Heaven's Queen (31 page)

It was astonishingly cold, but it didn’t actually hurt. At least, it didn’t hurt me. The phantom, on the other hand, gave a deep moan that set my teeth on edge, but it didn’t let go. Instead, it slid the tentacle in farther until I could feel the icy edge of it inside my lungs. And then, right before my eyes, the tentacle in my chest began to turn black.

For a second, all I could do was stare as the black ink swirl of the virus began to seep up the beautiful glow of the phantom’s body. I was still staring at it when the world fell away, plunging me into the dark.

Just like all the times before, my journey into the oneness happened in an instant. This time around, though, I at least knew what to expect. The second the universe vanished, I braced, ready to face the others, the crowd of lelgis I knew were waiting in the dark. And that’s where things took a turn for the unusual, because when I opened my eyes—something, by the way, I’d never realized I could do here—it was no longer dark.

I was floating weightless in the nothing, and hanging in front of me like a silver moon was the emperor phantom. It looked just as it had when I’d seen it from the window with its clear blue eyes and beautiful snaking tendrils, only there was no window anymore. There was no battleship either, no stars, nothing. Just the phantom and myself floating in the infinite dark.

No, that wasn’t quite right. As my mind adjusted to the beautiful monster filling my vision, I realized I could still feel the unseen watchers out in the dark beyond. I looked around, craning my neck, but the phantom’s glow ruined my vision, or what passed for vision in this place. All I could see beyond the glimmer of its moon-white light was blackness as thick as tar, and so I gave up, turning back to face the monster I could see.

“Okay,” I said, folding my arms over my chest, which I could now see was covered in the same medical scrubs I’d been wearing back in reality. “You brought me here. Now, what do you want?”

I can’t tell you how stupid I felt shouting across what had to be miles of emptiness. Now that I’d lost all points of reference, it was hard to actually tell how big the phantom was, or how far away, other than
very
. But the lelgis had been able to talk to me here no problem, and I figured the phantom, being plasmex as well, would be the same. So I waited, clearing my mind for an encore of the strange mix of impressions and words the lelgis queens had put me through when Reaper died.

What I got was a roar.

The phantom shifted, lifting its mass of snakelike tentacles as it made a deep, musical sound. “Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm.”

The call was so loud I could feel it to my core, churning my guts until I thought I was going to be sick, but what really got me was the fact that it was a
sound
. Not a psychic message or a scream-that-wasn’t-a-scream, but a real, make-your-ears-ache noise that went on for almost a minute before finally trailing off. Then, after a few seconds of blessed silence, the phantom roared again, even louder this time.

“HURRRRRRRRRRRM,” it roared. “
HURRRRRRRRRRRM!
”

I clapped my hands over my ears, but my palms were a poor guard against the vibrations rolling through me like an earthquake. I had no idea what this was about or why I was here or what the hell this phantom thought it was going to gain by yelling at me, but the whole mess was giving me a splitting headache. Worse, the phantom seemed just as frustrated as I was. The whole time it sat there
hurrm
ing, it was staring at me with those huge eyes, waving its huge tentacles in increasingly sharp motions, like it was trying to tell me something and it was angry that I wasn’t getting it.

“What?” I shouted in the gaps. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want me to do?”

The phantom waved its tentacles more frantically than ever, and then it stopped, tapping the ends of its appendages together in a way that gave me the distinct impression it was thinking. After almost a minute of this, it reached its two longest tentacles out toward me, tightening the coils in its snake nest body to get enough slack. I worried it was going to make a grab for me, but the phantom’s tentacles stopped a few dozen feet away. For a second, I was stuck again by how huge it was, and how beautiful. Its body glowed like water lit from within, sparkling in the dark as the longer of the two tentacles bent to form a rectangle.

It was a nice rectangle, too. The phantom’s squishy flesh squeezed itself neatly into four perfect corners. Of course, I still didn’t know what the hell “rectangle” was supposed to mean, but it was nice to see something recognizable. Just when I was starting to feel like maybe we could work with this, though, the phantom took its second tentacle and placed it in front of the rectangle, blocking it from view. Then, slow and deliberately, it pulled the covering tentacle away.

“Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm,” it sang when the rectangle was fully revealed again. “Hurrrrrrm.”

I folded my arms over my chest, wracking my brain as I tried to guess what that could mean. I sucked at puzzles in general, and this was way out of my league. I bit my lip, wishing with all my might that Rupert were here. He was clever at this sort of thing, and he knew a ton about languages. He could probably figure this out. But he wasn’t here, and I didn’t have the first clue what the phantom wanted, or how to tell it I was stumped.

“Hurrrrrrrrrrrrm,” the phantom called again, moving its tentacle back and forth in front of the rectangle like it was playing peekaboo. “HURRRRRRRRRRRM!”

“I hear you!” I shouted. “I’m trying, okay?”

“Horrrrrrrrrum,” it said, varying the intonation until it sounded like whale song from the largest, angriest whale imaginable. “Hoooooorum. Hooooooooooorum.”

I felt like ripping my hair out. God and king, why of all the people in the universe did this stupid alien pick me to play charades with? What the hell was a horum? I couldn’t even think with the phantom roaring like that, so I tuned it out as best I could, combing my brain as I tried to remember if I’d heard that word before in any context. I even tried to search Rupert’s memories, which was incredibly hard with nothing to help trigger them, but he didn’t have anything either so far as I could tell. I was pretty sure “horum” wasn’t even a word, but when I looked up to tell the phantom I had nothing and this was a waste of time, I realized its roar had changed again.

“Hooooooome,” it sang, looking at me as its tentacle went back and forth, the motion no longer just revealing and hiding the rectangle, but pivoting against it, like a door opening and shutting. “Hooooooome.”

And just like that, the puzzle fell into place. “Home,” I repeated, my face breaking into a grin. “You want to go home.”

The phantom dropped its tentacles, and though I might well have been imagining things, I would have sworn its blue eyes looked happy. “Hoooooome,” it roared, making my ears ring. “Hooooooome!”

“You want to go back,” I said, getting excited as well. I could almost hear Dr. Starchild’s voice in my head telling me that Maat was the wall that held back the flood of phantoms. But walls worked both ways. In cutting off the place where their universe broke through into ours, we’d kept new phantoms from entering, but we’d also prevented the ones who were already here from
leaving
. By plugging the hole, we’d cut off their way home. But even as the thrill of solving the riddle raced through me, I realized it didn’t make sense. “Wait,” I said. “Why are you telling me about this?”

The phantom dropped the rectangle and reached out its tentacle again, stretching until the tip was barely touching me. I paused, waiting, but the creature didn’t move. It just hung there, motionless, pointing at me with a glowing tentacle that seemed to be getting shorter.

I took a hissing breath. The tentacle wasn’t getting shorter; it was getting dimmer. Its light was going out, eaten from the tip by a creeping black stain.

I jerked away with a curse. My virus was crawling up the emperor phantom’s tentacle like ink seeping up paper. At my horrified sound, the phantom pushed its dying tentacle at me in a motion that seemed to say
See what you’ve done?
But I didn’t see. I didn’t know—

Stay away.

The words exploded into my head so suddenly I would have jumped twice my height if my feet had had anything to press down on. They didn’t, though, so I just kicked, craning my neck out of a frantic, instinctive need to see where the threat was. Frantic and futile, because I couldn’t see anything except the phantom. It didn’t matter, though; I knew that voice. Or, rather, voices. But just when I was sure I was wasting my time, I spotted something moving out in the dark beyond the phantom’s light.

I’d felt the lelgis when I’d first arrived, before the phantom had distracted me. I’d known they were out there, watching. Now, though, I could feel their hate and fear like bugs crawling over my skin.
We warned you, death bringer
, they whispered in the dark.
We told you, never return.

The words hit me like slaps, but I barely noticed. I was too focused on the great, black, mountain of a shape rearing up out at the light’s edge. I’d seen the lelgis queens before, in the vision they’d showed me of Caldswell bringing them Maat, but that had been just a glimpse, an impression of something enormous and alien. I still couldn’t see them clearly because they stayed in the shadows, keeping away from the phantom’s glow, but I could make out the glassy reflections of millions of eyes set in bodies even larger than the phantom before me coupled with slick flashes of long, sharp barbs the size of battleships creeping in the dark, waiting for their chance to strike.

You will not undo our work
, they hissed, their voices like cutting claws in my mind.
Be gone.

Like before, the word was accompanied by a blow meant to knock me out of the oneness. This time, though, I didn’t go anywhere. Right before the hit had landed, the phantom had wrapped its dying tentacle around my waist, holding me in place as it turned on the monsters in the dark and roared. Not the plaintive whale song it had sung for me, but a true bellow of fury. And as the sound filled the emptiness, the lelgis screamed in reply, their voices shrill and terrified as they skittered back into the shadows.

Once the lelgis had retreated, the phantom turned back to me, dropping the tentacle it had used to catch me, which was now completely black. I expected it to cradle its dying limb, or at least show some sign of pain. Instead, the phantom used the second of the two tentacles it had reached toward me, the one that was still moon bright and uninjured, to form the rectangle again. Once the shape was made, it placed the tentacle I’d infected, the one that was now crumbling into black dust, in front of the pantomime door. “Home,” it said again, its whale song voice filled with longing. “Home.”

As the last of the phantom’s plea rumbled through me, I couldn’t help thinking that I should have guessed the truth a long time ago. Maat had told me herself that the phantoms were prisoners and she was their jailer. She’d told me, too, that the phantoms were the ones who told her to find me. Small voices, she’d said.

I smiled at the enormous emperor. Apparently, I got the big one. But then, I needed it. They’d been trying to get my attention ever since I’d left Reaper’s ship, but I hadn’t spared them a thought other than annoyance. Now, though, I heard them at last, and I understood. Maat was the door, the force that kept them in, and as she’d always told me, my virus was the only thing that could kill her. The only way I could set the phantoms free. Before I did, though, there were a few things I had to be sure of.

“Will you
all
go home?” I asked, gazing up at the phantom shining like the moon above me, tilting my head back to stare into the bluest of its eyes like I could make it understand my question through sheer will. “If I open that door, will you and all your kind leave us in peace?”

The phantom made a deep keening sound, and then, slowly, it reached with its remaining clean tentacle, the one my virus hadn’t destroyed, and pressed the tip gently into my chest.

I hadn’t felt its other touches in the oneness, not when it had taken my virus the first time or when it had steadied me against the lelgis, but I felt this one loud and clear. Just like when it had gone into my chest in the real world, its flesh was unbearably cold. Cold enough to knock my breath out, like I’d jumped naked into an icy lake, and in the moment when my body seized up, the vision filled me.

It wasn’t like the lelgis’ many layered images or Rupert’s memories with their intense feelings. It wasn’t even like the daughter’s hand in my mind. I’d been on a ship with aliens and visited the farthest reaches of known space. I’d fought lelgis and felt an entire xith’cal tribe die one by one, but I’d never felt anything as alien as the phantom’s touch in my mind. I didn’t even think I had all the senses I needed to process the confusing torrent of experiences it was pouring into me, but below all the stuff I was sure I could never understand was a basic need that I got completely: hunger. Horrible, crippling, overwhelming hunger.

For one terrible moment, I saw our universe as the phantoms must: a great, barren waste without food or shelter. They’d come as explorers, but when Maat had closed the door, they’d gotten trapped in a land of death and hunger and darkness, and they couldn’t go home.

The vision vanished in a flash as air exploded back into my body. I floated panting in the nothing as my brain tried to recover, but I wasn’t sure there
was
a recovery from this. Even now that I was alone in my head again, I could feel the alien echo of the phantom in my brain, and when I looked down at my own body, at the faint glimmer of plasmex I could now see shining under my skin below the black film of the virus, part of me saw it as food. Thin, terrible, insufficient food.

“You eat plasmex,” I said dumbly, more to myself than to the phantom. Dr. Starchild had said as much, but I’d never really understood. Never known. “You’re starving,” I said, my head shooting up. “That’s why you want to go—”

The word died on my lips. When the phantom’s cold had left my body, I’d assumed it was because it had removed its tentacle. Now I saw I was wrong. The tentacle was still pressed against my chest, but it was black as the void around us.
All
of it.