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  He didn’t deny it.

  “Isn’t any of your story true?” Quinn said bitterly. “Hunter going away and coming back, the sage trying to help you remember. Is it the same story for everyone who comes along the crevice and meets you?”

  “Different people have posed as Dylan, it isn’t always me.” He bowed his head so she couldn’t see his face. “But I use the same story. Every time.”

  She heard the heavy sadness in his voice. She’d told him things she’d never told anyone. She suddenly felt sorry for him, sorry they were both locked in this awful nightmare.

  They were sitting now almost facing away from each other, both hunched over as if to protect twin wounds. He only wants to be away from me, she thought, away from here. She felt the same way—she’d only ever wanted to be left alone to do her work. But now she couldn’t for a moment think what had been so bad about that idea of going back to her band, visiting the sanctuaries in turn, setting up the tents and tearing them down, having children with Artak. Panic clawed in her belly. She could have found a way to go on searching for the Transporting Sanctuary with her children at her heels, rambling through the forest together. What was so bad about that? Why had she thought marrying would be so bad?

  Instead she had her Special Work: to kill one world for the sake of the other.

  She took a great shuddering breath. “I can’t do it,” she said.

  “I know.” He stood and gently took her hand. He pulled her up and led her away from the terrible red wound in the rock.

  They retreated to a copse of pale trees. Dylan sat on a soft carpet of leaves and moss and studied the scepter. It was supposed to repel the matter of his own world, push it away from the heavy tangles of matter that made up Quinn’s universe. It would close up the wound in his own universe and leave the wound in hers gaping open. There was no other way to do it. No other way that his people had found.

  He turned his gaze to Quinn. Her knees were huddled to her chest, eyes trained on some distant sight. Was she thinking about all of the avatars who had spoken to her? The sanctuaries she’d cataloged? Maybe she was only looking at the tangle of moss and trees in the distance.

  Dylan wished he were back in his own world, soaking up heat and energy. But he was beyond that point—no amount of energy would save him now. He breathed in warm air that seemed to leak right back out of his lungs into his loosening form.

  Quinn looked at the scepter Dylan was holding. “You’re too weak to use the scepter—is that why you want me to do it? You can’t do it yourself?”

  “It’s not exactly true that I’m too weak to do it on my own,” Dylan said. “It’s just that my people—we can’t quite bring ourselves to do it.” He struggled to find a way to explain. “There was a time when we felt we could. When we felt we must destroy your world to save ours. But then there was a great war between your countries, and it was terrible to watch the suffering that destruction brought on your people. We knew it would be the same if the connection between the worlds is severed, only worse—your whole world would be destroyed.”

  Dylan remembered the avatar she had told him about, the Moribund. He hoped the man wasn’t really experiencing his own death over and over again, that it was only that Quinn’s people were getting a glimpse of him through some window in time.

  He closed his eyes for a long moment, trying to erase the thought altogether.

  “After that, my people decided that we couldn’t bring that destruction on you,” Dylan went on. “And when we make a decision together, it’s very hard to undo. Our vorpals echo the decision back to us. That kind of resolve can keep a hold on us for generations. But now your world is suffering anyway. It’s coming to pieces the way my world is. We can’t let things go on the way they are, but we can’t bring ourselves to destroy you. We can only hope that you will choose to sacrifice your world for ours.”

  “But the story you told me,” Quinn said. “You said I would die if I saved the Other Place, but you didn’t say that my whole world would die.”

  “We’re getting desperate.” He turned away.

  “It’s not right,” Quinn said. “You should have told me the truth to start with.”

  Dylan laid the device between his feet. It looked harmless in the leaf litter. “You want to know the truth? My world isn’t some enchanted realm. We let you believe it was so that you wouldn’t stop us from taking your energy, so you wouldn’t look for a way to cut yourselves free from us. We made sure that we would be the ones with the power in the end.”

  He could see in Quinn’s searching gaze that she was deciding whether to believe him. He grew weaker under her hard stare.

  “That’s the truth I should have told you from the start,” he said feebly.

  Quinn crossed her arms. “You said that you once got people from my world to go into your world.”

  “It’s not a sanctuary that does it.”

  “The Transporting Sanctuary.”

  “There’s no such thing. It’s just . . . some people are special. They can see the Other Place, can walk right into it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that happening.”

  “You have to be in the right place. Even if you’re special, you have to come far enough south—here, to where the two worlds overlap.”

  Quinn drew herself up. “So if someone from my band, someone special, came here and walked into the Other Place with this device . . .”

  Dylan’s stomach went hard as rock.

  “That person could cut the Other Place away from this world,” Quinn went on. “This world would be the one to survive. Wouldn’t it?”

  Dylan studied the hard planes of her face. He nodded.

  “So the real decision,” Quinn said quietly, “is save the Other Place, or save my own land.”

  “No. Save the Other Place or save a dying land. That’s the choice.”

  “But still. It’s my choice.”

  Somewhere above them a bird warbled in answer. Dylan himself had nothing to say. He had already told Quinn at the beginning of this: You will choose.

  Quinn got to her feet. Her legs trembled. “I don’t want either world to die. I only ever wanted to find a way to the Other Place. I thought if I could find it, then maybe things wouldn’t be so hard for my band.”

  Dylan’s heart thudded. She was leaving. He’d known she wouldn’t go through with this; still, he wasn’t ready for her to leave.

  She turned and took heavy steps in the direction of her camp. A bolt of alarm went through Dylan’s heart. “Wait.”

  She looked back. Dylan could feel whole parts of him shutting down, over-stressed by exposure to the juncture. It was all he could do to hold together a semi-solid form. “Will you—will you stay with me? For just a little while?”

  Quinn stood frozen for a moment. Dylan felt sure she would turn and walk away without saying another word. But she took hesitant steps back to where he sat.

  “It’s just that you’re the first person I’ve seen in weeks,” he explained.

  Her expression softened.

  “I usually don’t mind being alone,” Dylan said. But there’s something different about you. He couldn’t say it out loud.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and he saw again how earnest she was, how she always thought so carefully about what she should do. He regretted ever trying to trick her. He hadn’t thought he had it in himself to feel so deeply about anything anymore, but he felt such deep regret that if he looked down he might find he had worn a hole right through himself.

  Quinn kneeled and touched the device lightly, as if afraid to wake it. “What would have happened to you if I had used this? Would you have been trapped here or could you go back?”

  “I can’t go back either way.” He cleared his throat. He’d left his water at his camp. “I—I’m not going to last much longer. I’ve been exposed to the juncture t
oo many times, for too long.”

  Quinn squinted against the sun reflecting off the far rock face. Her lips parted as though she was about to say something, but instead a rush of air escaped. Dylan wondered how there could be any room in her heart right now for sympathy.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “Really. I volunteered for this. I knew what would happen.”

  She turned toward him with a questioning gaze.

  “I thought I might as well,” he continued. “I haven’t been the same anyway. Since . . . Since something happened . . .” He shook his head. He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Maple flowers were spilling out of her skirt pocket. The petals were half crushed. They lent a sweet smell to the air. Dylan leaned closer to her.

  “I would have liked to have gone to your world,” she said.

  Dylan imagined himself showing her great glass buildings like she had never seen—High Towers with all their windows still in place. Whole cities whirring with life. “Yes, I think you would have.”

  “It’s not all ruined yet? Breaking apart?”

  “Some parts of it are. But other parts . . . Cities in the mountains that move with the snow drifts, crystal sea caves like windows that look into water . . .” He broke off again. More things he didn’t want to think about—he couldn’t go back home. Already, he felt his insides giving up, shutting down.

  “Is there a palace?” Quinn asked.

  He supposed there was—plenty of them. He nodded.

  “And the Girl Queen?”

  “There’s a queen. She’s not a girl, she’s grown. She’s not the same person from the stories, really.”

  Quinn touched his arm. “Don’t tell me about the Water Nymph. I’m going to think of her however I want.” She closed her eyes. The streaks of dirt on her face looked like misplaced shadows. “Do you really have a brother?”

  “I have an older brother who’s a bit like Hunter. We didn’t always get along.” A hot prickle went down Dylan’s neck. “When I think about it, it’s like being in that Warped Wood . . .”

  Quinn opened her eyes. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me more. I’ve been to a place a lot like those woods. I know what kinds of things happen there.”

  Some hard knot inside Dylan’s chest loosened.

  Quinn’s hand rested on his arm and it might have been the only part of him that wasn’t trying to dissolve.

  “Do you really think our two worlds were never meant to come together?” she asked, her voice so low he could barely hear her. “I can’t bring myself to believe that my world was never supposed to be this way. I can’t believe the Water Nymph wasn’t meant for me.”

  Dylan looked up at the birds skittering through the canopy of leaves. “Our worlds have changed each other in terrible ways.”

  “Not all terrible,” Quinn said.

  He supposed she meant the sanctuaries and the avatars, mistakes though they were.

  He cared only about her arm against his, the smell of maple flowers, the shifting sunlight that made her eyes flash copper. “No, not all terrible.”

  She looked at him, surprised. She must have heard in his voice what he meant. She gave him a sad smile. “The funny thing is, I always just wanted to be left alone.”

  “So did I.” A dark memory of his brother threatened to overwhelm him. He pushed it away. “People change you.”

  Dylan’s body felt weighed down—with exhaustion, with a sad sort of weariness. He lay back against a tangle of roots and moss.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “You should probably go now. You have a long walk ahead.”

  “No. I’ll stay a little longer.” She moved her hand into his. Little lines of worry appeared around her eyes.

  “Are you going to bring your band here?” he asked. “Find someone who can cross into the Other Place and use the scepter? You can still save yourselves that way.”

  “I don’t care about that just now,” she said. “I care about what’s happening to you. Isn’t there some way I can help you?”

  He shook his head. “What will you tell your band when you go back to them?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell them I met someone from the Other Place.”

  “Say it was a dark mage.” He felt dizzy. He thought he would float away if she didn’t keep hold of his hand. “The darkest. And he told you terrible things.”

  “I’ll say it was Dylan, and that he finally came home to his own world.”

  “To the world he ruined?” He closed his eyes. He hardly knew what he was saying. Exhaustion threatened to overtake him. “He started all of this, the real Dylan. Drew us all together and now we’ve screwed each other up. We might have been okay if we had walked away much sooner. We could have gone back to how we were before we got stuck together.”

  He felt Quinn shift in the dirt next to him. “You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “People don’t change you. They can’t, because you’re never just one thing to begin with.”

  “They do. They do terrible things and you go to pieces. You can’t be put together again.”

  She brushed a hand over his forehead, light as a falling leaf. “That’s what people are. Just all different pieces.”

  Quinn imagined the tall spikes of the Bristle Beast coming up through the dirt, felt herself speared. The smell of decay kept coming back to her coupled with the memory of running, running from the yellow Dream House.

  The soft sound of Dylan’s breathing drew Quinn’s attention. His sleeping form had sunk into the leaf litter, sunk too far. Quinn couldn’t tell where his back ended and the ground began. All of his lines and shapes had gone blurry. He was like a Water Nymph: half in, half out of the world.

  He was like something being consumed.

  Quinn was like something being invaded. Her entire world filled up all the space inside of her. The ruffled lakes, the shadows of moss on trees. The white unspooling rivers, trailing like veils over mountain ridges. Truley gathering up the howling baby, Artak at the fire. The yawning crevices. The charred camp.

  She tried to picture it all going to pieces.

  Once Quinn had seen her band set fire to another band’s camp. She imagined it now as the forest fire she had once watched from the High Tower—red and orange and soft gray—eating and eating at the world.

  Destruction wasn’t the work of mages.

  Dylan awoke when he heard Quinn’s soft footfalls coming back to him. She jostled him as she lay down again. He felt the cool smoothness of the device in her hand. He tried to slide it out of her grip and found that he was no longer solid enough to do so. The scepter tumbled into the leaves. Quinn’s hand melded into his, pushing right through his loosely held cells.

  He found he didn’t mind.

  Quinn severed the connection between the worlds. She chose death for her own.

  Her work was done. She trembled on the cool blanket of leaves, still holding Dylan’s hand.

  His words rang in her ears: Your world will continue to die. Time will go to pieces. If you sever the connection, it will happen much, much quicker.

  She thought: Maybe life will narrow down to a single moment.

  It could be a moment like the Moribund, a pinpoint of agony. Or it could be something lovely, like pulling out of the water into the sunlight.

  She listened to the leaves rustle in a warm breeze, the only voice on the air.

  Another sound among the trees—

  She raised herself up to look.

  And saw the oddest sight: A young boy was moving through the woods, confusion lining his face.

  And here was a young girl coming to meet him, the sun in her hair.

  Quinn shivered with surprise. She sat frozen, watching.

  “It’s them,” she said in awe. “The Girl Queen. And Dylan—the real Dylan.”

  Time will go to pieces.


  “It’s the moment they first met,” she said. It was like seeing an avatar, someone brought from the past.

  Already they were vanishing, like all the other avatars vanished. Sliding back into the time from which they’d come.

  But Quinn had seen them.

  A magical sighting, sent from the past.

  Or, no: a sign of a world going to pieces. And it was only chance that it had been young Dylan and the Girl Queen she had seen. An accident.

  But maybe some accidents were magic.

  Maybe some people were meant to find each other.

  Quinn huddled closer to Dylan and he stirred.

  “I wish people could know about the end,” she said.

  His agitation made the air around them ripple. “About how I lied? How your world will die?”

  “No. I wish they could know about the two of us,” she went on, turning to face him. She couldn’t feel his hand anymore. He was as loose as a cloud. But all of his molecules seemed to be reaching, reaching. “And how one world saved the other.”

  He and Quinn were both reaching now, lifting away with time and heat and air.

  Like water into sunlight.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Parker Peevyhouse lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has worked as an instructor and tutor and currently volunteers with teens. She enjoys puzzles and games of all kinds and can usually be found wandering local trails or watching science fiction movies. Where Futures End is her debut novel.

  Find her online at www.parkerpeevyhouse.com, and follow Parker on Twitter (@parkerpeevy).

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