“Don’t!”
But Kane was at the door, swinging himself inside and throwing his whole body into closing it behind him.
Inches away, Ursula screamed, “I’ll find you!”
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked into place with a gratifying THUNK!
And Kane was safe.
• Eight •
SPOILT BLOOD
Kane gulped in breath after breath. Every inhale clung in his throat like syrup. He kept his eyes on the door. Ursula had torn through a metal fence. Could a door hold her?
Somehow it did and Kane was safe. For now.
He finally let himself cry.
To some, the sudden onset of magic might be shocking, but to Kane it was owed. Ever since he was little, and ever since he knew he was different, he had woven the hope for magic into every one of the world’s disappointments. Every sneer, every snuck glance, every birthday spent alone with Sophia as his only guest. Each felt like a debt.
Prove to me that it’s all been worth it, he used to tell the universe. Let me have power that they can’t take from me.
Like the X-Men. Like Sailor Moon. Like Avatar Korra. He thought that if he suffered enough, magic might find him in a moment of insurmountable peril. Telekinesis, like Carrie. Or control of water, like Sailor Mercury.
Kane had not, in any of these imaginings, envisioned his hands erupting into projectile rainbows.
But that’s what had happened. He sniffed as he inspected his hands. Surprisingly, there were no burns. All that covered his skin was a layer of grime from his fall. In fact, he was covered with mud everywhere. A mixture of clay, sweat, and something both sticky and pungent.
Blood.
Kane flew into a frenzy feeling for wounds, but instead found that his cotton T-shirt was suddenly made of coarse twill. And his shorts were gone, as were his roper boots. He wore badly torn cargo pants and a pair of brown loafers that crunched on the uneven stone floor of the tunnel he now stood within, which was lit by torchlight.
Torchlight?
Cargo pants?
Kane was not in the locker rooms anymore. He wasn’t even sure he was awake. A crude tunnel curved into the darkness behind him. Veins of scarlet crystals webbed through the stone, their pulsing glow dyeing the passageway a ghastly crimson. A single torch jutted from a mount where the locker room light switch had been.
Kane ran to the walls to feel if they were real. They were. His hand drifted toward the torch to see if it was hot. It was. What was happening? Where on earth did the locker room door actually lead?
In a daze, he turned back to the door in time to see its metal melt into a cobbled mosaic. Still a door, but one that matched this new world. The mosaic depicted a scene of figures bowing before their god, a gigantic, pincered thing inlaid with rubies and black-red garnets.
“Glowing lobster,” Kane whispered.
This is what the Others were talking about. This was the reverie. The realization inspired more questions than it answered, but Kane forced himself to stay focused. He was done crying. For now, at least.
Then the door lurched upward, and Kane let out a cry. Voices hissed through the gap at the bottom, sending him stumbling backward. He reached for his phone but instead found a holstered revolver at his hip. He threw it away in disgust and shock.
“URĪB!” the voices chanted in time with the door’s rise. It sounded like men, and many of them. “URĪB!”
Absurdly, white subtitles appeared on the bottom of Kane’s vision. They read: HEAVE! HEAVE!
He blinked. The subtitles stayed. The voices grew louder, sending Kane sprinting in the opposite direction, down the sloping tunnel and out into a cavern of breathtaking space. The same crimson crystal webbed across the ceiling, clustering and breaking apart like blood vessels, and against a glowering red horizon stood an entire subterranean city. Buildings of stone, crystal, and moss thrust up through the cavern floor, each hundreds of feet tall and honeycombed with balconies. Massive stalactites hung from the cavern ceiling, carved with windows that showed through to torch-lit apartments. Rope bridges threaded between the homes, and gardens of white-leafed plants hung over the grooved avenues and cobbled walkways.
All of it was articulated in bloody red by the pulsing crystals, which summoned the elaborate city into focus and then banished it back into darkness every other breath.
Kane had never had such a realistic dream. He forced himself to keep moving through the streets as he waited to wake up. The city was empty, and he could guess where the citizens were; far in the distance he heard a massive crowd, their roar so loud it vibrated up through his boots.
Then, from behind him, came the sound of men approaching.
Kane threw himself into patches of darkness between a toppled stalagmite, ignoring the angry clicks of whatever creatures he’d startled.
What is happening? What the hell is happening? Am I dead? Can I be dead soon?
Kane tried every trick to wake up. He pinched. He bit. He slapped. He held his breath. He tried to pee. Nothing worked.
Then the men were near, and Kane could only watch. There were a dozen of them, and their uniforms were a futuristic take on barbarian-chic: armor plated in buffed metal over garments of cured flesh. Some wore masks of jawbones and teeth. They were humans, and they were dressed in human.
Kane swallowed back the bile and listened closely as the leader spoke, his words written in white text on Kane’s eyes.
“Sounds like the other caravans arrived. Hurry up, or it’ll be you on that sacrifice block!” He was massive, overgrown with thick muscles and brandishing a whip that looked to be woven from hair. Kane didn’t need to know the language to understand there was something wrong with the man’s tongue, which slid thickly around his words.
His men understood him just fine. They pulled forth a makeshift cage of petrified wood. It swayed atop stone wheels, filling the abandoned city with creaking. Within it huddled a gaggle of girls Kane instantly recognized from the cheerleading squad, except their uniforms had been replaced with oddly dated looks that contrasted with the rough environment. There was Veronica McMann wearing a blue blouse, her hair pushed into a bun. And Ashley Benton in a once-crisp cream-colored pantsuit. And the third might have been Heather Nguyen, but her hands were pressed to her face while she sobbed.
The girls and their outfits were a further complexity Kane couldn’t make sense of. But the cheerleading squad practiced near the football field. They would have been in the stadium, too.
Slowly, it dawned on Kane: the men pulling the carts looked familiar, too. It had taken him a second of hard staring to look through the armor, but their sneering faces all looked like boys from the football team.
“Hurry or I’ll sacrifice you all!” roared the leader. The boys cheered merrily and the girls whimpered.