"Is Niki dead?"

"Well, I know there's at least one coroner in San Francisco that'll swear to it. But then you people seem to have an awfully narrow view of life and death. Now, open your eyes."

But Daria keeps them shut tight, too far past even the desire to simply survive, because she'd always have the memory of the black thing on the ceiling and the mess in- 347.

side the circle. Because she'd never be able to forget the sound of this madwoman's voice, and whatever Archer Day intends to do to her, Daria knows that she's going to do it, regardless.

"I said to open your f.u.c.king eyes, b.i.t.c.h. Don't you want to see this? Imagine, two universes touching across the void-"

"The man who called me in Atlanta," Daria interrupts, wishing there were some way to shut out the sounds of it all, as well as the sights, "the man who wanted me to find Niki, so he wouldn't have to hurt her-"

"-is dead. Plans changed, and he was never very flexi-ble. Why won't you open your eyes? You're going to die, anyway."

"I know that."

"Then wouldn't it be better to witness such wondrous events first-the birth of a G.o.ddess, the Dragon's coming, the beginning of the end? A few marvels to keep you company through infinity?"

"Thanks," Daria hisses between gritted teeth, "but I think I'll pa.s.s," and Archer Day curses and shoves her; she stumbles and falls hard near the edge of the circle.

"Don't you dare f.u.c.king presume to judge me," the woman snaps and pulls the trigger. Trapped inside the bas.e.m.e.nt, the gunshot is earsplitting, thunder in a bottle, and the dirt floor a few inches from Daria's left knee explodes. She begins scrambling backwards, away from the circle and the thing on the ceiling and the crazy woman with the gun.

"Daria Parker, you cannot begin to imagine the sacrifice, what this has cost me, what I've given up-"

There's a sound then from the thing hanging above the circle, and even through the ringing in her ears the sound makes Daria think of a watermelon splitting slowly open, and suddenly the bas.e.m.e.nt air smells like s.h.i.t and ammonia. And now she looks, following an instinct stronger than the knowledge that she doesn't want to see, some undeniable, primal twinge, and for this moment, she's only a very 348 small and frightened creature huddled in the trees while hungry reptilian giants stride past.

"My life, my calling, everything which I'd ever believed and held sacred, I let them take it all from me," but now Archer Day and her gun seem far away, small concerns, at most, and there's no room left in Daria for anything more terrible than the burst coc.o.o.n and what's crawled out of it.

It crouches over the puddle of meat and bone inside the circle and begins to feed.

"For you, I did that, so don't you dare f.u.c.king judge me, wh.o.r.e!" and she pulls the trigger again. This time the bullet grazes Daria's left shoulder before it buries itself deep in the bas.e.m.e.nt wall.

She screams and covers her ears with both hands.

And the black thing stops eating and raises its head.

Eight eyes deeper than the sea, more secret than eternity, watch her briefly before it turns towards Archer Day. What Daria sees in its face, all it has told her without uttering a single word, is enough to wipe away the faintest hope that she might somehow survive this, that she would ever want to survive this.

"That's enough," she whispers to herself or whatever's listening, no more room left inside her for revelation or horror or the d.a.m.ning perspective that follows either. And she crawls to the bas.e.m.e.nt wall and stops because there's nowhere left to go.

"What the f.u.c.k are you looking at?" Archer Day asks the thing crouched inside the circle. "Isn't this exactly what you wanted? Isn't this Heaven, little girl?" and the ball bearing clutched in her left hand has begun to glow, a hot light like melting iron, light that might be red or orange, but everything's the wrong color down here. There's steam rising from her hand, but she doesn't seem to notice, all her attention focused on the black thing staring out at her from the circle.

"You're the lucky one, Theda. You're the lucky, lucky little goth girl who went looking for transcendence, and now you've found it in spades, wouldn't you say?"

349.

I won't see this, Daria thinks. I won't look, but her eyes are open wide, and she doesn't turn away, doesn't hide her face in the sanctuary of her own shadow.

Inside the circle, the black thing makes a strangled, gurgling sound, and the cat's cradle of its jaws opens wide.

Light has begun to seep from the empty coc.o.o.n or chrysalis; a liquid light like careless drops of mercury, yet no color that Daria has ever seen before, some shade a little or a lot too far beyond one side or the other of the visible spectrum. But she's seeing it now, anyway. It splashes across the high spines on the back of the black thing and trickles down its emaciated xylophone sides, though the creature doesn't seem to notice. It doesn't turn away from Archer Day, who suddenly looks more frightened than insane. She's raised her gun again and is pointing it at the thing's open mouth.

"Oh no, you little c.u.n.t. I get to go home. That's the G.o.dd.a.m.n deal, and we're playing by the rules."

Daria silently begs herself to shut her eyes, shut them quick while there's still time not to see what's coming next, but she doesn't close them, as though she's forgotten how to work her lids.

The thing from the coc.o.o.n opens its spindle jaws wider still and sprays Archer Day with some viscous, oily fluid, a living stream like the purest, darkest night, like the aching, barren distance between stars, erupting from its throat.

Her body shudders once before she sinks slowly to her knees, and the ball bearing rolls out of her hand towards the edge of the circle drawn in the earth. And the creature turns back towards Daria, cold night dribbling from its skull. Beyond it, the ball bearing glows, a tiny sun dropped in the dust.

Archer Day slumps back against the bas.e.m.e.nt wall and lies still.

Daria manages to keep her eyes on the ball bearing, surely the lesser of three evils. The earth around it has begun to burn the same indescribable color as the stuff oozing out of the coc.o.o.n, and the fire spreads quickly.

350.

Niki wonders how long there have been slivers shining through the soothing nothingness, how long there has been something to mar the exquisite absence of anything.

The singularly when-where consciousness began again, and all these intruding thoughts take longer than she expected them to; before they're done, the slivers have become radiant gashes and ugly strands and clots of existence are spilling through. If she had a needle and thread, or knew a little of the red witches' magic, perhaps she could seal them up again. Then she could float nowhere for a trillion billion years until there are no universes left that want any part of her. But she doesn't, never mind that she's the Hierophant, she doubts she could pull a rabbit out of a hat, even if she'd put it there first. She clutches in vain at the shreds of nothing coming apart all around her.

"Time to get on with it," Danny Boudreaux whispers from one of the clots or strands, and this is not the cruel spectre of Danny that haunted her in San Francisco. This is simply Danny, the boy who might have become the girl she could have spent her life with, if she hadn't been so afraid.

"If we could lie in bed all day," he says, "if we could lie in bed all day listening to the people in the street. Remember that guy who used to wander up and down Ursulines shouting, 'The monkeys are coming! Repent! The monkeys are coming!'?"

And she does, as the variegated waves of being wash over her, like frothy ocean waves around her knees. But she doesn't answer him, and she doesn't know why.

"You were always the strong one, Niki," he says, and she imagines his smile. She wants to tell him that's not true, that she isn't strong, and she's never been strong, no matter what's happened or what people have expected of her. But there are strings now, as if she's tumbled into a black room crisscrossed wall to wall and ceiling to floor with countless lengths of kite string dipped in glow-in-the-dark tempera paint or, no, not string, but fiber optic filaments in all the 351.

hues that roses grow-deep reds and pale pinks, snow and cream and vivid yellow fringed with vermeil-and if she moves, if she so much as breathes, she might sever a strand and bring it all down on her head.

"Mind you, this is only a representation," Dr. Dalby tells her. "A rude cartoon, if you will."

The filaments begin trading their colors, a game of musical chairs or a Halloween masquerade for the cast of the chaotic eternal inflation, carnival bulbs flashing first one delirious color and then another, and this is better than any acid or mushroom trip or schizoid hallucination, she thinks, even if it is only a representation.

Beyond the event horizon, the gashes have become gaping holes, drawing her ever nearer their rotting ivory teeth.

The flashing strings part to let her pa.s.s, though she wishes that they wouldn't.

"Wait," Spyder calls out, and Niki looks back, and her heart breaks again, and again, and again, at the beauty of the white, white woman who had once been someone she loved. The filaments are winding themselves into Spyder's gown and dreadlocks, and the red gem between her eyes devours them alive.

"You go so far with a thing, Niki, there's no turning back. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so. But maybe there is a turning back. I just turned my head to see you, didn't I?"

"There's no direction here," Spyder mutters, annoyed, like Niki should have known that.

"But you know what I mean, " Niki insists. "I know you know. What they've told me, is it true? Is that why you brought me here?"

"My father was a serpent. My father was an old snake in a tree with apples and candy and razor-blade Bible pages to cut my hands."

"He was only your father. And he's dead now. He isn't the Dragon. Not this dragon."

"You've been listening to old Pikabo. I knew you had."

And Niki realizes that she's feeling pulled, caught in the 352 competing, evenly matched gravities of Spyder and the reality holes. They'll rip me in half like a theater ticket, she thinks and wonders if it will hurt as much as she imagines.

"With the Nesmidians, we could have killed him. We could have killed him here, and none of this would have been necessary. She sees nothing but balance, Niki, balance at any cost."

"You would set the Dragon loose in our world?"

"This is our world. What is there back there worth saving? Tell me that, why don't you? Name just one thing."

And Niki doesn't have to think. "Daria," she says immediately, and there are other things, more than she could list in a lifetime, but she can see from Spyder's expression and the way the strings are winking out around her that there's no point in continuing.

"She has betrayed you. You know she has. You know she doesn't want you around anymore."

"But that doesn't mean that I don't still love her," Niki says, words that cut her tongue, her lips, the deepest parts of her soul, but they're true words, and she clings to them.

"It doesn't matter if she doesn't love me."

"Then you're a fool."

"Let me go, Spyder. I won't do this for you. I won't fight the Dragon for you."

Galaxies swirl in the irises of Spyder's angry, pale eyes, supernovae and blue giants, and Niki knows that the holes, which have now become a single hole, {horizon} (tidal gravity) are winning the tug-of-war. And she wishes that Scarborough had hit her just a little harder.

"Without the Dragon, this world would be perfect," Spyder says.

"There's no dragon where we came from, and it's not 353.

perfect," Niki replies, and now the things in Spyder's eyes are unrecognizable.

"There are dragons everywhere. There are serpents and dragons and devils."

"I won't do it," Niki tells her again, and then she's falling, which means there must be direction, after all, maybe direction that's only just come into being. Not so very different than the fall from the bridge and she watches Spyder d i m i n i s h falling the other way, until she's become only a bright speck, a particularly white star all but lost among the infinity of twinkling worldlines.

I'm near the edge now.

she thinks, but isn't at all sure what she means.

And then Niki slips through the breach, dropped back 354 into her body so hard that her teeth clack together and she bites her tongue. The salty, metallic taste of blood, iron molecules torn from hemoglobin and dissolving like Communion wafers on her tongue.

My mother was Catholic, my father was an old serpent, but no, that last part was Spyder, not her, and she has to remember that if she's to do this one last thing.

The temple at Nesmia Shar, that enormous, somber room of gray stone, flashes before her eyes like an epilep-tic slideshow. Images flickering lightspeed across her reti-nas, engulfed by her shrinking-swelling-shrinking-swelling pupils, and now oblivion seems very, very distant.

The red witches, a.s.sembled before the towering, graven image of Dezyin, their glowering griffin, gryphon, gryphus, grypgryps that isn't, neither half lion nor half eagle. The air of the chamber clouded with incense and the vocal press of chanting. The idol's eyes blaze almost as bright as Spyder's did.

Pikabo Kenzia, solemn and fearful and beautiful in her sage-colored skullcap, and all her sisters and daughters spread out around her like fallen autumn leaves set afire, smoldering, bleeding the smothering fumes of herbs and dung and amber.

And there I am, Niki thinks, spotting her naked self stretched out on the stone table set at Dezyin's taloned feet. One of the women with a white bandana tied around her hair stands on the table near her, and the sight fills Niki with something worse than helplessness or sorrow. She would slither right back into the place of strings, if she knew the way.

"We ask nothing of you, daughter, that you have not already pledged," Pikabo Kenzia says, and the woman standing beside Niki takes off her crimson robes, and they fall to the floor, revealing skin as white as bone. "You are brave, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture. By your sacrifice might worlds be saved."

No! Niki screams, but her lips are as still as the lips of the dead. Not for me, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! Don't let her die for me!

355.

The flicker across her eyes, and she raises a hand to cover them, the hand that the Dragon opened and curled up inside so long ago now that it seems like lifetimes pa.s.sed and pa.s.sed again, and now she can see that there are things growing in there. Not maggots, but the things that maggots worship, and they are eating her, one tiny mouthful at a time.

And she can see through her hand, as well, as though it were only gla.s.s or plastic that no maggot-G.o.d would ever want to taste. The flat-world globe has been replaced by the fire pit, and the naked woman in the white bandana stands at the top of the long iron trough. An old woman is painting Niki's skin with elaborate runes or ideograms, blood to ink, and for just a second, Niki thinks the characters might be Vietnamese.

Pikabo Kenzia draws a great, curved knife from her own robes, and the firelight glints brightly off its blade.

"The body of woman is like a flash of lightning," she chants, "existing only to return to nothingness. Like the summer growth that shrivels in winter. Waste thee no thought on the process, for it has no purpose, coming and going like dew."

f.u.c.k this! Niki screams at the red witch. f.u.c.k you all!

but even she can't hear herself. The old woman has finished dabbing the runes across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomach and thighs, and she lays the dried corpse of a small turquoise lizard across Niki's forehead.

"Like a wall, a woman's body constantly stands on the verge of collapse," Pikabo continues, "and still, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?"

Neither awake nor dreaming, Niki Ky stands before Dezyin, and blood drips from its sickle, raptor beak. Its wings give birth to typhoons. "I am not your daughter," she screams, "and you don't get anything in my name!" but the G.o.d ignores her, as G.o.ds do, and leers hungrily down at the offering standing at its feet.

And Pikabo Kenzia's arm swings round in an arc, draw-356 ing a vicious quarter circle, as her silver blade cuts the thick and smoky air.

And the G.o.d thing smiles, satisfied, ready to grant Pikabo's wish.

Obsidian against skin, and the woman's belly opens wide, spraying blood and releasing her intestines. And her scream wriggles up through the miasma of holy scents and the smoke and the swooping tapestry shreds suspended overhead. Not mute like Niki, this woman, and she screams again as the red witch's knife continues to take her apart.

Her blood rushes down the trough and sizzles loudly in the fire pit.

And Niki feels herself slipping again.

Her mind anch.o.r.ed nowhere firm, no tether to her sleeping body, and this time it's Dezyin, the old grifter whom the witches call Dezyin, who moves her like a wooden marionette.

The fish augur's spells, and Spyder's angels.

Dr. Dalby's pills and books.

The Dragon's jackals.

The witches' flimflam man.