“You are my vessel,” she continued, “my instrument, my own little DIY big bang. And to think! Ms. Abernathy nearly ruined everything by throwing you away from me. It’s a good thing I had the sense to let your sister keep me captive, knowing you’d come for her. You see? I’m not just beauty. Beneath it all, I’m everything else, too.”
Kane heard the words, but he did not understand them. They slid through his head like little silvery fish. Poesy’s breath cooled the tears pushing down his cheeks, the sweat prickling his temples.
“I’ll admit I miscalculated before.” Poesy swept behind the throne. Kane couldn’t look anywhere but forward, at the crowd of stilled onlookers. All of the ballroom’s motion strained against Poesy’s titanium will. “Teasing open the loom in a human boy always risked that he may one day turn his power against me, and so I created this device.” She returned to block Kane’s view of Sophia, who had finally reached Adeline. “It’s a crown, yes, but it is also a prison. This crown does not give power; it takes it. It accesses a person’s deepest potential, focuses it thousandfold, and allows me to use it however I please. I hear it is very painful, losing your lucidity this way. The last time I put it on you, you made quite the mess, swallowing whole the entire watercolor world of Maxine Osman, and Maxine within it. And then Ms. Bishop had the audacity to try and remove it! I wasn’t counting on that, either. Kudos to her. But this time your friends cannot help you. So long as you wear this crown, you are mine. My Pandora’s box. My grail. My muse. Mine, Mr. Montgomery, to imagine into reality anything I demand.”
“I won’t,” Kane said. “I won’t do it.”
Poesy pouted. “It’s a shame you won’t create for me willingly. I think you’d quite like what I have in store for this sorry world.”
She kissed his cheek, then sunk the crown onto his head. It fit like a charm, the pressure against his scalp tracing his scars perfectly. It felt familiar. It burned.
“Sweet dreams, my loom.”
Kane’s mind went a blistering white, like the heaven-hot edge of a cloud about to uncover the sun. And then he was elsewhere, cast into the crown’s oblivion. His body, his mind—his everything—no longer his. Whatever became of him, it belonged to Poesy now.
•∞•
BEYOND
Kane stood in the river, beneath a pale sky awash in drifty, pastel clouds. The low sun stretched over their dimpled banks, giving them the distinct impression of watercolors on canvas. The water, too, was stippled with light as it brushed sweetly through the slashes of green reeds where Kane stood. He grazed the water with his fingertips, watching a fleet of silvery fish wreath his ankles.
Dread flashed through him, sudden and strange. He wasn’t supposed to be here. His hands snapped to his temples, an urgency rising in him before melting back into the river’s slow chill. Something important, something he needed to remember but couldn’t, floated just out of reach.
A pine cone struck his head. It bobbed into the water, scattering the tiny fish.
He turned to the shore, spotting the old mill. It was a majestic building, framed in a lovely court of trees that bent to hide its noble face from East Amity’s judgment and curiosity.
Kane’s sister Sophia watched him with imploring, white eyes.
“Come on, Kane,” she called. “It’s time to go now.”
Kane trudged toward her, then stopped. There was someone else with him in the reeds. An old woman staring at the mill, trapped in a spell of rigorous focus. She held a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and a small easel jutted up from the water a few inches to her right. From where Kane stood, he could make out the rich reds and browns of the mill on her canvas. They matched the deep color of the old woman’s eyes as they slowly zoomed out from the mill and took Kane in with dawning annoyance.
“Oh, you again,” said Maxine Osman.
Kane had no idea how she knew him. He had no idea how he knew her. He wanted to unknow her, because even just thinking her name brought back that sourceless, flashing dread, like he was supposed to be doing something else. He rubbed at his temples again. Why did they feel tight?
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Maxine as she dabbed at her canvas. “This isn’t your world. Stay here too long, like me, and you’ll get stuck.”
“I’m sorry, we were just about to leave.”
“And go where?”
Kane shrugged. East Amity glimmered like a tumble of buffed coins in the afternoon sun, all piled up on the opposite shore. The day before him felt infinite.
“See?” Maxine swiped a gnat from her ear. “You don’t know, because even though the crown wants badly for you to belong, you don’t belong. I didn’t, either. Got dragged in here, I think, but now I’m a lifer.”
“What does that mean?”
Maxine peered at the small mill taking shape on her canvas. “It means you ought to go if you’re going to go at all.”
“Go where?”
“Not where. You need to wake up, dear.”
“Kane!” Sophia called from the shore. “Come on! Everyone is waiting.”
Kane glanced over his shoulder. She was right. Everyone he knew was waiting in the dim forests of the Cobalt Complex. A cascade of pale, white eyes asking him to step from the water and come on, come along, get going. Kane felt that once he stepped out of the river, he wouldn’t come back for a long time. Maybe never.
Kane turned back to Maxine.
“I feel a little lost,” he said.
“That’s okay. You are. I told you, you don’t belong here.”
“I’m not sure where I belong, though.”
“That’s okay, too.” Maxine swirled her brush on her palette. “That’s the thing about a big imagination. It’s hard to belong anywhere when you can always imagine something better. I wouldn’t worry about settling just yet, though. You’re very young. Lots of time to figure out what you want, and then make it happen. But not if you stay here.”
Again the dread flashed in Kane, and for a split second everything about the scene looked wrong. Fake.
A pine cone struck Kane’s shoulder. He turned in time to catch the next one.
“My sister—”
“That’s not your sister,” Maxine said.
“She—”
“She is not your sister,” Maxine said firmly.
Subtly, the river began to simmer. Steam bled up into the golden air in shredded arcs.
“See?” said Maxine. “Look, now the scene’s all upset. My colors are going to smudge.”