greater good must be your choice alone.”
“But it’s what I want,” said Milos, his tears flowing more heavily now. “To be one with you, if only for a moment.”
Mary did not meet his gaze. “I will ask you, but I will not coerce you.”
Milos bit his lower lip and wiped his tears with the back of his hand, embarrassed for his display before all the others.
“Well, then,” he said, “why don’t we let the cards decide.” He went to the roll-top desk that Speedo had so proudly offered to Mary.
Shuffle, deal three, toss toss toss.
When he was done tossing the cards over one another, he steeled himself and chose the card to the right. He held it before him for a moment, seeing only the back, then he flipped it, and when he saw what it was, he laughed. It wasn’t the Jack of Hearts, or the missing Jack of Spades… it was the King of Hearts. The one with the sword through his head. The suicide king.
He turned to Mary. “Do you love me?” he asked.
Mary hesitated, and said, “I will remember you more fondly than almost anyone I’ve ever known.”
Milos sighed, realizing that fondness was as good as he was ever going to get.
With everyone watching, and Allie shaking her head, trying to speak behind her gag, Milos dropped his cards and they scattered. He would not need them anymore. He then knelt beside the one-eyed jack that had extinguished Squirrel. Milos knew he had done things in this world that were unforgivable. He knew that if he ever went into the light, he would face the most severe of consequences. He wasn’t sure what those consequences would be, but he feared them all the same. Yet all of those deeds had only been to make himself worthy in Mary’s eyes. Now he had to accept that nothing would ever make him worthy-not even this-but this would bring him closer than he had ever been before. He wondered if he could live with that. And then realized that he wouldn’t have to.
“I sacrifice my existence for you, Mary. I do this of my own free will.” Then he reached down, firmly clasped the hand of the unconscious scar wraith… and in a single, silent moment, Vitaly Milos Vayevsky ceased to exist.
Once again pangs of mourning rippled through the world, just as they had when Squirrel was extinguished. In every ocean, massive rogue waves rose from the sea, curling and crashing in places where no ship sailed, so no human eye could see. In the polar ice caps, every glacier calved tons of ice, losing face. And in the Jornado de Muerto desert, a hurricane formed, turning, against all logic, clockwise instead of counterclockwise, and remained fixed over the Trinity site, its clear, cloudless eye the exact size of the deadspot. The storm didn’t just rage in the living world, but in Everlost as well, where there were never such storms.
Again, a sudden, sharp pain wracked the gut of every Afterlight, and it was so severe this time that everyone doubled over, collapsing to the ground.
No one felt the pain more than Mary. It was worse than that knife wound that had re-killed her, worse than anything she had ever felt or ever imagined.
“What have I done?” she wailed. “What have I done? What have I done to myself?”
When the pain had passed, her vision cleared to see the storm raging just beyond the edge of the deadspot and her children surrounding her, terrified. Then, as she rose, regaining her bearings and her poise, she realized that both Allie and the scar wraith were gone.
Clarence had been jarred back to consciousness the moment of the extinguishing. The blow to his head had addled his brain, however. He wasn’t quite sure where, or when, or even who he was, and his head hurt something awful, like the worst of hangovers. When he turned, the first thing he saw lying on the ground beside him were objects that had fallen from the pile of shiny things just a few feet away. A trophy and a silver martini shaker. Having not known where they came from, he concluded this indeed must be a hangover, and the martini shaker was probably the cause of it. Between the trophy and the shaker was a single playing card: the Jack of Spades.
Beyond that were dozens of ghosties, all doubled over, moaning in pain. The doctors had said the ghosties weren’t real, and in his confused state, he thought that maybe they were right. He knew how to make them go away, though. All he had to do was cover his dead eye with his dead hand and he couldn’t see them anymore.
He stood up, feeling dizzy, as if he were in a fun house and the world was shifting beneath his feet. With his dead eye covered, all he saw was a massive plain of fused sand with clear skies above it, but the angry swirling maelstrom of a hurricane raging beyond the perimeter. A few yards to his right was a dead soldier with a gun in his hand, and far away, straight across the patch of fused sand, was a jeep.
Clarence didn’t know very much at that moment, but he did know this was not a place he wanted to be. So, with his dead eye covered and his good eye to lead the way, he staggered across the dark expanse of fused sand toward the jeep.
At that same moment, Allie was incapacitated by the pain, but she knew it gave her an advantage. While the others were doubled over, Allie stumbled over to the Afterlight who had handcuffed her, and thrust her hand into his pocket, retrieving the key. Ignoring the pain in her gut, she jammed the key into the small keyhole, turned it, and freed herself from the handcuffs, dropping them on the ground.
“What have I done?” she heard Mary wailing as storm clouds began to billow beyond the deadspot. Allie tried to advance on Mary, but the pain ended as abruptly as it had begun and everyone began to recover. Allie would not make the same mistake twice: Hurling herself at Mary now would result in the exact same situation she had been in a moment ago. She saw that Clarence was gone, and if she escaped, there would come another time, and another place, to battle Mary. Maybe next time luck would be on her side. And so Allie retreated, running along the edge of the deadspot, until she heard a sound peaking above the surge of the storm. It was the drone of engines. Something was approaching, still unseen behind the storm, and she knew it was headed her way.
High up in the catwalks and deep infrastructure of the Hindenburg , the crowded souls of Chitchen Itza went about their perpetual party, for they had known nothing else for so very long. The mourning pang hit with such unexpected ferocity that they were broken out of the rhythm of revelry, and it took several minutes for them to get things going again. The warriors, crammed like sardines into the passenger promenades, used the pang to help fuel them for battle. “It is a strike against us by the Eastern Witch,” they told one another, “but we shall strike back with twice the force!”
Johnnie-O was at the helm-not because he could fly the thing, for he had never even been in the control room before, but having been trapped aboard for so long while the airship was adrift, it gave him “squatters rights” to pilot it now. Besides, his large hands appeared very confident on the wheel. King Yax had been with him for most of the trip, because the views from the control room were spectacular, but the king must have lost interest, because Johnnie-O hadn’t seen him for over a day. Instead, Nick, Mikey, and Jix were in the control room with Johnnie, getting their first glimpse of the Trinity vortex ahead, when the mourning pang struck.
“That was worse than before,” said Jix, understating the obvious, as he recovered.
“Do you suppose it was Mary who was extinguished?” Nick said, trying to mask his concern.
“No,” said Mikey with authority. “Remember, she’s my sister and we crossed into Everlost together. If she was extinguished, I’d feel it.”
None of them wanted to guess who might have been the victim of this extinguishing, for any speculation led them to answers they didn’t want to consider. Then, as if to give weight to their worries, a sudden rainstorm in the living world hid the view before them and penetrated the ship, pouring through their spirits with such severity it made them shiver. And yet, they could also hear the rain on the Ship’s skin.
“No es possible!” said Jix. “The storm is in both worlds!”
And the Hindenburg began to violently lurch in the raging wind.
In the clear eye of that swirling storm, at the southern edge of the deadspot, Mary and her children had all recovered from the mourning pang, but a sense of dread still filled every soul. Although she was far from the cluster of beds where her latest batch of Interlights had been laid, she knew that they had awoken in this second Great Awakening, and she would soon know how many of them were skinjackers.
The living-world sands just beyond the edge of the deadspot had become inundated so quickly by the rain that it looked like an ocean out there, rather then a desert. Even if they wanted to leave now, they couldn’t, for the living-world sand had become so soft and wet that they would all sink after only a few steps.
“The storm covers the whole world,” someone said.
“Nonsense,” said Mary. “It will pass like all storms.”
