusion I just endured. It’s Imogen, my mother. In tribute or in effigy, I can’t be sure. I’ve come to the conclusion that since I’m the creator of Mystiquiel, this false history must’ve been supplied by thoughts in my own subconscious—ones the Motherboard distorted to fit her purpose. This is her final ploy to scare me away, to finish what she started … cut me off at the knees and leave me in shreds.
I refuse to quit, but the wave of nausea that churns in my stomach forces me to stop long enough to retch. Frothy bile sours on my tongue. I spit, then swipe my lips with my shirt’s wet hem. I push up to standing, and nearly double over when my pulse drops, leaving me light-headed. I haven’t eaten anything since I entered the orchard earlier, so no surprise my blood sugar’s low. Panting, I lean against the cement pipe’s edge and contemplate the climb ahead of me.
A tall copper scaffolding supports the metallic likeness of Imogen, and the long, winding aluminum stairway that leads into the structure seems to go on for a mile. Since Perish isn’t down here to greet me, he must be inside. I’ll be making the climb alone.
Every muscle in my body protests, and a bone-deep bleakness zaps my strength. Still, I force myself to limp to the first step and start the ascent. When the stairway jostles to a hum beneath my aching feet, accompanied by a chink-chink-chink like the chain pulling a roller coaster to its highest point, I’m not even fazed. Why wouldn’t it be an escalator? After all, I drew such contraptions into my novels.
I laugh then, drunk on fatigue and hysteria. This entire journey, nothing’s acted quite like I sketched it; yet this last leg … this one instance … followed my rules, and in a moment when I needed it most. An overwhelming sense of gratitude anesthetizes me. I prop myself against the mobile handrails and ride the climb.
Within a matter of seconds, I’m nearing the top. I glance down, the heights both dizzying and inspiring until I see the result of my destruction to the Motherboard’s mainframe. True to Perish’s word, the world is no longer rusting. The brownish veins in the cement and soil have faded away. Yet everything else also fades—as if being erased.
Beneath the orb’s tinted shadows, Mystiquiel slowly disappears into a colorless void. The buildings, the homes and landscapes, all of it being swallowed by a snowy wave, as if someone spilled a bottle of Wite-Out across the panel, leaving a blank page.
The biomechanical characters and creatures—be they winged or footed—all gather into shivering, panicked masses along the evaporating streets and terrain, watching helplessly as the vortex of emptiness surrounds them. Bonbon, the troll, and Angorla float into view. Soon they’re all adrift in space—pencil-line sketches without any background to anchor them. The same event has already removed the beach, ocean, and carnival tents, as demonstrated by the sea creatures and corpses afloat alongside the others. The wave slows within a few yards of the orchard and the Motherboard’s lair, as if held back by the two most powerful beings’ magic.
An agonized moan escapes me. I thought I was saving everything … that I was stopping the Motherboard from blotting out my creation. But it appears I did the opposite. Is this what Perish wanted to accomplish all along? Did he deceive me? Or did I fail somehow?
An audacious idea enters my mind … a frantic last bid to save my creation. Once we get safely home, I can draw everything from scratch. Now that I’ve worked through my depression, my guilt, my ability to see colors has returned. I can revive Mystiquiel on the page, breathe life into my works. But should I even try? I don’t want to endanger anyone ever again, yet now that I’ve finally embraced my gift and understand it, I want to pursue it. And most of all, I don’t want to leave my characters and creatures orphaned here, adrift forever, lonely and helpless, with no world in which to exist. I can rebuild this place with a strong foundation, a good heart.
As if in response to my musing, my heartbeat takes another odd tumble behind my sternum. Breathless, I slide down to sit on the automated stairs—unable to look at Mystiquiel’s cleansing one second longer.
A slot above me opens, ferrying the escalator into the steel head, then closes upon our passage, thankfully shutting the sad plight of my world and its denizens from my view. The stairs flatten to a conveyer belt, and I’m funneled through a dim coolness—lit by sporadic penlights and red beeping alarms. The scent of machine oil and burnt cables singes my nostrils. Tangled electrical cords hang from the ceiling, many of them frayed, with orange and white popping sparks that fall like fiery rain to the floor. It’s both dreadful and beautiful, holding my attention in the way only chaos and destruction can captivate.
The belt slows, chugging toward a figure waiting in the shadows, blurred by split-second intervals of light. It’s not hulking enough to be Perish, and the face’s profile is too long and lumpy for Uncle. Once I see the furry dog dancing beside the silhouette, and hear the tapping of her mechanical foot against the floor, I gather what little stamina I have left and leap off my transport toward Clarey and Flannie.
“Nix!” Clarey catches me in an embrace before my knees give out.
Flannie yips in greeting and sniffs at my feet, wagging her tail as I wrap my arms around Clarey’s neck and hold on for dear life.
“It’s okay … we’re all okay,” he says, his shoulders stiffening with pent-up emotion. The fronds of his mutating hands snag at my lower back where my T-shirt is tucked into the waist of my jeans. Nuzzling my nose at the place where the BAHA has enmeshed with his mask, I breathe him in. He feels real … he smells real. But is he?
“Midnight Pumpkin,” I whisper against the molded ridge of his ear. It could be a term of endearment for him in this absurd moment, but what it really is is a test.
He leans back with a confused expression, and I fear I’ve fallen into another trap.
“I can’t hear from that ear anymore,” Clarey says, tracing the zipper that runs along my chin. “When the latex melded to my hearing aid, it started bugging out. I’m telling myself it will be good as new once the spell wears off and I can lose the mask. What did you say?”
“Midnight Pumpkin?” I present it as a question this time.
“Oh! Toni Price,” he answers back with a sad, crooked smile, correctly naming the singer of the album that once haunted me with its Halloween design. A holiday that no longer holds any power over me after this crazy night.
I yelp with relief, pulling him in for another hug. Then remembering the portal’s deadline, I force us apart again to check the pocket watch. There’s ten minutes left. I don’t want to admit that a part of me dreads this last step. Killing the Motherboard is suddenly feeling way too real and final, taking into account the devastation caused by just incapacitating her.
Rubbing Flannie’s ears, I look her and her master over as quickly as possible in the blinking lights and sparks. Dust, grease, and mud cake along Flannie’s damp fur, but other than that she seems as rambunctious and playful as ever.
Clarey’s wearing the same clothes he’s been in since we went to the carnival on Cannon Beach—the real Cannon Beach—though they’re spotted with grime and torn in several places. Strangely, they’re also almost as wet as mine. His natural complexion breaks through the orange latex while his flesh still retains the shape of his prosthetic; so that detail was true. He’s becoming permanently fused with his costume.
The question is, why are he and Flannie already here, broken out of the Goblin King’s marble spell? “I thought you were at the castle, trapped in Perish’s pocket. Is he here?”
Clarey frowns. “I was never trapped. I must’ve only been at the palace for a few minutes. Scourge snuck me and Flannie out, and I woke up here sometime around ten thirty or so. The king’s brother made some kind of deal with …” Clarey stops himself, his altered features folding to worry.
“The Motherboard,” I finish for him, realizing what Perish meant when he accused Scourge of stealing and conspiring. Which also means the Goblin King was bluffing with the gazing globes; it was merely illusions trapped inside. Hedging his bets, indeed. “Uncle?”
Clarey nods. “Angorla helped him escape early on. He’s been waiting here the whole night.”
My thoughts shift to the first illusion I endured. Was the Motherboard using her imagery to try to tell me she had Clarey and Flannie; that she had my uncle, too? “Why would the Motherboard want to help you … us?”
A deep sadness lurks behind Clarey’s bright eyes. “Because she’s—”
“Clarey.” Uncle Thatch’s voice drifts down from the second-story platform shrouded in shadows. An odd crackling sound sputters from the upper level, but I can’t make anything out other than a couple of burlap tarps draped across indefinable shapes. “Let me be the one to tell her, okay?” Uncle descends the steps and wipes some grime from his hands with a rag that he then tucks into Dad’s duffel on his shoulder. Uncle’s busted glasses sit crookedly on his face, the cracked lens lit up by flickering sparks. When he reaches us, he’s as wet and dirty as Clarey.
I throw myself into his open arms, so happy to see him I can’t find it in me to be angry at the secrets he’s kept, or to even ask what he means by stopping Clarey midsentence. I breathe him in, the scent of baked goods and lemony dish soap still lingering underneath the muck on his Enchanted Delights T-shirt and khaki jeans. His familiarity—and the unconditional acceptance and love he’s always given so freely—fills those lonely spaces inside me, all the gaping holes that reopened when I thought I’d lost the last remnants of my family.
Uncle hugs me close and mumbles against my dripping hair, “Aw, Nixie-girl. I’m sorry I didn’t realize who Jaspar was. I thought he was a henchman, not the king himself. I really wish you’d stepped back through the veil. She was trying to lead you out.”
“The veil?” I’m slammed with the one consistency in each illusion: doorways. One that opened to Cannon Beach through a cave, and two others in the ground, filled with light. All three were the way out of Mystiquiel. Two of them even tried to physically suck me in. “What about you guys? Did she open a door for you, too? Why didn’t you go?”
“We can only pass the threshold alongside you. You’re holding the key.” Uncle taps the vial on the chain around my neck, reminding me of the contents I once naively believed to be squid ink.
Another moment in the tunnels comes full circle. Angorla’s rhyme: No more trades nor loss, where only the Goblin King and his blood-chosen may cross. So that’s what she meant.
“The opening responds to royal blood,” I conjecture aloud.
Uncle shrugs. “Exactly. The veil can appear anywhere in the world, but for anyone to step through at any time, be they fey or human, they either have to be accompanied by the king or have a sample of his blood in hand—willingly given by him—to cross over.”
Willingly given: in our case, provided for our bakery.
“We tried to get to you by taking the drainage tunnel, but the flood kept us out,” Clarey answers. “It was too slick for us to climb in.”
This explains their wet, grimy clothes. I wonder if they know I was responsible for that particular flood. “Wait … so the Motherboard was going to send me alone, without you three? Didn’t you tell her it would kill me to leave you behind?” My entire body quivers, an all-encompassing chill that is one part rage and one part exhaustion.
Uncle tries to get me to sit on the lower step, but I refuse. “You were her only concern,” he insists.
I clench my jaw tight. Right. Because, like Perish said, I’m her one worthy adversary, and she wanted to shove me out of the way so she could finish what she started. I grind my teeth. “Where is she … this … thing? I want to talk to her.”
Uncle and Clarey exchange heavy, meaningful glances.
“Talk to her, or finish her?” Uncle asks, wearing an expression that teeters awfully close to accusation—confirming they do know what I’ve been up to.
“She’s my creation, and I have to deal with her,” I snap, all the confusion and frustration bubbling up inside. “You haven’t seen all the stuff she threw at me in those tunnels. All the horrors, all the lies. I have to finish what I started. Perish is the only one who can get us out—together.”
Clarey and Uncle stand there, looking indecisive.
“Seriously?” I ask. “What’s with you two? This entire world is being erased. There’s going to be nothing left. I’m not sure we can survive that. Even if we did, we’d be like all the characters, floating around in empty space.” I glare at Clarey. “And you—you’ll be locked in goblin form, forever.” I hold up the pocket watch. “Come on, guys! We’ve only eight minutes left before—”
“Perish padded the truth, Nix.” Clarey’s rippled jaw twitches as he interrupts me. “Yeah, every year the veil magically opens at dawn on Halloween and closes at midnight. But there’s no limit on it for the Goblin King. Perish can reopen it for us whenever and wherever he chooses—day or night, any month of any year. He just wanted you to feel pressed for time, to weaken the Motherboard before she defeated him and broke the contract for good.”
“Contract?” I look at Uncle. “The one you made for the goblin fruit?”
He places a hand on my arm. “No. The one our ancestor made centuries ago, to save her sister and preserve the human world.”