He didn’t deny it.
“Isn’t any of your story true?” Quinn said bitterly. “Hunter going away and coming back, the sage trying to help you remember. Is it the same story for everyone who comes along the crevice and meets you?”
“Different people have posed as Dylan, it isn’t always me.” He bowed his head so she couldn’t see his face. “But I use the same story. Every time.”
She heard the heavy sadness in his voice. She’d told him things she’d never told anyone. She suddenly felt sorry for him, sorry they were both locked in this awful nightmare.
They were sitting now almost facing away from each other, both hunched over as if to protect twin wounds. He only wants to be away from me, she thought, away from here. She felt the same way—she’d only ever wanted to be left alone to do her work. But now she couldn’t for a moment think what had been so bad about that idea of going back to her band, visiting the sanctuaries in turn, setting up the tents and tearing them down, having children with Artak. Panic clawed in her belly. She could have found a way to go on searching for the Transporting Sanctuary with her children at her heels, rambling through the forest together. What was so bad about that? Why had she thought marrying would be so bad?
Instead she had her Special Work: to kill one world for the sake of the other.
She took a great shuddering breath. “I can’t do it,” she said.
“I know.” He stood and gently took her hand. He pulled her up and led her away from the terrible red wound in the rock.
They retreated to a copse of pale trees. Dylan sat on a soft carpet of leaves and moss and studied the scepter. It was supposed to repel the matter of his own world, push it away from the heavy tangles of matter that made up Quinn’s universe. It would close up the wound in his own universe and leave the wound in hers gaping open. There was no other way to do it. No other way that his people had found.
He turned his gaze to Quinn. Her knees were huddled to her chest, eyes trained on some distant sight. Was she thinking about all of the avatars who had spoken to her? The sanctuaries she’d cataloged? Maybe she was only looking at the tangle of moss and trees in the distance.
Dylan wished he were back in his own world, soaking up heat and energy. But he was beyond that point—no amount of energy would save him now. He breathed in warm air that seemed to leak right back out of his lungs into his loosening form.
Quinn looked at the scepter Dylan was holding. “You’re too weak to use the scepter—is that why you want me to do it? You can’t do it yourself?”
“It’s not exactly true that I’m too weak to do it on my own,” Dylan said. “It’s just that my people—we can’t quite bring ourselves to do it.” He struggled to find a way to explain. “There was a time when we felt we could. When we felt we must destroy your world to save ours. But then there was a great war between your countries, and it was terrible to watch the suffering that destruction brought on your people. We knew it would be the same if the connection between the worlds is severed, only worse—your whole world would be destroyed.”
Dylan remembered the avatar she had told him about, the Moribund. He hoped the man wasn’t really experiencing his own death over and over again, that it was only that Quinn’s people were getting a glimpse of him through some window in time.
He closed his eyes for a long moment, trying to erase the thought altogether.
“After that, my people decided that we couldn’t bring that destruction on you,” Dylan went on. “And when we make a decision together, it’s very hard to undo. Our vorpals echo the decision back to us. That kind of resolve can keep a hold on us for generations. But now your world is suffering anyway. It’s coming to pieces the way my world is. We can’t let things go on the way they are, but we can’t bring ourselves to destroy you. We can only hope that you will choose to sacrifice your world for ours.”
“But the story you told me,” Quinn said. “You said I would die if I saved the Other Place, but you didn’t say that my whole world would die.”
“We’re getting desperate.” He turned away.
“It’s not right,” Quinn said. “You should have told me the truth to start with.”
Dylan laid the device between his feet. It looked harmless in the leaf litter. “You want to know the truth? My world isn’t some enchanted realm. We let you believe it was so that you wouldn’t stop us from taking your energy, so you wouldn’t look for a way to cut yourselves free from us. We made sure that we would be the ones with the power in the end.”
He could see in Quinn’s searching gaze that she was deciding whether to believe him. He grew weaker under her hard stare.
“That’s the truth I should have told you from the start,” he said feebly.
Quinn crossed her arms. “You said that you once got people from my world to go into your world.”