“Haven’t you wondered for yourself where etherea comes from? Haven’t you found yourself dreaming of its source? Such power it must hold, to unleash all manner of dreams, delusions, nightmares, and whims into our suffering reality. Whatever and wherever this source is, I’d consider it very dangerous in the wrong hands.”
Poesy sipped her tea, looking pointedly at Kane’s own hands.
Kane ceased all fidgeting.
“A weapon,” Kane said. He knew what came next. More accusations about what he’d done and who he’d been.
“Weapon!” Poesy laughed. “Weapons only destroy, my dear. Instruments, however, both destroy and create. That’s what makes them so powerful. The holy grail, Pandora’s box, the genie’s lamp; all were sources of etherea. If you look, really look, history is full of instruments that make the unreal real, that call forth power from nothing.” She toyed with a stray pearl caught in the hair around her temple. “These instruments are called looms for their ability to weave new worlds from the imaginations of mortals. I have spent my whole existence hunting them down, one by one, to ensure they are not abused.”
Poesy had said the reveries were a local phenomenon. A new one. Kane put the pieces together one by one.
“And that’s why you’re here? You think there’s a loom hidden in East Amity?”
Pleased, Poesy dipped her cup at Kane.
“Yes. The loom, by the scale of its power. A crown-shaped instrument I believe you’ve summoned once already. Tell me about it, Mr. Montgomery.”
“You think…” Kane fought the spinning vacancy spreading through his body. He vaguely remembered the Others telling him he had been searching for a source of power—a loom, maybe—and he had found a deadly crown. The actual symbol of power. But it was gone, cast away into the river or something. “I don’t know where it is, if that’s what you think. I don’t know how to get it back.”
Poesy exhaled, blowing curls of steam toward Kane. “Perhaps you don’t know now, but think, Mr. Montgomery: What do you find yourself so suddenly without?”
The answer rose up through Kane like a bubble breaking calm water. “My memories.”
Poesy’s eyes glinted. “How inconvenient. Memories interest me, you know. In a way, you explored the very memory of this town through Maxine Osman, who spent her life perfecting its rendering.” Poesy shrugged. “Her world must have been lovely. I wonder what you saw, and I wonder what you learned. But mostly, I wonder what must a person discover to make them dangerous enough to be hurt in the way you have been hurt. What power is deserving of such a thorough and vicious suppression?” She shrugged again, her downcast eyes sliding up to meet his. “A loom seems like just the inspiration for that caliber of evil, and we only know one person with the means.”
Kane’s breath halted as his hand traced the raised flesh of his burns. He had found the loom, and then he had been betrayed. It had to have been Adeline. Adeline was the one who had dug into his head and scooped out his memories. She said she’d done it to save him. Ursula and Elliot had agreed. Did they know, or had she brainwashed them, too?
A raw helplessness opened in Kane. It was hard to hold Poesy’s gaze with tears in his eyes. “What do I do?”
Not a hint of haughtiness touched Poesy’s voice now.
“You be brave, Mr. Montgomery. You face the reveries, you recover the loom, and you deliver it to me safely. Together, we will save reality from this plague of fantasy and ruin.”
Kane thought again of the barbarians with their frost-white eyes. The split lips of the altar, vomiting forth unfathomable beasts.
“What happens if I don’t want to?”
Poesy eyed him with unrestrained pity. “Saving the world isn’t usually a matter of want, Mr. Montgomery. How cowardly you must be to balance the destruction of reality upon the scales of your own heart. And how selfish.”
Kane sniffed. The words stung. They stung because they were true; deep beneath the swells of his fear he knew better. He nodded.
Poesy swallowed the last drops of tea, then unfastened a charm from her bracelet and tossed it to Kane.
“In my travels I have accumulated many artifacts that not only bend reality but break it in useful ways. The journal is one. This is another. Use it only in emergencies.”
The charm was a tube of black metal, heavier than Kane expected and ice cold. An old-fashioned whistle. Something told Kane the sound it made would be unlike anything he’d ever heard.
“Ms. Daisy and I must be going.” Poesy stood and drew her robe around herself. Kane stood unsteadily.
“And, Mr. Montgomery, if I were you I might keep our meeting a secret. There are others like me—others who hunt for the sacred looms. You cannot be too distrusting in matters like this, I find, because you never know what form darkness will take. A silver-eyed siren or a golden-haired prince, perhaps? Or even a dim-witted ogress? But do not fret. You are not alone. You never were.”
A chime swelled around Kane, rolling out through the empty space, and Poesy was gone. So was Ms. Daisy, the tea, and the furniture. Then the chandelier flickered away, and Kane was again abandoned to the watery dimness of the library, a small black whistle in his palm and a chorus of unanswered questions chirping in his head.
• Fourteen •
NICE AND NORMAL
Kane called Sophia right away, but she sent him to voicemail. When he texted her a simple what’s up and she didn’t reply, he knew he was in trouble, but how much? What kind? Her silence scared him more than anything. He hoped she wasn’t past trying to reason with him. Not yet. He would need her, if what Poesy said was true.
At East Amity High School, it was as though the reverie had never happened. Kane drifted through the sunny halls of laughing, clueless students. His eyes were glazed with the memory of a fantasy none of them knew about. He saw familiar faces from the reverie, now scrubbed of blood and grime and ash. He saw the slow pulse of red light every time he closed his eyes. As though acting as a reminder, the black whistle’s cool metal bit into his palm, assuring him it had all been real, that just because the nightmare had ended didn’t mean it had never happened.
Kane skipped homeroom, instead wandering out to the athletic fields. The locker rooms were open for cleaning. They did not lead to a subterranean city. The football stadium itself did not have a moat of magma. Nothing nefarious skittered in the wavy heat rising from the track.
The mystery of the loom, and the mission Poesy had charged Kane with, followed him everywhere. Was the loom a thing you summoned, or a thing you found? If it was as powerful as Poesy said, Kane was not eager to confront the person who kept it hidden, and decided all he could do was wait and see (and hopefully not die in the meantime).