I sank to my knees on the bones of those who had come before me, and I wept. The Klaxons still wailed in the city, in a metallic imitation of my own sobbing, and on the horizon I saw a line of smoke billowing into the sky, which was now the color of a days-old bruise, yellow and green and sickly.
I saw the Moaning Marsh to my left, the mud bubbling and steaming. In daytime the lost souls were sad scraps of things, and they clustered at the edge of the marsh, staring at me.
“Don’t cry.” A pair of pointed men’s shoes, covered in the dust of the bone road, came into my field of view. I couldn’t see clearly at first through the blur of tears, but I swiped at my eyes and regarded Tesla for the second time.
“And why not?” I demanded. “Now seems as good a time as any.”
“You did something I could never do,” Tesla said. “You kept this place alive, and you kept the Yellow King at bay.”
“But this place is his creation,” I said, trying not to start sobbing again. “I’ve doomed all of you.”
“No,” Tesla said softly, placing his hand on the top of my head. “No. As long as he’s trapped here, he won’t destroy this place. If he does, he’ll be floating in a void with nothing. And he’s too vain to be alone.”
“But what about Dean? What about all the other souls who’ll still be trapped here?” I said. I sucked in air for the first time since I’d landed in the Deadlands. It hit my empty lungs like a hammer, and I tried not to flinch.
“I have a feeling that with his power so diminished, this place won’t be the torment it was,” Tesla said. He gestured toward the city, where the green smog was starting to blow away in long wisps, like streaks of gangrene in the sky. “It might even be the sort of place one would want to visit after death. But as for Dean … you’d better take him and go,” Tesla said, looking truly grim for the first time. “Go right now, while Nylarthotep is still battered and confused, because that’s going to be your only chance to escape.” Tesla gripped my arms and stared into my eyes. His were pale and set far apart, but they were among the most intense I’d ever seen. Whatever life lent us the Weird, it burned behind his eyes like a living fire.
“Run for your life,” Tesla stated. “And forget this place. Never come back until the day you die.”
I looked toward the columns of smoke and wanted to sob all over again. “It’s too far.…”
Tesla shook his head and stepped away from me, into the center of the road. “Stand back,” he warned. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this.”
I watched in a mixture of wonder and horror as the air shimmered around us. White bone dust, fine and sparkling, rose in a whirlwind around Tesla’s body, and then pain spiked through my head as a clap of displaced air rolled across the landscape, and a black, swirling void in the landscape, surrounded by a mist of dust and cosmic flotsam, stood before us. I couldn’t see what was on the other side, could only hear the scream of air as the portal sucked it in.
“I may be dead and without my Weird,” Tesla said, “but I still have my skills.” He stepped aside and gestured me in. “This Gate will take you where you need to go, but you need to go quickly. Take Dean, take your reprieve, and go back to the land of the living.”
I started to step through the Gate, feeling its power pulse against my Weird, then stopped and turned back to Tesla. I wanted to look at him once more, and there was a question I needed to ask—really, the only question I’d wanted an answer to since the moment I’d discovered I could manipulate the Gates. The moment I’d discovered that Tremaine betrayed me, and the moment I’d discovered that to save my family, I might have doomed the world.
The question that lurked beneath the iron madness and the nightmares and the bad memories.
“How did you live with it?” I asked him. “Starting the Storm? Changing the world forever? How did you ever close your eyes again?”
Tesla gave me a sad smile, his fingers brushing my temple as our hair whipped around our faces in the wind. “I didn’t,” he said. “It haunted me for the rest of my life, Aoife. You don’t ever stop wondering if things could have been different if you’d just turned your face away from the shadows, away from the unseen, and pretended the world is just as it appears in daylight.”
I caught his hand, feeling the pull of the Gate but needing a few moments longer. “And what did you do instead?” I whispered, somehow knowing he could hear me even over the roar of the space-bending Gate.
Tesla stared into the heart of the Gate for a moment, before he switched his gaze back to me. “I found a way to endure,” he said. “I got up and I tried to fight against the evil I had unknowingly wrought. I made it my mission to protect my world from those who would seek to destroy it, and to help my world find those who would better it and bring it forward into a new age of the supernatural being entirely normal.”
He gave me a gentle push toward the Gate, and I was powerless to resist any longer. “Endure, Aoife,” he said. “Keep your head up, even when it feels like you can’t. You survive because you must. Because your gift can break the world, but it can also save it.”
Traveling through the Gate was merely a blink of an eye, but in that blink I could feel myself spread across a vast distance, every atom of me separate and distinct. Then, just as quickly, I was gasping on the wet floor of the Catacombs as the roof shook above and the restless spirits drifted around me, mouths wide open and screaming.
Tesla had said it would pass. That Nylarthotep could never be alone, would never destroy his world. I thought he was probably right—the Yellow King reveled far too much in his subjects’ misery to ever destroy this place.
Still, it wasn’t right, or natural. The dead didn’t belong to Nylarthotep. They didn’t belong to anyone. Someday, when I was stronger, when I was the Gateminder I was meant to be, I’d disregard Tesla’s advice and I’d come back here and make sure the Deadlands were as they should be—different for each soul, none in torment except those who brought it on themselves.
I knew it for a certainty as I made my way to Dean’s cell and shoved the bolt back on the door. “Dean?”
He came toward me at once, and wrapped his arms around me. “You can’t be here,” he said. “You have to leave, now.”
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
“No,” Dean murmured against my hair. He drew back and looked me in the eye. This was Dean, really him, and seeing his face I realized how pale the imitation that Nylarthotep had cooked up had been.
“There’s no arguing,” I said. “I came here to get you, more than anything, and I’m at least going to do that.”
“No,” Dean insisted. “I have to stay here, Aoife, and you have to get back.”
The Catacombs vibrated around us again, and a rush of souls flowed past the door like a flash flood.
“It’s not your choice,” I told Dean, and gripped his hands. I felt my Weird tug at me and realized that the shaking was not Nylarthotep but the thin tether that held me to the living world via the séance machine. Chang had said spending too much time in the Deadlands would make me harder to bring back, decay my living soul until it died, and I could feel it happening even as I wrapped my arms around Dean, even as he struggled, protested, tried to save me.
“It’s not your turn to save me!” I shouted as the cell collapsed around us with a great roar and blinding white light seared my vision into nothingness. “I have to save you!”
16
Awake
AT FIRST I thought I was in the void of nothing, the same place that contained the Old Ones. I saw flashes of their great eyes and limpid bodies, drifting between galaxies, between supernovas, on and on, until one turned to look at me and I thought if I could just hold its gaze, I would know all the secrets of the stars. But I couldn’t, and meeting the great eye burned me like staring into the surface of the sun.