Chapter Twenty

Rain? Really? Freezing rain?

Huh. It never rained in my dreams. But then again, I wasn't the architect of my personal dream world.

Angry black wisps of storm clouds rolled across the long wooden deck that I found myself standing on. The air was painfully thin, but that didn't stop it from slashing its way around my soaked and chilled body, pushing me aside from its path, thunder and flashes of burning light driving it forward.

Rising up before me stood the silhouette of a temple, its triangular flags flapping frantically in the arms of the storm cloud that surrounded us. I could see the reds and yellows of them begin to bloom in the growing light of the sun, as it surmounted the horizon behind me.

To the left and right of me stood tall vertical banks of ancient iron drums, spinning wildly in the wind, clacking woodenly with each rotation they completed. Counting. If this were a real temple before me, I'd say that they were counting the prayers that made their way to the gods. But here, there was no telling what Nawang was adding up. The drums felt cold and mechanical to me, like I had dropped into the guts of a Babbage difference engine, its gears and wheels feeding upon the very numbers that they chewed. As alien as the imposed magic that clattered around my head.

The deck shifted at my feet, rolling gently. Like a boat.

Turning back toward the light of the rising sun, I pushed my way through the storm to the wooden railing that circumscribed the temple, bending over it to peer down. Through the passing cloud, I could see, far below, the web-like lights of a modern city, still enveloped in the darkness before the dawn.

Sheets of rain dropped from the clouds to the city beneath, turning the lights into a golden haze.

I pushed the semi-frozen droplets away from my brow and turned back to the wide staircase that rose up to the bronze-encased temple doors. You had to give Nawang credit. It wasn't good enough for him to dream about a temple. He had to dream about a house of the gods, rolling across the sky with the clouds.

Which god? I wondered. One who still trod the mortal soil below? Or one who had moved on, to wherever the gods go when we don't want them any more?

Thunder and lightning curling around the floating temple, I pushed my way toward the staircase, my lungs working hard to process the meager, icy air. My legs pumping, I clomped up the wooden staircase.

Through the grinding wind, I made out the hunched forms of three dirty-looking people, huddled miserably around a meager dung fire, the water and mist suffocating it. They had propped up a makeshift roof over the fire out of an animal skin and sticks, but the rain just crawled underneath it anyway.

The three of them ignored me as I approached. They were wearing bits of animal skins for clothing, and there was something wrong with their physical features.

Cave men, I realized. Two men and a woman.

The old man was humming a soft tune, perhaps as a prayer to any god who might listen and show just one day of mercy. The younger man stared fixedly out into the brightening sky, one hand gripped around a sharpened rock. The woman sat with her head half-drooped down, gazing through the dripping water into the embers of the fire, perhaps vainly willing the warmth back to life.

I stopped and peered at them through the drifting wet that rolled around us. What was Nawang trying to show me? The first morning of human magic? The primal needs that lie restlessly at the root of every incantation ever voiced? The need to live, to hunt, to prosper?

What?

I stepped past them and pulled open the pair of temple doors. They were massive, maybe a ton or so each, but so perfectly balanced that I could open them both at the same time, one in each hand.

Incense blew past me from inside, making my eyes itch and water.

I tromped inside, water dripping off of me onto a stone floor. I wiped the last of the droplets off of my cheeks and away from my eyes. I was in a long hallway, rows of pillars marching away into the shadow. The center line of the roof had been raised along the length of the hall, letting in the gray light of the newborn daybreak along with the random, burning white flashes of lightning bolts.

My eyes slid down from the ceiling to the floor, where I first noticed the body lying on the massive hand-woven rug that ran from the doorway into the darkened distance. I stepped closer and kneeled down, bending forward to see the front of the corpse.

The body had my face.

It was me, lying dead on the floor, a black pool of blood spreading out into the carpet beneath my cold carcass.

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams," I gently whispered to my corpse.

A note written in a flowing hand in Old Tibetan was pinned to the front of my corpse's shirt. "No offensive artifice this time." it said. "Ran for it immediately. Made it the furthest to the door. Will install a second rear guard to counter."

I harrumphed and kept walking.

The temple was strangely empty of the trimmings and holy bric-a-brac that normally accumulates in places of worship, until they start to look like a haven for hoarders, or for pious bower birds. Perhaps those things held no meaning to Nawang. Or perhaps this represented an actual place from his deep memory, and the emptiness of the temple told of some real loss.

More of my corpses begin to show up, having died in various horrible ways. Sometimes I had burned to death, other times bludgeoned. Sometimes I just couldn't tell. Each of my corpses had a note pinned to it, describing in scientific terms how I had died and what I had tried to do to live.

Child employed a typical fire-based spell. Energy output was disappointing. Killed by lightning strike.

Use of magic is occasionally imaginative but limited to specific sphere of thought. Must think he is still in the real world. Attempted to use wind to blow self up to ceiling to escape. Killed after I turned raindrops to micro-meteorites.

This time resorted to fisticuffs. Is either untrained in martial arts, or unmindful. Stung to death by mass of scorpions.

Passively sat on the ground and refused to cooperate. Not quite a strategy, but at least offered a unique approach. Snapped neck.

The pile of my bodies got thicker the further into the shadow I walked.

I passed through a low archway into a round room that was almost pitch black. The walls and hardwood beams were coated with black shiny lacquer. A pair of iron sconces hung from the wall at each side of the arch within the room, each bearing a wooden torch that had long since spent their fuel and now burned with embers trapped under a cracked layer of white ash.

In the bits of light, I could barely make out the form of a crocodile laying in the middle of the floor, its body curled into a loose ball.

Its eyes were open, and shone like dark gemstones.

"The front door was open," I said to it, jerking my thumb back over my shoulder.

The torches burst to life, blue flames twisting around their ashen ends. In the light, I could now see that beyond this room, there was one more. It was empty except for a modern operating table in the center, a bright light illuminating it. It looked exactly like the table that Emma had been stretched out upon.

"Lay on it," the crocodile hissed softly.

"With you as the surgeon?" I asked.

"My art is as old as life itself," it said. "Memory and life are the same."

"Then you are asking me to die," I replied.

"Such concepts are a pointless illusion. If only you could see yourself as I do—as the formulation of your own thoughts, made into the semblance of substance. But if you choose to think of it in life and death terms, then consider that in losing your past, you buy back your lost future."

"It doesn't look like I agreed with you," I said, looking behind me at my pile of bodies. A pair of shadows hovered in the darkness on the other side of the archway, blocking the passing back to the temple's entrance.

"You only need agree once," it answered.

"You could take it from me by force," I murmured.

"I could. The effect is superior with a willing partner. I am patient. You will succumb eventually."

"That's where your problem is," I smiled with grim determination. "Two problems, really."

It looked at me passively.

"If I accept what you are showing me, then even if I die, I still come back anyway. If it's a stalemate, I can accept that. But I don't accept it. You are a liar, sir. I know you to be one, and I believe that these bodies are merely the trappings of your twisted world."

I held my hand up, palm out.

"I reject your world. I want another."

And tore open a Way in front of me. It wasn't magic that I used, exactly. It was more of an expression of will. It was like an inverse tulpa, the ripping away of my accepted reality, to be replaced with nothing. I didn't know where the hole went. Or what kind of metaphor it stood for in the world of dreams. But it was a door of a kind, and I wasn't going to just sit around and decide if I liked it better where I was. I stepped forward, into darkness, an angry hiss erupting far behind me.

And was back in the temple, right where I had stepped out.

But it wasn't the same, either. The torches were brighter, and threw a healthy red light around the room. There was no surgery table in the room beyond, but an empty stone altar instead.

And the bodies—they weren't mine.

But there sure were a lot of them, lying in the same places and in the same positions where mine had been in Nawang's dream. They were dressed in silk robes of bright orange and yellow, and their feet were bare.

All of them men, of many ages but mostly in the middle to older range. Tibetan. All bald. And definitely none of them were me. Even though it looked like they had died in exactly the same ways that Nawang had depicted me.

It should have been deeply disturbing. But that's the thing about dreams. You accept what is.

"Who comes?" the wavering voice of an elderly woman carried to me from the darkness of the main room, spoken in Tibetan.

"Just a visitor," I answered in kind. I looked behind me. The illusionary tear in space had closed behind me.

"What do you represent?" she asked. "Are you intended to be one of the grandchildren that they would never have?"

I looked down at them. "Who are they?"

A figure hobbled towards me from the gloom, a woman wrapped in badly dyed sack-cloth, hood pulled forward over her brow, enshadowing her face. Wisps of pepper-grey hair poked out from under her hood like the straws from an over-used broomstick.

"They are all that I am left with. They are my memory," she said. "And when I die, and I pray it be soon, they will vanish with me."

"Were they real people? What is this place?"

"Stranger, I was here when it happened, all those years ago. But the killers let me live. I don't think that they even noticed me. I was just the scrubbing girl. Sometimes I gave joy to the men, before— I was pretty then, very pretty. It was a good life.

"Truthfully, I do not know much about the men, other than how they died. You understand, this was not their permanent monastery. They only gathered here on the mountain for their meetings, coming from all over Tibet. They spoke of things that were over my poor head. The Outside Gate of this, and the Spirit Courts of that. But I did know that there were always one hundred and eight of them, no more, no less. I knew that because I was responsible for arranging their meals to be made in the village while they were in session."

"The Spiral," I whispered.

"Yes, yes, they used that word," she seemed more animated at the memory, and drew nearer to me. "Who are you, if not a ghost? You seem so familiar."

I looked around. "I only count about sixty bodies," I said.

She nodded glumly. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Only sixty-four. The other forty-four rose up and killed them. I watched while it happened.

"I had been with the men who died, and I had been with the men who killed. I still wonder how one could be different from the other. They all loved me the same."

"No one came for them?" I shuddered involuntarily at her words. "No one told you who they were?"

"Not afterwards, no. No one came. The villagers had to take care of the bodies. We didn't have enough wood up here to cremate them properly, so we had to bury them under stones. It was a terrible memory. No one comes here now, except in our dreams.

"But—" she hesitated. "There was someone else on that day. A woman, dressed in a man's armor. She had a pair of children's skulls dangling off of her thick belt by red ropes. And—she had terrible fangs. She came after it was all over, at dusk, and whispered with the men who lived. She seemed very pleased with herself."

"Her?" I said, disbelievingly. "You couldn't mean—"

"No, not her, you stupid child. You think I would survive a meeting with her? But one of her handmaidens, I sometimes wonder."

"Or one of her children," I said.

She shrugged. "I do not speak of such things. It would be improper."

The sound of metal tearing burst out from behind me. The fabric of the woman's dream screeched like the agonized sound of a car being torn apart by machinery. I looked back, and a man-sized hole was nearly fully dilated, the blackness of void beyond its threshold. The crocodile poked its head through and looked around casually and deliberately before the rest of the creature crawled through. It impossibly stood up on its hind legs like a man.

"You—" the woman moaned at the sight of the crocodile. "Go away, I beg you! I do not love you, now!"

Step by slow step, the crocodile padded towards us, its eyes matching the void behind the door, its head slowly scanning this way and that, taking in the nature of the dream around it.

"I am not here for you, woman. But it is worse for you that I now know you exist," the crocodile hissed through its black snout.

"Wake up," I said to her. "You have to wake up."

"I—" she stuttered.

The crocodile raised up one claw and pointed it at the woman. She suddenly froze, encased in a shimmering web of minute lights that ran along her body like little cars on midnight freeways.

"I came for you, Cimba," the crocodile said.

"This is your dream, too, isn't it?" I said.

"Not at all," the crocodile said. "This is her dream, in her mind. I do not know how you found her, but it is forbidden for us to be here. Your White Council would execute you, in fact. It is imperative to your good health that you come back with me before you are discovered."

I took in a ragged breath. "That's why you didn't enter the minds of the journalists. You made them enter yours. It wasn't because you had some fancy technique. You were just shooting for another legal loophole, weren't you?"

"When one wishes to change the universe, one changes oneself," Nawang said. "It's axiomatic. The legalities were secondary."

"Bullshit," I said. "You're afraid of the White Council."

The crocodile stood silently, its empty eyes fixed upon me.

"You were one of the forty-four," I pressed. "Those bodies of mine in the dream you showed me, they were really these bodies, weren't they?"

"Come away from this place," the crocodile said. "This pain was not meant for you."

"I wonder if it was meant for the men here, either," I pointed at their bodies.

"We could not agree on what to do about the invasion," the crocodile hissed out. "The old men wanted to capitulate. The young men wanted to defend. We drew up into two camps, with no agreements. Anger mounted on both sides. It was inevitable that we would devolve into civil war."

"Civil war?" I said. "Did the men who lay here even know that's what it was? How long did this war last? A minute? Five?"

"You mock what you do not understand. You can never know how painful it was. But at the time, we saw no other path. We took the hard road. We took the road of duty to our land."

"Who was your guru?" I asked.

I could almost imagine that the crocodile smiled. It stood up a little taller, and took in a deep breath of pleasure. "You've been thinking, Cimba," it said approvingly.

"Not on purpose," I muttered. "Everything that is happening to the White Council now—the internal division, the warring, the loss, none of it's new, its it? It's all happened before," I looked around us, at the corpses. "Like a dress rehearsal. What was it all for? What is it all for, now?"

"Come away," the crocodile said again. "Lay on the table. I had my millstone, you have yours. No one ever said our burdens would be feather-weight. But if you don't agree to treatment or training, you will never be free of the monster that lurks within you. I'm offering you freedom. A new life. A gift of mercy."

"For a price," I said. "For a sacrifice."

"It's called cutting your losses," the crocodile said. "Adults do it every day."

"It's not that I'm against the table," I said. "It's the surgeon that I have issues with."

"The only others who know how to make the repairs are just like me. One of the forty-four. Or a few others, who are much, much worse from your point of view. I am your best option, child."

"Shan't," I said.

"That's why I approve of you," the crocodile raised its claws at me.

"Shan't," I said again, raising my own hands in unison with Nawang's. I said it with the strength of youth, but my words felt empty. This wasn't the real world. It wasn't even Nevernever. Magic didn't work here. Or did it?

I had made my escape hole using the same methods that I would use to make a tulpa. I had made it with my will.

Maybe that's how fights would work here. Whoever wants it badly enough wins.

The crocodile's eyes reflected nothing.

Not just will, I thought. Deviousness wins. The trouble was, Nawang had practiced at that for years upon years.

Our hands came to a stop.

Behind Nawang, I could make out the shadowy form of something moving in the altar room beyond, accompanied by a great cracking and grinding noise that sounded like a cross between an avalanche and a fevered glacier.

There was a hard thunk. Followed by another. And another.

The granite and iron altar appeared at the doorway, heaving slightly, dragging furrows into the wooden floor with its heavy feet.

I waggled my eyebrows at the crocodile. The altar was my contribution to the woman's dream. But Nawang didn't even look back at it. The crocodile instead waved its nose at me meaningfully, bidding me to look behind me, where all was dead silence.

I couldn't help it. I slowly turned my head and glanced back over my shoulder.

Directly behind me, sixty-four corpses of Tibetan men sat straight up, their faces in various states of destruction and decay, facing me directly. Their mouths were open in silent screams of terror and anger, cemented upon their last collective moment of surprise and betrayal. Slowly, they stood, and raised their arms towards me.

Sighing, I sank to the ground, crossing my legs, and began to empty my mind. The altar wormed its way through the door, thunking its feet on the ground with each awkward step it took, moving toward the crocodile, menacing it.

The sixty-four corpses began to shuffle towards me, moaning inhumanly.

A shield, I thought. I need a shield, made of—out of what?

Of sound. A shield of sound.

Not a shield. A lure. A bell, to call them. To call them to their next life, where they would find peace, or another chance at it.

I spread out my mind, reaching beyond the room, to the boundary of the dreamscape. I worked the fabric of the world, with its single element of thought, into the shape of a great copper bell with a wooden clapper. I gave it just a little tin to turn it to bronze. It was eight feet tall, and cylindrical, and I covered it with runes about the gods and the heavens and the fate of men.

And as the corpses neared me, I rang it. Once, twice, thrice.

They halted, mesmerized by the sound.

I ran it again, and again. The sound was soulful and melancholy. It spoke of lives unfulfilled, of plans unachieved, aspirations forgotten.

Even Nawang stopped for a moment. Even the altar.

The dream itself seemed to pause.

Nawang stiffened, shaking loose from the music's embrace.

He raised his crocodile claws. And changed the tune.

I was falling.

The temple was gone. I was surrounded by clouds, and the grey ground was beginning to clarify beneath my plummeting body. The air was freezing again, and wet.

Nawang was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was everywhere, the new master of the dream. Maybe he was still in the temple.

I was falling, helpless. The wind burned me, in spite of the cold.

The ground grew larger. Bits of green and blue began to grow.

I closed my vainly watering eyes, and quieted my mind. The wind still whipped around me. I willed myself to fly.

I kept falling.

I willed harder. I felt the dream resist me, forcing me down. I passed a trio of condors, who were lazily circling, riding the thermals.

Thoughts about Nawang rolled through my head. How did he control dreams? What would happen if I hit the ground? What was he even trying to do? Kill me? Break my spirit so that I would give up and finally obey him?

The problem wasn't Nawang, though, was it? This wasn't his dream. No one had given him permission to change things.

I change myself, he had told me.

So that's what I did. I closed my eyes and let my mind float. I let the picture of the dream float with me. I let myself fall within it. My own meta-dream, in sync with the one that I was in.

And then, I changed my perspective. I told myself that down was another way, towards the horizon.

Maybe it was a kind of sympathy magic, like what I had done with my focusing rod and the lamp pole. Maybe it was a kind of tulpa magic. Maybe it was something self-inflicted.

I was changing myself. And in so doing, changing the world.

When I opened my eyes, I was flying. Soaring, like the condors.

It was brilliant and beautiful.

It didn't matter to me that the condors had turned to snakes and zipped through the air after me, or that the clouds turned into balls of fiery acid. I had the hang of it now.

I closed my eyes again, and changed the dream.

An ancient man sat half-slumped in his wheelchair, surrounded by three middle-aged nurses dressed in hospital scrubs. A spotlight shone down on them, with empty black beyond the light. The black of fate. The black of impending death.

The man in the wheelchair was Nawang, and he looked up at the nurses, unable to speak.

"You naughty man," one of the nurses said. "You forgot your medicine." She cooed over him with a fake air of affection.

"I—" Nawang managed.

"Go to sleep," another nurse said. "Your life is over, now. All that you were ever going to achieve has already been done."

"I never finished," he murmured.

"No," the second nurse agreed. "Did you really expect to? You set such high standards for yourself, didn't you? Could anyone have met them, do you think?"

"It wasn't for me," he gasped. "It was never for me. Please, help me. Let me live a little longer. I have to finish. Please."

"You failed," the third nurse said. "Let it go. Go to sleep."

Nawang closed his eyes. A rattling gasp issued from his windpipe.

It all changed.

I was standing on the stage at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, a live audience filling the seats before me. White spotlights glared angrily at me, spraying me with thin fingers of intense heat.

The audience was booing me loudly.

I couldn't believe it. I had never been jeered like that before. Never. I had always done such a good job. I had memorized my lines. I had studied the characters. Their little nuances. Their affectations. Their facial expressions.

But now they hated me. I was a failure. Completely and undividedly.

Behind me, Lady Macbeth took my arm into hers.

"They curse the ground you tread," she said.

"Why?" I begged her.

"Because you are wretched and contemptible in their eyes. They hate you because they can. Because you let them."

"I want them to stop. I just want to be loved."

"They want to hate you. Look at them. That is the real world. It overflows with spite, and it has reserved the worst for you."

"I don't want to live in a world like that," I groaned.

She held a dagger out in front of me, the poniard pointed away from me. The blade towards my belly. "So," she said. "Don't."

I took the blade into my hands. It was warm, and seemed to throb and wriggle. The angry shouts from the audience drowned me with violent noise.

"The dagger?" I asked her.

"The dagger," she nodded. "There's no other way out. You cannot change the world. You can only change yourself."

The dagger.

I looked down at it, mesmerized by it.

The crowed only got louder. I would show them. I would show them what happens to hate. How it all ends. I would show them all, and they would finally understand, even if it was all too late for me.

I took a deep breath.

That's when I felt the sharp pain in my right arm.

Lady Macbeth was stabbing me with her own ladylike dagger in my arm, over and over. Her face had melted away, and was only a thing of fury.

"Stop!" I yelled at her. "Stop it! Stop it!"

The dream fell to pieces around me, shredded away into livid nothingness.

I flicked my eyes open.

I lay awkwardly on my back, grey stars in a grey sky floating above me. Gulls cried out in the distance.

I turned my head to my right. Jeeves was standing beside me, holding a bloody sewing needle in his tiny right hand. My right arm stung horribly.

"Little dude," I whispered.

Jeeves saluted me with his left hand.

My muscles rebelling, I pushed myself up to look back at the table where Nawang had been sitting when he knocked me out. The candle was still there, still lit, and still not budging in the wind. Behind the candle sat Nawang, his eyes closed, breathing evenly, his face gently glowing from the candle's faint light.

He took a long breath and opened his eyes, piercing me with his iron gaze.

"Who woke you?" he said woodenly, his eyes moving around the remnants of the yacht before they settled on Jeeves. "Who let you have that?" he grimaced involuntarily at my homunculus. "Do you have any notion what you've been walking around with?" He raised up his hand, aiming it squarely at Jeeves.

But I was young, and faster. I shot my arm up, yelling, "Anil!" Jeeves suddenly shot up into the air, tumbling away from me like a rag doll, and fell into the water over the port side of the boat.

"As you would have it," Nawang growled. "And now for you."

"Mano y Lama," I nodded.

He flicked his wrist disdainfully in my direction, the barest wiggle issuing from his index finger. Black tendrils popped out of his hand, just like the kind that the vampiress had shot at me. Faster than I could move, they closed the distance between us and crawled over my body like an infestation of cold hatred.

And like before, the runes Nawang had made me memorize weaved in multiple directions, like tumblers in a complex lock.

The black tendrils touched me. I could feel the dark magic within them, hungering for life, promising death. But they never entered me. It was like I had become a clown-fish, swimming impossibly through a bloodthirsty sea anemone. I was supposed to die, but instead my body had made itself at home.

Nawang dropped his hand, and the tendrils slipped away from me, slurped back into his fingers. "He's assimilated the runes so quickly," he whispered to himself. "It's as if he'd been prepared for them beforehand." He shook his head incredulously. "Who could achieve such a thing?"

"Buddha's Nads," I snarled. "I hate being your specimen even more than being killed by you, you know that?"

"How little you understand," Nawang said. "You are a pawn. You have always been a pawn. Even before you met me, you were one. Who has been instructing you all this time, child?"

Senge. And Father. And the Wardens. And Miami Senior High. But I'm not their pawn. I'm their progeny. Right? There's a difference, isn't there?

He raised his hand again, high above his head. "Dorje," he intoned. He wasn't calling my name. He was calling my eponym.

I didn't have time to set up a proper Zen shield. And the thing was, out over the water I didn't have the power to make a very strong one, anyway. The hairs on my arms and legs stood up at attention, waving in the pre-morning wind.

There wasn't anything else to do. I jumped into the hole in the floor, landing badly on the VIP bed, tangling myself with large chunks of fiberglass. As I fell, I felt a flash of light and heat just behind me. A shockwave of sound concussed my skull, forcing a grunt of pain out of my body.

I looked up from the bed. Nawang was standing at the edge of the hole, staring passively down at me.

"Do it to me," I whispered to myself. "Go on, let your hair down, you big freak. I deserve it."

He called down another lightning bolt, right on top of me. This time, there was nowhere for me to run. I had to take it. Light boiled over me, ran ivy-like tendrils along my semi-scaly skin. The runes within me didn't protect me this time. I guess they weren't attuned to regular old mundane magic. The thing was, regular magic could blow you away just as fast as some exotic Outsider magic from another universe, or whatever it was.

I screamed in utter pain. When the spots cleared from my eyes, I found myself crawling helplessly through the smoking, half-melted wreckage of the boat debris. The mattress beneath me was on fire.

Another lightning bolt hit me. I would have screamed again, but I couldn't manage it. I blacked out instead.

A fourth lightning bolt woke me back up again. I was curled up in the fetal position, flames licking around me. My muscles were twitching spasmodically. My jaw was clenched shut, and I couldn't turn my lungs on to breathe.

I heard the muffled sounds of muttering above me, but couldn't make out what Nawang was saying. I slowly turned one eye up towards him. He was still standing at the hole's edge, his arms crossed and his expression unreadable. He balled up his hands into fists and touched them together. At the moment that they touched, the fiery mattress lifted up into the air, carrying me and the semi-solid bits of boat up with it. The mattress rose up past the top of the hole and flipped to one side, dumping me and the boat junk unceremoniously to the deck, littered in a loose pile.

I slowly raised my hand, aiming it at Nawang. "Nyima," I croaked hoarsely. A feeble jet of fire leapt out of my hand, covering barely half the distance between me and Nawang before it petered out. I dropped my hand to the ground with a thunk.

Nawang cracked his knuckles and whispered something more. The deck around me began to half-melt, half crack open noisily. The warped pieces of yacht twisted and wrapped themselves around my arms, legs, and neck, holding me down tightly. The loose bits of fiberglass melted into my shackles, strengthening them.

Nawang took out a white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He looked around for a moment, and then stepped over to one of the black bags left behind by Marcone's mercs. He rifled though it until he found a bayonet, grunting to himself as he turned it back and forth in his hand, testing out its feel.

Giving it a final shake, he stood up and stepped over to my side.

"It has to be this way," he said. "I cannot allow my creations to run free."

"Because I might turn on you," I barely managed.

"Because you will turn on me," he agreed.

"You're right," I said. "I don't regret turning on you. I just regret that I could never get the hang of an AK-47. It would have been so much easier."

"Goodbye, then," he said.

"Not with magic?" I asked, looking at the bayonet meaningfully.

He simply looked down at me silently.

"Because you're out," I said, almost smiling. "What a shame."

Nawang lifted the bayonet high above his head in both hands, the blade pointed downwards at my heart. The first glimmers of sunlight glinted off it, making it seem to glow a little of its own accord. The ocean waves below seemed to swell up, lifting the boat higher.

And behind Nawang came the soft crunching of fiberglass bits beneath small bare feet. The ocean seemed to rise again, more strongly this time. The sound of waves breaking against the hull of the boat rolled around us.

A feeling blanketed me. A feeling of—well, not of lust. Not of desire, or hunger. It was simply a feeling of love. Of the knowledge that comes that no matter what happens in the world, that there exists somewhere a person who gives an actual damn.

Nawang held the bayonet above me, almost motionless.

I saw a woman's hand come up from behind his left shoulder, touching it. And then his right. Nawang closed his eyes and shuddered.

"I'm here," Ava's voice carried from behind Nawang. She was standing right behind him now, her naked body pressed against his. But it wasn't a dirty kind of naked. It was the nakedness of nature. The nakedness of vulnerability. The nakedness of simple, unconcealed love. "I trust you," she whispered.

I closed my eyes and shook from her power. Steel clattered at my side.

"I feel your loneliness," she whispered in his ear from behind, her hands moving gently across his chest. I just stared at her dumbly, captured by her. Her words were for him, but my brain reacted as if they had been for me. I loved her. I had always loved her. And I always would.

Nawang let out a sob.

"Tell me about her," she stepped around his side, looking into his eyes.

He shook his head. "What does it matter, now? She is lost. May the gods forgive me. I've lost her."

"She is still within you," Ava put her hand up to Nawang's chin and guided his eyes into hers. "You are what you are because of her."

"No!" he cried out. "Accuse me of anything, but not of that."

"How did you lose her?" Ava caressed him.

Nawang sobbed again. His eyes stared out into space, hypnotized. "She was killed in prison…the Chinese…while I hid…"

"And there were children, too, weren't there? Her children. Your children."

He gritted his teeth, lost in his worst memories. Reliving them for Ava. My body rattled spasmodically from the power of her presence, chafing roughly against my shackles. "As soon as the surrender agreement was signed, I packed them up to flee the country with a friend's family. I knew there wasn't much time before the Chinese cleaned house. I had to protect them." He turned his eyes to look at her. "But I don't know what happened to them. They never made it to the border. I looked and looked, but—they were gone, just vanished from the earth. I used magic, summoned demons, made terrifying agreements. But it was for nothing. For nothing."

"You went for help from the Spiral," Ava said.

"They told me to be patient. To be patient. But I wasn't alone. There were so many of us, so much fear, so much desire to fight back."

"She offered the dark path," Ava whispered.

He squeezed his eyes shut. "She promised that I would find them. That I would avenge them," he groaned. "It was all lies. I sat at her feet, her pupil. But she lied. It was her finest, hardest lesson to me. How I hated her! How I needed to believe her!"

"Tomorrow you can look again," she whispered lovingly. "But for now, you want to sleep. Sleep, my darling."

And he did. His body slowly slumped to the ground, still held in her gentle arms.

She turned her naked body towards me, knelt down to get close to me. Sunlight glistened in her hair, outlined her perfect shape.

My plan had worked. I had never intended to beat him one on one, if it came to fighting with him. It would take a lifetime for me to become powerful enough to try. I just had to wear him down, distract him from the real attack, the one he couldn't fight. Ava—her love, and her unconditional and genuine understanding. A man like Nawang had no defense against that.

"Free me," I croaked. "I need to kill him."

She shook her head.

My mouth opened, but nothing came out for a moment. "But your husband. He murdered him. Indirectly," I added lamely.

"I know," she said. "But you don't understand the fey, or at least my kind of fey. What's done is done. I want Kalden to live, to face his life. It's my choice. My instinct."

"And Calvin? Who speaks for him?"

"He speaks for himself, from where he has gone to. You will see."

"I don't understand—"

"You will, when the sun is high. For now, you are exhausted from your fight. You need to sleep, my love."

I fought, but I didn't have it in me. She was right, I had abused my body horribly in the struggle with Nawang. Severe, bubbly burns from the lightning bolts ran up and down my skin. "He might wake up. I have to protect you," I whispered.

She smiled that smile, and my heart melted.

I slept.

The truth is, I had no more defense against her than Nawang did.