Illusionarium (21 page)

I touched my chest.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Then do tell the king for me, won't you?” she said, smiling. “I'm staying behind to turn this city back into London.”

“Johnny!” Lockwood yelled, plunging through the doorway.

I bowed, glimpsing Lady Florel for the last time before I gulped a breath of untainted air and held it, dove through the doorway and into the mist. The reporter had pulled off his mask and was wiping his eyes.

“Why are you crying?” Lady Florel's voice carried severely through the doorway. “That is silly. Please refrain, Mr. Wickes!”

“There is a—a f-f-foretelling a—a prophecy,” the reporter was stammering.

“Prophecies! Superstitious loads of tripe, excuses to sit back and do nothing while you let the world around you fall to dust. Don't
speak
to me of any such ridiculous—”

Lockwood slammed the gabled door closed, and we stood in the center of a landscape full of green rooftop slopes, gables, and mist. We inhaled the fantillium air at the same time. The world, once again, flipped underneath our feet. Lockwood and I slid and hit the jutting gable door now beneath us, knocking our heads against it.

“I'll kill you for this illusion!” he snapped as we scrambled to find our footing on the gable.

I closed my eyes and pulled together my memory
of the cell door on the
Valor
. The square window with scratches, rims with bolts, the latticework of the iron at the handle, the clanging it made when the ship rumbled . . . I inhaled deeply and exhaled the thoughts from my head and numerous fingers onto the door at our feet.

It took my blood and bones with it. It sucked everything from me and left my skin a shell. The cell door formed over the gable door at our feet. Every rusted plate, hinge, and bolt drew itself from me in glowing strings of mist. The cell door of the
Valor
lay before us, glowing white hot and then fading to bronze with such
completeness
that I knew I had illusioned it to the very scratch.

Above us, the air rumbled. The silhouette of Queen Honoria's airship loomed. I saw a glimpse of her peering below at us over the deck, removing her fresh-air mask.

“We
fly!
” Lockwood yelled, diving and grabbing the cell door latch, tugging it upward in a shriek of iron.
²⁸
We leapt into the dark, gaping rectangle as red forms slid down lines cast over the side of the airship.

Black enveloped me. All my organs and veins twisted and
blipped
as the threshold blurred past me.

BAM.

We smacked against the metal wall, and with our first gulp of air, the dim metal hall around us flipped ninety
degrees, and we toppled again onto the floor. We'd landed in the brig hall of the
Valor
. I had done it.

“Ha-ha!” Lockwood exulted, throwing cell door shut behind us. Nod'ol had vanished, leaving only the cell of bronze walls and a tiny port window. “You did it, Johnny, you great fool! Ha!”

His laugh was distant.

I writhed. Glass and mechanical creatures with numerous legs crawled up and down my head and chest, into my ears and mouth, hissing, hissing inside my head.

Jon . . . a . . . than
, they clicked.

Lockwood's hand broke through the darkness and boxed me.

“Come on!”
he yelled, lifting me to my feet. The reticulated creatures crawling through my orifices skittered away. My muscles felt surgically removed. Lockwood half carried me away from the brig. “On your feet! Stop daydreaming, Johnny boy!”

The cell door bent outward behind us, and then
burst
. It exploded forward and hit the opposite wall with a thunderous clang.

The masked guard poured forth as blood from a mortal wound. They smashed into the wall and over one another in a tangle of red fabric, hats, gloves, and masks, and pulled themselves to their feet like liquid, streaming down the hall and up the stairs after us.

Lockwood and I bounded. We clanged up the stairs, three at a time. The brig master, an elderly airguardsman with white hair, stood at the top of the stairs and leapt backward as we barreled past.

“Get out of here!” I yelled at him.

He furrowed his brow at us. I glanced back. The rivers of guards swept him up, casting him to the side and flowing on. Lockwood and I kept running, up more stairs, to the main floor and out onto the observation deck. Cold air hit us like a hammer.

Fata Morgana lay before us like a white castle, ringed with vertical docks, northern airguard ships, the
Westminster
, spires, and docks touching the black polar sky and canal offal falling down the sides in slow drifts.

We ran around the arc of the deck to the back of the ship as the masked guard poured through the entrance and out onto the dock. I caught a glimpse of Queen Honoria, graying hair frizzing wildly, her mask askew and red lips pursed, entirely pressed in the crush of the masked guard descending down the long dock and into the city.

We rushed past the row of airship dinghies, their balloons tied to the underbelly of the envelope above us. Lockwood hurriedly unharnessed the pulleys and ropes and dropped one to the deck between us. It
clonged
to the ground, and the metal deck thundered under our feet.

Lockwood shoved me in, and I hit back-first into the hull of the boat.

“
No
one,” he snarled, leaping in after, “accuses
me
of not being able to steer an airship! Figur-a-tively or otherwise! Hang on, Joooohnnyyyyy!”

He flung the orthogonagen wheel open and shoved the accelerator stick forward. I tumbled back into cases of food and ropes, just as the masked guard poured from around the side of the
Valor
after us. Their gloved fingertips just brushed the edge of our dinghy, and we fell, down—down—down—

The blood-red masks staring down at us over the railing grew smaller and smaller. My excitement turned to panic as they unharnessed the dinghies themselves, boarded, and sailed over the side of the ship, descending after us.

“Lockwood!” I yelled.

“I know!” he snapped, wincing. He turned the ascension wheel in a blur, firing the engines, throwing the ship sharply upward. “Good luck to them finding the altitude lever on these stupid boats!” He shoved the stick forward, and I knocked back again, banging around the ship's supplies as we zipped forward.

The ships that had been plunging downward like dead flies immediately fired up at the same time, shot upward, and zoomed after us.

“Looks like they found it,” I said.

Lockwood gritted his teeth and we raced forward in a polished blur. Fata Morgana's spires and observatory dome grew larger.

“Where's the infirmary?” he said.

I pointed out the building, in the center of the city. The ship propelled forward. Freezing air whipped around us. The ships behind us grew larger.

“No one outsails
me
,” Lockwood snarled. He shoved another lever forward and we shot up again, narrowly avoiding a masked guardsman's dinghy, which crashed into a vertical dock, then spiraled into the silver city below. My throat fell into my stomach, we rose so fast. Within seconds the dock had become a silver ribbon and the weathervanes on the city's towers spun in our wake. A few seconds more, and the entirety of the city lay before us.

Lockwood pulled steady at this new altitude. My ears rang.

“I didn't know ships could do this,” I rasped.

“Yes, neither did I,” said Lockwood.

The dinghies below us rose as spirits from the grave.

“Hold on,” said Lockwood, and he cut the engine.

We plummeted freely. Our clothes lifted from our shoulders, my stomach lifted into my throat, our entire selves lifted away from the floor of the ship. We blurred
past the masked guard, catching a glimpse of their masks and hulls.

Lockwood fired the engines. We smacked onto the dinghy floor, and before we crashed into a cloud canal, Lockwood jolted the ship forward. We skimmed the surface of the river of mist, dipping and bobbing. He gave the engine more fuel and we shot forward in a wake of white. The canal-front townhouses and white brick buildings smeared past on both sides.

Lockwood turned the boat around corners, tightly dipped it beneath walkways, just brushing the top of the balloon. The engine whined. Lockwood grabbed my arm.

“Jump!” he said.

“What?”

He shoved me over and leapt after me. I plunged into the misty black depths of the canal, suspended in orthogonagen-smelling fog, slopping against a curved brick wall and sliding down in a trail of slime. We slid to a stop on the mucky canal floor.

I coughed up mist. I used to play in these canal bottoms when I was boy, but you couldn't breathe this generator offal for long. Your lungs would fill with water.

The
bang
of our dinghy crashing into the canal side sounded in the distance. Lockwood's form appeared next to me, caked with muck.

“Yeah,” I said. “All those things I said, about you not
being able to steer a ship, you know, I think I take them back.”

Lockwood laughed, and then winced and held his head. I took the lead now, slopping through the bottom of the canals. Chemical light behind metal grates cast strange shadows around us, illuminating sky mussels clinging to the walls. Beneath them, numbers and letters marked the location. S-C-498. Stratus Circle, where the infirmary stood.

Metal rings had been built into the wall. Lockwood and I climbed them. I stumbled and slipped in my now too-small shoes, reminding me of my Rivening. I didn't dare look at my hands. Breaking through the mist surface and inhaling dry air, I pulled myself onto the smooth pavement, shivering. I helped Lockwood up.

The infirmary loomed before us. Frosted light shone from the windows.

My over-tight shoes squished and squashed as we careened through the entrance hall, shoving doors open and running to the main wing. It was evening now. I prayed I wasn't too late. The infirmary felt silent. Far too silent.

I should have recognized that.

Slamming through the main wing's doors shoulder-first, I pulled up sharp.

The entire infirmary, normally a stark white, was
filled with crimson. Masked guardsmen flanked the walls, filled the spaces between the beds of dying women, and swarmed upon Lockwood and me. Blue-uniformed men lay at their feet, either unconscious or dead. King Edward lay in a mountainous heap in the corner, knocked out next to the unconscious form of Dr. Palmer.

At the end of the wing, standing among the chess pieces of masked guardsmen, my father stood, chin up, his jaw set. A pistol was held to his ear. On the other side of the pistol was Queen Honoria, her chin raised haughtily.

“Jonathan!” she said, and she smiled, sweet as sugar. “Well! Isn't
this
familiar!”

T
he masked guard forced me to my knees. Constantine came up from behind Lockwood and with a swoop of his clawed glove, knocked his head so hard that Lockwood—already drunk—glazed over. He folded up into a blue brass-buttoned heap.

My father stared at me. He looked terrible. Unshaven, unkempt. Like he hadn't slept in a week. He probably hadn't. His horrified expression made me reach up and feel my face. My splitting fingers felt two bridges of a nose, extra nostrils, and the indent at my temple had a bulb of an eye beneath the skin. I winced.

Mum and Hannah lay in their beds. Hannah shivered and trembled. Mum didn't move at all.

“Jonathan, I think it's wonderful you illusioned a door so
well
,” said Queen Honoria in a patient voice. “This will be helpful in the future, of course. But right
now,
Jonathan
, you need to stop this silliness and come back to the theater.”

I slowly reached into my pocket, keeping my eyes fixed on my father and the pistol pointed at his head. My fingers closed around the small brown bottle inside.

“Jonathan,” said Queen Honoria, smiling.

“Please,” I rasped. “Please. Just let me cure my mother and sister. Leave my father alone. Let me cure them, and I'll go back with you, through the doorway. Please.”

“Let him,” said a hoarse voice behind me. Constantine.

Queen Honoria wavered.

“Let him,” said Constantine again, his eyes fixed on my father. “Give him five minutes, Your Highness. Then he'll come back with us. He'll get more orthogonagen with his illusions and help fix Nod'ol. Won't you . . . Jon . . . a . . . than?” He said my name with difficulty, like a rusty clock trying to run.

He tore his eyes from my father and fixed them, one yellow, one red, on me. My same eyes.

“Yes,” I said, dying inside. “I will. For five minutes, I will.”

Queen Honoria regarded me, her eyes glittering. Then, without lowering her pistol from my father's head, took a pocket watch out from a pocket in her layers of dress and clicked it open.

“Five minutes,” she said.

The masked guard released me.

Shakily, I found my feet and a pot of tea by a bedside, poured a cup, and mixed it with a dose of the antitoxin. Everyone's eyes were fixed upon me.

I administered the cure to my mother first; she lay breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Even her eyelids and lips had turned black.

“Hello, Mum,” I whispered, touching the cup to her lips. She drank it in little sips, then with a trembling hand reached up and brushed my cheek.

“My Johnny,” she whispered.

I kissed her fingers.

I poured another for Hannah and pressed it to her black lips. She gagged and tried to push it away.

“Stop being stubborn, for once,” I said.

She cringed but allowed me to help her drink, then curled up into her pillow when she'd finished, shivering. I pulled the blanket up to her neck with a shaking hand.

The bottle had one last dosage of antitoxin within. I walked to my father, still frozen with the pistol at his head, and pressed the antitoxin into his hand.

He blinked at the bottle, then at me. A mixture of expressions crossed his face: surprise, confusion, then hope and a glimmer of
pride
as his fingers closed tightly over the bottle.

“Jonathan.”

The five minutes had flown. Constantine wore a fantillium mask over his face. Queen Honoria pulled the pistol away from my father's head and fitted her own mask on, illusioning with broad gestures something I could not see. The masked guardsmen all around us produced fantillium masks, strapping them over the mouths and noses of their crimson faces. They handed a mask to me. I buckled it around my head. It pumped and hissed; I closed my eyes, inhaling. And the fantillium filled me once again, fizzing my blood and brightening the lights.

The door Queen Honoria had illusioned stood at the end of the infirmary wing, the same old Tower of London door with rusted hinges.

I faced it, resolved. And that very moment, the invisible compass inside my chest went
click
, an audible noise to soul. I felt Anna's touch on my chest, stronger than the numbing fantillium, and knew exactly what I must do.

I stepped in line next to Constantine. He ignored me. The masked guard streamed around us and through the door, which opened into the overgrown courtyard. Queen Honoria, Constantine, and I passed through the arched doorway at the same time. The moment we crossed over the threshold, the moment when our veins and cells and organs went
blip
, I closed my eyes.

And illusioned.

It wasn't like any illusion I'd created before. It flowed from me like a song, an orchestra of interweaving threads and melodies, painting themselves into a picture around us. The infirmary disappeared, the Tower of London before us disappeared, the masked guard disappeared, and only Constantine, Queen Honoria, and I stood in the Nothing between two worlds.

Walls faded in around us, and we stood in the center round tower. It was a mix of the Tower of London, Nod'ol, Fata Morgana, the observatory, the infirmary wing. The ceiling was made of glass, and weak winter light shone down over us. The floor was tile, the walls stone.

A lone door stood in front of us. It was the same Tower of London door we'd just walked through, moments before.

“What—” Constantine began.

The quickening formula grew in my mind and evaporated from me. The sun above us began to whip around, brightening, darkening, brightening, darkening, faster and faster until it became a flicker and our shadows danced around us. The tile molded and cracked. Weeds blossomed and died at our feet. Trees grew up along the sides of the strange room, filling with leaves in a blur and then dying, falling to
seed, seeds growing into trees, dying again. The glass above blackened with grime.

The Tower of London door in front of us blurred out of focus like a bad microscope, until it split into two identical doors, side-by-side. As time flickered over us, the identical doors began to change. One started rotting, hinges rusting even further, wood blackening. The door at the right grew polished, carved, with steel hinges and latch.

“What is going on?” said Queen Honoria severely, her voice muffled underneath her fantillium mask. “Are you illusioning this, Jonathan?”

“Madam,” I said calmly. The room had a Quiet that I'd only experienced once before. “You are witnessing . . . a schism.”

The glass ceiling cracked and shattered. Shards rained over us and disappeared into dust. The trees grew over our heads and broke the tile with their roots.

I halted the formula. The sun jarred to a stop. We stood knee-high in weeds, the room almost a forest, crumbling stone ruins shadowing us. Moss and vines covered everything. I walked to the doors and yanked the vines aside, exposing their frames. The door on the left had almost completely rotted away, hanging from one hinge. The door on the right stood, polished, solid wood.

“Your Highness,” I said, startling the three of us.
“Queen Honoria. Do you recognize these doors? They lead to Nod'ol—one thousand years from today.”

Queen Honoria's dilated eyes flashed at me, then at the doors. She took a wary step back.

“You,” I said, “are the schism between them. This door”—I nodded to the polished door on the right—“is the result of allowing Lady Florel to take leadership of Nod'ol.”

I strode forward, grasped the steel latch, and pushed it open.

Such a world I couldn't even dream.

Constantine, Queen Honoria, and I drew back. The Tower of London stood over us, preserved to a shine, the grass clipped as smooth as velvet, and words appeared in the air of the courtyard, dissolving, pulling together new words in some magical trick of light, or a new form of energy. “Tours from 10 to 6,” they formed. History, images of London maps. We stared.

Beyond the Tower of London, golden buildings peaked to the sky. Over each spire, gold pennants rippled. There was no Archglass. Airships flew through the air without balloons, somehow held aloft without wings or sails, mechanical bullets of steam sweeping through the cityscape. And something more—I inhaled sharply. Giant creatures soared between the towers, flapping leathery wings, bridled by people mounted on
their backs. Creatures, perhaps, that had once roamed the earth and had somehow been revived.

“
Dragons
?” Constantine rasped.

Queen Honoria snapped forward, grasped the latch, and shoved the door closed. Darkness fell.

“This is madness, Jonathan,” she snarled, hands shaking. “Turn time back!
This instant!
”

I did not move.

Queen Honoria whipped an illusion—a bolt of fire. Before she could lash it at me, I had dissolved it from her hands. She tried again to attack with fire; and again it disappeared with my anti-illusion.

“Constantine!” Queen Honoria screeched. “Help me!”

Constantine remained still as a statue.

“No,” he whispered.

“Queen Honoria,” I said, nullifying her illusion again. “I'm giving you one last chance! You can make Nod'ol the city you just saw! Go back with Constantine and
turn yourself in
. Give the monarchy to Lady Florel. Earn absolution for the crimes you've committed. It's not too late!”

“I will not,”
she growled, feral. She thrashed as her illusions wisped away.

“Do you want to see what happens to Nod'ol if you
don't
?” I said. “If you go back and still are queen?”

I threw open the door on the left. The wood crashed
from its hinges to the floor, revealing a vast expanse of Nothing. Not even weeds grew. The old stone walls had been reduced to rubble. No city tower stood beyond; there wasn't even a river among the ruins. A far distant post jutted up from the ground, marking an Archglass that had once been. A smoke hazed over the entire landscape.

Queen Honoria stared at it, frozen.

“You recognize this place,” I said. “Don't you.”

Queen Honoria went mad.

She screeched and threw herself at me, gray hair flying wildly. I fell back, hitting the wall, and immediately she was clawing at me, slashing at my face and neck, catching me unaware with bolts of illusions that seared my skin. I cried aloud, more from fear than from pain, as her clothes tore at the seams and I saw what she had been hiding, perhaps for years: Eyes.

They were everywhere—on her shoulders, wrists, dropping down her arms, melting down her neck. In that horrifying moment, she grasped the pistol at her waist and pressed it to my head.

A new force took over, grasping Queen Honoria and tearing her away from my side. The pistol clattered. With newfound courage, Constantine dragged Queen Honoria to the doorway of the abandoned city.

“You utter
coward
!” he said, tearing off her masks.
I scrambled about in time to see a third eye between her eyes, her dress soaked with tears and gray hair tangling to her elbows as Constantine forced her into the abandoned city, throwing her to her knees.

“Illusion time back, Jonathan!” he screamed, leaping back through the doorway.
“Now!”

Numbers took over before I could even think of them, searing my vision and coming alive in the illusion. The Quickening Formula:

And
x
= –6.3114 x 10
¹⁰
, turning the years backward into seconds. Time whirred retrograde. I gasped as the illusion left hollows in my mind. Queen Honoria disappeared as the sun jolted into a strobe and the wood replaced itself. Plants grew backward in the flickering light. The ceiling re-pieced together, shards rising up like billowing steam. The tile mended. The doors unfocused and melded back together, forming once again the unkempt door of the Nod'olian Tower of London. And behind me stood the door that led to the Fata Morgana infirmary.

Time slowed to a stop. The room had returned to its original form. I remained on the tile, heaving, broken
and sore all over. Constantine hulked by the door. He ran a hand through his matted hair as I forced my crying muscles to pull me to my feet.

We stared at each other for a moment.

“You're me,” he said without a trace of emotion. His eyes looked me up and down. “What I could have been, anyway.”

“What you can be still,” I said.

“Ha!” Constantine laughed, then broke into a cough. “Look at me, Jonathan.
Look at me
. I'm not you anymore. I'm a monster.”

I looked at him. He hulked underneath a thick orange coat, almost disappearing inside it. Every inch of skin was covered, his misshapen form hiding whatever he was splitting into underneath.

And yet, I caught glimpses of myself. The brown at the roots of his hair. The shape of his eyes and the way he rubbed his clawed hands together, over and over, not unlike how I kneaded my cap when I was nervous.

“When I died,” I said thoughtfully. “Did I tell you? I saw Anna.”