CHAPTER FIVE

  Exaltiture

  IV

  …Wilburn! …Get down here! Mom’s voice echoed from far side of the universe, causing a window in the back of Wilburn’s mind to open. Through the window, he looked down upon his body, thrashing in his blankets in his bed in the loft, far, far below. But he could not return. Although he fought with every fiber of his being, he could not pass through the window. He was paralyzed. This isn’t real, he told himself, as panic swelled within him. It’s only a dream. Nothing can hurt you in a dream. He didn’t actually believe it, though. His powers had abandoned him, just as Toukie had abandoned him. His dream body was ignoring his orders to move, and his Real Life body was ignoring his orders to be still. Neither belonged to Wilburn now; they were detached things, foreign objects. Any illusion of control was gone.

  He stood rigid as a statue, his gaze nailed to a distant point beyond the ocean. There was nothing he could do to prevent himself from seeing what was coming—what he knew no mortal eye was meant to see. His very mind was slipping, his ability to choose, to simply will. Thoughts came and went, but Wilburn couldn’t steer them. He could not react. He could only experience. And what he experienced was... terror. How lucky he had been the first time! In the first dream, he had felt only the brush of Her, the faintest whisper of Her power. Now he would look full upon Her face—and be destroyed.

  She came. Her Majesty rose up out of the ocean, not from underwater, but from behind the horizon, beyond the edge of the world. Her shadow gobbled up the world. Her wings reached wider than the sky. Her vastness was a thing greater than physical proportion; it was a magnitude of being, of reality itself. Her sheer existence was so terribly, pants-wettingly much—it shattered Wilburn’s capacity to perceive.

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  God. The word sang through him like his own true name. God. What else—who else—could it be? There simply wasn’t room, there simply wasn’t enough… everything… for this to be… anything… but… God. God.

  Perhaps, if Wilburn had paid a bit more attention in church instead of imagining what the stained-glass windows would taste like if they were made of candy, it would have occurred to him that God had never been described as having the appearance of a three-eyed hornet, even one as superlatively colossal as Her Majesty. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have occurred to him. Perhaps even a priest would have been hoodwinked by Her Majesty’s... well, majesty. For indeed, her beauty surpassed description, wrought in colors for which Wilburn knew no words. In basic shape, She was a hornet with a third eye in the center of Her head. This super-form, however, was composed of a bafflingly intricate latticework of geometry, whose complexity of detail exponentiated as the distance between Herself and Wilburn shrank, as Her gravity plucked Wilburn off the mountaintop and hurled him toward Her.

  Wilburn…! Mom’s voice echoed again. Through the little window Wilburn saw her rush upstairs and drop to her knees at his bedside. Wilburn saw, but it meant nothing. No connection. No context, or relevance to him. He had the feeling you get when someone jumps out from behind a corner and says Boo—except it didn’t fade—the instant of blind shock persisted, and he could not accept it, could not process, could not wrap his mind around the impossible yet undeniable fact of Her.

  Closer he fell. Closer. The face of the great vexpid Queen expanded past the edges of his vision. Her glory was devastating. Her presence, Her intelligence, was searing. He fell faster. He was hurtling toward the center of Her third eye. The vast, glittering hemisphere swelled before him, constructed from a trillion hexagonal cells, each bigger than a planet. With no obvious moment of transition, the eye’s convexity turned into a concavity, a tunnel. He fell into it. Down, down, into a whirling vortex of hexagons. She swallowed him. He was inside Her. Then… he wasn’t anywhere.