TRANSCENDENCE DOESN’T ASK US QUESTIONS ANYMORE NOW that Lucius has joined them. They have what they want. A god, a mascot. I wonder how long it’ll take them to realize that Lucius can’t inflict his own curse upon them any more effectively than any of their past prisoners were able to, despite his willingness to try. I wonder how long it’ll take Lucius to realize there must have been others before him, but that they aren’t here now.
The morning after he left us, I woke to the sound of metal scraping, then a loud thud. My eyes snapped open to see everyone lying in a tangled heap on the far side of the cage.
“You’re up,” Ursula said when she saw me. “Help us pull.”
Victor’s belt was wrapped around one of the bars, its leather tail now dangling limply as it waited for them to grab on again. “This is our plan to escape?” I asked as I climbed to my feet.
“The point of force just needs to be more concentrated and the power greater,” Ursula said. “This is a lot better than each of us pulling on a different bar with only our hands.”
“If the belt holds,” Ysabelle added. As they passed our room on patrol, the soldiers watched us warily as we all took hold of the belt again. They didn’t seem to think it was going to work, but they knew enough to know that when shadowless got angry, sometimes other unintended things could happen.
“Go!” Ursula cried. We all pulled, arms burning. The leather stretched. “More! . . . More! . . .”
“Motherfucker!” Victor cried when the belt slipped and we all collapsed on top of him at full force. “This is as pointless as everything else we’ve tried,” he gasped.
“He’s right,” the woman in white said suddenly. I turned to see her floating through the main door to the abandoned church.
“Are you here to give us breakfast or to proselytize?” Ursula asked her. “Because we’re only interested in one of those things.”
The woman stopped just in front of the cage. “I want to spare you the wasted effort. You’ll never be able to bend the bars.” She bowed her head reverently. “The Great One remembered long ago that they could never be destroyed. Nothing on earth can break them.”
As she said it, I suddenly knew it was true. I’d been able to feel it the moment we were locked inside—we all had, even though we’d refused to admit it to one another—but hadn’t been able to describe it. The feeling that the bars were somehow more than bars. Now that she’d said it, I understood what it was. It was as if they were both the thing itself and the name for it. Perhaps simple poles of metal could be bent with enough force, but how would a person break an “unbreakable bar”?
Ursula must have known it too, but she refused to show it. “The Great One. That’s what you call Lucius now?” she scoffed.
“Oh, no,” the woman said. “The Great One was far more powerful. A queen among shadowless. She was the first we found. What we all aspire to be.”
“Is that so?” Ursula asked. “A shame you have to refer to her in the past tense then.” She grinned. Trying to provoke her. “Did she kill herself in some stupid accident because she didn’t remember anything, this all-powerful queen of yours? Or did she commit suicide, to escape all of you?”
The white woman’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything at first. Open the door, I prayed. Open the door and reach for Ursula. You’ll never get it closed again.
But she didn’t. She finally looked away, and crouched down until her white layers rippled out into a small ivory lake. She looked at Zachary, who was still huddled on the ground, one sore arm from the fall tucked against his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked. She reached out and touched the back of his free hand softly. For once, he let her. He looked at her fingers, then slowly up at her face, into her eyes. “You have great power,” she whispered to him, awed. “You’ve almost transcended.”
Ursula finally took a step toward her. “Enough,” she said. “He’s fine.”
The woman put her palms up, and stood. “He’s very important to you, isn’t he?” she asked. Ursula didn’t say anything. “He’s important to us, too.”
“Hah,” Ursula finally spat.
The woman in white looked at Zachary again. “You don’t have to fight,” she said to him, almost as if praying. “You can choose to stop struggling. You’re safe here. This is your home.”
“This is not our home,” I said.
“And New Orleans is?” The woman’s eyes wrinkled above her veil. “They are bandits there, nothing more.”
“How do you know—” I started, but Ursula cut me off.
“Lucius,” she said simply.
Of course they had asked him. He’d told them everything. Our journey, our hopes.
“He did it out of concern for you,” the woman in white said. “You should know—whatever you think is there, you’ve been misled.”
“Don’t listen,” Ursula said to all of us. “She has no idea. She’s lying.”
The woman rose. “Someday very soon you’ll be able to see.”