Chapter One-Hundred Forty-Eight

Syaoran burst through the portal, magic tingling across his skin like a veil of ice crystals. "Sakura!" he shouted, plowing through the reservoir, splashing water everywhere as he raced toward her. Her body—only seven years old, just as it had been the day Fei-Wang had marked her for death—floated amidst a sphere of oily, black magic, slipping slowly toward the center, out of his grasp.

No. Never again. Syaoran surged forward, legs burning as he pushed them harder than he ever had before. Fei-Wang's magic slithered and writhed around Sakura's body, curling around her in what a more naïve onlooker might have called a protective embrace.

The reservoir shook, the sudden movement nearly throwing him face-first into the water before he righted himself. Behind him, the oppressive taint of Fei-Wang's magic filled the air.

He didn't look back.

The shadowy cocoon gathered around the princess, covering her face, her torso. She flung out a tiny hand, the same hand she'd extended so long ago, before Syaoran had turned back time, before he'd failed her, before everything, and he had an awful thought about being too late—again—and having to watch the curse sear itself into her body.

No. His own hand shot out, fingers splayed, and he knew he would be too late. Too late because he had already failed her once. Too late because tampering with the past damaged the future. Too late because—and he'd always known this, though he'd never admitted it aloud—he wasn't good enough to save her. Too late . . .

Never again. His fingers coiled around her wrist, the pads of his fingertips leaving indents on her skin. He jerked to a stop, and for one moment, his vision narrowed until he saw only their hands, linked together, still outside the influence of Fei-Wang's magic. A heavy stillness fell in the reservoir.

Syaoran threw his weight back and started pulling her body from the magic trap. As he did, the black tendrils peeled away, dissolving like smoke in open air. Sakura collapsed into his arms, head lolling against his shoulder, and for the first time in seven years, he pulled her close and held her.

"This place is falling apart!" Kurogane yelled as the ground began to shake. Nihon had been plagued with earthquakes often enough that he recognized the feel of the earth buckling under his feet, splitting and breaking and shivering as if a demon had burrowed up from its home underground to terrorize the people above. It had happened that way sometimes, he remembered. An earthquake would ravage some small village, and before he and the rest of the demon-hunters had a chance to ride out, the monsters had emerged from fissures in the ground and slaughtered everyone in the area. Kurogane braced himself, waiting for whatever menace their enemy would send their way.

"The time has finally come!" Fei-Wang's voice boomed throughout the reservoir, magnified to the point that it made Kurogane's ears ache.

"Look there!" The mage turned, pointing to the portal Kurogane had stepped through to get back to the reservoir. He turned to see the air around the portal bulging, an abscess in the fabric of the universe. It split open, and . . . And Kurogane wasn't sure how it happened, but suddenly, the room where Fei-Wang had taunted him less than a minute ago became part of this world, like a patch sewn over a moth-eaten blanket.

Kurogane heard a high-pitched noise somewhere behind him. It took him a moment to recognize it as the pork-bun's voice. "Mokona senses a feather!"

What? He looked over his shoulder. "Where? Since when? How—" He clamped his teeth shut, biting off the words. How it had happened didn't matter, and the fact that there was a feather also didn't matter, at least not at this moment. But the question still bounced around in his head, demanding an answer: How can there be a feather here?

"There shouldn't be any feathers in this world," the mage said, his voice almost inaudible over the din. "Syaoran-kun said that there were never any feathers in Clow—that's how he knew I was lying from the very beginning of the journey."

Fuck, can't anything make sense anymore? Kurogane wondered, rolling his eyes. "We've have to—"

Fei-Wang's booming voice cut him off. "At one time, that was true. There were no feathers in Clow. However, when you departed for your journey, the rules of the multiverse began to crumble, and everything you did in those various dimensions changed not only the future, but the past." Standing in the middle of the pedestal he'd brought into this world, his eyes began to gleam. "This world . . . I'm surprised none of you saw it, as frustratingly clever as you all seem to be. But it should be obvious. The vast fields of sand . . . the cadence of people's names . . . a reservoir where those people store and protect their precious water . . . a country that protects two towers that scrape the sky like wings. It should be obvious!"

"Tokyo," the mage whispered. "We're in Tokyo."

Kurogane rounded on him. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means," Fei-Wang said, his voice dripping contempt, "that Clow is a future version of Tokyo. The same Tokyo where the image of Princess Sakura left one of the pieces of her memory behind, a piece which only grew in power over time, until her magic imbued every stone and every grain of sand in these ruins." He raised one hand, and something rose from the water in front of his pedestal: an oblong glass chamber which contained one of the princess's feathers. It radiated a soft glow, so at odds with Fei-Wang's dark magic that it was no surprise when the glass around it cracked under the opposing forces.

"Sakura left that behind to help the people of Tokyo!" the meat bun cried, waving her stubby arms as if it really fucking mattered why she'd left it here. "The people would have died without water! It was Sakura's kindness! Syaoran told us about it—how the water here did everything it could to protect Sakura! It must have known! It must have known that Sakura's feather was there to protect the water!"

The words stirred an echo of puzzlement in Kurogane's mind. When the kid had told them everything that had happened that had led up to his imprisonment, he'd mentioned something about the water rising up to protect the princess against the dark magic. At the time, Kurogane had discarded that detail with no more than a mental shrug—hell, he didn't know anything about magic, so there had been no point in wondering about it. But now . . . Now, knowing that the reservoir had been drawing on the energy from that feather for countless generations, knowing that it had been that shard of Sakura's soul that had kept the water pure and safe to drink . . . No wonder it was important.

"But now," the meat bun went on, more subdued, "Sakura's feather will be used to bring unhappiness. That can't happen."

A sinister chuckle resonated through the room. The glass capsule shattered, the feather shooting up in an arc toward Fei-Wang, then sailing over his head and melding with the body of the princess he'd brought forth from wherever he'd been keeping her. Reminded of the younger princess, Kurogane craned his neck, searching the area the boy had run off to when he'd gone to prevent the death-curse from imprinting itself on Sakura's soul. He saw the boy cradling the younger Sakura's body, his expression tender, as if he held the most valuable treasure in the universe.

He still loves her. The thought came unbidden, unwanted, and laid roots in his mind. Or . . . no, that wasn't right. That thought had always been there, at first benign, then turning black with resentment as he'd grown to love the kid. He hadn't been able to squash that resentment entirely, even when the kid had chosen him over the princess, and now, seeing the love in the boy's eyes, his control over it wavered.

The boy's eyes flickered to his face, then widened before they darted away, swimming with guilt. Kurogane froze, then started to take a step toward the kid. A cushion of air pressed against his body from all sides, as if all the oxygen in the room had suddenly turned solid. What the hell? He resisted the invisible bonds, straining against them until his muscles stood up like thick cables under his skin, but he couldn't so much as move a finger.

"There's something weird in the air," the meat bun shouted—unnecessarily, to Kurogane's mind. Then it occurred to him that, with the air as thick as it was, Mokona shouldn't have even been able move her mouth to speak. It's got to be magic, he thought, relieved to find that his eyes could still shift, though he could barely see the meat bun in the corner of his vision. His eyes darted back to Fei-Wang as he raised his arms.

"I now have a body seared with the experience from many different dimensions," he said in his booming voice. The princess's body began to float in front of him, her gown rippling as if she was submerged in a tank of water, rather than open air. "And with that vessel, I have a feather that has stored unparalleled power during its long sleep within these ruins. With that power, I will tear apart the bonds that connect the dimensions to one another. And then the worlds' most stubborn rule will crumble! The dead cannot come back to life." A bark of laughter erupted from his mouth. "That rule will disintegrate!"

The cracks that had formed during the quake began to expand, the walls tearing themselves apart. But instead of debris from the crumbling building, other worlds peeked through those fissures. Still frozen where he stood, Kurogane saw the wall in front of him split apart, images of places both strange and familiar taking up the space between the edges of the cracks. A distant, cold horror swept through him, and a single thought echoed in his mind, repeating itself over and over again: Oh, fuck, he's tearing the universe apart.