Dylan studied her. “Why didn’t you go home last night?” he asked. “Why come here to face me if you knew I wasn’t—if you thought I was a mage?”
She squinted at him. “Are you a mage? You don’t feel like what I thought a mage would feel like.” Her vorpal probed at his. “But you’re not Dylan. So I can’t do what you want me to do. I know what my Special Work is now: to do nothing, to go back home.” Her voice was heavy.
Dylan leaned against a crumbling wall of rock. The red-black juncture in front of him left a sunspot on his eyelids when he closed them. “I’m not a mage. And my story wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.” He didn’t expect her to believe him, but maybe that was a good thing.
Maybe he didn’t want her to believe him.
When he opened his eyes again, here is what he saw: not some poor, stupid native of a world that was lumbering into its last days. But a girl whose tattered felt skirt was still green with moss from the nest she had made for herself the night before, whose weary slouch told him she’d been awake for hours, weighing his concerns alongside her own. A girl he didn’t want to hurt.
Quinn knew she must walk away.
And yet—
Dylan wasn’t a mage.
He had some secret, but it wasn’t that. Her vorpal felt his confusion and discomfort and . . . sympathy. For her. That wasn’t something mages felt, if she understood the stories.
And now Quinn realized the real reason it had taken her all night to make her choice when those three obvious mistakes should have made it for her: Despite the proof that Dylan was lying, Quinn believed his story.
Dylan wished he knew what was going through Quinn’s mind while she scrutinized the juncture in the rock. She finally turned back to him and asked, “Is there really a beast?”
Dylan only looked at the red-black swath of rock and shuddered.
Quinn charged up the scepter as Dylan had instructed her and gasped when the top turned vibrant blue.
Dylan’s stomach lurched. “Turn that off.” He was clammy with panic. He couldn’t let her do this. “I don’t think you’re the one who should wield the spell.”
She gazed at the crackling blue light, mesmerized.
“Didn’t you listen to the story?” he said. “I said you would die if you carried this out.”
She cocked her head and gave him a dark smile. “Do mages always feel so guilty when their evil plans work?”
Dylan wanted to grab the device from her hand, but he couldn’t manage to take more than a small step. Quinn moved toward the red-black glare in the rock, luring him. His body threatened to turn into a puddle of formless cells. The solid form he had taken was too difficult to keep together much longer.
“Don’t,” he said, almost choking on the hot dusty air. “It’s you. The beast is you.”
Quinn froze. The device crackled in her hand.
“It’s you,” Dylan said again. “It’s your whole . . . land.”
She blinked at him, confused. She finally lowered the device. “Canada?”
“Your whole world, all of it. Your entire universe.”
She looked around at the moss-draped maples, frowned at the sight of a distant dust storm. Dylan wondered how much was in that library she’d mentioned, what she might have studied of cosmology.
“Somehow our two universes got stuck together,” he told her. “Yours has been pushing into ours for over a century now. It’s wreaking havoc there.”
Her body was still rigid, her brow furrowed. “There’s no Bristle Beast.”
Dylan looked away from her and then back.
“It’s us pushing through the Other Place,” Quinn said. “Destroying it.” She folded her arms around herself. She seemed to be shrinking.
“It can’t go on much longer,” Dylan said. “Even your world is starting to come apart. You’ve seen the proof: The great crevices that have opened up. Other things.”
“What things?”
“The . . .” He didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t want to ruin everything that gave her world meaning. “The sanctuaries. Those places that vanish and reappear.”
She shook her head. “Those places are brought to us from the past. To help us.”
“No. They come by accident.” He couldn’t stand the way her shoulders drooped when he said it. He wanted her to go on defying him, refusing to believe him. “Everything’s getting pushed around. Pieces of the past are getting jumbled up with the present. It isn’t magic and it isn’t mages. There are no mages. What you see is merely your own world coming apart.”
Her face was pale as death. Her jaw clenched tight as a vise. “And the avatars? Are those just an accident too?”
He was silent.
“Tell me,” she said.
“The avatars are just people from the past,” he admitted, “getting pushed around in time.”