“Aoife,” Casey gasped. “Don’t let go!”
“You’re going to have to climb over me,” I gritted out. “Use me to get to the next step.”
To Casey’s credit, she didn’t argue. To mine, I didn’t scream when her weight increased exponentially and I felt a sick, wet popping in one of my elbow joints.
Her foot hooked in my belt, and then her weight was off me and her hands were around my tingling wrists, pulling me up by any bit of shirt or skin she could grasp. We both sprawled on the icy floor atop the spiral staircase.
I couldn’t remember when I’d been in more pain. Though, on the bright side, I wasn’t cold any longer.
Once I’d gathered my breath and my wits, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t stand just yet, and my arm was on fire, but I was alive, and I decided that for the time being, that was enough.
I saw we were at the top of the Bone Sepulchre, in a spire barely large enough for four people to stand shoulder to shoulder. I poked Casey with my good arm. “Are you all right?”
“More or less,” she panted. “Can’t stop shaking.”
“We’re lying on ice,” I said, and giggled. There was no rationality behind laughing—I was just glad to be alive, even with a busted arm, trapped at the top of a frozen spire. I tried sitting up and found it wasn’t an entirely impossible feat.
The spire room wasn’t polished like the rest of the Bone Sepulchre. The ice was rough here, icicles dripping from the ceiling, as if we were standing inside a pincushion. The walls were covered with black marks, and the floor, when I managed to clamber to my feet, was jagged and uneven.
“This is nuts,” Casey said. “We’re never going to get back down those stairs, and Mr. Crosley will skin me alive for sure.” She looked ready to cry. I held up a hand.
“It’s going to be all right, Casey. With any luck, we won’t have to climb down anywhere.” I hoped, at least. I really didn’t have the faintest idea.
But then I saw Tesla’s Gate. It sat in a corner, almost as if it had been shoved against the wall and forgotten, like unwanted holiday decorations in someone’s attic. Spindly and wholly unlike the Gate the Erlkin had constructed in the Mists, the whole thing rested on three squat legs, like a hat stand. A pair of metal arms arched overhead, a giant circuit connected at the top to a Tesla coil, which was attached in turn to a bulb of aether, sickly opalescent white with age and disuse, that barely moved any longer.
Two dials were attached to either side, just waiting for somebody to activate them, and I shivered, a shiver born not of cold but of pure excitement. This was the experience I’d hoped for, when I’d been holding Tesla’s journals. This connection, across time, to a man who’d envisioned such a thing, such a delicate piece of machinery that had the power to move whole bodies between worlds.
I couldn’t waste any time, I knew. Casey was right—by now, somebody had to have discovered we were both missing from our quarters. I checked for a power source, but the coil was it. I activated it and was rewarded with a spark of electricity before the thing began cycling. I was elated, but Casey shrank back.
“I don’t like the look of that thing,” she said. “Lots of faulty machines back in the Rustworks would kill you if you touched ’em. And that one looks rickety.”
I approached the Gate slowly, reaching out with my Weird. The coil was snapping and the ancient aether was drifting around inside its teardrop-shaped globe, but nothing pricked my Weird. The machine was, for all intents and purposes, alive but dead. It didn’t function, not even a whisper beyond the ions of electricity I could taste on the back of my tongue.
My hopes sank. A faulty Gate I could fix. But one that was simply dead, a lump of iron where a vortex into other worlds should be? I had no idea how to fix that, and my Weird wouldn’t help me if I did.
I tried both dials and was rewarded with electricity writhing across the ground as the Tesla coil released its pent-up energy, but there was still no flutter in the fabric of the space around us. Nothing. My Weird felt nothing. The machine was as dead and cold as the ice field outside.
I wanted to sob, scream, to kick at the Gate until it fractured, but the destruction all around us put me off. At one time or another, the Gate to the dreaming place had worked. I was missing something.
Be smart, Aoife, I told myself. Be an engineer. The Gate had both a power source and enough power in the aether to transform the dimension around us, but what did it lack? What, if I turned in this schematic in an Academy class, would I get marks off for?
Tesla. It began with him, it ends with him. Tesla was the connection. Tesla connected the Iron Land with all the others. Controlled the wild energy of the vortex between worlds. Beat back the Storm he’d caused even as he’d opened us up to unimaginable horrors.
He connected worlds, and his Gate needed a connector. Something to close the circuit that arced energy all around the spire, making Casey shriek with each new bolt, even though the offshoot of the coils was harmless.
“Don’t be frightened,” I told her. Maybe if I said it to someone else, I could take my own advice. It wasn’t very far to step into the rain of castoff electrical charge, to stand myself between the two iron bars that made up the main part of the Gate.
“What are you doing?” Casey shrieked as the coil amped up to a roar. I felt a spark of life in the machine, just the faintest one. I opened my Weird, hoping it wasn’t the last time I would do so.
This time, though, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt as if I’d always been meant to be here, standing in the center of the only Gate to reach past Iron, past Thorn, and directly into the dreams of everyone in every world. This wasn’t a machine I was touching. This was the fabric of reality itself. I nudged gently, and I felt the vortex grip me.
Just one more step.
17
The Dreamer’s Domain
WHEN I STEPPED into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”
Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.
My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.
I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.
The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the hexenring or the Gates in the Mists. This was being pulled into a vortex, not transported from place to place.
Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.
I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.