Adeline’s face twisted. “Kane, where’s the dagger?”
Kane searched his memory. “I kicked it into the fire!”
Adeline’s eyes widened. “You threw the ceremonial dagger with my virginal blood on it into the fire?”
“But you’re not a virgin.”
Adeline’s face twisted. “Oh, God. Oh my God. Kane, it doesn’t matter in this world. You fulfilled the sacrifice!”
At the lips of the hearth, the flames shaded a deep scarlet, pulling into a smoldering mounds. Then, like a bloated tongue, a gargantuan beast slithered forth from the throat of the earth and out into the arena.
Its body was a composition of blazing plates sliding over thousands of undulating legs. From beneath it, Kane could make out serrated mandibles large enough to chew apart a bus, and beady, ancient eyes that scanned the empty altar with hunger, then outrage. Whatever it was, it was furious to find its meal escaped, and it manifested its fury through an inscrutable language of clicks and squeals.
Elliot was wrong, Kane thought. There is a glowing lobster.
A new chant cut through the din, quickly gaining momentum.
“CY! MO! THO! AH! EX! I! GWA!”
The fiery crustacean craned back and let out an earsplitting screech in return, then turned its laser gaze upon Kane and Adeline. Its antenna twitched, then swung away as sparks gushed forth from its glowing mandibles.
They ran, but before they’d made it halfway across the altar the creature snapped open its great jaws and let forth a neon tsunami of fire.
“I got it! I got it!” Ursula shouted. She sped between them, toward the fire, her arm drawn back as though she meant to punch her way through it.
And, in a way, she did. Her fist rocketed forward just as the wave of fire converged upon the three and—absurdly—the deluge split apart. It flowed around them, the heat tremendous, unbearable, all-encompassing, and like nothing Kane had ever felt, but they were alive. They were preserved upon an island of black tiles as a shimmering shield of magenta light cupped over them. Ursula stood at the front, fist thrust forward and her whole body trembling as she pitted herself against the crustacean’s breath.
And still her hair would not move.
“Do it, Kane!” Adeline forced Kane to stand up. Her hair whipped wildly as the inferno began to bleed through Ursula’s force field. “Unravel it!”
Kane didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what she meant. But such an earnest belief shined in her eyes—belief in him. And what could he do in the face of such raw, unwavering faith? He dove into himself, searching for an answer, but all he could feel was his own stuttering heart, his own fear.
His own limits.
The fire let up, and Ursula slumped to her knees. All around them the floor was a desert of molten glass. There was nowhere left to run as the crustacean began to recharge its breath.
“This can’t be real,” Kane whispered.
Adeline eyes bore into his. “It’s real, Kane, but only until you say so.”
Sparks tumbled from the crustacean’s jaw as it slid through the shimmering heat. It was right over them. Kane squeezed his eyes shut, hugging Adeline.
He had denied this world—its power and its reality—but there was no denying what would happen if he failed. He would die. They all would. This reverie was not a dream. This reverie was not a story. There were no more twists, and there were no more chances. Just the reverie’s desire to see these interlopers annihilated. And, fueling this desire was a powerful rage, as though the reverie knew what Adeline knew: that Kane had come to unravel it. Perhaps it was Kane’s fear-addled imagination, or maybe it was a sense he hadn’t known he possessed, but in that moment he felt as though he could commune with the reverie’s core. And what beat in that core was more than desire or rage; it was fear.
The fear of being taken advantage of.
And the fear of being invaded, of being taken apart from the inside out. With new eyes Kane saw the screaming hearth and the parasite that had wound up from its molten guts. With an open mind, he understood the reverie’s pattern. What lay beneath the plot. The metaphor or the thesis or the marrow that unpinned everything. Even though he did not know the mind that created this world, he at least knew the heart.
And he thought he might know what to do next.
“Remember, Kane,” Adeline whispered into his ear.
He reached for the wisp of intuition, and it reached back, blooming bold and brash in his chest. The blooming sensation manifested around him, rivers of color coursing from Kane’s skin and carrying him upward. Buoyed upon nebulous rainbows, he faced down the awestruck crowd, then turned to consider their god.
It considered Kane back, unimpressed, before releasing its deadly breath over him.
Kane clapped his hands.
The arching fire stopped. Time stopped.
It was an instant of unmoving.
From Kane’s hands erupted a day-bright brilliance, washing the cavern in every color, as though Kane were a prism through which light split to spectrum. In this unmoving instant Kane knew the reverie for what it was: a living tapestry of memories and thoughts and dreams, sewn together with the desperation to be real, to be realized.
The reverie resisted Kane’s control, searing his mind as he fought to hold it in his head all at once. But it was lethargic, its energy waning, and Kane gritted his teeth through the pain. He was able to pin its corners wide and pick at its center, which was the fearful creature frozen before him. Its hideous body sagged beneath Kane’s concentration, sending out a shock wave that turned the arena to liquid. Colors and textures bubbled together. Pieces of the cavern broke apart to float unmoored in the vibrating air. Below, the floor scattered like dry leaves so that Ursula and Adeline floated in a white yawn of nothing as the reverie tore itself apart, whirling toward Kane, colliding into a knot of light gathering between his flexed palms.
The unraveling intensified, its rush growing into a thunderous riot. The pain in Kane’s head was beyond even the agony from the fire, but he stayed focused on his purpose, knowing he would feel the pain later.
He held the knot of light up, a white star dragging everything toward it.
He forced himself to stay strong as the weight of the world collapsed upon his shoulders.
• Twelve •
THE S WORD
Kane had a new empathy for punching bags. For crushed cans kicked down the road. For the focal points of incessant force.
His thoughts rose slow and blurry, like bruises on his brain.
He was floating. He was sinking. The aurora was dissipating, depositing him onto stiff, plastic grass scored in white symbols. His head hung over his streaming hands. He might have fallen asleep there on the football field if it hadn’t been for the unsure murmurs of the many people who had just watched him fall from the sky.