When I told Lore I wanted to leave town, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I’m lying in a slick, shining gully that spirals into towers against a dusky sky—not in Kansas anymore and all that, though something that looks sort of like a permanent tornado hovers high overhead. I might not know what I am anymore—or actually I might know too much—but I have a good idea of where.
I’m in the moonglow city. In Nautilus.
I’ve never been to Kansas—not as far as I know, anyway—but now I can’t avoid recognizing that I’ve been here. Lots of times, in lots of lives. It’s too much to say it’s all coming back to me, maybe, but there’s a wobbling of familiarity as I drag myself upright and look around. There’s a dude who’d be perfectly ordinary—bald spot, pink polo shirt, freaking khakis—if he didn’t have a pelican’s beak jutting out of his face. On a bench, humming absently to himself. He barely glances at me, like a gasping, sobbing mess of a boy doesn’t rate anyone’s attention here.
A piano with golden fur snuffles its way around the corner, then stops to paw at the ground. A memory rises, and with a lot more solidity and conviction than I’m used to. When I was little Margo used to hire a piano just like that so I could practice!
Margo. Shit.
Because, of course.
Because, hell in a handbasket, the howling damned nicely arranged with fresh fruit and some colored cellophane and delivered with a bow on top, of course.
There’s a reason my memories of Margo feel so different from everything else in my head—why Geneva thought they sounded so preposterous. I was remembering being with Margo here. Maybe I visited on weekends while I was growing up? The first time I got a candied baby dragon, for example—it’s so clear to me now! It was a delicate, exquisite thing: a snippet of emerald fire with green lace wings, twisting through the crystallized sugar. Margo told me then that sometimes dragons lay huge clusters of eggs up in the rafters of candy factories—tiny, glittery eggs, like bubbles of blown sugar. They like the warmth. But some of the hatchlings aren’t that good at flying, and they tumble into the bubbling cauldrons below. I cried and cried, and Margo didn’t have a lot of sympathy because candy like that cost extra. In the end I ate it anyway, and fragments of wing got stuck between my teeth.
The baby dragon flares into my mind, prismatic, brittle. But now it has Geneva’s face.
Maybe some of my memories aren’t a hundred percent trustworthy—but Margo? She has to be real, right? And she has to love me, even if nobody else does.
She’s here, I just know it. Somewhere. If anyone can help me make sense of this mess, won’t it be her? But how am I supposed to find her? I don’t know my way around at all.
Except that I do. The city’s map lingers deep inside me, an ice-white burn at the back of my retinae. I start walking, and recognition curves around me, a soft push that says this fountain, this stationary cloud-thing with the café chairs on top; wait, aren’t the slums behind that dome?
When I find Margo’s hut it’s made of the same paralytic mist as everything else. Peering into it I can dimly see the shape of an old woman’s body in a chair. She looks like a bug embedded in luminous ice. It impresses on me the awkwardness of my being here. The Anguses I fell through on the way here kept changing their faces, so she might not even recognize me. I mean, unless my voice is enough, because we talk on the phone all the time?
She sits up higher in her chair with an abrupt shrugging movement. She’s tense, waiting, and her head pivots my way. She sees me, too, so unless I want to look like a coward it’s too late for me to bolt.
Of course there’s no bell, and knocking feels stupid. No doorknob either. Just a plane of cold translucence framed by a lintel and doorposts beautifully carved with sinuous grooves, as if they’d been sculpted for centuries by a gritty, groping wind. Maybe you just push it open?
I raise a hand to the door. Open isn’t the word for what it does, but I can feel it recognizing me, somehow. When I step forward it doesn’t feel like entering the room.
It’s more like the room enters me. Cold whiteness pours around and through me, shifts me into place inside it. There’s an abrupt reordering of space, until everything settles and I’m looking down at a very, very old woman with pale gray eyes fixed on me and thin, crusted, purplish lips nested in dusty wrinkles. She doesn’t seem surprised, only maybe vaguely irritated—she must think I’m a stranger. A few white strands stripe her mottled pink scalp, and her clothes are colorless and wasted-looking, their fabric thinned with age. A shiny locket hangs from her neck, gold speckled with minuscule blue flowers. She smells pretty bad. Does she look like the Margo in my head, or does my head shuffle its memories to accommodate what I’m seeing? Familiarity and strangeness strobe through me at the sight of her, and it hits me: it’s the first time a memory from my pre-warehouse life has smacked up against reality.
Margo. She’s a person! I’m not completely disconnected from everyone except a random actress who’s made a hobby out of murdering me!
The air has a shrilly humming undertone to it, something like the faint shriek of electricity racing through wires, though of course they wouldn’t bother with powerlines here. Margo’s weary gray eyes narrow and she hangs her head, like even looking at me is too much trouble.
“Angus again, aren’t you? He’s outdone himself this time. Prettied you up until you shine like pure poison, as if that was ever going to win her over! She was never searching for some bright bauble of a boy, and she won’t be now. Even if it cost her her life, I dare say Catherine made the right choice. Dead is better than a life with you.”