Unreal City (20 page)

Outside, lightning was pulverizing the cracked earth. Glancing back, I could see Felix was behind me, and behind him the scorpion and its master. The gravity shifted four more times as we dashed across Poe’s garden. Each time I was on the verge of falling, but I kept on running. I would not fate myself to Poe’s mercy.

The gravity shifted again, but this time with it came a new scene. We now stood at the edge of a balcony with nowhere to go but a dizzyingly high drop. Black pine trees stretched upward and in the boughs sat three owls with impossibly large eyes. I stumbled to a halt, paralyzed by these owls that looked so still and threatening. A quick glance backward told me Poe and his familiar were still advancing, thundering down a hallway toward us.

“Jump!” Felix urged, and I trusted him. We leapt off the balcony together, the eyes of the owls following us.

There was no bottom to this fall. Once the tops of the trees left our vision, Felix and I plummeted downward into nothingness, frantically reaching for one another in midair. I grabbed the tip of his tail and pulled him close. Pure terror reigned while I tried to think of any way out of this, which intensified when everything froze. We were suspended in midair for what felt like eons, until out of the gloom I saw something materialize in front of me.

It was an image of myself holding Felix, only reversed. It took me a second to realize I was staring at a mirror that stood between two stone arches, and that ground now lay beneath my feet. I turned, only to see that another mirror blocking the way behind me. I turned again: another mirror.

“This way,” Felix said, leaping from my arms and marching forward through what I thought would be glass barring his way. When his reflection didn’t run up to block him, I hurried after him. “It’s a maze. He knows he can’t keep us trapped here. There are always cracks in every person’s mind, so he’s trying to confuse us. Keep us lost until he can get here first. If we run, we can make it.”

Felix and I took off through the mirrored maze. I felt a little wonderstruck by the repeating hallways and pristine glass that bridged the way between the stone arches. I could see dozens of reflections of myself—bruised and bloody—at every angle. It was almost hypnotic, until I heard the hissing, wolf-like cry of the scorpion beast and the thundering footsteps of Poe.

Of course, he
made
this maze. He knows how to solve it.

My heartbeat accelerated a hundredfold; I had to get away. Dead end after dead end barred our way, and the madman’s footsteps were growing closer. I felt myself succumb to hysteria.

“Can’t you just bust a hole in it?!” I hissed at Felix. He reared back and took a swipe at the wall, but his claws bounced off.

Suddenly, there he was. There, glazed in sweat and bearing his teeth, was Poe. I put up a hand to protect myself, then realized it was only his reflection that I saw. I ran in any direction I could, twice slamming hard into a mirror and seeing his image hounding me wherever I went. Forcing myself to keep going, I pummeled hard into a pinched end and when I turned to go back, I knew it was over. He’d caught me.

Felix stood between the advancing madman and me. Glee was apparent on Poe’s face, his lips twitched in a perverse smile, the scorpion scuttling at his bony feet. Felix hissed, baring his fangs.

The scorpion struck first, leaping on Felix and stabbing him viciously with his barbed tail. The two rolled over one another, ripping with claws, tearing with teeth, fierce in their urge to destroy one another. Poe sidestepped the brawl and came toward where I was cornered. A sob escaped my throat, and I sunk to the ground, my hands over my face.

“It’s because of you. It’s your fault that I’m this way. And because of that I’m going to take you apart and give you the punishment you deserve. You did this to me. You’re rotten to your very core,” he whispered, reverent, as though reading scripture from a sacred book. “I’m going to take from you what I could never have.”

Poe lifted his hand. The sound of the familiars’ rage behind him was growing more intense as he snapped his fingers and a bright thread of white light blossomed from his fingers. He brandished it in the air like a whip and brought it snapping down over my shin. It cut like an electric saw through balsawood. Searing pain shot up my leg and my screams reverberated through the mirrored halls. My head thrashed, my eyes bulged, and I could see it happening all too clearly, reflected all around me. I felt every pulse of agony as a rush of blood seeped from my stump of a leg. Poe was laughing at me, empowered by what he’d done. With gusto he reeled backward again and spun that horrid light-whip through the air. I put my arms up to block it, and in a flashing instant of spiraling torture, I saw my left arm drop off and hit the floor. Blood was quickly filling up my little corner and the sound of Poe’s laughter was drilling into my ears. Every inch of my being perceived pain.

He knelt beside me, putting his sweating, smelly head close to mine. “You have no idea what kind of a person you are, do you? You deserve this,” Poe whispered, his breath warm and wet on my face. He lifted a grungy finger and his nail lit up white-hot like the whip. He grabbed my forehead and pinned my head to the side of the mirror, then took aim. I could see in the reflection that he was going for the soft area between my jaw and ear.

The first puncture felt like a drill bit going into my head. My scream came, gurgled, and tears streamed down my cheeks. I caught sight of Felix scratching madly at the scorpion’s shell. Our eyes locked as Poe started to cut along my jawline.

“Help me,” I whispered to my familiar.

Without hesitation, Felix leapt over the scorpion to me, his claws extended. Poe drew back in surprise and with a staggering force my spirit slammed him into a mirror. The glass shattered and Felix tore into Poe’s chest, ripping off large hunks of his skin with every swipe. I crawled forward and seized a mirror shard that sliced my fingers. I leaned over to Poe and looked him straight in the eye as he tussled with Felix.

“I—am—
innocent
.” I plunged the mirror shard deep into his chest, and this time I enjoyed his scream.

Felix held him down as I picked up my fallen limbs from the floor. Out of nowhere, the officious little beast of Poe’s stabbed the foot still attached to my body with its stinger. The burn of its poison hit me with the force of a bullet. I clutched my severed arm and leg close to me, holding them in a vice-grip as I convulsed. Felix pushed Poe away, and with one decisive bite, snipped the wolf-like head off the scorpion. Its teeth continued to champ and its eyes rolled as it lay on the floor.

Felix wrapped his tail around me. It stretched out, curling over and over until I was coiled up in his bonds. “Hold on, Sarah,” was his only warning before he tossed me and I went shooting up.

I burst through the ceiling in a shower of glass and stone. My body went limp as I sailed through the clouds and starry sky, which looked as if it were the curved inside of a snow globe. Felix had thrown me into the airway above Poe’s garden.

Then I fell. I fell holding the pieces of my mangled body and watching my blood and tears stream upward into the air. My eyes shut, my face contorted, and I was swallowed up by the sound of wind roaring in my ears. It was the most nightmarishly sublime moment in my life, not knowing where I was falling to or what would happen when I hit the ground. But a large part of me didn’t care anymore. For those few brief seconds when I was falling, I was free.

WATER MET ME
at the bottom. But it didn’t knock the life out of me, or even sting my wounds. It swallowed up my body gently, as if I was sinking into a warm bath instead of being tossed by ocean waves, yet it stretched farther than my eye could see. As I sank deeper, I could see the surface above me. Trails of my blood showed how far I was going, and when I let my head roll to the side and all the air escape from between my lips, I saw that the sun was beside me and not above me. I stared into its burning glory as I went deeper and deeper into this warm ocean. When I came to a gentle rest at the bottom, the sensation of being underwater dissipated, but that massive, flaming sun remained.

Clutching my severed arm and leg, I felt the wetness evaporate from my clothes and rolled my bleeding head around. I was lying on a sandy plateau high, high above a desert. The sun was so huge it filled a great portion of the sky, yet it was sinking below the horizon and its brilliance painted the space behind it with many vibrant colors: pink, orange, yellow, and misty blue. And it was warm. The gentle heat soothed the sting in my wounds and dulled the ache of the hole drilled into my jaw. I drank in the rich colors of the desert many miles below where I lay, then shut my eyes again. Exhaustion had won.

“Child,” came the deep rumble of a man’s voice, gentle and soft. “What has brought you to such a sorry state?”

“My sister,” I whispered, thinking only of my broken heart and not my body. “She’s gone. I tried to make it right, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough.” I felt a tear slip down my cheek. “I’m tired.”

“Put yourself back together,” the voice ordered.

I wanted to resist it, to lie there in pieces and just bleed into the sand forever, but I could not ignore the command. With titanic effort, I heaved myself up with my one arm and let the two limbs fall from my grasp. I picked up my arm from the ground first and stuck it back where it belonged. The muscle and blood were cold against my wound when I first pressed it to my bleeding stump, but warmth soon flooded into it and it re-attached. A tingling sensation lit up my fingertips, and I wiggled my fingers and smiled numbly at the miracle. Next I put my leg back on, and whole again, I lay back down in the sand. The warmth of that burning sun was miraculous. I actually felt at ease. I took another deep, healing breath, then turned to see who the voice belonged to.

At the edge of the plateau, an old man sat staring at the sun in quiet meditation. His dark hair was braided and his eyes possessed a serene wisdom that I knew I could never fathom for as long as I lived. At his side stood a bull, its head clean of flesh and fur, but its skull painted with the mesmerizing images of the southwestern desert. In the intricate feathers and beads that decorated this creature’s head, I saw the luster of deep magic.

I worked up enough strength to crawl over and sit beside this man. For a long while, we fixed our eyes on the majesty of that sun in complete silence.

“What is this place?” I dared to ask as curiosity overcame me.

“The tallest mountain, the center of the world. It is all places and all things. It is the axis,” the man said, a cryptic mischievousness in his voice. I thought over what he meant and decided it was best to let such words resonate through me, to swallow them up and digest them and hope that the importance of them would become so assimilated that one day it would all make sense. “Tell me, child, what is it that you are thinking?”

I considered my thoughts for a moment, and they came spilling out in a flood of emotion. “I’m remembering a time before this. Before any of this. I remember a time when there was tenderness in my life, when things didn’t seem too harsh and cold and hard. I have a memory of hope, and of excitement, and of promise that my life was just beginning. That it would go to so many wonderful places. Things felt fresh once. Things were simple and smiles came easily—naturally. I remember loving people, coming to know and trust strangers and believing with all my heart that they would never hurt me. Safety was something I took for granted and I thought that she and I would go on forever. I never thought that I would end up like this. I would do anything to have that back.”

“And what took this from you?”

“My sister did. Lea took it when she died, and no matter h-how hard I try to hold on, I—I feel like I’m losing more and more. I’m forgetting her. I’m
already forgetting her
. The sound of her voice, and the moments we shared. I’m losing a bit more every day. She’s fading from my life, and I can’t do anything to stop it.” Tears came now, and I clutched my chest and hung my head, feeling powerless against the pain that gripped my battered heart. “I thought I could fix it by finding out what happened to her, but I just—I don’t know what I should do anymore.”

“You should let her go.”

“How can you say such a thing?” I bit back, looking at him with rage, but he would not meet my gaze. “I would rather die than forget my sister.”

“I can offer you that, if you’d prefer,” he told me. “Stare into that sun long enough and I will make it burn so brightly that your mind will be lifted from you. It will happen gently, easily, like being lulled into the deepest and most wonderful sleep. Everything that you are will fade, and back on the other side, your friend will take your life from you before you even wake. Your pain will cease for all time, and you will be freed from the burden of life.”