Chapter 11

  Eric Walker

  “Damn,” said Eric as their little lifeboat of a spaceship descended toward the Cloud Moon. A sea of gray soon filled the entire viewport. Tiny flashes of light strobed perpetually within the clouds as though the storm hid a host of paparazzi snapping shot after shot with multicolored flash. “Looks cool.”

  Kate pressed up against the window beside him. “Y-yeah, but there’s no s-sunlight. Ever! Always s-st-stormy!”

  Eric stretched and yawned. That sounded okay to him. Seemed like a relatively small problem for a moon to have in comparison to his moon, in which the population was MIA, or Isaac’s in which the moon itself was MIA.

  “Think she’ll b-be all right?” asked Kate for the twentieth time as she leaned back into her seat and buckled herself in. She motioned for Eric to do the same.

  They’d invited Heidi to come with them, to just leave her moon. But Heidi was the dutiful type, and she had responsibilities. She wanted to do her moon thing, do it right. And good for her, even though her whole moon thing seemed pretty fucking dark. Prisons and monsters made of pain and a weird glass plant that grew on dead bodies, feeding on their regrets and all that shit. Plus something called the Bleak Machine shining like a diseased sun at the middle of everything. But hey, if anyone could handle all that, it was probably Heidi.

  But he had to reassure Kate. Again. “Listen, she’s surrounded by a squad of elite badasses, okay? And they know Lady Chains is out there. She won’t get the drop on them.”

  Kate bit her lip and hugged her bass. Her hair, messily trapped in a handful of brightly colored plastic butterfly clips, began to drift toward the Cloud Moon as ‘down’ started being a thing again.

  Eric knew he was reassuring himself just as much as Kate. Heidi had seemed chill when she told them she could handle it. She had seemed unshaken. But how often had he seen her shaken? Did he even know what that looked like? If she really was scared, or nervous about being left on her clusterfuck of a moon while he and Kate sailed away in a spare escape pod, would she show it? Hell no.

  “Just gotta trust her, I guess,” he said to himself. Kate grunted in acknowledgment.

  “She c-called him her fr-f-friend,” said Kate after a moment. Meaning the bug monster. The one called Ruth.

  “I’ll apologize, damn, chill.”

  “I m-meant I’m happy. For her.” And sure enough, she was grinning a big toothy grin. “M-m-mmmaking friends.”

  Their pod dropped through the clouds and plummeted for over a minute through the dense canopy of storm while colorful lightning lit the surrounding vapor. Eric was no astronomy nerd like Isaac, but he knew damn well that falling through the atmosphere of a planet was supposed to be loud and hot and full of shaky-cam. Entering the atmosphere and gravitational influence of Theia was kind-of loud because of the thunder, and it was a little shaky, but they made it through with hardly any drama at all.

  Kate somehow read his thoughts. “W-well…it is just a m-moo-m-a moon. And a r-re- a p-pretty small one, too.” Her dark eyebrows scrunched together. “B-but then why d-do they all have o-one G of g-gravity? And one atmosphere of p-pre-p-of air pressure?”

  Eric knew the answer as though Isaac was whispering it into his ear with a silly accent. Because it’s just a story and we’re not supposed to question the details like that.

  The pod’s navigational abilities proved themselves when it finally cleared the storm. It popped a parachute to slow their fall with a harsh jolt. There, in clear view not two miles away, stood Kate’s palace. She pointed it out to him, buzzing with excitement, but he could not really have missed it. Bright colors and pointed towers like that one famous church in Russia, except that each tower was also a windmill. About a dozen windmills of varying shapes and colors and sizes, spinning at different speeds in the wind. Only one tower, the tallest, had no windmill. He couldn’t see the door, but he knew it was there.

  Their pod landed roughly on a grassy slope. The pod was round, so it began rolling down the hill as soon as Eric and Kate had unbuckled themselves from their seats. They tumbled about the cramped cabin for several seconds before the pod slowed to a halt.

  “Ow,” said Eric when everything had stopped spinning. He felt the tender spot on his face where something hard and sharp had come close to gouging his eye out.

  Kate, partially on top of him, giggled in exhilaration. She sat up, held out a hand. Navi appeared in a blink of light to deposit Kate’s glasses into her hand. “N-nnneed a s-a strap,” she said as she set them back onto her face.

  They clambered out of the pod after collecting their things. It began to rain when they set out for the palace. Eric concealed himself within a waterproof poncho, but Kate pranced ahead, accepting the soaking. The green hills and the fresh scent of the rain were exciting to Eric by their novelty. This was a dramatic landscape all right, with the mountains and cliffs and distant rolling hills, made all the more interesting by the perpetual roiling storm.

  He immediately liked Kate’s moon. It was alive, things were happening, its Guardian did not seem like a murderous monster, and its Hero had an obvious goal. It was unlike his own moon, the Hollow Moon, in all these ways.

  But there was something about the storms. He’d been wrong earlier. It was a big deal, a big problem, that it was constantly stormy here. Because the storms weren’t right. Several times he looked up at the dark skies, alarmed, because he had been sure, for just a second, that one of the distant rumblings had not been the sound of thunder. Storm worms, Kate called them. She had never seen one.

  They met Theians at the pearly gates of Kate’s palace. Eric recognized some of them from Skywater.

  “Mormo!” said Kate when she saw them. She skipped across the bridge to greet them while Eric came more carefully behind. He stepped close to the edge of the bridge, which had only a short, frail guardrail, and peered into the chasm below. He made a flashlight with batteries from his medallion, clicked it on, and dropped it over the side. It spun down into the darkness for five…ten seconds. Then he could no longer see it. Because it had dissolved into mist? In any case, it was a long fucking way down.

  He met the Theians. Mormo, green and brown moth. Polyom, blue and pink butterfly. A few others, including the bright orange and green little annoying butterfly from Skywater (Finch?) and the big beefcake moth that looked pretty cool in all-white with some purple spots. That one was named Slushy or something. But the first two were the important ones—Mormo and Polyom.

  These two were very excited to meet Eric. They had heard from the other Theians all about the events at Skywater—Lords, Ladies, Heroes. They made it clear that his presence honored them. A little too much so.

  “Just r-roll with it,” Kate whispered with a smile, seeing his discomfort. “Isn’t this w-wh-what you always w-wanted? To be a—a B-big Damn Hero?” She made her voice gruff and masculine.

  “Well yeah, but this isn’t being a hero, it’s being treated like one for no fucking reason, I haven’t actually done shit.”

  They ate dinner in the big hall that looked like unicorns had vomited rainbows all over it. Kate had filled the Theians in on what exactly humans ate, although she had neglected to mention that, unlike her, most of them also enjoyed meat. But Eric wasn’t about to fucking complain. No sir, not him. And he made sure Kate knew it.

  They’d slept a little in the pod on the way over, so neither of them really felt tired even though it was getting toward evening and a bunch of the Theians flew back to their home nearby. Kate was all wired on some sugary drink, anyway. “I’m g-go-g-going up to the l-the lab!” she told him.

  “Cool,” he said. “Guess I’ll come too.”

  She seemed surprised. “R-really? I’ll only be d-doing b-boooring science s-stuff.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. Labs are cool. And we should stick together, right? Don’t mind me, I’ll just be chillin.”

  High-tech machines populated her lab. Eric didn’t know enough science to tell whether they were legit science machines or fantasy bullshit like teleporters or fucking atomizers or whatever.

  Kate got right to work. She strapped on clear plastic goggles that fit over her glasses, gathered her hair into a messy bun, poured candy into a beaker from a secret stash in one of the cupboards, and pulled a large stuffed caterpillar Pokémon from the same stash. She positioned this creature on top of a nearby machine where it would have a good view.

  “They have Pokémon here?” Eric asked.

  Kate shook her head. “I m-made it.”

  “But it’s not turning into fog.”

  “We can make things p-p-permanent! It just t-ta-takes drops!”

  “Drops?”

  “Drops!” She reached down into the same space as the candy and showed him a jar half-full of little irregular chunks of glass, like melted misshapen marbles. He’d seen these before. The Xeon thugs had been betting them in Skywater.

  “Okay, I’ll shut up,” he said. “Guess I’ll talk to Frisby.” He dropped into a swiveling office chair and kicked it into a spin.

  “I don’t m-mind questions,” she said as she pulled a stack of notebooks from a drawer and began leafing through them.

  “Okay. Then what are you going to do?”

  She grinned like that had been exactly what she wanted him to ask. “I’m going to ma-m-make some gog-g-goggles for Heidi! S-so she can s-see the gravitational w-waves.”

  Eric didn’t bother asking how she planned to do this. But he remembered Heidi mentioning that the unexpected tugging of random gravity made it hard to surf the air on her moon. “Cool,” he said. Frisby joined him on the spinning chair, unreasonably excited by the thrill of twirling around.

  “Y-y-you see,” Kate continued, unconcerned by his lack of curiosity. “G-gravity isn’t actually r-re-r-real.” She turned her back to him to boot up some nearby computers or lab equipment or whatever the hell those machines were. “Or it k-kinda is, but it’s not a force so much as the result of the curvature of spacetime! It’s Einstein’s mollusk, Eric! The natural outcome of general relativity! Gravity is, is…it’s beautiful, Eric!”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He slowed to a halt and watched the lab churn in his vision.

  She didn’t seem to hear him, or to be aware that she had lost her stutter for a while there. She was beaming vacantly at nothing, thinking thoughts that Eric could not even begin to comprehend. She had her phone out, the one Isaac had given back to her. Either she or Isaac had cleaned off her blood. Music suddenly thumped through the air from the corners of the room. It sounded familiar. Because he, Eric, had created it. This was a beat track, a tricky rhythm in 5/4 over which someone had recorded a funky bass line. It sounded incomplete with just bass and a few layers of percussion. But it didn’t sound bad. Kate winked at him.

  Then she got to work, which at first seemed to consist of making lists and running around the lab gathering things. Sometimes she scribbled notes on a whiteboard or in one of her notebooks. Sometimes she ran off through a door in the back and emerged with random tools or materials.

  A message came for Eric while she was on one of her trips to the back room. Eric interrupted his game of fetch with Frisby to answer.

  CG: the fuck is this godsawful music

  EW: yo

  CG: don’t “yo” me you tedious cretin

  EW: tedious?

  CG: because you don’t do shit

  CG: you’re fucking boring, banal, insipid. i wouldn’t even be able to tell you humans apart if your names weren’t written here because you all look the fucking same, act the fucking same

  CG: imbecilic fucking animals

  Kate returned at this point, striding back into the room with several spools of copper wire around one forearm like bracelets.

  “Got a god on the line,” he told her. “Catch or release?”

  She paused to consider. “Which one? Is it a nice god?”

  “Let me check.”

  EW: yo

  EW: you a nice god?

  CG: oh you think that’s smart, huh? you think you’ll just make fun of me, right? like, what can I do, right, I’m just a fucking voice in the dark

  CG: you’re gonna die

  CG: sooner than you think, all of you, and I’ll be the one laughing then, okay? people will ask me, you think they deserved it? and I’ll tell them, it doesn’t fucking matter, I’m a gods-damned god and they’re a bunch of useless pathetic animals, piece of shit

  CG: I hate you

  CG: I hate you and your fucking guts, and it was a damned pleasure to see your friend get his throat shot out and bleed to death all over the road

  CG: but you might be wondering, what does this god think of me specifically?

  CG: well let me tell you

  CG: I think you’re a fakeass loser with some kind of hero complex where you think you’re this hot shit, just this gods-damned special star in the fucking sky, but really you’re just fucking angry at everything and mostly yourself because you’re fucking weak and too fucking stupid to make any difference to anything that matters, so you play it off like it’s this no big deal by being all nonchalant and then laughing it off, but actually you’re just an asshole, worse than that actually because you don’t think you are, and worse than even that because you’re this deplorable fucking wretch

  CG: and trust me on this, you won’t be able to fucking save anybody

  CG: got it, human?

  EW: not really could you repeat that

  CG: fuck you

  “It’s a nice one,” said Eric, speaking loudly to Kate over the music. “He says you look really pretty today.”

  She blinked at him in confusion. “That’s a w-weird thing to s-say, for a g-god! B-but tell him thanks!”

  EW: she says thanks

  CG: fuck you

  EW: need a thesaurus buddy?

  EW: also did you have a question for me

  EW: like why are we talking

  CG: I asked about the fucking music

  EW: oh right

  EW: its mine

  CG: it’s shit

  EW: eh

  CG: the fuck you mean, ‘eh’?

  EW: might be

  EW: might be shit

  EW: probably redeemed by kates bass solo though

  CG: the fuck is he doing?

  EW: she

  CG: whatever

  CG: I don’t even know how you can fucking tell the difference

  EW: shes making goggles that can see gravity or some shit

  CG: not like that she isn’t

  CG: it’s like watching an ugly fucking monkey bang rocks together

  EW: hey

  CG: oh, that touch a nerve? that get you riled up? don’t like me calling out your fellow humans?

  EW: ape

  CG: what the fuck

  EW: not monkey

  EW: shes a scientist she would prefer to be insulted accurately

  CG: funny guy huh?

  CG: well I’m a fucking scientist too

  CG: maybe I’ll help him out

  EW: her

  CG: fuck you

  “Hey Kate, the god has some pro tips or whatever for that thing you’re making.”

  “R-really?! Cool!” She picked up her phone. “I’ll p-pu-put them on s-speaker.”

  Eric grinned and scratched Frisby behind the wings as Kate did something with her phone, turning the music way down.

  “W-wh-which one is it?” she asked.

  “Changing God. Black text.”

  She frowned. “I th-thought you sa-s-said he was a j-jerk!”

  A monotone robotic voice sounded throughout the lab. “Well fuck you too you piece of shit inferior being I never said you were pretty I said you look like an ugly fucking ape banging rocks together honestly I mean gods damn it I have never observed such amateurish technical ineptitude it is like your brain is located in your fucking big toe and maybe what is in your head is actually gods damn rancid pus maybe that would explain why your skin is such a weird fucking color even though your blood is red.

  “Why are you laughing you fucking lunatics?”

  Kate howled with laughter, doubled over at her bench, and Eric could not stop his mirth from leaking out in stifled guffaws. There was something utterly ridiculous about that boring robot voice insulting them in a steady march of nearly meaningless words.

  “W-wait, w-w-w-whaha—wait!” Kate wiped a tear and did something on her phone. “O-okay,” she said. “S-s-sorry M-mi-m-mister Ch-changing G-god! P-p-pl-pleasecontinue!”

  The voice obliged. “[beep] off you [beep] [beep] asinine [beep] morons [beep] ludicrous [beep] I cannot even comprehend the [beep] [beep] magnitude of your [beep] [beep] worthlessness.”

  A moment of silence, save for uncontrolled laughter. Kate actually fell onto the ground, gasping for breath.

  “Oh [beep] you.”

  Things got a little more under control after that. Kate muted the voice after she collected herself, though for a while afterwards she burst into a sudden fit of giggles.

  “N-n-nice, huh?” she said to him.

  He shrugged. “It’s weird, he was being so nice to me. I guess it’s just you he doesn’t like.”

  “S-s-so was it actually y-you s-saying I look p-pretty today?”

  He opened his mouth to make some automated smartass remark like ‘let’s not jump to conclusions,’ but the novelty of the thought stalled him. Was Kate pretty today? Or any day? ‘Pretty’ didn’t seem like the kind of word that easily applied to Kaitlyn Carter, except for maybe when she had a big grin, like right then. “Sure, let’s go with that,” he said.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Awww!” She turned back to her work.

  “Said he’s a scientist, though. Had some tips for your gravity goggles or whatever.”

  She nodded. “I’m interested! B-b-but w-we’ll do it through t-text.” She giggled again.

  Eric resumed what he had been doing before, playing games with Frisby Wiser and trying to talk to him. Frisby seemed to know a lot about the Narrative and what was going on, but he was scatterbrained and didn’t reveal much unless directly asked. But the little dragon could tell Eric that the ‘drops’ are condensed pieces of the genesis mist, as found on the Earth that Eric had left behind. Creative potential given form, or some shit. Frisby told him that Eric could make a substantial, though not infinite, amount of temporary stuff from the medallion, which would need to recharge. But making permanent things was harder. It took drops, or else actual genesis mist, and it required that Eric copy something already in existence by touching his medallion to it, or else have a really fucking good idea in his mind of exactly what he wanted.

  This led Eric to thinking about the Repeat. He pulled it out of an inner pocket of his coat and held it up in front of him. It was a musical “repeat” symbol: two parallel lines, one thick and one thin, with two dots on the side of the thin line. It was the size of his hand, black, fairly heavy, and the lines and dots stayed firmly in place as a single unit though they were not physically connected. Perfectly smooth, like some kind of metal. He had found this on a random sidewalk on the Hollow Moon, stuck it in his pocket, and forgotten about it. Eric had no idea what to do with it, but he thought it might be important. It was glowing, anyway, with a faint light.

  But hearing Frisby’s explanation made Eric wonder if he could make more Repeats. He was considering this question, and also what the fuck he would do with a whole bucketload of Repeat signs, when the explosion happened. It wasn’t an explosion in the traditional sense, with fire and light and heat; it was more like a three-dimensional shatter. Veins of shimmering silver cracked through everything in an instant. No fire or heat, but there was noise, and there was a force that struck Eric like a battering ram and slammed him back into the cabinet he’d been leaning against, and slammed the cabinet back against the table behind, and then tumbled everything up into the air.

  Eric hit the floor in a daze of stunned surprise.

  Everything was too loud and too quiet. No more music, but machines beeped wildly, things crashed to the floor, glass shattered. His phone buzzed, but he ignored it. Where was Kate?

  He heard her before he saw her: a soft whimper that both relieved and terrified him. The machine she had been working on was in pieces all over the floor, not smoking or smoldering, but shimmering with a strange light. And she was there among them on the floor, clutching her face and trembling. A little white butterfly twitched helplessly nearby as though trying feebly to fly. Both of Navi’s wings were bent and broken like crumpled paper.

  His phone buzzed again. He didn’t need to look at it to know who it was, what they were saying. He could only think: why the hell did she listen to him? Why did Eric let her? Wasn’t he the one who said not to trust the gods?

  But, as Kate began to shiver and sob in pain, Eric glanced at his phone, just to be sure.

  CG: am I funny now?

  CG: you laughing now?

  CG: I mean damn I thought that would kill you but this is fine too

  Eric’s heartbeat sounds very loud. It fills the room, running fast, a succession of echoing thumps. Fast but steady, like a metronome swinging back and forth, an upside-down pendulum. A glowing red metronome.

  He reaches out and grabs it, stopping it in place. It’s heavy; it resists him. But he throws some muscle into it and slows it to a stop. Everything around him stops too—the movement of Kate, the shimmering lights, the ruffling papers. A spray of sparks from a damaged machine hangs frozen in the air.

  Frisby is there with him, trying to tell Eric something, something about the Repeat. Frisby tries to explain, but he doesn’t need to. Eric knows what to do, as though he’s done this before. It is suddenly very obvious: his heartbeat is the beat, and what do you do with Repeats? He has it in his hand. It is glowing brightly. All he has to do is put it in front of him, let his heart beat one more time—

  Eric was sitting in a swiveling chair, Frisby Wiser on his lap. Music played from the speakers overhead. Kate hummed along as she made an adjustment to the machine she was tinkering with. There was a strange pain in his chest, and he was really, really tired. And he held no Repeat in his hand.

  He stood up, shaking away thoughts that maybe he’d just dozed off, maybe it had been a weird half-asleep nightmare, that kind that jolted him awake as he was falling asleep from time to time. The Repeat was missing; he had used it up. That was all the proof he needed. He walked over to Kate.

  “Stop what you’re doing,” he said.

  She turned to him with a smile and a witty comment, but both withered away when she saw him. “O-okay.”

  “Phone.” He held out his hand.

  She gave it to him, watching with wide, curious eyes. Yeah, fuck her curiosity. In about twenty seconds it was almost going to kill her.

  He glanced at what the black text of the Changing God had been saying. Technical bullshit he didn’t understand. He opened the simple settings of CHIME and blocked the Changing God’s number. He gave the phone back to Kate. “Don’t talk to him anymore,” he said.

  Her big green eyes searched his face, then glanced down at the phone. “Umm…”

  His phone buzzed.

  CG: the fuck did you do

  CG: the fuck is this

  CG: what just happened

  CG: did you just fucking rewind time?

  CG: yeah I can still see it right here

  CG: the feedback blew it right the fuck up

  CG: and then it’s not fucking blown up anymore

  CG: fucking bullshit cheater

  CG: this is going to be harder than I fucking thought

  EW: hey

  CG: hey what?

  EW blocked CG

  “W-w-was that him?” asked Kate. “W-what happened?” Her eyes widened, and she stammered from excitement. “D-d-did you g-get a s-se- a sec- a message from your future self?!”

  “Nah, not really. Actually, I’ve been thinking, you know, I’m probably not gonna get some power like that. ‘Cause if I do, well, I haven’t gotten any messages like that.”

  “B-but there was that o-one! In Chicago!”

  “I think that one might be, like, different somehow. I’m just saying, if I actually did eventually gain the power to send messages to my past self, you bet I’d abuse the shit out of it.”

  “Hmm…” She half-closed her eyes, thinking, tapping one pale hand on the machine she stood by. Eric eyed the machine with suspicion. It was just a step or two away from blowing up. Twenty seconds away. But it should be fine for now, as long as neither of them touched it

  “W-what if you have gotten m-messages, but then you obeyed them, and so the o-oc-the stuff never happened that m-made you s-se-s-send them in the first place!?”

  “What.”

  “Like s-self-correcting p-po-p-pote-p-hypotheticals!”

  Self-correcting hypothetical time loops? That shit was too fucking abstract. Isaac or Elizabeth should be dealing with shit like that. He shook his head. “If it’s some bullshit like that, then what does it even matter? It’s the exact fucking same as not having the power to send messages in the first place.”

  She was clearly not done thinking about this.

  “Something did happen, though. I did turn back time, a little. I used a Repeat.”

  “Y-you look a little s-stressed.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. So this thing here blows up. Wrecks the lab.” No need to mention what happened to her. “That god tricked you, I guess, was trying to get us killed. So let’s remember what I said in Banana Quest, right?”

  “D-d-don’t t-trust the g-gods?”

  “Exactly.”

  She nodded, but Eric doubted the lesson had sunk in for her as it had for him. She would always be tempted by…well, almost anything. Her ratio of curiosity to caution was terminally fucked.

  “Anyway,” he said, “don’t do whatever that asshole was trying to get you to do.”

  She promptly powered down the whatever-the-fuck-it-was and proceeded with what she’d been doing before as though nothing had happened. Eric had to remind himself that, for her, nothing had happened. And she was just trusting him.

  She danced to the whiteboard and wrote, “κ = 8π /c 4 G ≈ 2.071×10 ?43 s 2 ? m ?1 ? kg ?1 .” She double-circled the G, tapped it, and told him, “I think we have to assume this doesn’t change, even on Orpheus.”

  No stutter when talking science. “Yeah, obviously,” he said. She knew damn well that he didn’t have a fucking clue what those numbers meant, except G, G was probably Gravity, but she explained it to him anyway.

  “Because it’s really hard to imagine a universe existing in which this number ever changes.” She tapped the G again.

  “Oh. It’s a number?”

  “It’s a constant.”

  “A constant what?”

  “That means it never changes. But the problem is, it seems like on Orpheus it must be changing all the time! Gravity is all goofed up over there in a way that doesn’t make any sense! Like, even if those big spikes are as dense as neutron stars, which they must be to exert such strong gravitational fields, why don’t they all collapse together?!”

  She wasn’t really talking to him, that’s what it was. She was elsewhere, in Science Land or some other goofy rainbow-themed numerical theme park in her brain, far beyond the intellectual reach of Eric Walker. But he liked it. So he tried to keep her talking. “That’s because it’s just supposed to be fucking cool. It’s not supposed to make sense.”

  “I know.” Kate glared at the board and spoke as though ‘it’ had therefore become her mortal enemy. “But my uncle is Riley McFinn, and my father is…was Nicholas Carter!” She rolled up her sleeves, and thunder boomed somewhere outside, and she looked like a badass right there. Not just some fun, reckless girl, but a legit mad scientist, inventor of crazy shit. Was he looking at a young female Riley McFinn? Well, she’d just dodged her second assassination attempt, so in that department she was well on her way.

  She became too focused to talk for a while after that, which was fine because he got a chance to experiment with the whole drops and making-things-from-mist business. He’d missed his chance to try to copy the Repeat, but Frisby helped him make other things, including a stuffed replica of Frisby himself. “Your origin,” Eric told him. Frisby took a liking to his plushy doppelganger and flew away to cuddle with it in a corner of the room.

  After this, he wandered around Kate’s palace. The Theians liked hanging around here, and they were eager to ask him every question they could think of. He fascinated them, and they wanted to know all about his similarities and differences to their Hero, Kate.

  They took him up to the towers to look at the storm and the landscape of Theia. Kate’s moon was beautiful, even in perpetual thunderstorm. An undeveloped landscape of natural splendor. He thought it probably looked like Iceland in the summer. He’d never been to Iceland, in any season, but he’d seen the calendars and shit. Fucking photogenic moon. His moon, on the other hand, belonged on a warning poster, scaring the other moons into line. This could be you. Or like a fucking anti-drug campaign. This is your moon on evil dragon.

  He took a trip to Kate’s platform, which was a crystal snowflake among all the turning windmills. He tried opening her door. Sure enough, it just opened right onto nothing. But if she’d calibrated it properly, she could make it open on Skywater, right?

  Right, Frisby told him. But not you.

  Kate found him up there. She marched onto the platform with her bass guitar in hand.

  “Done already?” he asked.

  “T-taking a b-break.” She rubbed her eyes and yawned. “G-getting tired. Must…p-p-play…MUSIC!” She thrashed out a chord on her guitar with sudden violence, and the tower shook with the sound as though the entire palace was the resonance box. It rattled his teeth.

  It rattled something else too; the storm overhead retaliated with a harsh battery of thunderclaps.

  “I’ve been thi-thinking about our b-our band,” she said as she came up close to him. She had marker stains all over her fingers and smudged onto her face.

  “Our what? We don’t have a band.”

  “We do!” She jabbed at him with the neck of her bass. “And y-y-you’re in it!”

  “Damn.” He rubbed his arm where she’d poked him. “What if I don’t want to be in it?”

  “Well then s-s-sour p-persimmons, buddy!” She slung the guitar around her neck and undid her bun so that her hair sprayed out to the side in the wind, following the example of her lab coat. Eric saw that her glasses now had a strap. About time. “Let’s play!’

  “What, now?”

  “Now! And here! Let’s m-ma-make a door! Like Jim and Liz did!”

  A door? He shrugged. Whatever. Sure. Little improv session here on top of the palace, all in the storm and shit. Pretty hardcore. Pretty metal.

  He was about to ask where he was supposed to get drums, but she tossed him the bag of drops. Right.

  It took a few minutes to create all the parts of a drum set because he kept forgetting things. He decided to go for two bass pedals in the end, just in case.

  When he was finally ready, seat and sticks and all, positioned just off-center atop the platform, Kate wasted no time. “Hit it!” she cried.

  He raised the sticks slightly. “Hit what? You haven’t said what we’re playing.”

  “Anything!”

  “Very fucking helpful.”

  “F-f-fine, Mr. Cool. I d-dare you to play something I ca-c-can’t jam to.”

  Yeah, fat chance of that. He shrugged. He thought for a moment. “Three against four, I guess.” He set up a quick cross-rhythm. It took him a minute to get in the groove; had he become rusty so fast? But it was there in the end. Hours of practice took over. He was sure as shit not capable of impressing Kate with his musical chops, but he was still probably the best percussionist in his high school jazz band.

  Kate joined in, first with a bluesy walking bass line, then with a quick and cool melody up on top of it, some modal shit that sounded almost old school—real old school, like Gregorian Chant.

  It all locked into place the way it does sometimes when everyone gets on the same wavelength, and this time it was just the two of them, him and Kate, and they were putting the music together the way Jim did jigsaw puzzles—flawlessly.

  She was building it up, and her eyes were closed but she didn’t have to say anything, didn’t have to give him any sign apart from the music, they were in the groove, in it together, and he built up to the big drop, the breakdown, and he slammed it in line with a new rhythm, Bluesy Gregorian Three-On-Four Shit 2: Theian Boogaloo.

  They were flying, like it was no big deal, like they stirred up the storm every fucking day. The clouds spun overhead in time to the beat, and the two musicians were dragging the thunder itself into their song, their rhythm. Gemstone lighting split the distance in a coordinated display, jamming right along to Kate’s melody. Eric nearly had the storm in his fists, the thunder at the tip of his drumsticks, at the kick of the bass. And were the big guys upstairs happy about that? Not a bit, no sir; one of them came right on down from the angry black clouds, looking like a cloud itself, a funnel cloud made of outrage and poor musical taste, basically like Mr. Robertson, Eric’s math teacher.

  Unlike Mr. I-Hate-Rock-n-Roll-Roberston, the storm worm can and did proceed to fuck shit up. It descended thrashing and crashing, and its wind tore up the castle, broke windmills, made tiles and small rocks and shattered glass spin upwards in a writhing vortex. It did not appear to give so much as a single shit.

  But neither did they. They hadn’t stopped, not Eric and sure as hell not Kaitlyn Carter. They had music to play, damn it, and it was pretty good. The storm thundered around them; the tempest lashed with rain; the two musicians could hardly see each other. Colored lightning crashed, and the storm wove round them its dark resound, and their music was electric.

  The beat of the storm was in Eric’s fists, right there in his hands, in the shivering membranes of the drums, and the tune of it was right there under Kate’s fingers, wet wire spraying as it thrummed. And it—the music—was not in the storm worm anymore. It had no authority; the rules had changed.

  The beast fell from the skies, plummeting down, crashing off the corner of Kate’s palace and dragging part of it down as it fell into the depths. The heroes win this round. First encounter with the storm worm: success. The stars swirled somewhere far above, like a key in a vast lock, and the Bright World flashed.

  The sticks tumbled from his cold, wet hands, clattering onto the crystal snowflake floor. Close by, Kate sat down hard on the same floor, panting, eyes wide.

  Eric gazed out into the rain, his shades askew. “…the fuck?” he mumbled.

  “L-l-look!” Kate sounded exhausted. He was exhausted too, fucking wrecked. But he looked. Partway around the hexagon from Kate’s door, another door had appeared. His door, exactly like the one on top of his home base.

  Kate got to her feet, staggered over to him, and collapsed onto him with a hug. She knocked him off the stool and crashed them both to the hard, wet platform. “W-w-w-we d-d-did it!” She squeezed him tightly for a moment around the chest before saying, “ouch!” She let go and rolled away onto another part of the platform.

  “Easy,” said Eric, though he didn’t try to get up. “Fuckin’ cakewalk.” He took a moment to catch his breath. “Hey did you know that would piss off the storm worms?”

  She made a weird little sound, and he didn’t have to look at her to know she was shrugging.

  They laid there for a few minutes, drenched. “Hey,” he said when he sat up at last. “Can you stop this rain?”

  “P-probably.”

  “Wanna come see my moon? It’s dry as a fucking bone.”

  That got her moving. She was almost to his door, slipping on the crystal floor, by the time he’d made it to his feet.

  Something stopped her just before she reached his door. A message on her phone. She read it quickly, began to put the phone away, then stopped and read it again more carefully.

  “Who is it?” Eric slid the fallen drumsticks over to the set with one foot. He wondered whether it was possible to un-create something from mist, because if not, then Kate might just have to deal with a big chrome drum set set on her platform for a while.

  “Um,” she said, “I know you s-said don’t t-tr-t-trust the gods, and we just est-t-stablished that, b-bu-b-but one is t-telling me to open my door t-to Skywater.”

  “And? Obvious trap, right? There are Ladies on the other side. It’s fucking rude to just walk in on Ladies, right?”

  She stifled a laugh, then tried really hard to be serious. “B-b-but this is the one that s-saved our lives on Heidi’s moon!”

  “What, the green one?” She nodded. “Look, we can’t just—”

  Frisby chirped in alarm. He flashed back and forth over the platform, clutching his stuffed doppelganger.

  A voice hissed, low and menacing. “Come quietly,” it said. It was the voice of a Lady of Skywater; nothing else had that eerie rasping hoarseness.

  Two of them stalked up the ramp that led to the platform, shrouded by rain. Lady Fires came in front, glowing like windblown coals, hissing and spitting in the rain, trailing a dense cloud of steam whipped away by the crosswinds. Even this downpour could not quench her burning cloak. Behind her lurched an even larger hunched figure, too obscured by rain and steam to be seen clearly but obviously another Lady.

  Kate made a break for her door across the slippery crystal platform. Lady Fires swept a wing of flame at Kate, who instinctively reached for her bass to protect herself. But she wasn’t wearing it; it was lying in the middle of the snowflake.

  The flame carried force; it swept her right off the edge of the platform into the haze of pouring rain. Fuck. Falling is totally my thing, she’d told him.

  Fuck.

  Eric tried to focus, to find the beat, to reach out as he had before. He was fucking tired, but at last he found it. He tried to stop it, could barely do so. The metronome he saw in his mind now seemed as easy to halt as a wrecking ball in slow swing.

  Pale spots cloud his vision. His mind is blank. He only thinks: did I pass out? Fuck, I either just passed out or almost did. Fuck.

  He forgets for a moment where he is, when he is, what he’s doing. Then he sees Lady Fires, like a flaming evil bird steaming in the rain. She’s moving slowly, larghissimo. The rain is creeping down through the air. The Ladies’ heartbeats are hardly there, but Eric can sense them.

  Eric has seen this before—time almost stopped—but he is still momentarily entranced by it. His own heartbeat, his own tempo, has sped up so much that everything else is barely moving. The beat is there, pulsing as usual in his chest. Then he remembers Kate, swept off the edge. Two Ladies, trying to kill them. On the floor, wet and shining with the red glare of Lady Fires, Eric sees Kate’s phone where it fell, the screen still lit up. He can barely make out a tiny line of green text against the white background of CHIME.

  Fuck it. He scoops up the phone. He notices that the rain is falling faster and faster; he can’t hold the pendulum, he can’t stop the beat, he’s too fucking tired.

  He can’t open Kate’s door. He runs to his own, scrambles for his medallion, thrusts it against the door. Skywater. Open onto Skywater.

  He flings the door open, sees bright skies on the other side, several figures waiting there. Safe figures? He doesn’t know, he can’t tell, he doesn’t have time to wait around and find out.

  He turns around. The rain is falling faster and faster, Lady Fires is turning to look at him; lights are breaking up at the edges of his vision. His heartbeat is the same as ever, but his grip on the tempo is slipping; everything else is speeding up.

  He runs, dives past Lady Fires, slides along the wet crystal, right off the edge.

  He looks frantically for Kate as he falls. He sees her, or rather her parachute as it begins to snap open with the pull of her descent. And he thinks: fuck, she was going to be fine.

  And he can’t hold the pendulum any longer. He is flung away into the darkness.