To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)
by P.H Wise
1.7 - Pareidolia
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.
Thanks to Cailin for beta-reading.
An hour later, I still hadn't had a chance to relieve myself, but we were all back together. Or possibly I was with the Undersiders' local doubles who were doing their damndest to make me believe they were the ones who came with me. And now that I thought about it, that did make more sense than putting us all in a locked room together after they went through the trouble of interrogating us separately.
Then again, if anyone was in a position to understand our powers, it was our captors. Maybe a heavily reinforced blast door and reinforced walls really was all they needed to contain us. Or maybe they had decided we weren't their enemies. Maybe they just weren't sure what to do with us yet. Surely our local equivalents had little reason to want to hurt us; surely their boss had even less.
It was another bare, concrete room, and we were scattered about it. The ceiling had some kind of spray nozzle spaced at regular wasn't any furniture, and Bitch had claimed the far corner for herself, and glared angrily at anyone who came near. Her dogs were missing, and I took this to be the source of her foul mood. Grue's helmet was gone, and he had a truly impressive black eye that showed a mottled red and purple against his dark skin.
The thing they don't tell you about being held captive is just how boring it is, especially when you're just put in a locked room and then ignored. After a time, I wanted to say something if only to break the oppressive silence, but Regent beat me to it.
"So who's running this show?" he asked.
No one answered at first, and then Lisa seemed to come to a decision. "The local version of Coil, probably," she said.
"He's our boss, huh?"
Tattletale nodded.
"I'm a little disappointed that a supervillain with such a stereotypical evil base hasn't showed off his torture chamber yet," he said.
Tattletale looked uncomfortable. "Yeah. Weird."
"You think he has an unnecessarily slow moving/dipping mechanism?" I asked, and Tattletale laughed a little too quickly and too loudly; there was a disturbed look on her face, and my own grin slipped as I wondered what she knew that we didn't.
"We can only hope," Alec said.
The Undersiders, I reflected, were easy to like. It was easy to think of myself as one of the group even though I wasn't, even though I knew we might be enemies once we returned home. If we returned home. Lisa was like a know-it-all older sister, Brian was gorgeous when he smiled, he'd been nice… okay, polite to me, and I kind of wanted to run my fingers through his hair, Alec was… kind of a dick, actually, and Bitch was a Bitch, and now that I thought about it, why did I want to be friends with these people exactly?
Oh. Right. Because I was an ugly, friendless loser who happened to have superpowers.
I forced myself to maintain at least something like a state of appropriate paranoia as I recalled my suspicions about the others. Of all of them, Lisa seemed least likely to have been replaced with her doppelganger considering the obvious scar and the headache I'd given her. Then again, maybe the headache had been a calculated gesture, and maybe the facial scar had been accomplished with makeup. … no. I had to assume that at least some of them were the Undersiders I came in with, and I had promised to help them get home.
I considered their faces, tried to read their expressions. Lisa seemed amused. Brian had a neutral look. Alec was bored. Bitch was in defense mode. "So," I said, "who wants to go first?"
Brian - Grue, I needed to think of him as Grue - looked my way. "Go first?" he asked. Nobody else said anything.
"Okay," I said, "sounds like it's going to be me."
I recounted what had happened to me during the time I'd gone into the city to investigate the situation. I told them how I went to my double's house, the evidence I'd found there and what I had feared, the costume in the basement and the supplies I'd taken. I described my trip from the house to Captain's Hill, mentioned that I'd run into a weird Changer on the way, and then told them all that I'd learned from the aid worker about the Slaughterhouse Nine, Leviathan's attack, and what had happened in the city since April 30. Finally, I showed them the paper on which I'd written down the names of the fallen.
"Jesus," Tattletale said. "Tear that up, S. Swallow it. Get rid of it."
I looked at her in askance. "What?"
"That piece of paper breaks every rule of cape conduct that there is," she said.
"There are rules?" I asked.
"Sure," Tattletale said. "Every game has rules; this one just has higher stakes than most. Being a cape is like playing a really high stakes game of cops and robbers…"
It took a few minutes for her to explain the Cops and Robbers theory of cape conduct in detail, but when it was done, it seemed at least mildly plausible. What it came down to was maintaining the status quo. Everyone benefitted from it, and anyone who went too far and disrupted things too badly got smacked down.
I wasn't buying it, and Lung was a big reason why, but I didn't want to argue at the moment. I'm pretty sure that she got that, too. "Right," I said at last. "I'll just… put this away until I decide what to do with it " I said, and refolded the paper and returned it to its plastic bag in my pocket, where it seemed to burn like a coal, and never mind the lack of combustion. I got uncomfortable, and I filled the silence with words. "What about you, Grue?" I asked.
"What about me?"
"I lost sight of you during the fight," I told him, "back when we were captured. What happened?"
"Oh," he said. He seemed to gather his thoughts. "I wound up on the roof," he said at last, "fighting my double. We were both immune to each other's power, so we took it hand to hand. It got weird."
I raised an eyebrow at him. "Weird how?" I asked.
Grue shrugged and said nothing.
"Don't leave it there," I said. "I told you everything that happened to me."
Grue continued with some reluctance. "He got angry," he said, his voice low and troubled. "Real angry. It got worse when he got the upper hand. He started hitting me, over and over, saying it was my fault, that I wasn't strong enough..."
"That does sound pretty weird," Regent said.
Grue nodded. He paused, missed the obvious moment to resume, and then said, "I'm starting to think I've got issues."
Tattletale started cackling, and Grue's cheeks slowly colored.
"I'm pretty sure we all have issues," I offered.
"Except me," Regent said.
I regarded Regent with a look that expressed my skepticism for his claim.
"What?" he asked. "All the rest of you are crazy, sure, but I'm a picture of mental health, stability, and good judgement."
Tattletale, Grue, and even Bitch joined in the nonverbal expressions of skepticism, and Regent rolled his eyes. "Whatever," he said. "Fuck all of you, too."
Time kept slipping by, and we were no closer to getting home. Ten minutes. Half an hour. I was getting seriously fed up with waiting on the good graces of our local counterparts, and about the time I was thinking to just say screw it and try to shape my way home, Tattletale finally asked, "Do you really want us to keep calling you 'S?'"
I sighed. "No. You might as well just call me Taylor."
"Good," Tattletale said. "So Taylor, tell us about your power."
"You already know about the Brute part," I said, and Tattletale agreed. "What you probably don't know is that I've always been strong, and I've always healed fast." I had their attention now. "Even when I was little, sunburns, cuts and scrapes are usually gone the next day. Bruises might last two. I broke my arm in three places, once, and I was fine in a week. What Lung did to me was the longest it had ever taken me to heal from something. It was the same with disease. I never had allergies, I rarely get sick, and when I did I got over it fast." My thoughts took a darker turn as that old, familiar pain came rising up. "Mom was the same way."
I went on. "For a while, I thought I'd gotten my powers from…" My thoughts darkened again. "... a bad day."
"You don't have to tell us about that," Brian began, but I shook my head.
"There's three girls at school that had… have been making my life pretty goddamn miserable," I began. I went on, and they listened as I sketched Emma, Sophia, and Madison's campaign against me. How it had gotten worse and worse. I felt a little pathetic and ashamed for sharing this, but nobody laughed.
I didn't cry. My voice didn't crack. I felt like shit, but I wasn't going to show that. I related it all in an uninflected near-monotone, like I could have been talking about the weather, and not a campaign of systematic bullying culminating in me being locked inside my own refuse-filled locker.
Part of me wondered why I was telling them this, why I was telling a bunch of villains I liked and might have to fight some day about the worst day of my life, especially when I didn't want them to pity me, but once I'd started, I couldn't stop. The words tumbled out one after another. I told them about being shoved into the locker, being trapped, how I didn't have the leverage I needed to force it open. How, when the janitor had found me and opened the locker, I'd come out fighting, kicking and screaming.
At some point, Lisa sat down next to me, put her arm around me, and it helped.
"I started having the dreams in the hospital."
"Dreams?" Lisa asked.
"I'd had them before, maybe once or twice, but after the locker I had them every night. I'm standing on a black floor that's like glass, except it isn't slippery. There's a pattern burned into the floor, and it looks like blue-white fire. It's a strange, looping design, weirdly angular without losing its curves, and it traces a path that leads from the outer edge opposite the door through loops, lines, curves, and filigree to an empty center.
I walk to the start of the Pattern, and it sends up sparks when I step onto it. I take a few steps, and I can feel myself changing. I wake up."
"Can you draw it?" Lisa asked.
"I can, but the other you reacted badly to it."
She frowned. "Hmm."
"I was stronger after I woke up from the first dream. I don't know by how much, though. I never really did sports or anything that physical before then. It was enough that I thought I'd gotten a brute package from the experience, but now I'm not so sure that I didn't always have it. And ever since then, sometimes, reality goes weird."
Nobody said anything to fill the silence. I went on.
"I can't control it very well, or much at all, but I can change things about the universe. It happened in the park when I met Bitch for the first time."
Bitch nodded. "The dogs didn't like it," she said.
"Again when Bakuda hit us with whatever that bomb did. Then in your hideout on this Earth. … and I'm not totally sure, but I think I might have made a water bottle exist where there wasn't one before when I was being interrogated by the other Tattletale."
Grue let out a breath. "So your power is that you can warp reality and you have almost no control over it?"
I nodded.
"Fuck me," Grue said.
"Your mom," Alec said, and his expression was unreadable. "What was her name?"
I hesitated. Was there a pressing reason not to tell him? No. I'd already gone beyond that point. "Annette," I said. "Annette Hebert."
Lisa and Brian exchanged looks. Then Brian said, "You got something you want to tell us, Alec?"
"Not really," Alec answered.
"You're hard to read, but it's not impossible," Tattletale said.
I looked at Alec, and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. If Lisa could, then her powers of observation were scary.
"I think you know what that pattern is that Taylor's been dreaming about," Lisa said. "I also think you know exactly what her power is."
"Come on, man," Brian said. "You're stuck here the same as us. Are you seriously not going to help? If you know something, say it."
"I'm not stuck," Alec answered, "I'm lying low."
My thoughts raced as the implications of that statement in conjunction with Lisa's settled into place.
"Because you don't want your family to know where you are?" Lisa asked.
"Right."
Realization came to Lisa. She saw further than I did, had information I didn't. "Oh."
"Oh what?" I asked.
She didn't turn to me but kept speaking to Alec. "When I looked into your background, I assumed you were one of Heartbreaker's kids, but you aren't, are you?"
"Not the way you were thinking." Annoyance showed in his expression, and I could only conclude it was because he meant it to. "Do we really have to talk about this now?"
"We really do," said Lisa. "You were never Jean-Paul Vasil, were you?"
"I am, but not the way you thought. He's one of my Shadows."
Shadows. The word went through my thoughts like a lightning bolt, and I stiffened and then sat up straight.
"Did you kill him?" Lisa asked, her eyes gleaming dangerously.
Alec rolled his eyes. "We both got what we wanted," he said.
"Shadows," I murmured, and some of the haziness that had settled in around the edges of the memory of my conversation with Pyewacket cleared away. There was a sense of sharpening, of things suddenly standing out in stark relief that had been slightly muddled before. "Pyewacket used that word, too," I said.
Alec whipped his head toward me, his eyes narrowed. It was the single biggest reaction he had yet displayed to anything in the time I'd known him. "What did you say?"
I blinked. "Um, Pyewacket used that word, too?"
Alec's voice had actual intensity to it, and the contrast between that and his normally flat affect was startling. "You met someone calling himself Pyewacket?"
I nodded. "After I left my house. Well, Skitter's house. He was the Changer I told you about. He took the form of a talking kitten."
"I need you to tell me everything he told you. Every word, if you can remember them. Then describe Pyewacket in as much detail as you can recall."
I did this. I told him everything, leaving out no detail.
"Shit," Alec said.
"What is he?" I asked.
Alec shook his head. "We don't have time for the explanation. We need to leave. Now."
Brian eyes this new and weirdly assertive Alec the way a person might have eyed a three-eyed fish. "How do you suggest we do that?" he asked.
Alec produced his scepter from somewhere behind his body, and I knew for a fact that it had been taken from him by our captors, but that didn't stop him from pulling it out anyway. "I've decided that it's very likely that our captors forgot to lock the door," he said.
I felt something shifting around me. The stuff, whatever it was, that I could manipulate with my power was somehow responding to Alec now, and my eyes went wide. "What did you just do?"
"Not now." He walked to the blast door, put a hand to the wheel upon it, and spun it as easily as you please until it settled into the open position, proving it to be unlocked. "Heh," he said. "I honestly wasn't sure if that would work. Someone's getting fired tonight. Let's hear it for incompetence." Then he opened the door and looked back to the rest of us who were still gawking. "Come on," he said. "We're getting the hell out of here."
"I'm not leaving without my dogs," Bitch all but snarled.
"Stay here, then," Alec said, as if it didn't much matter to him.
I frowned. "We can find her dogs, can't we?"
"We don't have time for this," Alec said.
Brian folded his arms. "Explain, then."
"Later," Alec insisted.
"Fuck you, Regent," Brian said. "We're getting Bitch's dogs."
Alec didn't look happy, but he gave in. "Fine," he said. "This way."
We left the room and followed Alec down a long corridor just as an alarm began to howl. The nozzles on the ceiling in the room we had just left came to life - too late - and began to spray containment foam, but we were already gone. A pair of guards with rifles appeared down the hallway in front of us and one of them yelled, "Stop! Surrender now and no harm will… oh fuck." He aborted his speech as we bore down on him; he and his partner leveled their rifles at us, but Alec gestured and their arms jerked upward just as they opened fire. There were two bright discharges of energy that cut swaths into the ceiling, and then we were on top of them.
Alec punched the one who had spoken. He hit him in the gut, and the guard doubled over, fell down, and threw up.
The second guard tried to bring his rifle to bear, but I wrenched it from his hands; his fingers broke like dry kindling. Then I swung the butt of the rifle at his head, and down he went.
We raced on, and I hoped that I hadn't killed him.
The facility was essentially a concrete bunker, and each corridor looked very much like any other, but Alec seemed to know where he was going, and I wondered at the lack of guards beyond the two we had run into. As we rounded a corner, i felt Alec doing once more whatever it was he had done before, and the ceiling abruptly transitioned from concrete to natural stone. We ran on. A little further, and the walls did the same, and then the floor. We were in what seemed a natural tunnel now, though electric lights were still set into the roof of the tunnel at regular intervals.
I could hear someone or something following us, running after us down the tunnel, but they were far enough back that we didn't need to turn to face them yet.
We pressed on, and the tunnel widened into a huge limestone cavern dimly lit by sunlight filtering down through an uneven ceiling; the holes that let the sunlight in - or what I took to be sunlight - were so bright in that dimness that I couldn't look at them. Stalagmites rose from the floor; stalactites hung like stone icicles from the ceiling; gemstones of green and red and pale white glittered in the walls; water drip drip dripped from above into a wide, dark pool, and I couldn't tell if it was just the lighting, but the water in it looked less like water and more like black ink, and the ripples were strange.
At the far end of the cavern there were four tunnel openings; we took the third, and it gradually sloped upward. Lisa, Brian, and Bitch were all breathing hard, but I wasn't really feeling the effort yet. The light faded to absolute darkness about a hundred feet up the tunnel, and the tip of Alec's scepter began to glow with a pale blue light to show the way. We ran on for another ten minutes, up and up and up and up; sometimes the tunnel was wide enough to for us all to move side by side; sometimes it was so narrow we had to stop running and squeeze through in single file. Brian only barely made it through a particularly tight squeeze, but then the passage widened again, and the walls transitioned from natural stone to concrete and brick work, and I heard the sound of running water.
Alec paused, then, to let the others catch their breath, and as they did, I turned to him and asked, "What is this? I know you're doing this, making these changes, but how? And how can you do it so easily?"
"This," Alec replied, "is Shadow."
Lisa began paying very close attention.
"That word again," I said. "What do you mean by it?"
"Your mom really didn't teach you anything about this?" he asked.
"Nothing."
He made an all-encompassing gesture. "All of this is Shadow. The world. The people in it. The world we came here from. Earth Aleph, too. Scion. The Endbringers. It's all Shadow. A reflection of the true world mingled with the influence of Chaos."
"That sounds crazy," I told him.
He shrugged. "I'm not the one who set it up. But there are only two real places, and the rest of the multiverse - every single alternate universe that exists or can exist or once existed - is created and sustained by the interaction between those two real places: Amber and the Courts of Chaos."
Amber. The sound of the word struck me like a thunderbolt. Had I heard it before? Had Mom mentioned it? I couldn't remember.
"So what," Lisa said, "I'm not real?"
"No," Alec answered in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone. "You're a Shadow. Though I guess you're more real than most Shadows. That happens when they interact with people like me and the dweeb here." He gestured to me.
"Hey!" I protested.
Lisa looked like she was about to laugh in his face, but something stopped her before she made the first sound. She stood there, her mouth open. Then her face went pale, and she closed her mouth.
"People like us have power over Shadow," Alec explained. "You can slice it into any shape you like if you know how. Go anywhere you can imagine, find anything you want. Shape a whole damn universe according to your desire if you feel like it."
Holy shit. That explanation shocked me so much that I almost missed the way he'd referred to me. Like us, he said. "What am I to you?" I asked.
Alec shrugged. "Not sure. A cousin, maybe? Maybe an aunt, maybe a niece."
I practically rocked back on my heels. "What?"
"The design you saw in your dreams is called the Great Pattern of Amber. It's the key to our power over Shadow, and only people of our blood can walk it. If you want to gain control of that power, you're going to have to go there and walk the Pattern."
I stared at him. "What?" I asked again.
Brian looked like he didn't buy Alec's explanation of Shadow, and Bitch didn't care, but Lisa still looked disturbed.
"Break's over," Alec said before anyone else could speak. "Let's keep going."
We hit the water a few minutes later, and there was no avoiding it. We waded in and on, and it quickly rose to waist height. It became apparent that we were in a storm drain, and a few minutes after that we came to a ladder beneath a manhole, and once we were there we stopped for another minute or two.
I couldn't hear the sound of pursuit anymore, but that didn't mean we had lost it. Even so, I'd been thinking about what Alec had said, and while I found a certain pleasure in the thought that Emma, Madison, and Sophia weren't actually real, the idea that Dad was similarly unreal bothered me a lot. "Hey Regent?" I asked.
"Hmm?"
"Supposing what you said is true, and our - my - home universe and every other one and all the people who live there are created and sustained by the interaction between Amber and the Courts of Chaos. How does that make the universe and the people who live in it anything less than real?"
I was prepared to hear a philosophical argument. What I wasn't prepared for is what actually happened; Alec rolled his eyes. "Figures you'd be one of those," he said.
I stared at him, searching his face, trying to discern if he actually, really believed that people from what he called Shadow weren't really real; I found nothing in his expression that would contradict the assertion.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I shuddered.
We climbed the ladder and came out of a manhole in the middle of an empty street, and the light was blinding.
It took me a moment to get my bearings, another several for my eyes to adjust, but then I recognized our surroundings: we were in the Docks, in Brockton Bay. Not far away stood a half constructed building, the rusting skeleton of a crane abandoned on top of it, a silent monument to the economic downfall of Brockton Bay.
Almost as soon as I saw the building, I heard the barking. When she heard it, even exhausted as she was, a certain tension went out of Bitch's posture. She glanced at us once, and then strode purposefully toward the door.
We followed.
A sharp whistle came from inside the building, and the barking ceased. Bitch opened the door, and we followed her inside. When a second door leading further into the building was opened, there came a sharp whistle and a command of, "Sirius, Bentley, hurt."
I had time to see a half-finished room and somewhere around a dozen dogs standing silently around the local version of Bitch before two of them - each grown to the size of a mastiff - came rushing at us.
Black smoke began to curl around Brian's shoulders, and he tensed to receive a charge, but before anything else could happen, our Bitch whistled sharply and commanded, "Stay."
The charging dogs faltered. Their ears drooped, and they looked from one Bitch to the other.
"Hurt," the local Bitch ordered again even as our Bitch ordered, "Stay."
One of the dogs whined.
We followed Bitch through the door.
Cement was laid out over nearly half of the building interior, as the floor or foundation, but the work had been interrupted and abandoned partway through. There were areas where crushed stone had been laid out in preparation for the cement pour, and a combination of wind and rain had mixed regular dirt into the crushed stone a long time ago. Any spot inside the building that wasn't covered in concrete was marked by patches of grass and a few scraggy weeds.
The local version of Bitch stood across the empty shell of the building from us, glaring at us like she was seriously considering murder as a course of action, and our Bitch glared right back.
"I'm here for my dogs," our Bitch said.
"You think you can take them?" local Bitch snarled challengingly.
Our Bitch showed her teeth. "I know I can," she said. Her eyes went to the group of dogs crowded around her doppelganger, and after a moment they narrowed. "Brutus?" She asked. "Kuro? Bullet? Milk? Stumpy, Judas, Axel, Ginger?"
The local version of Bitch glared all the more fiercely. "Dead," she said.
"How?" our Bitch asked.
"Leviathan," the other answered.
Some of the tension went out of Bitch's posture, and a moment later the other mirrored her. Bitch's brow furrowed in thought. Smoke still curled around Brian, but none of us made a move to interfere.
"Brutus," Bitch said, "Angelica, come."
A Rottweiler started toward us, hesitated, looked at the local version of Bitch.
Local Bitch gestured.
The Rottweiler went over to us, his tail wagging, followed by a second dog, some kind of terrier that I recognized as Angelica. A third and fourth dog started to follow, but Bitch said, "Judas, stay."
The fourth dog stopped. The third seemed to be a second Angelica, and she was limping as she walked, and every movement seemed to pain her just a little. Bitch regarded Angelica's double, clipped a lead to her own Angelica's collar and then to Brutus', and then repeated herself: "Judas, stay."
Judas stopped, and so did the second Angelica.
Something in Bitch's doppelganger's body language eased. "You sure?" she asked.
Bitch nodded. "Take care of him."
Her double nodded back.
Then Bitch turned to the rest of us. "Let's go," she said.
We left the building in peace.
"Okay," Alec said. "We have the dogs. Can we go now?"
Bitch nodded.
"Yeah," I said.
"Finally," Alec muttered.
He led away down the street toward the flooded section, and I felt him begin to shift what I now knew was Shadow. The floodwaters receded. As we walked, the damage to the city grew less and less, and five minutes in, everything Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine had done to this future Brockton Bay was gone. Though it had been late afternoon only moments before, the eastern sky bloomed with the sunrise, and even the slums of Brockton Bay looked beautiful in the light of the dawn.
"We're here," Alec said, and everyone seemed to let out a breath they'd been holding.
I couldn't help that smile on my face that followed, and I hugged Lisa and started to move for Brian after before I could stop myself. He saw my hesitation and grinned, and his grin was beautiful and boyish, and I felt my cheeks coloring.
"Our place is still blown up," Alec pointed out.
"We can find another place," Brian said.
My thoughts turned to matters more arcane. To my power, to the means by which I might learn to control it. I looked to Alec, then, and I said his name. He looked my way. "I want you to take me to Amber," I said. "I want to walk the Pattern."
He gave me a sidelong glance. "Fuck you," he said.
A sense of outrage rose up in me, then, and I almost rounded on him. "I need to learn to control this," I said. "I can't keep going like I have been."
He thought about it. "I can't," he admitted after a moment.
"Why?"
"Politics," he said, making a dismissive gesture. "My dad's branch of the family isn't welcome there. If you came there with me, the best either of us would get is prison."
My heart sank. "I need to walk the Pattern," I told him.
"Yeah," he agreed. He thought for another few moments. "Amber isn't the only place you can do that," he said.
My brow furrowed. "What?"
"There are two mirrors of it. Two mirrors of Amber, two mirrors of the Pattern. We can try the one in Tir na Nog'th."
"Tir na Nog'th?" I echoed.
"There are three places you can walk the Pattern and gain mastery over Shadow," Alec explained. "Each is the same Pattern, and each has its dangers. Amber is closed to us, and so is Rebma - Amber's reflection in the sea - but we might be able to get into Tir na Nog'th: Amber's reflection in the sky. It'll be tricky, and the place is dangerous even if you aren't walking the Pattern..."
"Dangerous how?" I asked.
"Tir na Nog'th is weird. You might see distorted visions of the past or the future, you might be haunted by the ghosts of people you've betrayed, people you killed, people who betrayed you. Sometimes you can get useful information from it, sometimes it's all bullshit colored by what you wanted to find. Time can be weird there. The city might try to snare you in some enchantment. Hours can pass in what seems like minutes. All that would make it dangerous enough, but it also exists only as long as the moon shines on Amber, and trying it any other time is lethally stupid."
"Where does it go when the moon isn't up?" I asked.
"Fuck if I know," he said. "But there's a Pattern there when the moon is up, and I know a secret path that will take us there without us having to climb up from Kolvir." He held up a hand to forestall my obvious question. "That's the mountain that Amber's on. It's the easternmost peak of the Ardeni mountains.
"Tell us about this secret path," Lisa said.
Alec looked at her for a moment. The he shrugged. "Okay, so Tir na Nog'th has connections with most of the major Dreamlands. Technically, they're all Shadows of Tir na Nog'th, and they get more distorted the further you travel away from it. Usually the connection is one way, but I know a place where it goes both ways. A pool that glows silver when Tir na Nog'th is in the sky of Amber, and if you step into it while it's glowing, you end up in this big fountain in the grand square in front of the palace."
"Okay," I said. "Where's the pool?"
"Hang on," Brian said. "I can't go on some quest to fantasy land so Taylor can walk this Pattern. I have responsibilities here, and I can't leave them."
"Not leaving my dogs," Bitch agreed.
"Well, I'm going," Lisa said. "I wouldn't miss this for the world. But what do you say we leave off on the trip until tomorrow? We can all get some rest, pack some supplies, make sure we aren't leaving any loose ends."
I could see that. I guess. I reluctantly agreed.
"Great," Lisa said.
"I'm going, too," said a voice I didn't recognize from right behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
There was a girl behind me, about the same age as me, and she was beautiful. She and dark skin, high cheekbones, a long neck, flawless skin, impressive assets, and a purple streak in her black hair; she had a backpack on, and she wore denim shorts over neon green fishnet leggings and a strapless white top, and when he saw her, Brian's jaw dropped open.
"Ai-Aisha!?" he spluttered. "What the hell are you doing here?"
The girl cackled. "That look," she said. "That right there, it makes the whole thing worth it."
Brian's face flushed. "What the hell, Aisha? How did you find us?"
"Followed you from Coil's base," she said.
The implications of that statement sank in, and Brian muttered, "Oh, fuck."
I might have stayed to listen on, but at that moment I saw the best, greatest, and most beautiful thing I had seen all day: a public restroom. I said my goodbyes, promised to meet Lisa for lunch, and sprinted over to the place I could find relief.
I guess it kind of put the whole thing in perspective.
