Poesy, crushed.
Denial thundered in Kane’s heart. Poesy was dying—or was already dead—which felt impossible given the queen’s former glory. Sophia stared at the body with hollow resignation, a faint frown pulling her painted features down. Her fingers dug up into her hairline as though holding terrible thoughts away from her unblinking eyes.
Kane was already running toward her when the crowd hushed, everyone turning to watch the curtain rise. Sophia stood, her hand still pressed to her head.
The stage was a nacreous ivory, buffed and polished so that the light bounced off it and illuminated the great hall in hoops of rainbow. One lone figure adorned the stage: Adeline, bare shouldered and shivering in a pure white tutu. She teetered atop what Kane first mistook for stilts. He stifled a gasp. Satin ribbons crisscrossed Adeline’s thighs, weaving down her muscular legs and into ballet pointe shoes at her feet. But they didn’t end in blunted tips like they should. Instead, they continued into elegant blades as long as swords, forcing Adeline to pitch backward for balance as their points glanced off the stage’s smooth face. The crowd leaned closer, hungry to see her fall.
“You’re here for a reason,” Sophia called out. “Tell me the truth this time.”
“Sophia, please. It’s Adeline. You—” Adeline pitched sideways, catching herself barely. “You know me. We’re friends, from the conservatory—”
Sophia winced, sending a ripple through the ballroom. It caught Adeline, maneuvering her body into a pirouette atop one blade. She spun slowly, perfectly balanced.
“You can’t lie here,” Sophia said. “You can’t lie. She tried to lie, and it killed her. Just snapped her apart.” She pointed at Poesy’s crumpled form before turning desperate eyes to Adeline. “Please. I don’t want to see you hurt. Please, don’t lie to me.”
Adeline turned, rigid and barely able to nod.
Her face relaxed as Sophia slumped back, relieved. “You know my brother. You need to tell me where he is. He wants to hurt my kingdom, doesn’t he? That’s what the witch told me. He wants to bring the Doom home to us.”
Worlds overlapped, the reveries intertwined in her mind, but Kane understood. In the mess of converging story lines clawing at her identity, she hadn’t lost focus of the betrayals he had inflicted on her. And even here, barely holding on to her sanity, she still understood that Kane had run away into a darkness he couldn’t defeat and had brought it back with him to destroy their home.
“Kane can help you,” Adeline said through her teeth. “He’s not going to hurt you.”
“You’re lying again.” Sophia clutched her head, another ripple boiling over her. Dolls of alabaster rose up from the stage in perfect imitation of Adeline, balanced atop the same lethal blades. Sophia groaned hopelessly as they spun. Like a music box, Adeline danced within their orbiting choreography, the blades flashing by her without striking. Kane understood the trap. If Adeline resisted—if she moved so much as a centimeter out of step—those blades would find her skin.
Etherea crackled in Kane’s fist, but he shook it away. He couldn’t fight yet. He would only have one chance.
No one noticed as he dashed behind the pillars, up toward the throne. No one heard his footfalls. The only sound was sourceless music, like in the conservatory, and the precise scrapes of knives on porcelain. The sounds of looming cruelty. Kane reached the side of the throne’s stairs, doing his best not to look at Poesy’s mutilated body. He focused on Sophia, who focused on Adeline with increasingly frantic terror.
“Please,” Sophia begged. “Please don’t do this to her!”
Kane realized she was begging the reverie to spare Adeline. He had seen this before, but it had been Helena. The reverie was beyond Sophia’s control by now, acting out what it thought best. Punishing those that threatened it.
Adeline’s knees shook. Her resolve was strong, but her body was going to fail her. She leapt straight up as the dancers blended the air beneath her. Sophia cowered on her throne, her sobs punctuating the quickening music.
“Stop! Stop it!” she cried.
And then it happened. Finally—terribly—Adeline made a mistake. One tittering scuffle and suddenly one of the blades smattered the crowd with red. Adeline kept dancing, a ribbon of blood flowing down her ribs and into her tutu, dying it pink.
Adeline said nothing, but twirled, dipped, and twirled again, increasingly unsteady. More red bloomed at her shins, then at the back of her neck. The crowd applauded appreciatively.
Kane crept up the stairs, behind the throne. Everyone, including Sophia, was focused on Adeline. When Kane pulled the teacup from the bracelet it grew to its proper size, cradled in his palm. He held it out, shaking, every particle in his body begging him to think of another way to stop his sister. He squeezed his eyes shut, then risked a glance to the stage. There was, in sticky profusion, red everywhere. The image of Adeline burned bright: wobbling, achingly lovely, atop those bladed shoes. She was looking right at Sophia.
No, right at Kane. She was watching him, failing on purpose so that he could have this chance. Seeing that he understood, she smiled, but it was wiped away as she finally collapsed. The room filled with the sounds of stabbing.
Kane’s choices narrowed to just one. Adeline had been wrong; they were going to lose Sophia, after all.
He flicked the teacup with his nail.
And everything.
Stopped.
The teacup swallowed Kane, taking him down into the curves of its dizzying power. He felt as though he himself was the vibration radiating from the china, as though he himself was the sonic frequency tearing through the reverie and painting itself across every particle. Kane became not a who, but a where. He was everywhere, his consciousness in every thing.
He could feel it all, from the farthest reaches of the reveries all the way inward: the clutching vacuum of deep space, the tang of the ozone atmosphere, the shimmering streets of Everest. He felt the shattered gems ground into the garden by Ursula’s heel, and the leathery musk of the Dreadmare’s hide as it wound over her protectively. He felt each glittering mote suspended over the awestruck crowd. He felt the stage and its stickiness. And finally he felt Adeline’s slowing heart as it pushed her blood from her punctured body.
He felt every interlocking fiber of Sophia’s world—and then he felt Sophia herself as she turned to face him.
She was terrified. Her memories boiled through Kane in complete color, with complete sensation. Her triumphs and her abuses, her guilt and grief. Her love. Her loss. The scorching exposure caused her to scream, and Kane screamed with her, for they had reached a point of synchronicity as their minds intertwined in the teacup’s bowl. Together, they felt Sophia’s soul open, peeling back so that the teacup might implode her dreams with impartial authority, crushing her down into something cute and quiet that Kane could command.