The Crooked Letter (61 page)

He wanted to yell again, to vent his frustration at the Sisters for leaving him as much in the dark as everyone else had. What was the point of bringing him to such a place and leaving him to get lost? There was precious little choice open to him. All the lives he had seen ended in Cataclysm, one way or another. It was either that or he didn’t exist. What difference would it make if he wandered the empty halls of his life for eternity? Nothing was ever going to change.

Even as he fumed, Ana’s parting words sank in, triggering a memory.

Don’t be fooled, boy,
the raven Kutkinnaku had told him.
There is a third way.

A third way?

He picked a life at random. In it, Hadrian was run down by a speeding car and died in a German hospital when a nurse administered the wrong drug. The first incident was an accident, but the second was deliberate; Bechard’s lips were pursed sensually as he administered the fatal dose. Hadrian plunged into a dark landscape of hideous creatures, with hands like knives and limbs of bone. They snapped at him, chopped off his arms and legs, and took him prisoner. While he languished in a psychic cell, the Cataclysm came as planned and Yod overtook the world. He was reunited with his brother an instant before they died, when everything had been devoured and the world itself was dead. In the depths of Yod’s belly, they clutched at each other like babies and wept as darkness fell.

No sign of a third way there. Ellis had been present, though. She was in the ward when he had been murdered. She’d called for help as his heart had stopped. Her frantic cries were the last thing that version of himself had heard.

He tried another life, and another. A dagger to the heart, a knife across the throat, a bullet in the head. Poison. Incineration. Evisceration. Every death he could possibly imagine, he or his brother suffered it. His life-tree was a nightmare.

It dawned on him, eventually, that the moment of death wasn’t the turning point he required. He needed another one, another point of reference from which to search. The act of rescuing Ellis wasn’t an event common to all universes. Neither was the ascension to the top of the mountain with Pukje and the confrontation between him and Lascowicz. There was, in fact, only one common point across all the lives he visited, regardless of who was murdered, Hadrian or his brother:
All roads lead to Sheol,
Mimir had said.

That was the turning point, then. Even Kybele had listened to the old god’s advice. If there was no way to avoid the Cataclysm, there might be ways to minimise it or contain it.

At the turning point in Sheol, an array of options spread before him. He couldn’t see the moment itself; everything within Sheol was excised from his life-tree, as though it stood outside him. And that made sense, he supposed. What would happen if he were able to look in and see himself? It would be like standing between parallel mirrors. The existence of an infinite number of reflections did nothing to warp space and time, but it did bend the mind of the person contemplating the fact.

The echo of the thought spread around him, as his earlier shout had.

Although he couldn’t see Sheol, he could see the roads leading from it. He could see where worldlines had been severed and grafted onto new ones. One future could be traded for another by taking the present — within Sheol — and crossing it with another. It wasn’t so much rewriting history as turning it into a Frankenstein’s monster: this past and that future connected by a present removed from both of them, set free to lurch off on its new path, most of its inhabitants none the wiser. The success of such worlds was varied. All featured the Cataclysm in one form or another. If Seth went back to the First Realm, the Cataclysm went away until Yod murdered one of them again. If Hadrian stayed in the Second Realm, Yod found another way across — by killing either of the twins a second time and forcing a Cataclysm between the Second and Third Realms. When that happened, the alien predator was able to stroll through life-trees at will and choose the one that resulted in the conjunction it actually wanted. One way or another, it always got into the First Realm, and there its feasting on human life began in earnest. Hadrian’s days, whichever way he looked, seemed always to end in a wasteland steeped in ruination and despair, as Yod willed it.

It was ironic, he thought, that the link between he and his brother, which they had spent most of their life defying, could bring them to that end. Yod wouldn’t want them apart if they weren’t mirror twins. If they weren’t mirror twins they wouldn’t belong together. There was no way out, as far as he could see.

But there
had
to be a way out, and he had to be able to find it, or else why would Ana have left him there? He doggedly considered all the directions in which the escape might lie — along which of the many possibilities he had considered thus far. Existence or non-existence? Life or death? First or Second Realm? Cataclysm or no Cataclysm?

Where was the third way?

He almost missed it. The sole exception was just one branch among millions, a single, solitary world-line stretching away from Sheol at an odd angle, branchless and, at first glance, completely empty. But it wasn’t empty. Hadrian could feel its presence when he stumbled across it, and he was able to navigate along its length back to Sheol, then forward again, by following its geometry. It existed, and he existed in that world, even if very little was happening to him. There seemed to be precious little left of him for anything to happen to.

The branch extended for a disproportionately long rime. Far past the ending of all the other lines, it was still going strong. He began to wonder if he had made a mistake after all — if the branch was a weird flaw in the Third Realm rather than a genuine feature of his life — when suddenly a flash of colour and motion rushed over him. The world burst back into being with a torrent of browns, whites and reds.

He slowed his headlong rush and looked around in amazement. This wasn’t the world he had known, either before or after the Cataclysm. Hints of what it had been and what it might become lay buried beneath deserts and mountains, under seas and mighty glaciers. It was a world that hovered on the brink. Barely had the transition begun when that world-line exploded into a multitude of possibilities, too many to take in at once. His death was in all of them.

There, on the cusp of oblivion, he found Seth sitting despondently on a rocky outcrop, staring out over the barren mountaintops.

‘Where were you?’ his brother said, looking up briefly then turning back to the view. ‘Took you long enough.’

‘I didn’t know you were waiting for me.’ He followed the direction of Seth’s gaze. The weird thing was, he knew the mountains around them. He had been there, and recently. ‘I’m sorry I kept you waiting.’

Seth waved his concern away. ‘You haven’t missed anything. I can’t believe Agatha died for this.’

‘Who’s Agatha?’

‘She got me here. And what for? It’s pointless.’ Seth’s voice was full of bitterness. ‘I’ve been pushed around and kept in the dark right from the beginning. They never had any intention of giving me what I wanted.’

Hadrian had no idea what his brother was talking about. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I asked them to take me to the moment I died, meaning the train in Sweden. The knife.’ He swallowed. ‘Well, that’s not where I ended up. Meg dumped me here instead.’

Hadrian looked around. The metal hut was gone, but there was a stone structure in its place that looked weathered and ancient.

‘I’m sure she did it for a reason.’

‘If she did, I fail to see what it was.’

‘Well ...’ Hadrian moved cautiously closer to his brother, trying to show sympathy even though he didn’t understand the deep sense of powerlessness that undermined him. ‘You don’t have to stay. You can move —’

‘Oh, I know about that. And fine viewing it makes, too. How does it make you feel to know that we were always for the chop, that no matter what we did the world was going to end?’

Hadrian stared out at the mountains, at the crisp dawn light setting the horizon on fire. The view from that point in his life-tree was one of scars and cancerous growth, but there was healing, too, and the chance of recuperation.

He remembered Kybele saying:
It’s time you accepted the fact that the life you once knew is gone.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Some people might love to be in our position.’

‘We’re not some people.’

‘And it hasn’t been all bad.’

Seth snorted. ‘Don’t lie to me, brother. I’ve looked down your world-line. I’ve seen what happened to you. No wonder you looked so shocked when you saw Ellis.’

‘You’ve — what? How?’ The thought that Seth had been rummaging around in his history — all his histories — made him feel violated and angry. Hadrian fought it. He hadn’t known what to expect, seeing Seth again, but he was certain that being thrust back into his old way of thinking wasn’t right.

‘This is an intersection,’ his brother said. ‘A join. You can look at mine, too, if you want. I can’t stop you. Our life-trees overlap.’

Was that why you did it?
Hadrian wanted to ask him.
Because I couldn’t stop you? Or because you actually wanted to?

‘That’s exactly what I’ll do,’ he said, letting his anger fuel the desire to do unto as he had been done to. He sought the opening to Seth’s life-tree, found it all around him, in the very fabric of the reality they had stumbled into, and stormed off into another past.

* * * *

Metallic meteorites hurtled around Sheol and pleaded in soft voices to be allowed to live, while a living ship swam in response to its pilot’s song and dreamed peaceful dreams. Ancient gods in ancient cages whispered with hope of Hadrian’s coming, and a captured hurricane bayed for revenge with darkness at its heart. A glowing goddess stood trapped in a statue of gold, betrayed by the child of her love, while a sailor in the sky wished him peace. The snake-toothed monster Hadrian had dreamed of in the First Realm saved Seth’s life, then the monster’s identical twin tried to kill him.

Words assailed him:

In the times to come, we will all lose something and gain something.

Does he know who he is?

I’m sure you’ll find the rest of you soon ...

* * * *

Hadrian pulled out of his brother’s life with a cry. It was too much. He couldn’t take it all in: the faces, the places, the names, the issues. How could he pretend to understand what Seth had undergone when he could barely comprehend his own experiences — the ones he himself had lived through in this life alone?

‘I’m sorry.’

The moment he had been viewing froze around him in a blur of motion. Xol had been fighting

Quetzalcoatl in a bid to break the terrible deadlock binding them both to the Second Realm. Little did the dimane know that they were as trapped as Seth and Hadrian. Without Xol’s betrayal, Yod would never have known how to bring about a Cataclysm using the Castillo brothers. One preceded the other.

Seth had joined him.

‘I know you’re sorry, too,’ his brother said. ‘It’s not your fault it has to end like this. Horva told me it wouldn’t fix anything, coming here. I should’ve listened.’

‘Would it have made any difference?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe if it had just been you, things would’ve worked out all right. Maybe you would have known what to do. Maybe Agatha would still be alive.’

Hadrian stared at his brother, wondering where the twin he had known had gone. Who was this weakened, hollow thing before him?

That’s me,
he thought.
Or it was me. We’re still reflections. We’ve just changed sides.

He wanted to tell his brother that there were no easy fixes, that coming to Sheol was only the beginning of the solution, not the end. The woman called Agatha was dead, but so was Kybele. There was at least some sort of balance.

But there were no easy ways to say that, either.

‘Let’s go back to Sweden,’ he said.

‘What would be the point? We know how it ended.’

‘It hasn’t ended yet.’

‘What I saw in the hotel room? I’d say it’s pretty much over and done with now.’

‘You didn’t see what you thought you saw. I mean you
did,
but —’ He stopped, knowing words alone would never be enough.

‘I’m going there now,’ he said. ‘I’ll expect you soon.’

He willed himself through his branching lives, sweeping back to the world-line he had followed to Sheol, to this strange reunion with his brother. The suite was exactly as he remembered it: much better than they’d become accustomed to elsewhere on their trek, but nothing terribly special. He and Ellis were on the bed. The door was ajar. A hand pushing it open was visible from the perspective he had chosen.

What came next was burned in his memory.

(‘I knew it,’ said a voice from the doorway. All passion vanished at the bitter chill in those three short words. ‘I fucking knew it.’

Hadrian pulled away from Ellis. The doorway was empty, but Seth had been there. There was a black hole in his wake, as though a winter storm cloud had invaded the room. The void sucked away all of Hadrian’s contentedness and replaced them with guilt and panic.

He leapt out of bed. ‘Seth!’

The door to the suite slammed. Footsteps thumped down the corridor outside.

‘Bloody hell.’ He pulled on the bare minimum — pants, a T-shirt, sneakers — and grabbed his coat.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Ellis, but he didn’t hear her. He was out of the room before she was barely on her feet and reaching for her clothes.

The corridor outside was empty. Elevator doors closed on a lonely figure punching the cab’s opposite wall. Hadrian hurried to the fire stairs and ran down them two at a time. His brother was just crossing the foyer as he burst out of the stairwell on the ground floor.

‘Seth, wait! Let me explain!’

A slight quickening of pace was the only sign that his brother had heard. Head down, hunched like a turtle into his coat, Seth strode out of the hotel.

Hadrian doggedly followed, wincing at the blast of cold air that greeted him. The pavement was slippery beneath his feet and a wintry sun hung low over the horizon, glinting off ice crystals. Seth was already at the nearest corner. Hadrian ran after him, calling his brother’s name. When he turned the corner, Seth was running too, shouldering his way past sensibly dressed pedestrians. Warm air puffed from mouths in startled curses, puffed again as Hadrian followed in his brother’s wake.