An Artificial Night

“Karen—” I turned. Karen and Hoshibara were gone. The landscape was dissolving in a pastel smear, and I could smell roses on the wind. I closed my eyes—


—and opened them to find myself at the edge of Acacia’s wood, hidden by a tangle of branches. The sky was black, and my candle was at least four inches shorter. Whatever Luna dosed me with knocked me out for more than a little while, and time was running out.

I stood slowly, leaning against one of the nearby trees. I was back in Blind Michael’s lands, and I knew how Luna managed her escape, and why she’d been willing to give me up to keep its secret. “The end justifies the means,” I whispered. “Oh, Luna.”

The cuts on my fingers were swollen and red and burned if I put too much pressure on them. Cute. “It’s poison Toby week, isn’t it?” I muttered, looking out over the plains. A thick mist had risen, bleaching the landscape; the lights of Blind Michael’s halls flickered dimly in the distance.

There was no time like the present and no time to waste. Shivering, I stepped out of the shelter of the trees and started walking. The steady whiteness of the land around me added an eerie quality to the trip that I could’ve done without. Boulders looked like looming monsters until I got close enough to see them clearly, while brambles and clumps of grass turned the ground into an obstacle course. I held my candle up to light the way, and it burned the mists back just enough to let me see that I was walking in a straight line. The flame was my compass and the light from Blind Michael’s halls was my lighthouse, leading me through the night.

Nothing stopped me as I walked through the mist; the land around me was silent. My candle kept burning slowly down; by the time it was another inch shorter, I was standing in front of the halls, aware of just how exposed I really was. The guards wouldn’t miss me for long. I hunched down behind a crumbling wall, eyeing the mist for signs of movement.

The Luidaeg said Blind Michael had taken Karen’s “self.” Remembering ALH, that phrase made me cold. January’s machine pulled the self out of people, left them empty and dead from the shock of separation. I didn’t think it was something you could just toss into a cell—he had to be keeping it in something more solid. A trinket or a toy of some sort, something she couldn’t escape from. So what was it?

The butterfly globe he taunted me with. That had to be Karen’s self, trapped inside the glass and beating itself to death as it struggled to get free. But where was it? He’d had it with him before. He might still have it, or he might have given it to his monstrous children as a toy. Either way, I needed to take it away. Neither place seemed more likely than the other, and I finally settled for the children as the lesser of the two evils. I might survive them and get a second chance if I chose wrong. I couldn’t say the same about him.

Crossing Blind Michael’s holdings alone in the dark is something I never want to do again. I moved from building to building, freezing and holding my breath at the slightest sound. Nothing came out of the darkness to attack me and somehow that wasn’t reassuring. There was no way to know whether I was walking into a trap, and so I just kept going, stopping when I reached the hall with the broken walls. It looked different from the outside, but I recognized it. I always know my prisons.

The outside of the hall was smooth stone. The only way in was the obvious—the broken walls were only ten feet high, and they weren’t barred in any way. It wasn’t a bad climb. I could make it.