Pain.

Suddenly, it was everything I knew.

My limbs felt like they were burning and my head was aching with the memory of pain ricocheting through my entire body. My stomach cramped violently, and I opened my eyes, attempting to sit up.

Everything was white. The ceilings were white; the wooden furniture had been painted white; the sheets wrapped around my body were white; and my rage, when Cyrus came into view, was white-hot.

“I’m going to kill you,” I announced, my voice croaky and weak. I cleared it, and tried again. “I’m going to kill—” this time the words died off on a cough that seemed to seize through my whole body.

Dying was hard.

Wait a click—

“You stabbed me!” I pointed a finger at his entirely too-neutral face. “How am I still alive? Was it a trick? Is Five here? Was it an illusion? Why did he have to make it so damn painful?”

“It wasn’t an illusion,” Cyrus answered carefully, “and I did stab you—but, before you kill yourself all over again trying to murder me out of revenge, you should probably ask why I stabbed you.”

I could feel that rage again, and I knew that some of it spilled into my tone when I answered him. “I don’t think the why is really so important in this scenario. I think a stabbing is still a stabbing and should be treated as such. Where are the Abcurses? Why aren’t they torturing you right now?”

“They did,” he admitted. “I healed. They’re waiting in a secure place. I gave my word that I would send for them when you woke up.”

I frowned, glancing toward the open doorway leading out into Cyrus’s living room. I recognised his secret little hidey-house. What I didn’t understand was why he would bring me here.

“Did you say something about me killing myself all over again?” I asked, my tone going completely flat. Surely he hadn’t said …

“Yes, Willa Knight. You’re dead.”

“I’m dead,” I echoed, still completely toneless. “Like … died and ascended to Topia?”

“More like murdered and smuggled into Topia, but you can tell whatever version of the story you want to all your new Topian friends. If you manage to stay here that long.”

“Where else would I go?” I almost screamed, starting to sound a little hysterical now. “I’m dead, Cyrus!”

“There are ways to kill the gods, just as there are ways to weaken the sols so that they never become gods. Really, there’s a way for everything. You just have to find it: and now we just have to find a way to keep you here, and keep everyone from knowing that this is where you’re hiding.”

“But Emmy … my mother …”

“Donald is in the living room. It seems that Staviti was a little … lax, in his orders with her. You were supposed to be captured at the arena and brought to him, and Donald was supposed to be the distraction that stopped you fighting long enough for one of his servers to grab you.”

“Why didn’t he just tell Donald to grab me?”

Cyrus smiled then: a crooked, humourless grin. “Donald isn’t very good at following orders.”

“It runs in the family,” I admitted, and if I was going to be completely honest … I was a little proud.

He shook his head at me, stepping back toward the doorway. “You can go and fetch them now,” he called out. “She’s awake.”

“Yes, Sacred One.” I could hear my mother’s robotic-sounding reply, and I clenched my jaw a little too tightly, my eyes flicking to the open doorway.

She wasn’t even going to come in and see me.

She wasn’t even happy that I was awake—alive—going for Round Two? I wasn’t sure how to describe my current state.

“What would you call this, exactly?” I asked Cyrus, glancing beneath the sheet that had been draped over me.

I was dressed in white robes—I preferred the yellow dress so much more. I would have thought that they were Cyrus’s robes, except that they fit me perfectly. I frowned, plucking at the wispy material before drawing the sheets away completely and holding up a section of the skirt toward the light, sticking my hand beneath it.

“What in the name of Topia are you doing?” Cyrus asked, following the movement of the skirt with his eyes.

“Checking to see if it’s transparent,” I muttered. He closed his eyes, and I caught him shaking his head again, but I wasn’t going to let him avoid my question, so I dropped the skirt and met his eyes again. “I don’t feel dead. I definitely feel like I’ve been stabbed by an asspit, but I don’t feel dead.”

“Did you just say asspit?” His brow was a little scrunched, as though such high and mighty beings as the Glorious Gods of Topia didn’t say things like asspit.

“What of it?” I asked defensively.

“What is it?”

“An asshole was too … small a word to describe you. You’re an asspit. An asschasm. An asscrater—”

“Wow,” he interrupted, holding up a hand. “I think I get the picture. Unfortunately. Thanks for that. And to answer your question: whether you feel dead or not, that’s what you are. We made sure of it. Welcome to godhood, doll. Try not to stop the world from turning in the right direction.”

“That’s something I can do?” I finally managed to pull myself out of the bed and stand, my legs threatening to collapse beneath me. I pressed a hand to my ribcage, right between my breasts. There was a scar: thick, long, and raised. I could feel it through the flimsy robe.

“Honestly …” Cyrus glanced at where my hand was pressing, his frown matching my own. “I have no idea what you can do.”

“So why the fuck did you kill me?” I growled out, getting a little agitated that the Abcurses had left me alone with him after he had stabbed me.

“Rau was convinced that you were the Chaos Beta—hell, even I was convinced. His curse had been centuries in the making, a concoction proven to alter powers—alter allegiances. He had been using it for a long time on the sols, because Staviti wouldn’t allow the Chaos power to be cultivated in Minatsol. The curse that hit you was different. It was powerful enough to alter a god: powerful enough to kill a sol. And you, a dweller, survived it—absorbed it, as though you were a god yourself.”

“I actually tripped into it,” I told him. “Didn’t mean to do any absorbing or anything.”

“Of course not.” He sighed. “You have always been a dweller. Rau guessed that you had formed a soul-link with Abil’s sons and we both assumed that the soul-link was the reason you had survived. It made sense. He had tailored the curse for Abil’s bloodline, and when the curse splintered you, the pieces of your soul that fractured apart were drawn to the beings around you that the curse had been intended for.”

I frowned, leaning back against the side of the bed. It was a nice theory and everything, but I was failing to see how any of it justified stabbing me to death while Rau whispered sweet, creepy nothings in my ear. I opened my mouth to tell Cyrus that much, but he was already continuing with his story.

“So that’s what we thought, but when I joined your soul-link and channelled your power, I noticed something strange.”

“Only one strange thing?” I quipped. “Because I remember a cart full of bodies and a server-creation-farm. That’s at least two strange things. And Fakey making out with Mountain Man counts for five points, so that’s seven strange things.”

“I have no idea who those two people are, but the strange thing wasn’t to do with what was happening around you, it was your power. Your Chaos … wasn’t actually Chaos.”

“What are you talking about? You set a building on fire and disfigured a bunch of people.” I had meant the statement to come out sounding matter-of-fact, but the image of Evie flashed into my mind as I was speaking, and it ended up coming out as an accusation.

“It was pure power,” he told me, his expression openly curious. “I have been the Neutral God since before Abil’s sons were born—believe me, I know what Chaos feels like. Your power is not it.”

I blinked at him, trying to process that information. “But I do have a power? I mean … Topia isn’t going to realise that I’m not a Chaos Beta and kick me out, right?”

He grinned, but once again, the motion was without any real warmth. “I felt your power. It was connected directly to Topia. You belong here more than all of us.”

“Is that why you shoved a knife in me and let Rau give me a death-cuddle?” I was back to my biting tone as I narrowed my eyes on him. “Because I belong here?”

“No.” The answer hadn’t come from Cyrus, but from the doorway. Coen was standing there, staring at me. “Apparently, Rau had planned to hit you with another curse, like a back-up curse, just in case the first wasn’t enough to make you strong enough to enter Topia. He had embedded it into the knife he tossed at you, and Neutral was supposed to make sure that the knife hit you in the exact same place as the previous curse.” Coen strode further into the room, stopping beside me, his hand raising to my chest and pressing against the scar through my robe. “Instead, Neutral pulled the curse into himself and gave you the knife without the enchantment.”

I stared up at Coen, who wasn’t meeting my eyes, until another figure appeared in the doorway. Siret. He was staring at the place where Coen still touched me, and I watched as one-by-one, the rest of my Abcurses appeared. None of them approached me, or even looked at Cyrus.

They’re still in shock, I realised.

“We didn’t know if you would wake up,” Coen whispered, so low that I almost didn’t hear him.

My head snapped back to him, and I quickly pushed his hand down from my chest, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him down far enough that I could hug him properly. He wrapped his arms around me softly—too softly, as though he thought I would snap in half if he squeezed any tighter.

“I’m here,” I assured him, loud enough that the others could also hear me. “I’m not dead, I’m just on Round Two.”

“Technically, it’s your final round.” Cyrus spoke from the other side of the room. “There are no rounds after this one.”

“I refuse to die,” I snapped back, still angry that he had stabbed me. “I’ll have as many rounds as I want. And you still haven’t explained yourself properly. Why the hell do you care if I die from Chaos, die from a knife, or not die at all?”

Coen released me, almost reluctantly, and I turned as the others moved to surround me. Aros linked his fingers through mine, and Siret claimed my other hand, while Rome planted himself almost directly in front of me and Yael moved beside Coen. I could still see Cyrus, even though Rome was probably trying to block him out—and he looked annoyed.

“We tortured him for a really long time,” Aros murmured to me, somehow sounding seductive even though he was talking about torture. “And we eventually listened to what he had to say—but if you want us to do it all over again so that you can watch, just say the word, sweetheart.”

“How sweet,” Cyrus noted dryly.

I squeezed Aros’s hand, but shook my head in a little no, my lips curving up at the corners.

“Why do you care?” I repeated, flicking my eyes back to Cyrus.

“I felt the power,” he explained. “If that amount of power became too absorbed in Chaos, it would destroy both worlds completely. You could say that I was just in it to save myself, or you could say that I was in it to save every single person or creature that you hold dear.”

“I’ll go with the first option,” I returned. “So if Rau thinks you helped him, then why isn’t he here, demanding I destroy the worlds with Chaos?”

“Because of us,” Rome announced, his voice booming around the room. He was still pissed, apparently. “Neutral didn’t tell us his plan, so we stormed out of the cave and started raining hell. Apparently, that was the plan all along. That was why Neutral didn’t tell any of us that this was going to happen. He wanted it to be believable.”

I broke away from Siret and Aros, moving in front of Rome and standing before Cyrus, looking him over very carefully. There wasn’t a single hair out of place; not a single wrinkle in his robe.

“You took on Rau’s curse?” I asked for clarification.

He nodded: his only answer.

“And you took what I’m assuming was a very major beating from these five?” I nodded my head toward the Abcurses.

“Yes.” This time, Cyrus’s lips twitched in a smile.

“So why do you look like you’ve been spending the sun-cycle luxuriating in a bathing chamber?” I asked suspiciously.

“Because he’s the damned Neutral.” Yael said the words like an accusation. “We can’t destroy him. The bastard just kept healing himself. It was a nightmare. Eventually, we were too exhausted to keep killing him, so we listened to what he had to say.”

Well, now I was a little bit terrified of Cyrus.

“You know I can’t stay hidden in here forever, right?” I walked away from them all, feeling the eyes following me.

The Abcurses were anxious. They wanted to touch me, to reassure themselves that I was really there, really real. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, I could just feel it. Just as I could feel their reluctance to reach for me with Cyrus in the room.

“It’s a temporary solution.” Cyrus sounded somewhat disgruntled. I supposed that was understandable, considering that he had just absorbed a curse and been tortured a whole lot, just in the name of saving possibly the universe but probably just himself.

“How close are we to finding a permanent solution?” I asked. “One where I can see Emmy, and check on Evie, whose face you almost burnt off, in case you don’t remember. I also wouldn’t mind punching Dru in the ballbags. And it would be nice to get my things from Blesswood.”

“I already brought them,” Aros spoke up. “You’ve been out for quite a few sun-cycles now. I checked on dweller-Emmy, too. She wanted me to give you this.”

He came over to the doorway where I had stopped, and handed me a small, cracked timepiece. It had been a gift for Emmy, from our mother. She never remembered birth-dates—or any dates, really—but that sun-cycle had been special. It had been one of the rare sober times, and she had returned home with a cracked timepiece and a wide-brimmed farmer’s hat with a hole in the top of it. She had told us to choose which present we wanted, and Emmy had chosen the broken timepiece, because she was never late to anything anyway. I had chosen the hat, because I could widen the hole in the top and pull it all the way down over my head, so that the wide brim acted as a catching-plate for all the food I dropped at dinner time. Emmy had hated my genius contraption, and it only lasted through seven dinners before it mysteriously disappeared.

I smiled at the memory, turning over the broken timepiece in my hand. There was now a chain looped through the top of it, and I turned without a word to the others, approaching my mother in the living room.

“Hi mu—Donald.” I held out the time piece. “I have something for you.”

She had been sitting on one of Cyrus’s white couches, her back ramrod straight and her eyes fixed steadily, unblinkingly ahead. She jumped to her feet when she heard me speak, and then bowed twice in short succession.

“Greetings, Sacred Willa.”

She stared at the timepiece—obviously not recognising it, and then reached out and took it from my hand, raising it to her lips. I blinked, confused, as she tried to bite down on it.

“Oh my gods.” I quickly stepped forward and snatched it out of her hands. “Why are you always trying to eat everything?” I looped the chain quickly around her neck, and then stepped back again. “You’re supposed to wear it.”

She looked down at the timepiece, and then back up at me. There was no emotion in her face, but for some reason … I was strangely okay with it. Maybe I was deluding myself, but I refused to think of her as simply a server: something separate to me and the life I had lived. She was my mother, no matter what form she took. No matter how drunk. No matter how forgetful. No matter how … dead.

“Thank you, Sacred Willa,” she said.

“Just Willa,” I tried again, turning away from her with a small sting of disappointment.

“Thank you, Willa.”

I paused, my head snapping up. The Abcurses were all standing in the entryway to Cyrus’s room. I met Siret’s eyes—because he was a little further in front of the others—and I could see that he was just as shocked as I was. I spun, slowly, but my mother was already back to sitting on the couch and staring blankly. I assumed Cyrus had probably told her to do that. Maybe she had started trying to eat his furniture. I glanced behind the guys as I walked back to them, seeing no sign of Cyrus.

“Where did he go?” I asked as I stopped in front of Siret. He didn’t reach for me, but I could still feel the pull in our soul-link that ached for closeness.

“He left—off to another of his secret lairs. Said we could have a few sun-cycles here to ourselves. Rest. Recover.”

I nodded, and cast my eyes toward the bed. Apparently, that was all the invitation they needed. Rome was already moving over to it, kicking his shoes off as he went.

“I could sleep for a whole life-cycle,” he groaned, picking up the mattress and sliding it from the bed frame.

I blinked, watching as he dropped it on the floor and sank onto it with another groan. Movement from behind me had me turning around before I could ask what the hell he was doing, and I noticed Coen walking into the room with another mattress dragged behind him. He dropped it beside the first mattress, and then kicked his shoes off, walked over to me, and pulled me right down beside him. I crumpled to the soft surface, my white robe fluttering around me, and he stretched me out until I was laying partially on my back and partially on my side, with him curved around me.

I’ve died and gone to Topia, I thought, as Aros tugged off his shirt, kicked off his boots, and dropped to the mattress on my other side, pulling my hands to his chest and tossing a heavy leg over my thigh. Yael and Siret claimed the rest of our makeshift bed, and I relaxed just enough for my body to sink into the heat that surrounded me.

“Does anybody know what I am?” I hadn’t really directed the question at one of them in particular, and so none of them answered me, at first.

“You’re perfect,” Aros told me.

“Ours.” Coen’s voice was low. Exhausted. “You’re ours.”

How long had they spent trying to kill Cyrus? Hopefully it wasn’t the whole time I had been unresponsive.

“Stubborn,” Yael added. “You’re also really fucking stubborn.”

“You’re never allowed out of our sight again.” Rome seemed to be half-asleep when he answered, his voice a sleepy grunt.

Heard that before.

“You’re Willa-damned-Knight,” Siret told me, his familiar voice wrapping around me in a way that had me smiling into Aros’s chest. “And so much more.”