Where Futures End Page 21

  No worse instructions could he have given to us. We dreaded returning to the wood, even with the mages banished, because of the terrible things that still lurked there. But we knew the task must be done and so we started off, our steps heavy.

  On the way, more trouble befell us: The Bristle Beast pierced my arm with one of its bristles. I was so overcome with horror that Hunter promised he would finish our task on his own. I returned to our camp to nurse my wound, but the quill had sunk so deep into my flesh that I could not remove it. When Hunter returned the following night, I told him I had removed the quill. I could not bear for him to know that something fell still lay inside of me. We never spoke of it or the wood again.

  Now, years later, I knew I must travel back to the Wasted Wood. I left Hunter and the queen at the palace and went to find out whether all of the dark magic had drained away, or if some vestige remained and managed to putrefy the whole land. I had only to come to the very outskirts of the wood to find my answer.

  The wood was as infected as it had been years ago; no dark magic had drained at all.

  This knowledge so sickened me that I lay in camp for days before going back to the palace. Even when I left the wood, I felt that some curse followed me, that I was tainted by dark magic.

  I told Hunter about the Wasted Wood and he revealed the truth. He had meant to take the Bristle Beast to the Wasted Wood that day years ago, but as he had gotten closer to the wood, he had been so overcome with dread that he had dropped the beast into a deep cavern, where he left it to starve.

  The source of the realm’s sickness was now revealed.

  We couldn’t find the cavern, so we assumed the earth had since closed over it. But it was clear what must have happened to the beast. It had fed not on the dark magic of the distant wood, but on the good magic of the land. The beast was growing so large on this diet that its black bristles had pierced the earth: The spikes reported by farmers and hunters were really the prickled brow of the beast jutting up from the soil. The black island in the poisoned bay was rumored to be the heel of the beast, pushing out from the soft silt of the bank.

  I realized that to kill the beast would be to collapse the whole of the Other Place. To let it live would be to watch it grow large enough to break free and in doing so, destroy all.

  I called for the sage, who gave an answer to my dilemma. A very old and almost-forgotten type of magic must be used to petrify the beast. Turned to stone, it would no longer be able to feed on the magic of the land, nor would the beast collapse or decay underneath the land. Slowly, the magic would leak out of the petrified beast, back into the land, and all would be saved.

  There was a problem with this plan: The person who petrified the beast must have non-magical blood. Otherwise, the beast would defend itself by sucking all of the magic out of its attacker in an instant, killing the person and preventing the beast’s petrification. In the whole of the Other Place, only Hunter and I had non-magical blood, so the task had to fall to one of us. I was ready to agree to this task, when the sage revealed one thing more: The person who wields the spell would petrify not only the beast but also himself. He would give his life for the Other Place.

  Still, I was willing. I loved the Other Place with all my heart and would do anything to save it. And yet I came to realize I did not have the strength to wield the spell. The bristle that had been lodged in my arm so long had slowly poisoned me so that I had almost died journeying to the Wasted Wood and back.

  I could not save the land that Hunter and I had doomed.

  Upon realizing this, Hunter fled the palace, never to be seen again. For him, the Other Place was only ever a dreamland, and he was not willing to give his life for it.

  I determined to find some other non-magical person to complete the task. But by this time I couldn’t remember how I had first come to the land, or that I had once lived in a non-magical world. The sage revealed to me that there were other non-magical people in existence somewhere, people I had once known but had lost, though he didn’t know where I could find them. I set off to search, with the fate of the Other Place growing ever more precarious. I wandered into your world.

  Now I must see my task completed. Here, where the earth has opened, someone must cast the spell to petrify the beast and save the Other Place. Whoever is willing must be ready to give her life. If no one is willing, it will mean death to that magical land, and to the queen I love.

  The Third Day

  DYLAN & QUINN

  Quinn made up her mind. She knew what her choice would be. She was surprised to feel disappointment.

  Dylan too was surprised at how his heart sank when he saw Quinn coming back from her camp. The crevice where the earth had opened revealing a swath of rock either black or deepest red was too terrible for him to look at straight on. In the corner of his vision, Dylan saw the molecules of the rock shifting and sliding into tangled knots. The juncture of two universes. He felt his own body weaken at the sight of it so that he could hardly keep on his feet.

  Quinn took the shining scepter from Dylan while he explained how to use it. He pressed himself against the mossy far wall of the crevice and gave her instructions for how to perform the spell that would petrify the Bristle Beast. The beast’s flesh showed through the wall of the crevice, a wound open to the air. Quinn wondered why Dylan wouldn’t look at it, why he squirmed now like an agitated animal.

  “Will you perform the spell?” Dylan asked, breathless and wincing.

  Quinn lifted the scepter, admired its smooth silvery handle, the clear bulb of an eye at its tip. “You aren’t who you say you are, Dylan.”

  Quinn stood before him, brandishing the device he’d given her like a club, brandishing her vorpal too. Here, near the juncture of the two universes, his vorpal was weaker than it had ever been, distracted by the ever-shifting molecules Quinn didn’t seem to see. He felt her vorpal pressing at him, testing him.

  Could it be that his story hadn’t worked after all?

  But then, why was she still here?

  Quinn hated to admit it: Dylan’s story was a lie.

  No one had listened more closely to the elders’ stories about the Other Place than Quinn had. She knew them all—up to the point where Dylan and Hunter had found the Bristle Beast and had agreed to return it to the Warped Wood.

  She turned to find that Dylan had stopped his tortured squirming and was watching her, a faint line creasing his brow.

  “You made three mistakes in your story,” Quinn said. Dylan’s expression was all curiosity—not what Quinn had expected. Her conviction wavered for a moment.

  “First,” she said, “the jewels on the silver scepter—you talked about ‘a rainbow array.’ But everyone knows the silver scepter’s power comes from a band of sapphires from the crystal waters of a fairy cove.

  “Second, you called the lair of trolls and fell beasts the Wasted Wood. But I’ve always heard the place of trolls called the Warped Wood.

  “Third, the way you described the Bristle Beast—the creature you hate so much that its image must be seared into your mind. You said its eyes were white. But the stories say they’re as black as its body, that its one weak point is almost impossible to find.”

  She held the scepter out in front of her as if it might offer some protection against whatever reaction Dylan might decide to have. He went on gaping at her.

  He was going soft at the edges like something dissolving in water.

  Dylan felt he might collapse at any moment. From relief or fear or exhaustion.

  She hadn’t believed his story. Everyone believed his story.

  She lowered the scepter, dropped her stony expression. “I wanted you to be the real Dylan,” she said. “I wanted this to be my Special Work.” She nodded at the terrible face of the rock. “Now my only work will be to walk away. And cut Artak’s meat and wash his pots and hope birthing his babies doesn’t kill me.”<
br />
  Dylan studied her. “Why didn’t you go home last night?” he asked. “Why come here to face me if you knew I wasn’t—if you thought I was a mage?”

  She squinted at him. “Are you a mage? You don’t feel like what I thought a mage would feel like.” Her vorpal probed at his. “But you’re not Dylan. So I can’t do what you want me to do. I know what my Special Work is now: to do nothing, to go back home.” Her voice was heavy.

  Dylan leaned against a crumbling wall of rock. The red-black juncture in front of him left a sunspot on his eyelids when he closed them. “I’m not a mage. And my story wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.” He didn’t expect her to believe him, but maybe that was a good thing.

  Maybe he didn’t want her to believe him.

  When he opened his eyes again, here is what he saw: not some poor, stupid native of a world that was lumbering into its last days. But a girl whose tattered felt skirt was still green with moss from the nest she had made for herself the night before, whose weary slouch told him she’d been awake for hours, weighing his concerns alongside her own. A girl he didn’t want to hurt.

  Quinn knew she must walk away.

  And yet—

  Dylan wasn’t a mage.

  He had some secret, but it wasn’t that. Her vorpal felt his confusion and discomfort and . . . sympathy. For her. That wasn’t something mages felt, if she understood the stories.

  And now Quinn realized the real reason it had taken her all night to make her choice when those three obvious mistakes should have made it for her: Despite the proof that Dylan was lying, Quinn believed his story.

  Dylan wished he knew what was going through Quinn’s mind while she scrutinized the juncture in the rock. She finally turned back to him and asked, “Is there really a beast?”

  Dylan only looked at the red-black swath of rock and shuddered.

  Quinn charged up the scepter as Dylan had instructed her and gasped when the top turned vibrant blue.

  Dylan’s stomach lurched. “Turn that off.” He was clammy with panic. He couldn’t let her do this. “I don’t think you’re the one who should wield the spell.”

  She gazed at the crackling blue light, mesmerized.

  “Didn’t you listen to the story?” he said. “I said you would die if you carried this out.”

  She cocked her head and gave him a dark smile. “Do mages always feel so guilty when their evil plans work?”

  Dylan wanted to grab the device from her hand, but he couldn’t manage to take more than a small step. Quinn moved toward the red-black glare in the rock, luring him. His body threatened to turn into a puddle of formless cells. The solid form he had taken was too difficult to keep together much longer.

  “Don’t,” he said, almost choking on the hot dusty air. “It’s you. The beast is you.”

  Quinn froze. The device crackled in her hand.

  “It’s you,” Dylan said again. “It’s your whole . . . land.”

  She blinked at him, confused. She finally lowered the device. “Canada?”

  “Your whole world, all of it. Your entire universe.”

  She looked around at the moss-draped maples, frowned at the sight of a distant dust storm. Dylan wondered how much was in that library she’d mentioned, what she might have studied of cosmology.

  “Somehow our two universes got stuck together,” he told her. “Yours has been pushing into ours for over a century now. It’s wreaking havoc there.”

  Her body was still rigid, her brow furrowed. “There’s no Bristle Beast.”

  Dylan looked away from her and then back.

  “It’s us pushing through the Other Place,” Quinn said. “Destroying it.” She folded her arms around herself. She seemed to be shrinking.

  “It can’t go on much longer,” Dylan said. “Even your world is starting to come apart. You’ve seen the proof: The great crevices that have opened up. Other things.”

  “What things?”

  “The . . .” He didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want to ruin everything that gave her world meaning. “The sanctuaries. Those places that vanish and reappear.”

  She shook her head. “Those places are brought to us from the past. To help us.”

  “No. They come by accident.” He couldn’t stand the way her shoulders drooped when he said it. He wanted her to go on defying him, refusing to believe him. “Everything’s getting pushed around. Pieces of the past are getting jumbled up with the present. It isn’t magic and it isn’t mages. There are no mages. What you see is merely your own world coming apart.”

  Her face was pale as death. Her jaw clenched tight as a vise. “And the avatars? Are those just an accident too?”

  He was silent.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “The avatars are just people from the past,” he admitted, “getting pushed around in time.”

  “None of it is from the Other Place? It’s not magic?”

  Yes, it’s all magic, he wanted to say. All accidents are magic. The fact that you showed up here, the fact that it’s me you met and not one of the others who were sent here . . . “Your world is breaking apart. Like ours has been doing. It’s going to get worse. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. We didn’t think it would be right to make you sever the connection between our worlds . . .”

  She unfolded her arms to study the scepter in her hand.

  “Look, the story I told you—it was as fair as I could tell it,” Dylan went on. “I said you would be giving up your life if you did this.”

  She fumbled to turn off the device but couldn’t figure it out. Her hands were shaking too much to find the right pressure points.

  “It’s only fair.” Dylan heard his voice coming out garbled and strained. He took a few steps back from the scarred rock face, as if that would help. “Your planet is going to pieces. You’ve bombed the whole place. Even if our worlds weren’t stuck together the way they are, it’s doubtful you could ever build everything back up. The ice caps aren’t coming back, even though we’ve taken so much of your solar energy. Do you understand any of what I’m saying?” None of this was coming out right. “You let everything get so bad that there’s no turning things around.”

  She finally found the right points; the blue light went out.

  “Our worlds have to be separated or they’ll smash each other apart,” Dylan said.

  Quinn said what he couldn’t.

  “And only one will survive.”

  Quinn’s skin went cold even as the heat of the late-morning sun pounded the top of her head.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Dylan said. “I told you we wouldn’t make you.”

  Quinn’s grip on the scepter slackened. Dylan lurched forward and caught it. He retreated with it back to the far side of the crevice, away from the wound in the rock wall behind her.

  “So that’s the decision I have to make?” Quinn said, her mouth dry. “If I save the Other Place, my own world dies?”

  “But do you see? That’s not even the decision. Your world is going to die anyway. It’s a world beyond repair.”

  Quinn tried to understand what he was saying. A world beyond repair. The great crevices, the Ruined City, the food shortages, the animals growing scarce, the summer fires in the unbearable heat . . . But that was what the sanctuaries were for, to help them in their need.

  Except—the sanctuaries were really another sign that her world was broken.

  “What will happen to my world if no one cuts it away from yours?” Quinn asked.

  “The same thing that’s happening now. Your world will continue to die. Time will go to pieces. Perhaps something more. If you sever the connection, the same will happen, only much, much quicker. At least, as far as anyone can guess.”

  Quinn’s stomach turned. Her legs buckled in the heat and then Dylan was at her side. He guided her to a shaded sp
ot where a sapling grew out from a deep crack in the rock wall. Quinn lay back against the slope of rocks and grasses, heat pounding in her head.

  “I shouldn’t have told you all that,” Dylan said. “I was only supposed to tell you the story. It was supposed to be a lot easier.” He gave her a glum look of apology.

  She glanced away. “Do you know about the Transporting Sanctuary?” she asked weakly.

  “I told you the sanctuaries—”

  “I know. But is it true that there’s a way we could get into the Other Place? Into your world?”

  “You mean like an evacuation?” He chewed his lip. “We’ve thought about that. A long time ago a lot of your people came into our world. We tried to make a place where they could live. But it doesn’t work. Our atoms hold together more loosely than yours do. Your people can only stay for so long. And when we come here to your world—it’s like holding our breath. It’s like trying to live underwater. Neither of us is made to live in the other’s universe.”

  Quinn heard him through a long tunnel. She thought she might be losing consciousness. For a moment she had the sensation of swimming in dark water, as though through an underwater cave. She imagined herself surfacing on the far end, breaking into sunlight like the Water Nymph. Finding herself in another world. Dylan’s world.

  His voice brought her back. “We’ve tried to work this out for over a century. We’ve tried to find some other solution.” His tone dipped low. “Our worlds are foreign to each other. They weren’t ever meant to meet.”

  A hot spike of anger went through Quinn’s chest. She lifted herself, weak as she was. “That’s wrong. You’re wrong. The Other Place is all I’ve loved ever since I was young. I saw the Water Nymph, I don’t care what you say about the avatars. She came to me, only me. She knew I had a Special Work.”

  Dylan didn’t say anything. His eyes were round and startled.

  “The real Dylan wouldn’t say those things,” Quinn said. “He was glad our worlds came together.”