Dying Is My Business

burned in Stryge’s eyes. The fire of the Ancients. I exhaled, and more of it erupted from my mouth and nose.

I felt like I’d swallowed a nuclear reactor. It flowed like lava through my veins, burned inside me like the heart of the sun. I felt … altered. Changed.

It is a combination of elements that were never meant to be combined.

I got to my feet, but I couldn’t stand for long. I dropped to my hands and knees, vomiting up more gouts of cold white fire. It just kept coming. There was more of it in me than my body could hold.

It is a danger to all who live.

Had the oracles foreseen this? Had they been trying to warn me?

As long as it walks upon this world, as long as it dwells among us, it puts us all in peril.

The fire burned and burned and felt like it would never stop.

Bethany’s voice came from a distance. “Trent? Are you okay? What’s happening?”

She’d come back to check up on me. I squeezed my burning eyes shut and turned away from her. “Stay back! I don’t know what’s happening to me!” I heard her footsteps running toward me, and shouted, “Damn it, stay away!” Something powerful coursed through me, something frightening and building in pressure. “The plan worked, but something’s wrong, it’s different this time.” Then I couldn’t contain it anymore. I leaned back and screamed, the white fire jetting from my eyes, nose, and mouth. Before I knew what was happening, I was floating into the air, as though I were being lifted. I stopped myself somehow, hovering a dozen feet above the ground.

Above, the red and black clouds Stryge had summoned were gone, replaced with a far more normal-looking gray cloud cover. The warring factions of gargoyles were gone, too, probably frightened off by Stryge. In the near distance was the wreckage of the Cloisters, its broken stones littering the hillside. The bits of trees and rocks and body parts had fallen to the ground as well, the laws of physics restored with Stryge’s death.

As for Stryge himself, the once mighty creature lay on his back below me where he’d fallen to the ground. A thirty-foot-tall mummy, shriveled to bone and dried tissue. Once again, I’d done the impossible. I’d killed an Ancient.

Out of habit, I added his name to my mental list.

11. Stryge.

Eleven names. Eleven lives I’d stolen. God. My heart felt heavy at the number, and even heavier when I thought about how many more had died over the last couple of days. More than I could count, and most of them had died because of me. It felt like there was so much blood on my hands they would never be clean. The oracles were right. I was a threat.

Bethany stared up at me in awe, which angered me. Didn’t she know what a monster I was? What an abomination?

But of course she did. She’d seen it firsthand. The thing inside me had almost killed her. I had almost killed her.

My anger boiled inside me. Everything around me changed, as if a filter had been put over my eyes. Suddenly I didn’t see Bethany, or the park grounds, or the wreckage. I saw through them, into them. I saw the millions of silken threads that bound their atoms together, and the more I looked at them, the more I understood how easy it would be to sever those threads, to break those atoms apart. As an experiment, I chose one of the threads in the ground directly below me. I plucked it with my mind. It was a gentle pluck, not even a break, and the ground crumbled. A sinkhole formed as the dirt poured into the darkness below. It was so easy. I could make it bigger, I thought, and plucked again. The sinkhole grew into a crevasse that cut through the ground like a wound. I laughed at how easy it was. I could pluck all the strings if I wanted, even break them and bring everything crashing down, and it would hardly take any effort at all. Perhaps I ought to. Maybe that was what I was meant to do. I could unmake everything and start over from scratch. Or maybe skip starting over altogether. Maybe I would just float in the void I’d created, endless, deathless, until I was as old as Stryge.

Bethany stepped back as the expanding crevasse crept toward her. “Trent, what are you doing?”

“Fulfilling my destiny,” I told her. “You heard what the oracles said, you were there. I’m a threat to all life.” I looked at the Bethany-shaped silhouette where she stood, filled with a thousand silken strings connecting all the little sunbursts of atoms inside her. It looked like she was made of comets and stars. It would be so easy to stop them cold, to just sever the threads inside her. The urge to do it shocked me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. “They said I was an abomination. They were right. I always was. And now this abomination has the power to unmake everything.”

“Trent, listen to me,” she said. “Somehow you absorbed Stryge’s magic when you got his life force. I don’t know how it happened, but the magic of the Ancients is different from ours. It’s not meant for us, our bodies can’t contain it. If you don’t get rid of it somehow, it’ll kill you.”

“But it can’t. Nothing can kill me, not even this.” I looked up at the sky, and saw through it, saw the gears of the universe moving like clockwork. It was filled with spheres, gorgeous, singing, rotating spheres decorated with mystical symbols and designs that made my heart soar. The spheres circled each other like dancers. It was so beautiful. So pure and unsullied by all the horrors of our world. “I have the powers of a god, Bethany. I can unmake it all. I can put an end to the suffering and cruelty, to the killing and the pain, and all I would have to do is pull a loose thread.”

“Don’t. You’d only be proving the oracles right. But they’re not right, Trent, this isn’t who you are. You’re not a killer.”

“I have a list of names that says otherwise,” I said. “But even so, it wouldn’t be murder to unmake this world. It would be mercy. Watch.”

It took no effort at all to reknit the threads below me with a thought, joining them together in a new pattern. The ground shook, and long, sharp fragments of stone burst up out of the crevasse, forming a crooked fence of giant stone spears. Bethany gasped and took a step back from it. She was afraid of me. She was right to be.

Philip came at me from out of nowhere, moving so fast I almost didn’t see him. I’d been wondering where he was. Had he reached me, he could have done some serious damage, but I didn’t let him get that far. There were threads all around him. I bent two of them, and Philip came to a sudden stop in midair, as if he’d hurled himself into an invisible wall. I plucked a thread, and down he went, tumbling to the ground. The threads inside a vampire were different, I noticed, darker in hue, and the atoms they bound burned colder, brighter. It was beautiful, in its own way.

Isaac came at me next, running over a nearby hill. The mage’s entire body crackled with an energy only I could see—magic, shimmering inside him like a star, pure, uninfected. He threw a spell my way, a bright burst of searing light, but I worked a few threads and the spell dissipated. Gabrielle attacked then, wielding the morningstar with her good arm. I sent her sprawling into the dirt next to Philip.

“Stop it!” Bethany yelled. “Stop it, all of you!”

There was so much anger in her voice that it pulled my attention back to her. Isaac’s, too. He lowered his crackling hands, and Philip and Gabrielle stood up, brushing dirt off their clothes.

“You’re not going to unmake the world, Trent, because you’re not a killer,” Bethany insisted. “That’s not who you are. I know it’s not.”

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“But I do.” She walked closer, skirting around the jagged spears of rock until she was right under me. She wasn’t afraid anymore. “Do you want to know why I kept you around after the power inside you almost killed me? Or why I didn’t kick you out after you drew your gun on me? It’s because despite everything, I saw something good in you. I saw who you could be if you only gave yourself a chance.”

I looked down at her, concentrating until the atoms-filled silhouette was gone and I could see her face again. “But the oracles…”

“To hell with them. Believe me, I’ve been called every name in the book. I know what it’s like. When you’re a kid and you’re different, the other kids make sure you know it, every single day. It’s hard not to let it get to you when someone calls you an abomination. It’s hard not to internalize it, but it’s normal. It’s human.”

“What if I’m not human?” I asked.

“What if you are? Would it make your life easier? Would it make you a different person? You still have free will, Trent. What matters isn’t what you are, it’s