Chapter Twenty-three: What Was Lost

 

We landed in a tangle, and as if the jolt of landing broke the last of Stavros's carving, a second waterfall of emotion crashed, igniting the embers of dead connections and leaving me gasping like I had been drowned.

I grabbed Constantine and my fingers scrabbled for any bare skin I could find, pushing cloak and shirt aside for unhampered touch, face digging into a warm throat like I was going to nest there.

“He took it, he took it, tried to take all of it.”

“Shhh.” Constantine's arms wrapped around me, and a bare palm pressed against the back of my neck. Relief so strong that it felt like he would choke on it pushed against me. “I have them.”

I shuddered and let the ghosts of the connections in his fingers settle over the top of all that was broken, lighting destroyed pathways everywhere on me—like a trunk that had survived a forest fire, but all its branches had burned.

The embers started to fuse back together, slowly at first, then lightning fast, leaving me gasping with the mass mess of feeling and connection.

I pushed away and my hands fell against a marble floor a moment before I threw up.

A vapor of distorted paint spewed from me in an ugly mist.

“He's not in there,” Axer said from my right shoulder, his magic running through me, searching every crevice in my chest. “And you can't collapse, Ren. Not yet. I'm sorry.”

The floor sucked the mist down. Magic zipped along the imperfect marble pattern like a freight train migraine that was incoming on a train with broken tracks. Flickers of magic touched against the points where my fingers touched marble. It was strange, but it felt like the magic in the marble was surging up and fixing broken points of magic inside me.

“I know.” I let my emotions run wild for a moment, acknowledging all of them—especially the horror, terror, and crushing anxiety of losing everyone—then pushed them gently into the background. I could feel Constantine holding back the tide of the connections with difficulty, letting through just small bits of feeling from the others to not overwhelm me. I could feel the boys both trying to hide all that they felt as well—letting the other absorb any overpowering emotions. I let a little of my own overwhelming gratitude through to their circuit, then let that emotion rest in the back as well.

I needed to be back to full strength. Deal first, collapse later.

I held out my hand to look at it, trying to bring the world back to rights as my view started swimming with magic. It would make brutal sense that I'd get a magical migraine after what Stavros had done. I shut my eyes, trying to let the magic running through the marble floor—familiar, yet foreign—finish its task.

“Stavros doesn't want to use me as a vehicle,” I said, eyes still shut. “He has plenty of those. Even when he tried to take me from Excelsine, he just shoved me into the background to drive my body where he wanted it, to secure the surroundings until he could successfully port us away. Using a person's magic means he must accept some of the person inside. He must be part of them. It's why he doesn't usually use anyone's powers when he's riding them. Stavros hates emotions. He's an empath.” I laughed without humor. “He wants to hollow... Hollow me out. Make me more useful long term.”

And Raphael... Raphael would have been an in-between experiment. To see if Stavros could manipulate the emotions of someone with so much love into something else.

“To remove my ability to feel.” I tried looking at the floor again. The zips of magic had grown stronger, like I was waking from a blind sickness and was starting to see again. “He already has what he needs for his version of Genesis Omega. I saw it, tweaked it, certified it—but for one piece. He can get it from me easily the next time he sees me, but he wants me for other things. To tweak variables in later pieces of the destruction, and for rebuilding after, in the way that he wants. We still have a chance. We just don't have enough time.”

The magic was fixing more than just my external senses. I could now feel the tension and panic in all my connections—all of them scrabbling on the other side—subtle differences between them. I closed my eyes, and brought forth the warrior side Axer had spent so long training. Soon, soon, I could fall into my reformed connections, but not yet.

Axer, permission given, softly rippled through my memories and conversation with Stavros, Constantine looking in, their magic connected.

Axer disengaged gently, fingers tapping. “We need to move fast.”

“To where?” Constantine sounded resigned. “Stavros has the containers and the trigger. It's just a matter of pulling it. Tonight, tomorrow. As soon as he heals whatever damage we did, and you know it wasn't enough.”

Axer didn't answer.

“Itlantes won't survive what Stavros is planning,” Constantine murmured.

“No,” Axer said, his own raw emotional reaction held back in the same way that he held onto everything that wasn't useful in the middle of battle. “It will be one of the first places he attempts to destroy. Selectively. He'll want some of the minds. Same with Excelsine. He wants to cull specifically. That will save some, and not others.”

I could feel it, even though he held himself so tightly in control—the devastation that he knew could happen. Some of his family would be destroyed, and he'd have no chance to physically say goodbye.

My heart ached for him and my thoughts strayed to my parents and our friends at Excelsine. Returned emotions threatened to overwhelm me and tears welled in my eyes.

“Can we go back to campus?” I asked desperately, gathering my connections close, wanting last moments, wanting to experience that last hug. “Now that he's been exposed?”

“No. We are still expelled, and Excelsine needs to keep it that way for its own protection. We must believe that we will win. Losing is not an option. The Baileys, Marsgrove, Julian, and everyone else who viewed the Basement will spread the view and evidence, and it will put a dent in Stavros's reputation and public role, but it won't be enough, not in the time we need. At least half the people already after us will still be after us. I can feel bounty hunters heading this way right now—they are tripping wards along five different tracks Julian set up. We don't have time to flip public perception or to get rid of the bounties or hunters after us before going after Stavros. And though when trying to rouse you I was hoping you'd take us to an Origin Circuit spot, we can't stay in this one.”

I looked up sharply, finally taking in our surroundings fully.

Soaring columns of gold formed a crown around the atrium, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. The ceiling of the atrium showed a moving view of the Milky Way galaxy and the galaxies beyond. Black holes and dark matter. Supernovas, nebulas, and stardust. The magic constantly shifted and rotated the view as if I was viewing it in four dimensions.

The more I looked, the more things strengthened and expanded into view.

I sat back on my heels and stared. “Wow.”

“You are finally appreciating good design, darling, if not adequate construction,” Constantine said casually, over all the intense emotions simmering inside.

“It’s beautiful.” I reached up, as if I could touch one of the celestial bodies. I thought of Makali reaching toward the cosmos, and pulled my finger slowly down. She was still alive, I thought fiercely.

“I suppose I can see how after the turret, a half-caved in gold ceiling might be breathtaking,” Constantine replied.

I tilted my head, seeing nothing but wonder. “I see space. Comets and solar events. And matter forming the strangest patterns.”

I started to rise and Axer grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t move.”

I noticed that Constantine was carefully staying in one place as well.

“There are traps everywhere. The Broken Palace,” Axer said, gaze canvassing the space and the magic all around, blue magic fluttering across his eyes. “Flavel Valeris’ home. This is not a place we want to remain.”

My breath caught. I looked around with new eyes. “Golden turrets, Con.”

“I stand corrected,” he said with a bit of reluctant amusement, though his gaze was still dark.

“The more obvious the traps,” Axer said. “The worse that will be hidden beneath.”

“Ren already contributed magic.” Constantine waved a hand at the floor that had eaten my mist, posture tense. “I don’t think we are going to remain anonymous.”

“We could use the portal pad we got from the O’Learys on the way to Crelussa,” I offered, staring longingly upward. How had Valeris done the spellwork? Were those real astronomical events taking place lightyears away, or like the falsely enchanted ceiling I had tempted Olivia with in our room?

“Not here.” Axer’s voice was grim. “We can’t trust what is here.”

“Because Valeris built it?” I mean, granted, he had killed millions of people—

“No, because this site, while a well-guarded secret, isn’t unknown. Unlike Kinsky’s lair, which was never found, Valeris’s palace was well known in its day. It constantly shifts actual location, even now in the broken world through which it ripples, but he never made it hard to track. Valeris was very open with his magic in a society that welcomed his gifts.”

“A bubble,” I murmured. “He made a bubble that floats between.”

Something flitted at the edge of my vision, and I looked sharply to the right.

“Something has been watching us since we arrived,” Axer said in response. “But I cannot see what it is.”

“Nor I,” Constantine said grimly.

“It doesn’t feel…harmful,” I said.

The watching just felt—watchful. Not the paranoid type born from being watched for months. No, this type of watching, it spoke of Neph and how we had first met—watching each other surreptitiously from afar. A type of watchfulness that preceded good intentions, not bad.

I let a sliver of searching magic escape...and saw a shape duck back from far up the wall. Far up.

“What’s the Third Layer situation on flying beasts?” I asked.

“Mixed.” Clear magic encircled Axer’s arm like a watery gauntlet.

Another little poke had my shoulders sagging. A papered claw wrapped around the edge of the wall and the tip of its spine poked around.

“It’s a book.”

Neither of them lost their tension. “Where?”

“Right there.” I motioned to the book. “Come on out.”

It ducked back in. But then just as quickly peeked back out.

“Ren… I see nothing.” Axer was looking at the exact spot I was motioning to, as was Constantine.

“You don’t see it, really?”

“No.”

“Right over—”

“Even drained and half-dead, I do not doubt that you can see something that we cannot, especially in a place such as this,” he said, on full alert.

Guard Rock dropped from my hood and started padding across the floor in a strange shuffle, dancing around the traps and snares crisscrossing the floor.

“Ren!” Constantine hissed.

I shrugged helplessly. Guard Rock was his own man.

Guard Rock got to the edge of the seal in the center of the floor, stared down at it without stepping closer, then looked at the book. He waved his pencil toward us. The book tentatively hopped out, and oddly, its cover was completely blank. It flew over, also making a wide circle around the seal in the center of the floor.

“What's the rock doing now?” Constantine asked resignedly. “Going to take us to Felrut Tears where we will all be swallowed by the Bog of Despair? Or maybe—”

The book landed carefully next to Guard Rock and they proceeded to have an incomprehensible conversation.

Constantine sighed, only being able to see Guard Rock’s side. “Do I even dare ask?”

“Maybe the book knows something,” I said. Guard Rock had been the one to bring us here. “Give them a moment.”

I looked back at the ceiling and its glorious cosmos. Something distant exploded with color and blackness and sent shockwaves around the other bodies.

I looked at the marble column closest to us and watched little stardusts flicker over it. “The gold and marble are a little much, but it is beautiful. I know so little of Valeris,” I murmured. “The Second Layer only highlights his downfall and the Third Layer whispers about him like a fallen god.”

Axer looked down at me briefly, keeping his gaze mostly focused on the moot between rock and the book he couldn’t see. “Valeris was a showman. Tales say that he was just as serious-minded and caring as the rest of your breed, but he understood the value of perception. And he made a lot of friends in high places.” He ran a finger along a buckle on his chest and I could see magic spark, ready. “Of course, they all died with him. Took the brightest minds of the Third Layer out in one fell swoop. But he was quite the hit at parties, they said.”

I grimaced. Great.

“I can only imagine what it was like, though.” He looked up at the ceiling, his gaze distant. “What they saw before they died. They wouldn’t have even felt that death. Only the wonder.”

I touched his arm and let my magic connect.

He inhaled a gasp. Gaze already glued to the ceiling as it changed to my view—watching as a galaxy was born, cosmic events swirling in endless lines and patterns around it. Endless possibilities and explorations. I reached out with my other hand and grabbed Constantine’s.

He didn’t inhale at all. I looked over and saw that he was staring at me instead, gaze indecipherable. Then he looked upward, and I saw his lips part. Magic fluttered over his eyes in a pattern almost too quick to see.

Both pulled away, and their fingers went to their eyes.

“What a rush.” Axer’s hand moved to his forehead. The magic fluttering over his gaze steadied into a slower pattern, then stopped. He touched his nose and the suddenly dripping blood there disappeared.

“Oh my god.” I reached for him, but he waved me off.

“Worth the ride,” he said.

Constantine’s nose was bloody too, and I stared at them aghast. I started to step back, but Constantine caught me before I could complete the motion, hand clamping around my upper arm, waves of calm running through his fingers and into my skin.

“As Alexi said, worth the ride. Do not worry over being exceptional, darling.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He waved a hand and his face was once more immaculate. “And now I’m not.”

“I can see the book,” Axer said, gaze affixed on it.

“As can I,” Constantine said. “Hopped up on Ren’s magic as we are. And her magic is back—nearly cleaned even. Interesting, don't you think?”

Axer’s calculating gaze lifted to the ceiling. “Not many know the true aim of the experiments Valeris was running. The speculation was that he was trying to get humanity off Earth. To deal with the population crises that the Second, Third, and Fourth Layers had started to worry about back then. To explore the unknown far from where the magic as we know it in the layer system reaches.”

I frowned. “You think that’s what happened that day? An experiment to leave Earth gone wrong?”

We were all made of elements. I looked up. Of stars. All the same elements, but in different combinations and concentrations across the galaxy. Therefore, magic must exist beyond Earth. It would make sense that we’d somehow be able to travel using it.

“I don’t know.” He looked around with my magic filling his eyes. “Valeris is seen as a grandiose eccentric now more than anything. The pertinent piece to present day policy isn’t what he was doing but that whatever it was, the experiment failed. Badly.”

So badly it had killed millions of people and devastated an entire layer for 70 years.

Guard Rock padded back. I scooped him up on my shoulder.

Guard Rock motioned at the book again, his pencil making the gesture at the side of my view.

The book tentatively hopped a step closer. There was no writing anywhere on its cover. An untitled book was unusual. And there was something otherly about it. Like it held a concept too large to comprehend.

“You know this book,” I murmured to him.

Guard Rock tapped an affirmative against my shoulder with the eraser end of his pencil.

The book hopped a step closer, looking nervously at the boys. I touched the undersides of their arms carefully with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said to it.

Constantine raised an eyebrow.

But the book was looking between where we were physically connecting, and it hopped another step—this one a little more eagerly.

“I can’t see a title,” Constantine said. “What do you see on its cover?”

I shook my head slowly. “It’s blank. Or maybe not blank—there's something otherworldly about it—but without a visual concept that makes sense, the way something that is incomprehensible might appear.”

Axer shifted, his attention sharpening in the way it did when danger was near. “Hunters are here,” he said. “They have one of the Origin Elite. They just broke through an entrance in a courtyard below. We have five minutes.”

Axer pulled the new portal pad from his cloak. We’d get ten more minutes somewhere else, and then another ten—a series of endless jumps until we could find a safe port. Maybe.

The book hopped forward frantically, then motioned at me, then at the seal. Then it reached forward with a tentative corner.

I let go of the boys and reached out slowly, and made contact.

An image of protection and hidden worlds bloomed, then one of my magic swirling down the hole in the floor. My breath caught. The book hopped the last foot closer, anxiously, its spine twisting a bit as if listening to something in the distance. It opened its covers and a staircase built itself upon the page, tunneling downward.

I extended my fingers toward it. They were suddenly gripped in a larger hand.

“No,” Constantine said, staring at the book with both distrust and a sharp, darkly-edged interest.

Guard Rock leaped from my shoulder. Constantine reached out to grab him with his free hand, but like a cliff jumper entering crisp water, Guard Rock had already become part of the page. His small legs pumped down the papered staircase and out of sight.

“Stupid rock.” Constantine frowned fiercely at the book, gripping me more tightly as if expecting me to jump in next.

“The book said it will help us. Protect us,” I said.

“And we are going to beli—”

“We have no time.” Axer touched a finger covered in magic to the book’s edge and the book stiffened. “If we enter, can we leave at will?”

It stiffly dipped the top of its spine.

Axer handed the portal pad to Constantine. “If I don’t return in ten seconds, go.”

Constantine’s hand let go of mine and planted itself on his roommate’s chest, eyes dark with irritation, before Axer could step inside. He shoved the pad back into Axer’s hand.

“Stupid heroes.” Constantine withdrew the cat from his cloak and set her down. She looked at him and Constantine pressed a finger against her forehead. “Analyze. Quickly.”

The purple and blue furry monstrosity snapped her hundred needled teeth together, then walked into the page. Little bursts of paint colored the page around her, seeping into the grains, as she stepped onto the staircase. The book shook with a pleasant shiver. The cat tipped her head at Constantine, and a whirl of magic lifted, then she padded down the steps with her three spade tails waving through the air as if tasting the magic. She disappeared into the crack touching the book’s spine.

“We will survive inside,” Constantine reported grimly. “There is life sustaining magic. The cat recognizes its kin to yours.”

I could feel the shadows growing closer.

“Valeris’s magic, then. I will go first,” I said. The blankness around the staircase was as unnerving as it was exciting—something new. Something Origin made. “Just like Will’s sketch.” But my adventure now.

“No.” Axer shook his head, stepping forward. “We won’t be able to retrieve you, if you get trapped. The reverse, however, we know is in your power.” Eventually, went without being said.

Constantine pushed him back. “She can’t survive the end game without you.”

“Maybe I’ll just be the weird paper creature swooping down to save the day,” Axer said with an entirely inappropriate edge of amusement.

I looked at him, horrified, then clasped the emotion to me. I never wanted to be without the ability to feel again.

Constantine looked skyward, then down at the book. “Stupidity is truly transmittable,” he muttered, then stepped foot inside, sinking into the page, faster than either of us could grab him. Little violet, turquoise, and ultramarine zips of colors stained the paper as he fully sank inside.

We crouched over the top, tense.

Constantine stood in 2D form on the staircase, and breathed in deeply as the page turned to creamed parchment once more. He reached out of the book in a violet ripple of emerging 3D, then pulled his hand back inside. He nodded sharply at Axer.

Axer went next in a burst of blue. He closed his eyes once inside, then quickly motioned to me. I stepped into the parchment world in a wash of color. Lanterns lit at the sides of the staircase, like a black-and-white drawing coming to life. I could see the real-world shimmering above—like a dome into another world. It was a little like looking at Valeris’s ceiling.

With that unsettling thought, I extended my head, shoulder, and arm out of the book and gathered magic to me. Footsteps pounded toward the room as my magic pooled—identifying me as the caster. The book’s page fluttered around me, feeding me bits of knowledge in how it kept itself hidden. I included a little of magic from each of us and layered that magic into the package I was creating. At the last second, I let it all go and ducked back inside the page, just under the cover of the book’s spells.

The packet of magic shot toward the seal and was sucked into the center, just as a man wearing my brother’s face rounded the corner.

Magic spewed upward from me at the sight, and I reached forward. A hand pulled me against a hard chest, another fastened around my mouth, and magic clamped firmly over mine.

The fake paused for a moment, but then he and the others—a dozen men all wearing my brother’s face—flew into the seal. The book closed its covers, and all went dark.