The Mirrored Shard

The whispers had bodies, bodies a living person couldn’t perceive.

The pitch of the machine’s whine increased, and I felt my last breath slip out of me as if a piece of silk had drifted through my fingers.

The whispers turned to look at me, and the woman who’d spoken reached out to grab my hair.

A small boy, also wearing traditional Chinese garb, stopped her. “No, Mama,” he said, looking at me with the same blank, bleeding eyes as the girl on Alcatraz. “She’s not staying here.”

The whispers converged on me, grabbing at my clothes and hair, trying to touch my face, and I lashed out, trying to fight them.

The pain had stopped, and I could move, but I felt as if I were drugged, moving slow and dull, not nearly at my usual speed.

In the center of the machine, between the coils, I saw a small fissure of the same black and silver light the whispers seemed to be made out of, and I tried to shove my way through them toward it.

Don’t leave us! the woman screamed. Don’t go away like the man!

That made me stop struggling for a moment. “Man? What man?”

Mama, stop, said the boy. The man didn’t stay. She won’t stay. She’ll go on to the Deadlands and we’ll still be here.

The fissure widened and arched into the shape I recognized, the tiny tear in space-time that Gateminders could perceive when they traveled from place to place. Now that I was dead, I could perceive the one to the Deadlands as well.

I tried to move again, and the whispers relaxed their hold this time, but when I took the first step, something hit my chest as if I’d been struck with a bat.

Chang had started trying to bring me back. I moved again, trying to fight against the blows Chang was raining on my physical body as he tried to resuscitate me.

My fingers grazed the fissure in the fabric of this in-between place, and I felt as if I had been sucked into a whirlpool. There was no free will involved in this at all—I touched it, and the Deadlands dragged me down.

There wasn’t the usual tug of the Gates, the feeling of being spread across the universe, my mind and body a million glittering points of light. This felt like sinking, like I was drowning in the deepest of oceans, powerless to do anything other than watch as I drifted down through the silver-gray fog, into a place no human eye had ever touched.

I saw other faces, other shapes, in the fog. More of the whispers, who hissed and gnashed their teeth and tried to grab for me, and other, larger things.

One turned an eye on me, sightless and cloudy, and if I’d had breath I would have gasped.

It looked like the Old Ones looked to my eyes, great star-sized bodies that held universes of their own under their translucent skin, drifting tentacles that brushed through galaxies, eyes like suns that burned you to the core.

But this one was small, and broken, and floated before me as if it, too, had drowned and was dead.

You came, it whispered to me. You shouldn’t have.

“I had no choice,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking or we were speaking in some other, more primal way that transcended voice and language.

That’s what the other said, the Old One told me. The one who came before.

“The doctor,” I said. “I know who he is.”

Not the sad soul who fears death. The other, said the Old One. The one touched by our gift, before you. He came here, for the same answers you seek.

The thing had to be talking about Tesla. But it couldn’t be. Tesla had built the Gates, but he’d never spoken of that part of his life to anyone except the Brotherhood.

“You’re lying,” I told the Old One, as we drifted through the silver. The cold increased. Below us, I saw a black whorl, toward which everything in this in-between place was slowly drawn. A whisper wavered at the edge, and then broke apart into a thousand blots of darkness and disappeared.

I am old beyond knowing. I cannot lie. I speak only what is true, the Old One said.

“I’m not here for you,” I tried to explain. I was done acting as the tool of beings older and more powerful than myself. All that mattered was Dean.

But you are here for us, it said. You are our agent, our herald in the Iron Land, whether you like it or not. You, Destroyer, and your vast gift are the harbinger of the wind that will sweep the world clean, just as the one before you was. And you have no choice in the matter, just as he had none. You will pave the way for our return, or you will perish. It is a simple truth, even for one as primitive as you.

“Leave me alone!” I screamed. It couldn’t be true. I’d made the bargain with the Old Ones out of desperation, not because I was fated to. Nothing in my life was predetermined. Everything that had brought me here had been my doing, my choice.

At least, that was what I had to believe if I didn’t want to go insane for good.

Beware, said the figure. You go to the realm of the one who waits. He watches. He schemes. He knows that you are coming.

Before I could reply, I touched the edge of the black floor of this place, and it enveloped me.

When I opened my eyes, I was on solid ground, and I knew for sure from the cold and my lack of breathing that I was dead.

10 Deadlands

I LAY ON A road, paved in crushed white shells that poked into me every which way. I got up and brushed myself off. My skin was gray and I felt no heartbeat in my chest, nor air drawn into and out of my lungs. My soul was here, covered in the white dust. My physical body, I hoped, was still suspended somewhere in Chinatown, between life and death, and relying on Conrad, Cal and Chang to bring me back before I became permanently attached to the Deadlands and my body withered away, devoid of everything that made me Aoife Grayson.

I turned in a slow circle, examining the landscape. The road wound through black sand, a switchback snake as far as I could see. Red clay mountains rose to the east; their plateaus and spires looked as if real mountains had melted, peaks and valleys turned to slurry. In the other direction, I saw the faint outline of a distant city wreathed in noxious green-yellow smoke. I could hear the faint whine of air-raid sirens.

Some sort of bird with leathery wings and stained white feathers flew low over me and landed with a squawk on a lumpy object at the edge of the road.

I flinched when I realized that the object it perched on was a body, bloated with decay and covered with drab brown rags. A little farther away, I saw a wheeled caravan, the type pulled by horses, burned out and on its side. Picked-over bones scattered across the sand told me what had happened to the rest of the passengers.

Looking between the city and the mountains again, I picked the city and started walking. There would be someone there, I hoped, who could tell me what I was looking for.

The heat was oppressive—I had never thought about the Deadlands in terms of being a real place, a physical place with gravity and geography and atmosphere. I’d pictured a vast nothingness where the dead, if they still existed in some form, collected like pennies dropped into a bucket.

But it felt as real as any place I’d ever walked as a live person. The heat, the grit on my face, the sounds and certainly the smells, all real. Unpleasantly real.

I tried to tell myself that I seemed as if I belonged here, that no one could harm me. There was nobody here to do it, anyway.

As I walked, the shells crunching under my feet, I saw the air waver on the horizon, where a purple-cast