Worldwielder, page 24
Melissa ceased breathing, she was so aghast. And when she turned back to Luud, some dark part of her was glad she was about to die. She stilled and waited for the end. But it was stolen from her.
As the bald man raised his knife for a bloody plunge, the door of the penthouse burst open, and in stormed half a dozen people. Kyle turned. Luud turned. Melissa turned. Even Fink, still locked in the knife’s embrace, turned.
Leading the pack of newcomers was the woman, who Melissa saw as though for the first time. She didn’t look the least bit surprised by the scene within, a fact that puzzled Melissa until she saw the object in the woman’s hand: her own backpack, which she now realized she'd abandoned on a pew in the cathedral on Cynn. She wished she hadn't, if only so that Luud wouldn't have been interrupted.
Following the woman were five robed Crumholtzians, Tibor among them. All had drawn knives.
The woman halted her advance midway through the chamber, folding her arms and sighing. “Melissa. What a pity,” she said, and Melissa was sure she imagined the tinge of sadness staining the words. But she knew she wasn't imagining the faint blue shade of the woman's mind.
For a long moment, she just stared at the woman’s face, roving its edges, points, and planes again and again with her eyes. It was quite a nice face, really. No more than forty years old, soft-skinned and angular, attractive by anyone’s estimation. But above all, it was a disappointing face, because, after all the efforts that had been taken to hide it from everyone’s memory, Melissa thought there was nothing particularly special about it. It didn’t seem a face worth hiding. It was a face you might find in the movies or on a magazine cover, beautiful and harmless. It was a woman’s face. Nothing less, nothing more.
But she still scanned it, because in the woman’s statement a moment ago, there had been a hint of something baffling and unexpected—recognition.
The woman had spoken as if she knew Melissa. And now a spine-tingling possibility entered Melissa’s mind. What if she’d encountered this woman at some point before on her quest, only for the meeting to flee her memory moments later?
“Who are you?” she murmured. “Do I… know you?”
The woman, acting as if nothing had been said, turned to Tibor. “Take my son out of here.”
With a nod, Tibor walked to Kyle, took him by the arm, and led him out of the penthouse.
“Yes, Melissa,” the woman said. “I'm his mother.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Melissa shook her head at the lie. For it was a lie. It had to be. Kyle’s mother was dead. Even in life, she’d been a sick woman, rarely found out of bed. And she wasn’t a psychomaniac madwoman with designs to end the world. No, it had to be that this woman, in her deranged state of mind, merely fancied herself Kyle’s mother. She wished herself to be his mother. That was what she’d meant.
But a funny thing happened then. As Melissa tried to recall Kyle’s mother, she found her memory to be a temperamental little devil. She knew she'd met Kyle's mother, but couldn't quite place what the woman had looked like, or what her voice had sounded like, or anything at all about her, in fact, except things Kyle had said about her. Melissa could only remember a formless presence. It was almost as if… but no. She wouldn’t follow that thought where it led.
The thought, however, wasn’t averse to dragging her along, and so it was she ended up biting her knuckles and gasping in horror as she gazed at the monster who’d made a ruin of Kyle’s life. His very own mother.
The woman motioned to Luud. “You may proceed, Luud. Just do it quickly.”
With pleasure, Luud’s grin said, then he turned to Melissa.
A minute ago, she’d been ready to accept death without any further struggle, but as the blade of her would-be killer ascended again, a desperate urgency to live overtook her. The universe in which Kyle’s mother was the one using him to instigate the mass murder of millions was not a universe she could so readily abandon. It needed her.
She didn’t trust her vim to save her. Even if it came, Luud’s five aegises might prove more than a match for her strength. But that left only one other option with any chance of succeeding.
“Wait!” she screamed. “I’m a wielder. I’m a wielder!”
Luud didn’t slow, let alone give any sign that he’d heard her. The woman, however, stiffened and held up a hand. “Luud, wait.”
He did, though with an embittered hiss.
Melissa, shaking in fright, waited as the woman made her way closer, stopping just inches away and frowning. “What was that you said, Melissa?”
“I said… I’m a wielder. So you don’t wanna be killing me.”
The woman reeled. “A wielder? Please. There hasn’t been a wielder in all the Gallery in over a thousand years, and only by decades of toil was I able to create one. Yet you ask me to believe that you—my son’s childhood friend who occupied a house down the street from us for eight years—just happen to be another of the extinct demi-gods of the Gallery? Really? Strains credulity a smidge, don’t you think?”
Bathed in the icy sun of the woman’s presence, Melissa found herself at a loss for persuasion. “Well, it’s true.”
A sniff. “Prove it, then. Show me your vim.”
“I can’t… control it.”
The woman pirouetted on a heel until she was face to face with Luud, and, in the most nonchalant of tones, said, “Cut her tits off.”
Luud looked as near laughing in glee as any Crumholtzian had ever looked. Brandishing the knife, he wasted no time in storming up to Melissa and tearing her shirt open in the middle with his free hand. Then he thrust.
***
By now, the headache was a familiar one. This time, though, it faded within seconds of awakening. Before Melissa knew it, she was sitting up, eyes open, in full possession of her mental faculties, and there before her was the woman’s face, giving her the look of an atheist who’d just seen God reign down fire from the heavens.
Melissa looked to her chest. Aside from the torn shirt, no damage was evident. She breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the tattered halves of her garment together, then tied them. Only now did she realize the woman’s command to Luud had been a test. One she’d passed, of course.
What have I done? Melissa wondered, for this was precisely the situation Psu-Tem had been attempting to prevent. She’d avoided death, but only by giving herself to her enemy.
Luud was sitting on the floor nearby, massaging a bump on his elbow and snarling with passion. Kyle stood in the doorway of his room, motionless. He was looking in Melissa’s direction, but through her, not at her. The remaining Crumholtzians were scattered around the chamber.
“You are one,” the woman murmured, her voice failing her. “By Ohlem. Right down the street for eight years, and I never…” She spun to Kyle. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew?”
If he gave any sign of affirmation, it was subtle enough to escape Melissa’s notice. But not the woman’s. Mind blooming red, she jumped to her feet and shook her fists, then stormed up to the nearest Crumholtzian and tore the knife from his hand.
By now, Melissa was well on her way to standing and doing anything necessary to prevent harm coming to Kyle, even if he was some kind of ghoul Kyle. She was spared the necessity, though.
Shrieking in rage, the woman took the knife and plunged it into the chest of the Crumholtzian, again and again, each time more forcefully than the last, until she was a convulsing, blood-covered mess and the Crumholtzian was a mangled mass upon the floor.
Her fury spent, she set the knife aside with great care, wiped her face and hands on an unsullied corner of her robe, and straightened, acting as though she’d done nothing less innocent than dice an onion.
“Ah, that’s better,” she said with a sigh. Then, to the Crumholtzians, “Take it out of here.”
It, they correctly interpreted, meant the corpse, which was carried away in seconds, leaving Melissa alone with Luud, Kyle, the woman, and the heavily-damaged Fink.
The woman—or Mrs. Lamb, as Melissa now found herself reluctantly thinking of her, since that was what she used to call Kyle's mother—stalked forward with bloody hands on bloody hips. “Full of surprises, aren’t you, Melissa. So, how did you find us?”
Despite a strong urge to back away, Melissa held her ground, adopting what she hoped was a steely-eyed glare. “What have you done to Kyle?” she demanded.
Mrs. Lamb countered this parry with a smile. “Melissa, I could have Kyle pull on your mind with Veritas and a few other worlds to force you to talk, but that wouldn’t be very fun. So, we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way, with a twist. Now, I must warn you, this isn't quite the same as the real thing. There isn't a world whose pull is just right. But it's close enough.” She turned to Kyle. “Let’s give Melissa a taste of some Crumholtzian torture. Maybe… ah yes, the Stretcher!”
Melissa took a stumbling step backwards. For a minute, she’d been foolish enough to think herself invulnerable, what with her success holding Luud off, but there was another wielder in the room, wasn’t there? And however certain she was that Kyle would sooner die than harm her, this wasn’t Kyle, was it?
She trained desperate eyes on her friend, pouring every ounce of her will into a silent plea. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. No brainwashing could go so deep as to make him do this abominable thing, tantamount to gouging out his own eye or slicing open his own chest. But the harder she stared, trying to imagine in this counterfeit the kind boy she’d known years ago, the less of him she saw. The more old memories came to mind—the pressed flowers, the chess game, refusing to fight Lucas—the more they seemed like vapors scattering into darkness. This wasn't the Kyle who'd made a friend of the girl who had no friends. This was a Kyle who would slaughter millions without hesitation. Yet Melissa persisted in her plea, even to the last moment.
She wasn’t ready for the pain. It came without warning, knocking her flat on her back. From the tips of her toes to the deep recesses of her hips, from her fingers to her shoulders, everything was being pulled apart. Like a piece of gum stretched between two hands, she felt herself lengthening. She could feel the snap of shattering cartilage, the pop of rent ligaments, the crack of fractured bones, up and down and in and out and everywhere. Frayed muscles severed. Skin tore. First one leg, then the other, came free of her body. Then the arms followed suit.
In a place of such pain, time had no meaning. For all she knew, she remained in this excruciating state, the mental torture repeating over and over, for seconds, minutes, or hours, every moment an eternity.
Then it was over. Light entered her eyes, sound entered her ears, but after the deafening cacophony of pain, it was all so faint and distant.
She scarcely heard Mrs. Lamb’s words. “Need I repeat the question?”
Any sensible person would have given in, but Melissa knew she’d long ago forsaken any claim to that title. “Let… him… go.”
Mrs. Lamb laughed. “The tub.”
This time, with some idea what to expect, Melissa thought she was ready. She was wrong. First, her insides began to swell, to the point she was sure they would explode. Next came the stinging, rippling over her like a swarm of convulsive needles. Feeling came and went in her extremities. But there was always the nausea, the thirst, the burning everywhere.
The world rippled and twisted and spun. She couldn’t breathe. Then she could. Days passed. She felt her skin being eaten away, her insides rotting, her sense and sanity pouring from her as delirium set in. But this too ended, exchanged for the agonies unique to reality.
Back in the penthouse common room, she felt no pain, but the memory of it was torture enough. Worse yet was any thought of Kyle. At least in the torture, she could forget about him.
“Ready to talk?” came the pleasant voice of Mrs. Lamb.
Melissa, face wet with tears she had no memory of crying, forced herself up onto an elbow to look her enemy in the eye. “Why… are you doing this?”
The woman gave her a look of feigned disbelief, then shook her head. “The Bone Crusher.”
The penthouse once again dissolved into anguish, this instance of a sort whose severity defied comparison. Melissa felt herself pressed between two rolling pins, her body flattened like a lump of dough. Bones snapped, splintered, were ground to powder. She should have died from the damage, but in this mental cell of horrors, there was no dying from fatal wounds, and the pain continued to escalate. When it ended, it left behind an echo so forceful that she didn’t realize she was back in reality for several minutes.
Mrs. Lamb was leaning over her. “You can give up any hope, Melissa. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. You may as well answer my questions willingly, because one way or another, I’ll get my answers. So what’ll it be? Shall we finish out the set? We haven’t even gotten to the Brazen Lutris yet!”
In an instant, Melissa saw everything she'd ever wanted flash before her eyes, then catch fire and disappear in a blinding explosion. What Mrs. Lamb said was true. There was no hope. There was no more wanting anything. She’d been a fool to resist this long. She’d lost.
“I’ll talk,” she said, a kind of calm coming over her.
“Good. So how did you find us?”
“Vili. Luud’s brother.”
“Vili was incapable of saying the name of the world, so what did he tell you?”
“What the painting looked like.”
“Did he now. What made you come looking for Kyle?”
“He sent me a message.”
“Ah. And where’s the big fellow who was with you on Melton?”
“Dead.”
“Does anyone else know where you are?”
“No.”
Mrs. Lamb reached out and gave Melissa a pat on the shoulder. “See, that wasn’t so hard.” She stood and moved away.
Melissa remained on the floor, content to do nothing more than trace the patterns in the ceiling panels. They were oddly hypnotic, complex enough to get lost in their bends and twists and swirls for hours, which was exactly what she intended to do. Their form, if it could be called any sort of form, reminded her of… coils of wires…
For a split-second, the lights flickered, plunging the room into darkness. Then all was back to normal.
Melissa’s heart was racing now, her eyes wide open and dancing about.
The lights hadn’t flickered at all, had they? Something altogether different had taken place.
“Unfortunately, Melissa,” Mrs. Lamb was saying. “We can’t let you off that easy. You’ve caused me a great deal of stress.”
Melissa wasn’t listening. She was fixing her eyes again on the patterns, following them from end to end, thinking of nothing else. She let them burn themselves into her eyes, let them enter her and become a part of her being, let them swallow her reality whole.
Just when she was sure it wouldn’t work a second time, it did. Darkness fell upon the room, this time for a moment longer than before, just long enough for the faintest flash of the worlds to materialize. She would have stayed there, but gazing into her vim was a bit like leaning over the edge of a cliff, only a thin wire forestalling a fall. The reflex to shrink back from the void was a strong one.
The third time, however, she succeeded in repressing this involuntary retreat, hanging on the brink of the abyss for an entire second. This was long enough for the full canvas of the worlds to coalesce, a thousand times more beautiful than she remembered or imagined.
She passed in and out of this mysterious door that had been hidden to her for so long, forging a sure-footed path to it in her mind. She made no effort to stay in it, only to master the art of finding it. Staying, she sensed, would be the easy part. It was the finding that had eluded her before.
With a laugh, she realized it was only her ludicrous obstinacy in the face of torture, and the ensuing delirium, that had allowed her this breakthrough. In her right mind, she could never have become so lost as to find this place.
“We'll see if you laugh at this,” Mrs. Lamb said, irritated. “Kyle, let's give Melissa a taste of a halok world. Just a smidge.”
Melissa's eyes went wide. “Wha—? No, please—”
But her terror was fuel to the woman's delight. “Oh, don't worry. Kyle's quite careful. You'll only lose your short-term memory. Nothing we'll lament being rid of.” She snickered and turned to Kyle. “Whenever you're ready.”
Melissa knew she had but moments. She would have to put her newfound knowledge to use. On command. And merely finding her vim wouldn’t be enough this time. She had to use it.
Clamping her eyes shut, she retraced her steps of a moment ago. There was the door. There was the darkness beyond. There was the instinct to flee from it. But whatever waited in the abyss couldn't possibly be worse than the horrors of inaction, so in she dove.
A charge of raw power shot through her as the worlds unfolded in every corner and crevice of her vision, alive and pulsing. Now, rather than just look, she could touch. She recognized, among the swarms of strands making up each nearby mind, old friends of a sort—Prota, Veritas, Melton, all the other worlds she'd visited. It didn't take long to find her own mind, which was firmly in the pull of Prota. With mental fingers, she reached out and tightened her grip upon it, holding the strands steady.
Then she waited. But not for long.
Kyle's assault was a hurricane in force, hacking and tearing at her defenses. A headache sprouted and bloomed and multiplied, worse than any she'd experienced during the grayings. But the torture had dulled her to pain, and she regarded it as little more than an annoyance. Even so, his strength was staggering. If this was just a smidge, she couldn't imagine what his full power would let him do.
Several times she felt her grip slipping, only to regain hold at the last possible second. Several times she knew she didn’t have the energy to resist the attack one more moment, only to muster hidden reserves that carried her through another five. But eventually these too spent their store of power, and still Kyle's vim raged upon her.
Her mind slipped from her grip, surrendering her to a darkness more complete than the void of her vim.
As the bald man raised his knife for a bloody plunge, the door of the penthouse burst open, and in stormed half a dozen people. Kyle turned. Luud turned. Melissa turned. Even Fink, still locked in the knife’s embrace, turned.
Leading the pack of newcomers was the woman, who Melissa saw as though for the first time. She didn’t look the least bit surprised by the scene within, a fact that puzzled Melissa until she saw the object in the woman’s hand: her own backpack, which she now realized she'd abandoned on a pew in the cathedral on Cynn. She wished she hadn't, if only so that Luud wouldn't have been interrupted.
Following the woman were five robed Crumholtzians, Tibor among them. All had drawn knives.
The woman halted her advance midway through the chamber, folding her arms and sighing. “Melissa. What a pity,” she said, and Melissa was sure she imagined the tinge of sadness staining the words. But she knew she wasn't imagining the faint blue shade of the woman's mind.
For a long moment, she just stared at the woman’s face, roving its edges, points, and planes again and again with her eyes. It was quite a nice face, really. No more than forty years old, soft-skinned and angular, attractive by anyone’s estimation. But above all, it was a disappointing face, because, after all the efforts that had been taken to hide it from everyone’s memory, Melissa thought there was nothing particularly special about it. It didn’t seem a face worth hiding. It was a face you might find in the movies or on a magazine cover, beautiful and harmless. It was a woman’s face. Nothing less, nothing more.
But she still scanned it, because in the woman’s statement a moment ago, there had been a hint of something baffling and unexpected—recognition.
The woman had spoken as if she knew Melissa. And now a spine-tingling possibility entered Melissa’s mind. What if she’d encountered this woman at some point before on her quest, only for the meeting to flee her memory moments later?
“Who are you?” she murmured. “Do I… know you?”
The woman, acting as if nothing had been said, turned to Tibor. “Take my son out of here.”
With a nod, Tibor walked to Kyle, took him by the arm, and led him out of the penthouse.
“Yes, Melissa,” the woman said. “I'm his mother.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Melissa shook her head at the lie. For it was a lie. It had to be. Kyle’s mother was dead. Even in life, she’d been a sick woman, rarely found out of bed. And she wasn’t a psychomaniac madwoman with designs to end the world. No, it had to be that this woman, in her deranged state of mind, merely fancied herself Kyle’s mother. She wished herself to be his mother. That was what she’d meant.
But a funny thing happened then. As Melissa tried to recall Kyle’s mother, she found her memory to be a temperamental little devil. She knew she'd met Kyle's mother, but couldn't quite place what the woman had looked like, or what her voice had sounded like, or anything at all about her, in fact, except things Kyle had said about her. Melissa could only remember a formless presence. It was almost as if… but no. She wouldn’t follow that thought where it led.
The thought, however, wasn’t averse to dragging her along, and so it was she ended up biting her knuckles and gasping in horror as she gazed at the monster who’d made a ruin of Kyle’s life. His very own mother.
The woman motioned to Luud. “You may proceed, Luud. Just do it quickly.”
With pleasure, Luud’s grin said, then he turned to Melissa.
A minute ago, she’d been ready to accept death without any further struggle, but as the blade of her would-be killer ascended again, a desperate urgency to live overtook her. The universe in which Kyle’s mother was the one using him to instigate the mass murder of millions was not a universe she could so readily abandon. It needed her.
She didn’t trust her vim to save her. Even if it came, Luud’s five aegises might prove more than a match for her strength. But that left only one other option with any chance of succeeding.
“Wait!” she screamed. “I’m a wielder. I’m a wielder!”
Luud didn’t slow, let alone give any sign that he’d heard her. The woman, however, stiffened and held up a hand. “Luud, wait.”
He did, though with an embittered hiss.
Melissa, shaking in fright, waited as the woman made her way closer, stopping just inches away and frowning. “What was that you said, Melissa?”
“I said… I’m a wielder. So you don’t wanna be killing me.”
The woman reeled. “A wielder? Please. There hasn’t been a wielder in all the Gallery in over a thousand years, and only by decades of toil was I able to create one. Yet you ask me to believe that you—my son’s childhood friend who occupied a house down the street from us for eight years—just happen to be another of the extinct demi-gods of the Gallery? Really? Strains credulity a smidge, don’t you think?”
Bathed in the icy sun of the woman’s presence, Melissa found herself at a loss for persuasion. “Well, it’s true.”
A sniff. “Prove it, then. Show me your vim.”
“I can’t… control it.”
The woman pirouetted on a heel until she was face to face with Luud, and, in the most nonchalant of tones, said, “Cut her tits off.”
Luud looked as near laughing in glee as any Crumholtzian had ever looked. Brandishing the knife, he wasted no time in storming up to Melissa and tearing her shirt open in the middle with his free hand. Then he thrust.
***
By now, the headache was a familiar one. This time, though, it faded within seconds of awakening. Before Melissa knew it, she was sitting up, eyes open, in full possession of her mental faculties, and there before her was the woman’s face, giving her the look of an atheist who’d just seen God reign down fire from the heavens.
Melissa looked to her chest. Aside from the torn shirt, no damage was evident. She breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the tattered halves of her garment together, then tied them. Only now did she realize the woman’s command to Luud had been a test. One she’d passed, of course.
What have I done? Melissa wondered, for this was precisely the situation Psu-Tem had been attempting to prevent. She’d avoided death, but only by giving herself to her enemy.
Luud was sitting on the floor nearby, massaging a bump on his elbow and snarling with passion. Kyle stood in the doorway of his room, motionless. He was looking in Melissa’s direction, but through her, not at her. The remaining Crumholtzians were scattered around the chamber.
“You are one,” the woman murmured, her voice failing her. “By Ohlem. Right down the street for eight years, and I never…” She spun to Kyle. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew?”
If he gave any sign of affirmation, it was subtle enough to escape Melissa’s notice. But not the woman’s. Mind blooming red, she jumped to her feet and shook her fists, then stormed up to the nearest Crumholtzian and tore the knife from his hand.
By now, Melissa was well on her way to standing and doing anything necessary to prevent harm coming to Kyle, even if he was some kind of ghoul Kyle. She was spared the necessity, though.
Shrieking in rage, the woman took the knife and plunged it into the chest of the Crumholtzian, again and again, each time more forcefully than the last, until she was a convulsing, blood-covered mess and the Crumholtzian was a mangled mass upon the floor.
Her fury spent, she set the knife aside with great care, wiped her face and hands on an unsullied corner of her robe, and straightened, acting as though she’d done nothing less innocent than dice an onion.
“Ah, that’s better,” she said with a sigh. Then, to the Crumholtzians, “Take it out of here.”
It, they correctly interpreted, meant the corpse, which was carried away in seconds, leaving Melissa alone with Luud, Kyle, the woman, and the heavily-damaged Fink.
The woman—or Mrs. Lamb, as Melissa now found herself reluctantly thinking of her, since that was what she used to call Kyle's mother—stalked forward with bloody hands on bloody hips. “Full of surprises, aren’t you, Melissa. So, how did you find us?”
Despite a strong urge to back away, Melissa held her ground, adopting what she hoped was a steely-eyed glare. “What have you done to Kyle?” she demanded.
Mrs. Lamb countered this parry with a smile. “Melissa, I could have Kyle pull on your mind with Veritas and a few other worlds to force you to talk, but that wouldn’t be very fun. So, we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way, with a twist. Now, I must warn you, this isn't quite the same as the real thing. There isn't a world whose pull is just right. But it's close enough.” She turned to Kyle. “Let’s give Melissa a taste of some Crumholtzian torture. Maybe… ah yes, the Stretcher!”
Melissa took a stumbling step backwards. For a minute, she’d been foolish enough to think herself invulnerable, what with her success holding Luud off, but there was another wielder in the room, wasn’t there? And however certain she was that Kyle would sooner die than harm her, this wasn’t Kyle, was it?
She trained desperate eyes on her friend, pouring every ounce of her will into a silent plea. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. No brainwashing could go so deep as to make him do this abominable thing, tantamount to gouging out his own eye or slicing open his own chest. But the harder she stared, trying to imagine in this counterfeit the kind boy she’d known years ago, the less of him she saw. The more old memories came to mind—the pressed flowers, the chess game, refusing to fight Lucas—the more they seemed like vapors scattering into darkness. This wasn't the Kyle who'd made a friend of the girl who had no friends. This was a Kyle who would slaughter millions without hesitation. Yet Melissa persisted in her plea, even to the last moment.
She wasn’t ready for the pain. It came without warning, knocking her flat on her back. From the tips of her toes to the deep recesses of her hips, from her fingers to her shoulders, everything was being pulled apart. Like a piece of gum stretched between two hands, she felt herself lengthening. She could feel the snap of shattering cartilage, the pop of rent ligaments, the crack of fractured bones, up and down and in and out and everywhere. Frayed muscles severed. Skin tore. First one leg, then the other, came free of her body. Then the arms followed suit.
In a place of such pain, time had no meaning. For all she knew, she remained in this excruciating state, the mental torture repeating over and over, for seconds, minutes, or hours, every moment an eternity.
Then it was over. Light entered her eyes, sound entered her ears, but after the deafening cacophony of pain, it was all so faint and distant.
She scarcely heard Mrs. Lamb’s words. “Need I repeat the question?”
Any sensible person would have given in, but Melissa knew she’d long ago forsaken any claim to that title. “Let… him… go.”
Mrs. Lamb laughed. “The tub.”
This time, with some idea what to expect, Melissa thought she was ready. She was wrong. First, her insides began to swell, to the point she was sure they would explode. Next came the stinging, rippling over her like a swarm of convulsive needles. Feeling came and went in her extremities. But there was always the nausea, the thirst, the burning everywhere.
The world rippled and twisted and spun. She couldn’t breathe. Then she could. Days passed. She felt her skin being eaten away, her insides rotting, her sense and sanity pouring from her as delirium set in. But this too ended, exchanged for the agonies unique to reality.
Back in the penthouse common room, she felt no pain, but the memory of it was torture enough. Worse yet was any thought of Kyle. At least in the torture, she could forget about him.
“Ready to talk?” came the pleasant voice of Mrs. Lamb.
Melissa, face wet with tears she had no memory of crying, forced herself up onto an elbow to look her enemy in the eye. “Why… are you doing this?”
The woman gave her a look of feigned disbelief, then shook her head. “The Bone Crusher.”
The penthouse once again dissolved into anguish, this instance of a sort whose severity defied comparison. Melissa felt herself pressed between two rolling pins, her body flattened like a lump of dough. Bones snapped, splintered, were ground to powder. She should have died from the damage, but in this mental cell of horrors, there was no dying from fatal wounds, and the pain continued to escalate. When it ended, it left behind an echo so forceful that she didn’t realize she was back in reality for several minutes.
Mrs. Lamb was leaning over her. “You can give up any hope, Melissa. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. You may as well answer my questions willingly, because one way or another, I’ll get my answers. So what’ll it be? Shall we finish out the set? We haven’t even gotten to the Brazen Lutris yet!”
In an instant, Melissa saw everything she'd ever wanted flash before her eyes, then catch fire and disappear in a blinding explosion. What Mrs. Lamb said was true. There was no hope. There was no more wanting anything. She’d been a fool to resist this long. She’d lost.
“I’ll talk,” she said, a kind of calm coming over her.
“Good. So how did you find us?”
“Vili. Luud’s brother.”
“Vili was incapable of saying the name of the world, so what did he tell you?”
“What the painting looked like.”
“Did he now. What made you come looking for Kyle?”
“He sent me a message.”
“Ah. And where’s the big fellow who was with you on Melton?”
“Dead.”
“Does anyone else know where you are?”
“No.”
Mrs. Lamb reached out and gave Melissa a pat on the shoulder. “See, that wasn’t so hard.” She stood and moved away.
Melissa remained on the floor, content to do nothing more than trace the patterns in the ceiling panels. They were oddly hypnotic, complex enough to get lost in their bends and twists and swirls for hours, which was exactly what she intended to do. Their form, if it could be called any sort of form, reminded her of… coils of wires…
For a split-second, the lights flickered, plunging the room into darkness. Then all was back to normal.
Melissa’s heart was racing now, her eyes wide open and dancing about.
The lights hadn’t flickered at all, had they? Something altogether different had taken place.
“Unfortunately, Melissa,” Mrs. Lamb was saying. “We can’t let you off that easy. You’ve caused me a great deal of stress.”
Melissa wasn’t listening. She was fixing her eyes again on the patterns, following them from end to end, thinking of nothing else. She let them burn themselves into her eyes, let them enter her and become a part of her being, let them swallow her reality whole.
Just when she was sure it wouldn’t work a second time, it did. Darkness fell upon the room, this time for a moment longer than before, just long enough for the faintest flash of the worlds to materialize. She would have stayed there, but gazing into her vim was a bit like leaning over the edge of a cliff, only a thin wire forestalling a fall. The reflex to shrink back from the void was a strong one.
The third time, however, she succeeded in repressing this involuntary retreat, hanging on the brink of the abyss for an entire second. This was long enough for the full canvas of the worlds to coalesce, a thousand times more beautiful than she remembered or imagined.
She passed in and out of this mysterious door that had been hidden to her for so long, forging a sure-footed path to it in her mind. She made no effort to stay in it, only to master the art of finding it. Staying, she sensed, would be the easy part. It was the finding that had eluded her before.
With a laugh, she realized it was only her ludicrous obstinacy in the face of torture, and the ensuing delirium, that had allowed her this breakthrough. In her right mind, she could never have become so lost as to find this place.
“We'll see if you laugh at this,” Mrs. Lamb said, irritated. “Kyle, let's give Melissa a taste of a halok world. Just a smidge.”
Melissa's eyes went wide. “Wha—? No, please—”
But her terror was fuel to the woman's delight. “Oh, don't worry. Kyle's quite careful. You'll only lose your short-term memory. Nothing we'll lament being rid of.” She snickered and turned to Kyle. “Whenever you're ready.”
Melissa knew she had but moments. She would have to put her newfound knowledge to use. On command. And merely finding her vim wouldn’t be enough this time. She had to use it.
Clamping her eyes shut, she retraced her steps of a moment ago. There was the door. There was the darkness beyond. There was the instinct to flee from it. But whatever waited in the abyss couldn't possibly be worse than the horrors of inaction, so in she dove.
A charge of raw power shot through her as the worlds unfolded in every corner and crevice of her vision, alive and pulsing. Now, rather than just look, she could touch. She recognized, among the swarms of strands making up each nearby mind, old friends of a sort—Prota, Veritas, Melton, all the other worlds she'd visited. It didn't take long to find her own mind, which was firmly in the pull of Prota. With mental fingers, she reached out and tightened her grip upon it, holding the strands steady.
Then she waited. But not for long.
Kyle's assault was a hurricane in force, hacking and tearing at her defenses. A headache sprouted and bloomed and multiplied, worse than any she'd experienced during the grayings. But the torture had dulled her to pain, and she regarded it as little more than an annoyance. Even so, his strength was staggering. If this was just a smidge, she couldn't imagine what his full power would let him do.
Several times she felt her grip slipping, only to regain hold at the last possible second. Several times she knew she didn’t have the energy to resist the attack one more moment, only to muster hidden reserves that carried her through another five. But eventually these too spent their store of power, and still Kyle's vim raged upon her.
Her mind slipped from her grip, surrendering her to a darkness more complete than the void of her vim.
