“Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. You’re spending a whole lot of time explaining your master plan to a kid because you’re scared.”
The Dark One said nothing, but the color of the sky changed to a deep crimson. Alex was now floating in a boat. There were no stars in the sky, no clouds. The masked boy sat across from Alex in the rowboat, his knees pulled tight to his chest.
The eye of the Dark One hung heavy in the sky. “Hey,” Alex said to the child. “That thing up there scare you?”
The child looked up at the Dark One’s eye. “Yeah, it does. I don’t like it. Not at all.”
“So, I’m thinking about making that thing go away. How would you feel about that?”
The boy pulled up his mask, his blue eye peering deep into Alex’s soul, his dead eye glowing the same hue as the Dark One’s eye above. “I’d like it to go away,” the boy said.
“What happens to you if the mean guy up there goes away?”
The masked boy pulled his mask back down and looked over the side of the boat. “When he goes, I go too. But maybe it’s better that way.”
Rage, pure unfiltered and destructive, radiated from the Dark One’s eye. He knew what Alex was doing, and he was not pleased.
Alex wasn’t sure what she was doing, but by now, she knew enough to trust her gut. She didn’t need to know what the boy was in relation to the giant eye in the sky, but she could piece together enough to know the boy with the missing eye was somehow related to the Dark One’s eye.
Alex rose, rocking the boat slightly. “All right, kid, it was nice to meet you. I’m going to put a stop to this. Uh, thanks for talking.”
The masked boy leaned over the edge, drawing his hand through the water. “You are right,” the boy said. “He is afraid. That’s why he’s so angry. He wasn’t lying, though. This is only a piece of him. There’re many pieces of him. Of me, I guess. Even when you destroy this version of him, there are more.”
“That’s all right. Just means I gotta kill them all.”
Alex closed her eyes, focused on finding Chine. The world around her melted away and she heard Chine’s heart beating. Hey, I’m ready to get the hell out of here. This place is way too weird. You mind helping me?
Chine’s voice echoed as if he were speaking in an acoustic chamber. Concentrate on your body, Dustling. Bring your mind back to it, he explained.
Oddly enough, Alex didn’t know how to imagine her body at first. She still hadn’t gotten used to seeing her reflection in the mirror. Even if she tried, she couldn’t really think of what she looked like—except her hands. Alex knew her hands better than her features.
She imagined her fingers running over a page of braille, the stammer of the bumps, the edges of the paper as she turned the page.
When Alex opened her eyes, she was lying next to Chine, his wing over her. Jim was sitting at her side, holding her hand. He helped Alex sit up as she rubbed her eyes. “How long?” she asked.
She stumbled to her feet with Jim’s assistance. “Way too long,” Jim answered. “I thought you were dead, but whatever you did in there worked.”
Jim and Alex stepped out from under the dragon’s wing. The eye hanging from the ceiling had changed dramatically. It was still large, but now it looked as if it had been pumped dry of all its fluids. The veins around the eye looked weaker.
Alex anchored herself to Chine as Jim stepped back into his mech. “All right, let’s go ahead and wrap this up. This whole place is hollow like a wasp’s nest, and you know how easy it is to break one of those up. All we need to do is set off your mech, and we’re good to go.”
Alex and Jim took off, flying toward the eye. Alex was glad to put all of this behind her. She could finally go back to the Nest and deal with all the trouble she was going to be in. At the moment, death sounded much easier to handle.
The two riders hovered below the eye as Jim primed his mech for detonation. Once the mech was ready, he climbed into Chine’s extended claw. The dragon tossed Jim onto his back, and Alex anchored Jim’s feet to the dragon. “Cool. Let’s blow this thing,” she said.
Suddenly, Alex felt her body go stiff. It was as if someone had stepped into it. She tried as hard as she could, but she didn’t budge.
Jim noticed Alex’s frozen face. “Everything okay?” he asked.
Before Alex could try to answer, she felt an intense pain in the front of her brain. That pain quickly spread until her entire body was wracked with it. The meteor broke apart around her and she was falling, her mind on fire. A thousand voices jabbered in her head. She didn’t know which was hers. Then a voice louder than any of the others shrieked loud enough to shatter her skull.
The voice took a form that far exceeded what Alex was capable of understanding. Looking upon the form filled her with mindless dread and the desire to run away screaming, to hide and hope she was never found.
“I fear nothing!” the Dark One boomed.
She knew then she was not going to die. What she was going to experience would be a thousand times worse, her mind rotting before her, flailing in the burning presence of the Dark One’s essence. It was already happening. She could feel herself drifting.
Chine’s voice rang in her head amongst the chorus and cacophonous screeching. Dustling! It is not your time yet. Do not give up!
Alex held onto her dragon’s voice. She tried to use it to support herself, to drown out the voices behind
