Dante arched an eyebrow toward me. “Did you want to feel the pain?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not. Tell me what you did.”
“Nothing,” Dante said. “I was simply the catalyst for you. What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I echoed. “I just wanted to build another shell to stop Zo. Maybe . . .” I frowned in thought, feeling my way through a new idea. “When I created the shell at the apothecary shop, I did it by pulling some of the timelessness from the bank. That’s probably why Zo could hurt me. I was linked to the shell because I’m connected to the bank. But this time, we’re on the bank, so maybe this shell was built by using some of the time from the river.”
“And so it’s linked to the river, not to either one of us,” Dante finished.
“Are you all right?” Orlando asked, coming up next to us. Valerie clung to his arm and refused to let go.
I nodded. Exhaustion weighed me down. I leaned against Dante’s body for support. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me up. I could feel his muscles trembling with the strain, and I hoped what we had just done hadn’t aggravated his injury. Pressing my hand to his chest, I could feel his heart beat. Slow and steady, but, I feared, not as strong as before.
Zo tapped on the glass wall. “Abby? Dante? I just wanted to say thank you,” he called out. “By linking this to the river, you’ve given me the key to escape. After all, I also know how to make the river do what I want.”
And he opened his mouth, but not in laughter this time. In song.
Even though Zo didn’t have his freedom or his guitar, even though he was sick and dying, he still had his music. And he still knew how to use it.
The song rose in volume, a strong melody, but there was something off about it. A sharpness to the notes that rendered it just this side of discordant.
As Zo’s voice picked up the tempo of his song, he touched the interior wall and the shell bulged and flexed. He closed his eyes, clearly struggling to summon the power he had wielded so effortlessly in the past.
The music rumbled from deep inside his chest, rising in a tide of notes that spiraled up higher and higher, pushing against the inside of his prison. In some ways it was similar to the music I could hear running under the roar of the river, but in other ways, it was different. I had listened to the river’s music and asked for help; Zo demanded.
I saw a hairline crack appear along the surface of Zo’s shell, and I took a step back.
“Dante,” I warned quietly, pointing out the black thread against the silver.
“I see it,” he said.
“We can’t let him escape,” I said. The music pressed on me, a suffocating weight.
“I know.”
“What can we do? I don’t think I’m strong enough to build another shell.”
Dante took a deep breath, looking at the three of us standing before him, then he glanced at the river. The silver had turned to the gray of a corpse. A few of the threads that had peeled away were going dark, the blackness slowly eating away at what little light remained.
Dante touched his chest just once. I mimicked the motion and touched the locket next to my heart. “Dante—” I started, but he held up his hand.
Stepping toward the crack in the shell, he simply said, “Count for me.”
I felt tears well up in my eyes.
The poem he spoke was gentle and rhythmic, a soothing balm that ran counterpoint to Zo’s driving song.
Zo opened his eyes; when he saw Dante standing outside the shell, his song shifted in intensity.
I counted out loud, trying to match the numbers with my heartbeat, even though I could feel my body and my breath racing. Orlando and Valerie stood beside me, and their voices joined mine in a chorus of counting.
Dante’s voice remained slow and steady, but it sounded deeper, resonating with power. The poem seemed to take on weight, a shape and substance.
The flat light of the bank flickered, the pressure around us turning thick. The air crackled with the power that had been unleashed, humming with the power still to come.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck lifted as though lightning was about to strike. Still, I counted. One number after the next. After the next. I held Valerie’s hand, and she still held Orlando’s. I felt stronger knowing my friends were with me.
I fixed my eyes on Dante, listening to his words, his voice, with everything I had inside me. My body thrummed with the power of his poetry.
Still, I counted.
Zo clenched his jaw, struggling with the effort of forcing his song to bend the world to his will. He ground out the notes between his teeth, spitting them at Dante. But it wasn’t enough.
The crack in the shell slowly reversed direction, filling in and smoothing over. The bulging wall stopped breathing and grew strong and straight.
Dante’s words continued in an unending flow. The rhythms and rhymes created images in my mind: the winding path of a labyrinth, a spiral shell, stars scattered in constellations across a night sky, a half-sun, half-moon circle, an hourglass spilling sand with a sound like crackling flames.
I frowned. Something was wrong. The shell around Zo seemed smaller than it had been before, as though the space inside had been compressed. Zo’s eyes were closed; he hadn’t noticed the change.
Zo continued to sing, his voice as sweet as an angel’s hymn, though the words he offered up were dark and dangerous. Promises of pain. Threats to bind, to bend, to break.
The shell of time shuddered. As I watched, it grew even more compact, ratcheting tighter and tighter in response to Zo’s music.
My numbers turned to ash in my mouth and blew away as I exhaled a low moan. The bubble around Zo was about to burst—not outward, to release, but inward, to crush.
“Dante!” I called out, and I ran forward, grabbing his arm and pulling him away just as a horrible tearing sound came from inside the shell.
The ground beneath Zo’s prison cracked open between his feet. A shimmering black light flowed into the confined space like water in a glass.
I gasped. A section of the river had broken free of the main flow and was seeping up through the bank, surrounding Zo’s feet in a corrupted and poisoned puddle of time.
Zo’s music suddenly stopped and he opened his eyes, looking around wildly. “What have you done?” he shouted. The walls had collapsed in on him so much that he had to hunch over, his back pressed against the curved dome. “Let me out!”
“I’m sorry,” Dante said, shaking his head. “It’s too late.”
The gurgling river sloshed over the tops of Zo’s boots.
Dante and I watched in horror as the outline of his boots softened and melted in the rising river, disappearing into a blackened emptiness.
“You built this, Dante.” Zo pounded on the wall but nothing happened. “You break it.”
“I can’t,” Dante said.
He turned frantic eyes to me. “Abby. You have to help me. You owe me.”
The lingering touch of Zo’s mind inside mine urged me to obey. The compulsion was still there, but Zo wasn’t strong enough anymore to enforce it. I remembered the words to Dante’s poem, the one that had restored my memories, and as I filled my mind with his words and his voice, the final drop of Zo’s darkness vanished. Zo’s hold on me was gone. “The shell is part of the river,” I said. “We can’t break it without breaking the river. It’ll destroy everything.”
“It’s destroying me!” Zo shouted. The water level had crept past his ankles, rising up his legs, threatening his knees. Everywhere the river touched, Zo was being washed away. Erased. Unraveled.
He looked to Valerie, but she merely looked back, her face expressionless.
“Orlando—” Zo choked. “We were friends, once. Brothers-in-arms. We were the Sons of Italy. We were going to change the world. Remember how you agreed to follow me? You swore you would obey me.” He banged his fist against the shell. “I order you to help me. Get me out of here. I promise, I won’t hurt yo
u. Any of you.”
Orlando began shaking his head before Zo had even finished. “I know what your promises are worth.”
Zo backed up as far as he could inside the shell, but it had shrunk so much in size that there was nowhere for him to go. He braced his good hand against the curved wall next to his head and lifted his foot above the level of the sludge, but when he raised his knee, his leg ended abruptly midcalf. There was nothing there. No blood, no wound. Just an emptiness intent on slowly devouring him.
His prison would become his tomb. And we all knew it. Especially Zo.
The rising water came faster and faster, a black hole of nothingness.
Knees, thighs, hips. Half of Zo was gone, buried in the water that he couldn’t avoid, couldn’t touch, couldn’t escape.
Zo howled, his eyes wild and raw. His hand slipped off the wall, splashing into the water and disappearing in an instant. He looked down in stunned disbelief. His two broken fingers were gone, along with the rest of his hand. His arm ended abruptly at the elbow.
Then the panic that had burned in his eyes turned to anger and loathing. His mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips pulling back over his teeth. His face darkened.
“Go to hell,” he growled. “All of you.”
And then, in one swift motion, he dunked the rest of his body into the water.
A wave of black corruption closed over his head, swallowing him completely.
When the trapped river had reached the top of the shell, the shell bulged under the pressure, bending but not breaking. Then, with a sound like a pulled plug, the river water drained away down through the bank until it had vanished.
A deep silence settled over the bank.
Dante cautiously approached the empty shell.
“Careful,” I warned.
He nodded, reaching out his hand. I caught my breath. Before he could touch the shell, however, the clear wall shattered, falling to the ground like so many shards of glass. One of them flew past me, cutting my cheek with razor precision, leaving behind a trail of fire that burned.
A blue-white glow surrounded each piece of the broken shell of time, flaring hot and then dying away, leaving behind only a shine like an oil slick and the lingering sound of music.
Chapter 27
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the spot where Zo had disappeared. The shock of what had happened hit. Hard. My mouth felt dry; my stomach tightened. My whole body shook.
Dante gathered me into his arms, pressing his hand to the back of my head.
“Did it work?” Valerie asked in a raw voice. “Are we safe?”
“It’s finished,” Dante said. “Zo’s gone. And he’s not coming back.”
Valerie sighed in relief.
“Are you all right?” Dante asked me, rubbing his hands in circles over my back.
I nodded, but I wondered how much of that was the truth and how much was a wish. I feared the image of seeing Zo unraveling from time would haunt my dreams forever.
“You might be all right,” Orlando said, “but what about the river?” He pointed to the ground at our feet. The once wild rush of time was barely flowing anymore; the river that had once been as clear as glass had darkened to a clogged green and black and gray.
The stench had grown worse, the sulfur now layered with rotten meat and burned flesh.
“But Zo’s dead,” Valerie said. “Why didn’t the river get better?”
“Because the loop still needs to be closed,” Dante said, his face drawn and pale. “And if I die—either here or in the dungeon cell—the loop will never be closed.”
I frowned. “I thought it was too late to go back to the dungeon. Do you think, if the other you sees me there, that will be enough to fix the river?”
Dante paused in thoughtful stillness. He studied the river as though he could see through the murky shadows all the way to his other self. “I don’t think so,” he said quietly. “A wound of this magnitude will require something of equal magnitude to heal it.”
“Like what? It’s the end of time, Dante. How can we fix it?” I coughed, feeling the thick air weighing down my lungs like lead.
“I know how,” Orlando said softly.
I whirled on him, a sharp hope burning in my heart. “What? What can we do?”
“Not we,” Orlando said. Then he pointed at my chest. “You.”
“Me?”
He nodded.
“You have a plan,” I stated.
“I have an idea,” he corrected. “It might not work.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I can’t simply stand here and watch the river die.”
“It means traveling to a place where no one has ever been before,” Orlando warned.
“Where?”
Orlando pointed upstream. “There.”
“What’s up there?”
“The beginning of the river,” Orlando answered, his voice calm and controlled.
Fear pulled into a tight knot in my stomach. “What?” I breathed.
“If you walk back along the bank far enough, you will find the point where the river begins. And when you do, you will be able to heal the river.”
The idea staggered me. “Why would you think I could do something like that?”
“Because you can speak the language of time,” Dante chimed in.
Orlando lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I saw what you did to heal Dante. What you did to Zo. It has to be you, Abby. You’re the only one of us who can.” He looked back at the sludge that crawled past our feet. “And it has to be now.”
I swallowed. “But, once I get there—assuming I even can—what am I supposed to do there? Heal the river? I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“You’ll know,” Orlando said.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Dante said that we all have a gift here on the bank. Mine is that I can see the light of the river. I have seen that same light around you. The river wants your help, my lady. It needs it.”
“You can do it, Abby,” Valerie said.
I looked up at Dante’s face. His clear gray eyes were steady and sure. That small smile that was mine alone curved his mouth.
I swallowed and held out my hand to Dante. “Will you come with me?”
“Yes.” His answer was instant.
“Will you catch me if I fall?”
“No.”
I pulled back, surprised. There was a finality in his voice I hadn’t heard before. And then what he had said hit me, making me blink in confusion.
“What? Why—?”
Dante cupped my face with his hand and brushed his thumb across my lips, silencing my questions. “You will not fall. You will not fail.” He brought his other hand up to frame my face and looked directly into my eyes. “I won’t catch you, Abby, because I won’t need to. You were always meant to fly.”
I caught my breath, feeling a swell of emotion rising up inside me. I nodded, then turned to Orlando.
“I’ll do it. I promise.”
I hugged Valerie and Orlando in turn. Then I took Dante’s hand in mine and together we walked along the edge of the river, heading upstream, heading into the darkness. Heading toward our future.
Chapter 28
The darkness is absolute.
She remembers how the sky above the bank had turned black once before, when the river had been redirected and washed away her family, her past, her life. But this is even darker than that. This blackness breathes. This darkness waits.
She is only a thought. She is a shape without form. She is drifting without moving. She is alone in a darkness that is as tight as a drum, taut as a string.
The tension hums, not quite a sound. Not quite a song.
There is only the waiting. Endless waiting.
She wonders if this is the end. Or the beginning.
After a timeless moment, she realizes this is the before.
The moment before the beginning. This is the anticipation.
This is what they came f
or. To find this moment, here at the beginning of forever.
And she knows exactly what to do.
Her mouth shapes his name, and her mind rings with remembered echoes. His voice, dark, like chocolate, but also light, like citrus. There are no words yet, just sounds inside her mind, just feelings inside her heart: a laugh as bright as a wish, a sigh as soft as a secret. A kiss as solid as a promise.