The source of my beam. Well, I guess I know who that is now, and I know exactly how to kill him. I can’t believe how gross it’s going to be—but Catherine and Lore don’t give a fuck about that. All I am to them is one big explosive lump of murder-suicide, and if they can get me to detonate, that’s just peachy freaking fabulous.
He gave me a weapon, old Gus did. He stuck it somewhere in the back of my throat. I haven’t seen the thing, but reading Catherine’s description with this pendant slapping its image into me—shit, projecting it into me—is nearly as good. Pink and frilled and gelatinous, a deadly blob of magic sticky enough to catch the loose ends of lives. And pull.
Well, looks like he didn’t think it through. Carry your kiss, you old shit? Technically I’m just thinking the words, but they rip through my head like a scream. Carry it where? Oh, do I have the wrong address? Did somebody here order a pizza?
I dog-eared the box that will drop me back in Nautilus, and I didn’t know I was marking it for this exact moment. I open my door onto hazy darkness and stomp out into the warehouse, ready to go.
My nose bumps a cement wall three feet from my door. My hands flail out reflexively and scrape against two more walls, just as close. There’s no warehouse and no boxes and instead I’ve been entombed in a telephone booth?
I have to infer that Gus is onto me, somehow or other. How does he feel, watching his beamer go this haywire? And I maybe don’t have the greatest tolerance for frustration even at the best of times, but right now it’s at absolute zero.
“Help me!” At least that’s what I mean, but it comes out more of a wordless shriek. “You want me to die so bad, then help me!” My hands claw at the walls, hoping they’ll give—just some magic bullshit, my mind says—but they don’t. “Help me, Catherine! I’m not pretending now.”
Nothing happens. I lean my upraised arms against the wall, lean my head on my arms, cry.
Something bright flickers at the edge of my vision, and I open my eyes to see glowing letters racing across my bare wrist: that same beautiful peaked handwriting dancing along in firefly ink.
I’ve pushed letters through the membrane before. You’re rather larger, though. It will take a significant rupture. Lore has the skill of revelation, of opening true windows onto Nautilus, but the only methods I know are messier. Predatory shadows that will swallow you down.
“Do it,” I say.
It might not go well.
“I don’t care. I’m trying—” What the hell am I saying? “I’m trying to be real.”
I need a defined shadow, which means I also need a light. If you would check your right pocket?
I reach in a hand. There’s a tiny box striped in sandpaper. Carmen’s matches. I’m sure I never put them there, not consciously anyway. One thing you can say for the ghost hitching her interminable ride in my head, she prepares for shit.
I pull them out, choose one, hesitate for just a moment. Strike up a little screw of flame, and gold washes my cell.
Gouts of shadow groove the light, mesmerizing in their lurch and sway. They’re so dark they seem to take on new and hungry dimensions, to bend free of the ceiling, looping and reaching—
Right. They don’t seem. That’s not what they do.
I have just enough time to register that fact before they’re on me like strangler vines. I slide out of joint with myself, staggered strips, twitching dead ends. There’s a scream that’s too broken apart to be audible, pain fraying like decayed flesh. It’s like what Lore did when she slaughtered all those versions of me, but without the mercy of a conclusion. I know the whirl is there, the gyre over Nautilus, but only by the way its winds cross through my hollowed being, whistle through my slats—
And then my back slides down a glowing wall and I land with a thump, legs splayed in front of me. Which means I still have legs. Hands to push myself up with. Guts available for puking, while I’m at it. I spray bile all over the shining ground, smack my forehead on the wall. Everything’s spinning, as if my scraps are taking their sweet time sorting back into place.
Angus, my wrist insists in a quick snaking of black. The line writes and then squirms under my skin as soon as it finishes the word. Angus!
“What?” I say. “That was horrible. You need to give me some time to recover, before you start—”
Gus is outside Margo’s room. I can hear his voice.
Right, because she still has a second vantage here in Nautilus. The rest of her is in that locket.
“Fine. I’ll mosey on over there as soon as I get oriented. My head is swimming and there’s barf on my face, in case you missed it.”
Now, Catherine writes. Run.
My legs surge into motion, helplessly obedient. Why? At first it’s just random charging, because I don’t know where I am. But then the map cut into me, and erased, and cut again a hundred times by a hundred terminated lives here takes over, and I know exactly where I’m going. My steps pound down in a jostle of competing magics, one of them spindling the distance and stretching it out in front of me, and the other pulling back the opposite way to draw Margo and me together. Gus knows I’m coming, he knows.
But I don’t think he grasps yet who’s working with me.
Who’s working against him.
I can feel his frustration that the magic countering his is so strong—too strong to quite make sense. He’s never understood what he’s up against, never understood her. Sick as I still feel, I can’t keep down the glee of knowing what he doesn’t, of beating down his magic with my footsteps, of gaining on him.
We reach the slum where Margo lives. The streets are narrow here, cluttered with people sitting against walls and sticking their legs everywhere—and here everyone actually looks like a regularish person. Too poor, I guess, to pay for rotating heads or whatever. I jump over them, light with the strength and speed Gus gave me. A few shout, and one jerk swings up his knee to trip me. As if, bitch. I skim right over him and land like a freaking gazelle.
Margo’s little room heaves into view, a pearly bulge at the base of a towering, rippled cliff. I can just make out a dim coil at its heart—she’s still stuck in that chair, naturally—but I don’t see anything that looks like a second person in there? I reel to a stop, gasping.
“Catherine? Where is he?”
He’s hiding behind Margo’s chair. He’s employing a glaze of light as camouflage, so that he’s precisely as bright as the walls. He means to ambush you.
That makes sense—until I remember something that makes me squirm with doubt. “I thought you couldn’t see anything? You’re shut up in that locket, so all you can do is hear what’s happening outside?”
I can’t see, Catherine writes, when I’m inside the locket.
Huh. Okay?
“So how am I supposed to do this? If I could take him by surprise and smack a kiss on him before he knows what’s happening—but he’ll be trying to crumple me to nothing at the same time. Like, what, we’re going to chase each other around the chair?”
I’ll help you. Margo will help you.
“He won’t give me a chance!”
That was certainly his intention. But at this very moment Gus is discovering something that will make him hesitate to strike. Seize the advantage.
I trust her, and I don’t trust her. How can I, when she’s hated me for centuries? How can I not, when she’s been part of me for so long?
The wall will open for you.
Fine. As I get close I see—what? It’s almost too subtle to identify, a stir and thrash of the light in Margo’s room. And then I hear a muffled cry: an old man’s voice, cracking and anguished.
Then I get it. Gus has given up his ambush and he’s banging around the room. Looking for something.
Maybe for someone, actually, now I think of it. I push through the milky shimmer of the doorway. It must have been right here where Catherine dismantled Asterion, turned him into a bloody buzz. And I think we’re on the same side now and everything, but my pulse still gets a little twitchy.
Gus rears back as I come through: the face of a dog’s favorite chew toy, except he’s glazed in light like a donut. Only his pale green eyes pierce through, scowling up a storm. And hey, there’s that big gold locket with the little blue flowers, the one Margo was wearing. It’s open like a tiny book in his right palm.
And it’s empty.
“Where is she?” Gus screams at me. The light slides off him. Whoever thought rage-purpled cheeks coordinated well with ice-green eyes should do some serious rethinking. “Did Lore steal my Catherine? Did Sky? Where is she?”
I’m in imminent danger and everything, but it’s still hard not to laugh. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Oh—that would be a lie. I do know one place where Catherine is. But that’s not what he means.
“Agency, Asterion said you needed agency, independence, to win the love of your Catherines. You not only fail to turn your agency to account, you also have the gall to turn it against me, collude with my enemies—”
“Hey, so, you might want to think twice before you walk through any doorway ever. Right? If you don’t know where Catherine is, I mean. Looks like you’d better move in with Margo here, maybe never go out again. Why don’t you ask Margo where Catherine is, anyway? She should know.”
The guardian of all his cherished horrors, she called herself. Now I know what Margo meant, because what horror has Gus ever cherished more than his dead ex-friend?
Margo’s been awfully quiet, now I think of it. I look at her: slumped sideways in her chair, eyes closed, lips compressed in pain. How could anybody sleep through Gus’s freakout?
Neck mottled red. Not breathing.
I look back at Gus. Accusingly, I guess, because his shoulders hike and his wrinkly mouth purses.
“She tried to stop me from taking the locket. She bit me like a cat. As if Catherine weren’t always and forever mine, as if Margo had any say in it!”
“You could have let her go home to die.” Who knew I could get indignant on Margo’s behalf? Who knew I’d cry for her? But she was basically my mom a hundred times over, and I still love her, it turns out. “Let her breathe unworld air one last time, let her hear real birds. After everything she did for you, you could have given her that much!”
Gus isn’t even paying attention. “Why, though? Why fight me over the locket, when Catherine wasn’t in it any longer? She must have known, must have allowed someone to take my Catherine away. It makes no sense.”
It makes no sense unless Margo was trying to throw him off. To buy me time.
It makes no sense unless she was helping me. Has Catherine been slipping notes to Margo, too, planning this with her?
Hah. Nobody took Catherine anywhere. Ghostie got out of that locket all by herself. Maybe Margo swung her neck until it knocked against the chair, jarred open. The stitch Sky used to tie Catherine to the hinge wasn’t all that strong, she said.
Gus is stewing, staring around the room. Not a lot of hiding places, he must be thinking, and, like, obviously Catherine doesn’t have enough magic to stifle her own scream. So she must be gone. Right?
Then it hits me: this right here is the advantage Catherine was talking about. The one I should seize.
“Actually,” I tell him, “I know exactly where Catherine is now. She told me herself.”
Gus goggles at me, jaw gone slack and nostrils flaring. He won’t want to destroy me until he knows what I’m talking about, he’ll waver and snarl and delay. Because as far as he’s concerned, Catherine isn’t supposed to be able to tell anything.
I leap and feel his shriveled old body slamming back against the wall.