Unremarkably, the universe had once again vanished. Not outside that room, Andy realized, but including the room. A green glowstick, Kerri, and herself. That was the total inventory of the cosmos.
And it was disintegrating. She could feel it in her gut—her soul withering and crumbling into space dust.
Kerri was crying from the debris of her own cataclysm, stranded, light-years away, and she was trapped on her own planet, prehistorically overwhelmed, unable to reach. Andy looked into herself, fathoming the void, searching for something to hold on to. Something to evolve from. Something that could grow, one single seed.
“I was afraid.”
She said.
“I was afraid to talk to you. To share what I felt. I thought that if you knew, if I poured my heart out for you, you wouldn’t be able to handle it, it would scare you away. ’Cause it scared me.”
She gazed up, into the lonely crying star.
“So I did the easy thing. I left because I would always know where to find you. I ran away to get my shit together, and I thought about you every single day. You were my last thought before I closed my eyes and your name was—is!—it’s the first word on my mouth when I stir up, but I couldn’t woman up and tell you. So I just kept it to myself, and whenever it hurt too much all I had to do was dial your number and hear your voice, and I’d feel better. And it never, ever crossed my mind that you would be needing me. (Tearswipe.) I was selfish. I was a coward. I am sorry.”
She was kneeling down to Kerri now, her hand hovering near the orange planet by the neon-green light of Glowstick Nebula.
“Kerri, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you. But I am here now.”
Kerri’s hair stirred, a once-fearful civilization gazing up to the sky with hope.
“And I’m getting you out of here.”
Darkness dispelled.
Kerri looked around, smelled, listened.
“They’re gone,” she whispered.
Andy’s sensors hummed back on. The room had returned. It was just dirt and bricks, but it was something to work with.
“The necromancer’s got us, but he doesn’t know yet,” she said. “Don’t speak up. We’re nowhere we haven’t been before.”
“But last time Peter was here to get us out.”
“I know.”
“And Nate deserted us,” Kerri sobbed.
“I know,” Andy repeated through a grimace. That one hurt like someone fingering a fresh wound. “But Tim didn’t.”
“Oh, God, Tim,” Kerri moaned, fighting the gloom off. “If something’s happened to him…”
“Nah, he did pretty well up there. The monsters were within the walls, inside the brickwork, and Tim chased them back in. (Points at a vent.) He must still be inside.”
“How is he going to find us?”
“He will,” Andy said, as she fished out of her jeans the last treasure in her armory—the one thing she had found when the universe faded, the one thing she always held on to.
A plastic penguin.
She squeezed the little toy next to the vent, and the sound wave of a squeak rippled through the walls of the newly silent, carcass-ridden haunted house.
—
Parsecs away, under the Milky Way, firs watched the thin white scar of a rowboat in the middle of the lake.
PETER: Faster, Nate.
The lights on Debo?n Isle were gone; the sighing of waves breaking onshore long lost.
“Don’t think about it, just move. Fuck Andy and her stupid plan. (Leaning forward, whispering.) This was all a mistake, Nate. Their mistake. We should’ve never come back.”
Nate canvassed the horizon. The jagged line of trees could be made out against the sky in any direction, though in one direction stars were yielding ground to wind-riding rain clouds. No shore seemed nearer than any other. Nate realized he wasn’t sure he’d been sailing in a straight line after all.
As soon as he’d started rowing, his arms had kindly pointed out that, in the last eighteen hours, they had descended a mineshaft, gone spelunking, climbed back up, trekked, run, and fought a horde of carnivorous underworld fiends. Rowing didn’t seem so taxing when Andy was doing it, but that was two days ago and, as Nate’s arms patiently reminded him, he was no Andy. The straw that breaks the camel’s back always looks light enough, until it lands.
He squinted back at the isle, camouflaged against the storm. He checked the stars. Four or five of those stupid tiny glowworms should form Ursa Minor; he should know which. Kerri would know which.
“What, are you waiting for a signal or something?” Peter said. “Oh, wait. Here comes one.”
Nate returned his attention to the surface. He didn’t feel it, but the moonlight showed ripples on the still water. Coming from the storm’s direction.
Damn high ripples under his watercraft.
The boat rocked gently once, violently twice, and then a wave nearly flipped it over, sending the sailor overboard.
Darkness, and then cold—in that order—stung every pore in his skin.
He frantically swam up to the surface, too scared to even stare into the depth of the second-deepest blackest lake in the Americas.
“Here, let me help.”
He grabbed Peter’s bloated white hand, and Peter smiled back from the boat, worms crawling out the corners of his smile.
Every fir in the county heard Nate’s scream.
“Kidding!” Peter said, laughing, a beautiful punchable white grin across his face. “Sorry! Come on, Nate, it was a joke! Hurry up, or you’re gonna die in there.”
He smiled a rascally apology, offering a hand over the bulwark—a clean, strong hand that Nate refused to take.
“I’m sorry, man. I couldn’t resist. Come on. We need to get out of here.”
Nate, blood and gore washed from his face, stayed in the water, barely afloat, completely ignoring his body’s cries of pain, staring at Peter from this new perspective.
When he finally climbed back on the boat and sat across from Peter, wet clothes stuck to his skin, wounds too cold to bleed any longer, something had changed.
Peter retrieved the oars that had fallen overboard and handed them to him. Nate didn’t take those either. That had been the last straw indeed. As light as they come.
NATE: Why would you do that?
PETER: (Confused.) Do what?
NATE: Help me. Why would you even want me to escape?
PETER: (Frowns, puzzled, then shrugs.)
NATE: If you are a smear in my heart, if you are a piece of Debo?n left inside me, haunting me in the shape of my dead friend…why would you let me go now? You wanted me in that house. You wrote messages inviting us.
PETER: (Genuinely nonplussed.) I don’t follow you. (Then challenging.) I thought I was a manifestation of your subconscious.
NATE: Yes. Either you are my subconscious and you want me out of here because you’re scared—which means I’m scared, but I should be braver than you—or you’re truly an avatar of Debo?n and you don’t want us here anymore…because we can actually beat you.
PETER: (Blank.)
NATE: In either case, you’re a coward, and I should go back.
A gentle thunder unexpectedly switched sides and rumbled triumphantly for Nate as he snatched the oars from Peter’s hands and forced his arms to start rowing again—back to Debo?n Isle.