I picked up the first puzzle ball, the one Will had given me and in which I’d found the quiet one of Dru’s pair of earrings, and rolled it around in my hands until I found the odd slit in the surface into which my father’s key fit. I didn’t have to fumble around with the funny little wire puzzle this time. Once in my hand it shuffled into the right shape on the first try, adding its satisfied humming to the song of the grid. I was filled with disgust at the smug noise of it all.
The puzzle ball folded outward, opening wider and larger, moving away from me as it pushed a passage into the Grey. I started to step into the passage, but a distant voice shouted and made me pause:
“Theseus had a ball of yarn to mark his path through the labyrinth.”
It didn’t look like another labyrinth, just a hallway, but so far very little of this had been what it seemed. I didn’t have any yarn, though. I put my hands into my pockets, searching for anything I could use and finding only the hard, cool tin in which I’d stuck the strand of Todd Simondson. I pulled it out and looked it over. The writhing end of his energy fluttered from under the lid.
I opened the tin and Simondson flowed out, confused by his surroundings but still pissed off. Before he could start demanding anything, I shushed him and caught a twist of his strand on my finger while I stuffed the second puzzle ball—Cristoffer’s puzzle ball—into my jacket.
“Stay right here,” I ordered the ghost of my murderer, and I started into the doorway, trailing his angry color behind me. Nothing and no one seemed to object.
The red illumination of Dru Cristoffer’s labyrinth faded until I was able to see only by the shifting ghostlight that defined the hallway I was walking down. I cast a glance back over my shoulder, but though I’d never made a turn, the way behind me bent and vanished into darkness. The deeper I moved into the mist, the quieter my head became. I could feel more, feel the energy of the grid running through me as if I’d bled out completely and my veins were full of the living fire of magic. But of the chorus that had invaded my mind both dreaming and awake, I could hear almost nothing. I twisted to the left and found another, smaller round room with no other entrances or exits.
This had to be the center of whatever labyrinth I’d just run. Keeping Simondson’s thread looped around my finger, I dug the other puzzle ball from my jacket even as I felt the grid nexus below my feet as strong and loud as before; I had moved and yet ended up in the same place. I fiddled with the key and felt it click into shape. This time it only made a dull whisper and opened the next ball with a grating noise.
There was a stink of recent, bloody death, burned gunpowder, and the ice-blue odor of anesthetic. For a moment the silence was so profound I thought I’d gone deaf. Then came the distant sound of bone spines chiming against one another and a train wreck’s screech moving sideways and away from me. I recognized the strange underwater babble from a dream, and still trailing the red light of Simondson’s ghost from my fingers, I stepped into utter darkness that unfolded from the second puzzle like a blanket of night.
TWENTY-FOUR
Beyond the portal of the open puzzle ball, the darkness brightened slowly into the silvery mist of the Grey, but not quite as I’d seen it in a long time. This was more chaotic than I’d become used to. The mist itself writhed and swirled as if things churned unseen below its surface, things that pressed incomplete impressions of their form into the dark fog, turning up glimpses of faces and limbs that then sank away into the restless steam of the world between. Walls made themselves evident, the form of the maze composed of passing roils of gaping, half-formed heads and writhing limbs. The grid had ceased to sing and only the vague burbling remained. Here the power lines of magic had gone quiet and reverted to the empty wire-frame grid I used to know. Here was a corner where the Grey was hidden even from itself.
I followed the walls, staying to the left for two turns, drawing closer to the gut-wrenching odor. I came around a corner and into a small open circle: the middle of the last labyrinth. Here the faces in the walls made shrieking, gibbering expressions of torment and madness, but no sound came out of their twisted mouths. Off to my right, about the three o’clock position, a human form protruded from the wall, mostly free but not entirely. Part of the head, one arm, and the side down to the hip were undifferentiated from the cloud-stuff of the writhing wall that appeared to be splashed with dark-red gore. I recognized the odd medicinal smell under the death-stink: lidocaine, a contact anesthetic my father had used in his dental office. The figure in the wall turned toward me, twisting in an impossible way through its apparent skin.
I recoiled a step: It wasn’t that the head was imbedded in the wall, but that part of it was missing. And I recognized the too-fine hair and doe-brown eyes just a moment before he said, “Little girl . . . you made it.”
Part of me wanted to run to him and part of me wanted to scream and hide, but I just stood still and stared at him and felt my eyes grow hot and wet.
“Oh, no . . . oh, little girl, don’t do that. Don’t cry. There’s already plenty of blood and plenty of tears here.”
I stumbled a step toward him. “Dad?”
“I’m sorry you have to see this. I never wanted you to.”
“I understand that, Dad,” I said, wiping the ruddy tears off with my sleeve.
“Be careful. You’ve been clever—and lucky. You were always lucky, but now you have to be wise. Listen up, little girl—there’s not a lot of time. Don’t cry. Don’t bleed. It heals you, but this close to the web the power wants to flow freely through you. It’ll push every living thing out of you if you let it. I don’t want that for you.”
“Dad—” I started, but he cut me off with a glare that sent ice into my chest.
“Listen up! It’s the Guardian Beast he’s after. He’ll take its place—that’s what he means to do—but he has to have you to make the way. He needs someone to call it and someone to kill it and you to trap it between the Grey and the normal. And after that he has no use for any of you.”
“But . . . why would he want to be the Guardian . . . ?”
“He doesn’t want to guard anything; he just wants to take its place—that’s not the same thing. He’s like you: He’s becoming part of the living grid. But he doesn’t want to be sucked away into the song. He wants to own it, to control it. If he can displace and destroy the Guardian—”
A clattering and bubbling started up beyond the wall of silently screaming faces. My father’s eyes bulged and he looked panicked. “Oh, no. . . . They’re coming back. . . .”
The mist-world began a gentle heaving.
“You have to go. I don’t want you to see . . .”
“But Dad, how do I get you out—”
“You can’t. They’ll know. You mustn’t tip your hand until the last minute! This place is hidden, but if it’s empty, they’ll know.” He twitched and pulled into the wall a bit, letting out a gagging sound. “Please go! Now! Listen to the song. Don’t trust it, but listen. It will tell you what it needs, but you must know when to refuse or you’ll be swallowed up. Draw close; command it; then turn it on him when he’s vulnerable. Don’t let him become the Architect of the Grey. Use the second door—this puzzle—from wherever you are. It will bring you straight here so long as the first door is still open and then . . . and then you can do what you have to. Carry the ball and key with you until then and protect them well. Anyone can use the door but only you can stop the plan. Oh, no. . . .”