The Mirrored Shard

put on a brave face nonetheless.

“Then you’re going somewhere, but somewhere you’ll never return from.”

“I have”—I took a deep breath and decided to just come out with it—“I have so much I need to ask you, Mr. Tesla.”

He helped me to my feet and gave a wan smile as he regarded my soaked frame. “Please. Call me Nikola.”

Before I could tell him that I wasn’t sure I could do that, not until I processed that I’d actually met a great man such as him, albeit after death, he started walking, leaving me to follow.

We reached some rocks on the far side of the marsh. A line of blue sunlight had started at the horizon. “The nights are short here,” I said, and then wanted to bang my head against the same rocks for saying something so inane to Tesla himself.

“Nothing makes sense here,” said Tesla. “You’ll find that out if you stay much longer.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m just here for one thing.”

“No,” Tesla said. “You may have come here initially for selfish reasons, but now that the Yellow King knows of your existence, you are here at his pleasure. He will never allow you to find what you seek.”

I took in a shaky breath. I couldn’t seem to get rid of the bone-deep cold the marsh had put in me. “I just want to get my friend back. And I found him, so if the king is out to stop me, he’s slow.”

“I’m not talking about Dean Harrison,” Tesla said. “I’m talking about the real reason you’re here, Aoife. The Old Ones.”

I stopped walking at that, and folded my arms. “How do you know so much if you’re just a spirit?”

Tesla shrugged. “I was an inventor in life, and in death I have found ways to harness the energies of this bleak place. They feed me information, fluctuations in the fields.” He scraped a hand across his eyes. “Time was, I knew everything. Now it seems as if bits and pieces fall away as quickly as the bones that the souls grind on Ossuary Road.

“Stopping the Old Ones is something you will never accomplish,” Tesla said. “Imagine my horror when I found, through my Gates, that they were the spark, the source of magic and wonder in the universe. Something so horrible giving life to such brilliance, all across the Land.”

“I really just want Dean,” I lied, but Tesla shook his head.

“The king, the Old Ones—they are all threads binding the universe,” he said. “And I have not as yet figured out how the knot is tied, but I do know that if you pull one string, it will all unravel.”

I stared at Tesla and tried to look stony. “I have to try.”

“And once you steal from the king, and upset the plans of the Old Ones, what is your plan?” Tesla snapped. “You will be a marked woman.”

“I’m a living soul,” I said. “Somebody in the Iron Land is waiting for me.”

“And they found a way to come here and return to the living?” Tesla shook his head. “You know, I’d read theories. I even tried to construct a prototype once, but it failed miserably. Whoever sent you over is a genius.”

“He’s a drunk,” I said. “He doesn’t even know we’re using his device.”

Tesla barked a laugh. “I know how that feels. How you create something and can’t see that it could be used for evil.” His face drew down. “Can’t see what you’ve done until it’s too late.”

“You couldn’t possibly know what the Gates would do,” I told him, picking up on his discomfort. “You couldn’t know what was beyond them.”

“I had hopes,” Tesla said. “To see worlds beyond my own. Everyone in the scientific community laughed at me, but there were a few men, men who were not of science but of the otherworld, who didn’t think what I’d said was at all laughable.”

He went to the edge of the rock and stood silhouetted against the rising sun. “The Fae had been using their hexenrings to visit the Iron Land since time immemorial, taking our children, playing with humans as if we were pets. We just wanted a way to strike back. I wanted to help. I had no idea that us constructing our own Gate, sending the flow the other way, would fracture the barriers between all the worlds, allow things to come from anywhere and everywhere.” He rubbed his forehead. “Yes, things like you and I and full-blooded Fae need to use a Gate, but I always knew that the endgame would be the barriers fraying, time and space crashing into each other, and the destruction of the universe. Only the Old Ones will survive, and that’s the way they like it. They’re probably laughing at us right now.”

“They’re doing a lot more than that,” I said softly. I thought I’d feel shame, but it felt almost good to finally tell someone the truth. “I almost destroyed the Iron Land, and I bargained with them to set things right. All I really got was my mother back, though. They didn’t fix the destruction, and now they’re returning to the Lands because of what I did.”

Tesla shut his eyes. “You found my last Gate. The one to the dreamland, to that awful man in black.”

“Crow’s not awful,” I said, thinking of the sad, pale man who lived alone in the land that controlled the dreams of all the others. “He tried to stop me. But I didn’t listen. And I didn’t listen to anyone else, so now I’m here trying to save my friend who died because I couldn’t live with what I’d done.”

I didn’t have to breathe in the Deadlands, but it appeared that I could cry. Tears slipped down my cheeks, colder than my frozen skin.

“Listen to me,” Tesla said. He came back to me and took me by the shoulders. “Why you came here isn’t important. You were probably doomed from the moment you went under. The Old Ones are the most powerful things in the universe, yes, but the worst one is Nylarthotep.”

Tesla was solid, if gray, as if he were a piece of lantern reel in the world of color. I looked down at his hands. “What happened to you? You’re not like the other Walkers.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I’m what happens after you’ve been a Walker for a few hundred years. Eventually I’ll dry up and blow away. But not today.”

“The Great Old Ones grew terrified of the power Nylarthotep commanded,” he said, “so they dumped him here, cut off from everything, with only the dead for company. Here he’s the Yellow King.”

I shifted my feet. If the Faceless knew I was gone, then all this trying to get them to lead me to the Yellow King would be for nothing. “I should get back to the camp.”

“No!” For the first time, Tesla’s face hardened, and he grabbed me by the wrist when I tried to walk away. I struggled, panicked, but for a dead man he was strong.

“I must have an audience with him,” I said. “It’s the only way to get Dean out of here.”

“And I’m telling you that there’s no hope of that,” Tesla said. “That Fae nonsense about everyone having a thread of life and only when it’s cut by fate do you descend into the Deadlands? That’s bunk. You die, you’re dead, and the spheres keep turning without you.”

“No …” I shook my head and tried to struggle, but there was no undoing his grasp. “No, I heard if it wasn’t your time …”

“You were marked the moment you came to the Deadlands,” Tesla told me. “The Yellow King knows someone with your gifts is his only hope of getting free, of returning to the power he once commanded. The Old Ones might destroy us, or they might usher in a new age of science and prosperity, but if Nylarthotep is freed it will be the end of everything—for the Fae, for the Iron Land, for everything.”

“You can’t know that,” I told him. I didn’t want to believe anything he was saying, but I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my guts that it was true.

“I can,” Tesla said. “Because when I died and came here, he tried to do the same thing with me.”

A wan smile lit his face, and in the growing light I could see the hollow pain in his eyes, the look of permanent loss, of things he could never get back, only remember. My mother had had the same look, for as long as I’d known her.

“He took me from the Catacombs, when my soul had barely realized it was dead,” Tesla continued, “and he asked me to open a Gate. I was dead, so I could no longer use any of my Weird, but he didn’t believe there wasn’t something I could do for him.”

Tesla released me, but he didn’t need to keep me close. I wasn’t going anywhere now. I had to hear the end of his story.

“He tortured me for months—maybe years,” Tesla said. “Time flows differently here, I’m sure you can feel. He tormented me, kept me as his special amusement. And you’re walking into his trap. He’ll string you along,