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Verso’s knees buckled. He fell to the bottom of the space between worlds, managed with the last of his strength to roll. Alicia dismissed her sword and rushed to his side.
She knelt. The soap-bubble light in this place made his eyes strangely pale when they should have been blue.
“Hey, please, listen to me,” he said. “Only you can do this. You can do this please. Unpaint me. Unpaint me!”
The rage of their fight subsided into pain and pity. Alicia reached for his cheek and brushed away a stray petal. Time and space were unstable here at the limit of reality. Caustic. The air itself ate into Verso’s substance like turpentine and bits of him peeled off and swirled away. He bled under the ribs where she’d run him through by the sword. She had done that to him, somebody she loved. But taking the boy away crossed every line.
“Please. I don’t want this life. I don’t want this life…”
He became translucent as more of him came apart. The stresses of this place gnawed him all the way down to the immortality that wouldn’t let him go.
She just wanted to fix everything. She had all these plans for a perfect future where they could be together forever. They could ride on Esquie! Go for walks in the forest! Eat those little almond pastries she’d always wanted to try! She had all the power. She could do anything. Restore Lumiére to its glory. Fix Verso. Everything would go so much better than the last time he’d died.
A hunk of bloody hair hung in Alicia’s face. Now that she let herself think about it, her clothes clung to her with blood and sweat, and she ached all over from beating their way through the ruined city. All that work just to kneel over a desperate, half-dead man.
He’d try. For her sake, he’d try. Command performances at the opera house. Forced smiles. He’d go through the motions of a life in Lumiére and go to bed just to get up in the morning and do it all over again, all while curdling with secret despair.
Again.
All the dreams she’d built up in her head about Verso getting better, they shattered, she shattered, there was no world, inside or outside any canvas, where Verso would be happy.
Alicia put a hand on his chest and hesitated. His chest felt warm with what remained of his life, even now.
She had enough rage left to do it.
She found his heart with her power and tore.
Verso had time only to jerk. His eyes widened, maybe in surprise, but she would never know. More and more petals came off of him and his substance eddied into the crackling air. Little air currents made them dissipate. Less. Nothing.
Maelle threw herself onto the bottom of the space between worlds and wept.
#
Eons later, Maelle propped herself up on her hands and wiped her eyes. Her ribs ached, she felt hollowed out and exhausted. Nothing was okay.
Still the boy painted.
She held very still on hands and knees and observed the boy like a naturalist observing a marmoset in the wild. She had and had not seen many soul shards at work before. He seemed not to notice her or anything else around him, driven by that strange compulsion to paint eternally.
Now what? Her dream of being with Verso forever was over. Through pain and grief, she formed the outlines of a new plan. She needed to talk to the boy.
But she needed more time. She turned away.
Maelle crawled through the portal back to Lumiére and nearly landed on top of Lune.
Lune caught her. “What happened in there? You fought—”
Sciel nudged Lune. “Later.”
Maelle leaned heavily on Lune’s arm. A lonely streetlamp cast harsh yellow light over the square where they’d fought Papa. The air tasted metallic. The whole front half of an apartment building was crushed, another one teetered over a huge hole in the ground. A terrible, terrible silence smothered all. The four of them were the only living beings in the city.
Maelle eyed Monoco’s mask. He’d known that version of Verso well. He must have known his intentions all along.
She drew a breath. “He tried to destroy the canvas.”
The words came out more hoarse than she expected and everything threatened to rush back. She clenched her fists. She’d killed her own brother. An impostor. Her brother.
“Traitor!” Lune was saying. “After everything we—”
“We should talk about this later,” said Sciel with a glance at Maelle.
Lune trailed off.
Maelle took another steadying breath. “I’ll start with the expedition,” she said. “We need the help.”
The plan. The plan would hold her together. First they needed a better place to bring the expedition back. This square had too many holes in the ground, somebody could fall. She should scope out what she had to work with in the city, keep one rational thought going after another, that was better than remembering.
Dawn rose while they walked, revealing a haze of battle smoke across a sky that would never be perfect again. Lune quickened her pace to drift alongside Maelle, in silence. Her large dark eyes asked all the questions.
Maelle didn’t want company.
“It sounded like he asked you to unpaint him,” Lune said at last.
Maelle hunched in an attempt to retreat into herself. She didn’t answer. A drift of black petals lay heaped up against the doorway of a hat shop, all that remained of their army of the dead.
“Why?”
Again Maelle didn’t answer.
Lune put a hand on her shoulder.
When they reached the flower market, Esquie swooped down to greet them and Lune and Sciel gave him a quick explanation of the battle. The market must not have seen the worst of the fighting. The stalls were overturned and scattered, banners torn, a tree leaned with its trunk snapped, but the ground was whole. Good enough.
The others exchanged looks, then stood back.
Time to apply everything she had learned. Maelle—but if Alicia studied painting on the outside, then who—Maelle focused on the essence of the expeditioners. A torrent of chroma slammed into her. The onslaught flowed through her, a jumble of light and noise that threatened to sweep her off her feet and away.
She snapped to the here and now. Her hands shook. So much. Well, yes, now that Papa had let go of it all, the chroma all sloshed around loose in the world.
Lune narrowed her eyes at her. She expected results.
Maelle reached for the chroma more carefully this time. The expeditioners, the brave, desperate explorers. The landfall under the eclipse, the awe, and minutes later, the battle. Eager Seba. Gentle Tom. Tristan loved cats. Catherine didn’t cheat at cards, she counted cards, and she smiled when she mopped the floor with Michel. Maelle had hold of something now, as if hauling drowning people ashore—
—and a dozen men and women fell out of the air.
Arms and legs smacked into cobblestones. A dozen voices shouted over each other. Backpacks and swords glinted in the watery morning light and limbs tangled as people scrambled to sit up and rub their eyes. A gun went off.
Maelle shouted and rushed toward one man in particular.
Gustave knelt on the stones, breathing hard. Maelle crashed to the ground and skidded to him, scraping her knees. She didn’t care.
“It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s me.” She took his hand. “You’re all right. We won. You’re home.”
Gustave stared at her, wide-eyed.
A doubt nagged at her. “Do you understand what I’m saying right now?”
He didn’t look like he understood. Still he stared. Somebody behind them was screaming about monsters with giant hands.
He tried to speak, swallowed, tried again. “Where is he?”
She took a heartbeat or two to remember who he was. For her, months had gone by since that night on the cliffs. “He’s gone. He’s gone. We won.”
Maelle gripped his hand. Beside them, Sciel helped Margot stand. Lune expostulated with Tristan, pointing at the gibberish on the monolith. Jérôme leaned on his knees, catching his breath. Gustave touched the wounds that weren’t there anymore, the prosthetic that was attached again, and the terror in his expression turned to horror. That doubt again. Had she made a mistake? He lurched to get up and dragged Maelle up with him.
“No, no, no, it’s all right. I can do it,” she said. The Paintress is my mother—maybe now wasn’t the best time. “I can repaint people.”
Getting pulled around hurt because Gustave was strong. He broke free from her grip and they separated and stood two paces apart.
“What did you do?”
The sight struck Maelle to the heart, the distance between them like a gulf. She had somehow hurt him bringing him back, and what was he doing now, trying to scrape his body off of himself…
“I can do it right,” she said. “It’s really you. I saw you in there.”
She pulled on a fraction of the chroma and conjured a few petals, just to show him. That earned a sharp look from Catherine.
“Dumas,” someone said. Irrelevant. During their last desperate push to stop Papa, when she’d remembered what she was capable of, she’d played out this moment in her mind so many times to give herself the strength to go on. While repairing her boots. In her bedroll, trying to sleep. So many versions of the joyful reunion. Nothing like this.
No. Not twice in one day. No.
She had to ask. She had a responsibility to ask. “Do you want this?”
Gustave wasn’t looking at her. He saw something far past her, and he took too long to think about her question, much too long, and Maelle felt their future slipping away.
He focused. “Yeah.”
Thank the sun, the moon, and all the stars that Gustave would be all right. With all the tomorrows they would have together, they could talk, she could explain, she could help him get used to the way things worked now. She took a step toward him.
“Dumas!”
Recognition crawled up from a deep corner of her brain. How long had it been since she’d used the name Maelle Dumas?
She turned. The expedition commander, Alan Perrault, staggered towards her.
“You, Hugo, Verne, and the strange creature need to come with me. You have a lot to explain.”
#
Maelle told Alan as much as she could. They pulled some chairs from a fishmonger’s stall upright to sit on. She started with the moment she woke up after the battle on the shore and told their adventure in order, more or less, and Lune and Sciel filled in details. Monoco explained what he was.
Through all of it, Alan said little. Maelle struggled to read his expression. Tense? When she described the total gommage, his face almost betrayed something.
She hesitated when she got to the part about the army of the dead. She had seen Alan’s previous body dueling an Aberration on the roof of the café. The Aberration had swiped his body with a sword and he’d exploded in black petals. What remained of him lay maybe fifty meters from here. Did Alan need to know she had used him that way? Would mentioning that detail do any good?
“I was able to reuse the chroma in the fallen expeditioners to help us,” she said at last. “Most of them were very old.” Both of those sentences were true.
When she’d finished describing the battle to expel her father, her shoulders dropped. The ache of her failure with Verso returned.
Alan was still hard to read.
He gestured widely. “All this is better than it looks?”
Half of the council building was collapsed on itself. An embroidery shop sign hung from one bolt with broken glass strewn underneath it. Dust and rocks everywhere, the broken tree, claw marks gouged into the fountain.
In the middle of the wreckage Expedition 33 made a semblance of a camp, cleaning and putting market stalls upright, going through their bags that had fortunately come through the chroma with them. Gustave sat on the base of a statue breaking a chair down for firewood. He seemed recovered from the shock of his murder. Maelle wanted to go to him, to try to explain.
“Yes.” She hoped she sounded sure about that. “Now that you’re here, I’ll bring back the rest of Lumiére—”
“Wait until tomorrow.”
She bristled. What made Alan think he could order her about like … her commanding officer. At last her mind slotted down into the role of Maelle, just Maelle, the soldier from Lumiére who answered to authority.
She deflated. “Yes, sir.”
Alan turned to Lune. “Go check on the desalination plants and see how much of the water’s drinkable.” Lune nodded and drifted off.
“Food, housing … we have to keep people alive after…” He seemed to be talking to himself. To Maelle he said, “How much control do you have over this power?”
Maelle had wondered the same thing. “Well, it feels like pulling people out of people soup…”
“Can you repaint the city a little at a time?”
“I think I can, but…”
“Good. A little at a time. I’ll spread the team out and keep everybody calm, because…” His hand strayed to his neck.
She’d seen his head cut off. A flash of pain for him. According to old books about the guillotine, there must have been a few seconds of consciousness after, long enough for him to feel his head roll onto the sand of an alien beach, to feel his life drain out. And then he woke up here.
Shame settled in. She should have thought about what her power felt like for other people.
“Dumas,” Alan said. “You’re asleep on your feet.”
She was. And sore. And hungry. All her injuries came back to her, blood and an aching back and a blister developing on her heel.
“Sleep. All of you.” Alan’s face revealed more; he was deeply unhappy. “Do what you need to do tomorrow.”
#
Maelle devoured a couple of seaweed bars from the expeditioners’ rations, stretched out on a pile of old clothes, and fell asleep in an instant.
Much later, she half woke up in the dark. Lumiéran homespun brushed against her cheek. Parisian linen. She stretched her legs. She could hardly move, didn’t want to. Decent sleep at last! She dreamed of pipe tobacco and linseed oil, callouses. Kindness if one looked in just the right light and squinted.
She jolted awake. The stars were out—how could it be night again? She sat up. The sleeping forms of the expeditioners surrounded her. Catherine and Tristan were on watch, talking, but she couldn’t make out their conversation from here. Beyond the harbor, the sea rolled in and out in the dark. All seemingly as real as ever.
Papa had kept his word and stayed out of the canvas. But in the outside world, he had not left her side. He stood right there next to her physical body, looking over her shoulder, his arm brushing up against the fine hairs on her arm. He wanted her to make safe choices in here.
She was wide awake now. How well could Papa see over her shoulder? Dimly, and at dizzying speed. All of her actions since the battle, including that one, had passed in a few seconds for him.
Did he approve?
She hugged her knees to herself. She must have slept through the day and into the next night and messed her schedule up. How would she restore Lumiére while being watched … then she remembered everything, everything that had happened over the past few days, and shed more tears.
#
Another dawn came at last, and with it preparations. On the commander’s orders, she and the other expeditioners swept the harbor and the flower market clean. Following orders took some getting used to. Still the idea nagged at her that she had all the power, right? She was the only one who could save them all? They dragged tree branches and rubble away and piled up bags of food and water. There was nothing they could do about the claw gouges.
At last Maelle stood at the top of the harbor stairs, the late morning sun over her shoulder. The soldiers of Expedition 33 stood out in a line, at attention, looking as fine as they had that first day of their mission. They looked grave. They remembered dying horribly.
As she approached the line, Gustave gave her a nod. They were on speaking terms, technically, but as they swept black petals into the trash pile, she kept their talk about work, kept it normal. She didn’t think she could manage anything more.
He’d been shot in the stomach. Burned his arm off. Stabbed. Hit the stones, bled out, and left to die. And then she’d yanked him back into the world.
She took her position in front of the fountain. A wind kicked up from the sea, fresh-smelling, and ruffled the last of the market banners.
Seba stood nearest her in the line. He leaned to her and whispered, “What happened to your hair?”
“An effect of the magic. I don’t know.”
Alan gave the signal to begin.
Maelle reached for the chroma. The torrent came to her and she expected it this time and braced her feet. She stood in the middle of a maelstrom of the dead. Now for the trick, to find the essence of her home. One of her homes. Her home.
Digging for oysters knee-deep in the water, shucking and gulping them on the spot. Playing jacks out in the street, dodging the feet of the adults, as sunlight lanced through the patio umbrellas above. Pigeons. Learning to climb the abandoned grain exchange, the warm scent of the moss on granite as she found her handholds. Fewer and fewer people to play with every summer.
Strange how it felt like these people, her people, whirled just under the surface of the chroma. She grabbed some of them and pulled on them as carefully as she could.
A small crowd of spluttering citizens materialized in the harbor. They stumbled and held each other, wide-eyed. Some people yelped. Some half-formed questions. What just happened? What is that thing? The expeditioners stepped forward and explained. They won but … the whole world they had ever known was as a soap bubble at the mercy of monsters from another dimension. Maelle over there, the youngest and smallest of the monsters, wanted to help.
The expeditioners reassured the dazed crowd and directed them to the supplies. Then Maelle painted again.
Emma rallied to the news. She set to organizing search parties to navigate the broken terrain in the city and scavenge food. It all came so naturally to her.
Guillaume came back in tears and refused to talk to Maelle or even look at her. Alexandre and Adrian kept their distance, wary.
Maelle went further back, pulled out a victim of the Year 33 gommage, and his children weren’t orphans anymore. Why were the Year 33 gommage victims fainter than the other people? Now wasn’t a good time for that question.
Reunions that nobody ever thought would happen. Lovers. Friends. Aunts and uncles, fosters and apprentices. Alan broke ranks to embrace his daughter. When he was able to speak, he appointed Catherine to temporary command until he could compose himself.
But also confusion. Also fear.
Maelle painted again. She sweated, arms sore, as if she’d physically hauled all those people to shore. But damned if she’d stop now.
The married couple who ran the sweet shop she’d always wanted to try, the one with the little almond pastries, listened to the explanation about other dimensions. Then they demanded to be unpainted because none of this was real.
Defeated, Maelle respected their wishes. Hadn’t that English writer, Mary Shelly, warned her about raising the dead? What did she think she was doing? But she looked up, across the crowd in the harbor. So many had accepted her offer.
She painted again. As the new batch of citizens caught their breaths, Lune and Sciel came to take her away from her post.
“What, why?” She felt the exhaustion all the way to her bones.
“It’s been eight hours since you started,” Lune said.
“Shifts matter?”
But she let them take her away. The sun was beginning to set. Citizens checked in at the tents Emma and her volunteers had set up or the apartment buildings that were still intact. Others collected their wits. Maelle could revive about twenty people at a time, a few times an hour … she was looking at a little more than five hundred survivors out there. So much more work to do.
A long table with lanterns in the flower market served as a temporary mess hall. Bread and seaweed scavenged from the shops, water. She’d heard that her fight with her father had trashed a lot of the farms.
Lune, Sciel, and Maelle got some bread and looked for a seat. The citizens gave Maelle strange looks. They moved on. Gustave … was deep in conversation with Sophie. Maelle nudged Lune and Sciel to keep going.
The next table over, much of her old team had gathered together, Jérôme, Tom, Margot, the others. Tristan poured water from a pitcher. They didn’t look lighthearted, exactly, but much better than that terrible morning she’d dragged them back to life. Lucien scooched over and made room for Maelle to sit. Like she was a regular person, not a monster from another dimension.
It was the best stale bread she’d ever tasted.
#
Pulling everybody out of the chroma kept Maelle steady, sweating was better than dwelling in the memories. Alan had been right about slowing down. The Lumiérans had disaster recovery to do between each day of revivals, and that took time. Emma sent a team to patch up cracks in the sewer system, Maelle would never have even thought of that.
Every once in a while, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Papa’s breath.
After a couple of weeks, she’d repainted about seven thousand people, most everybody from the total gommage and many from the Year 33 gommage. She felt like she dared take a day off. She had a promise to keep to Sciel.
She walked with Sciel through the flower market. There was a great deal of hammering everywhere and a scaffolding had been erected on the council building. Men in work clothes examined one of the holes in the ground, a pile of rebar beside them. They waved at Maelle as the two of them went by. Very polite. Stiff, even.
Maelle hunched. She could kill anybody, anybody at all, with a touch, and the construction workers knew it. She didn’t mean them any harm! She wanted everything to go back to the way it was before. In a lot of ways.
Sciel noticed. “Don’t worry about them,” she said. “They weren’t there. I was there. I know you meant well.”
Maelle’s form in this world didn’t feel right, wobbly, like her joints didn’t exist. She was wearing herself out too fast repainting Lumiére. But how could she not, after everything her family had done to them? She’d bring out the victims of the Year 34 gommage next.
They arrived at a cove on the south end of the island, away from the harbor. Behind them up the hill was the closest thing Lumiére had to a countryside, a patchwork of aquafarms and land farms and scattered houses. Cypresses dotted the rocky slope. The sea stretched out before them with no land in sight.
“This is where we met,” Sciel said. “I was out on a walk and saw this strange man poking around in the pond scum over there.”
Maelle took mental note of that. She would need to know as much about Pierre as possible to find him.
She peered into the chroma in the way she was getting used to. She’d hauled so many dead people out that the chroma was calmer, like the sea on a windless summer day, and she found it easier to see the living. Sciel and the people up the hill looked like knots in the chroma full of furious metabolic activity on the inside. The cypresses pulled chroma up the roots and exhaled it out the leaf pores. Chroma flickered in distant fishes.
Pierre had cherished a passion for the botany of his world. He’d volunteered for outdome duty just so he could document specimens in undisturbed natural environments.
He thought he could get a strawberry operation running on Sciel’s farm and so he left his aquaponics prototypes lying all over the house. On the stairs. In the bathtub. When the reek of fish poop got to be too much, Sciel had a talk with him about taking the work outside. His hair flopped in his face as he adjusted tubing, not seeming to notice her complaint. If he could just get the ratio of red and blue light right, he said, he could induce flowering and they would all feast on strawberries.
He'd been so excited for his last outdome voyage, the one to install the weather station. He’d hoped to sight scarlet puffballs in the wild.
Nothing seemed to happen, so Maelle shook her hands out and took a closer look at the chroma. There were the currents she expected. The living. There. Knots in the chroma she hadn’t accounted for. Three of them, they looked like the living people up the hill, but much less active, like the chroma in seeds or hibernating frogs. They undulated as bits came off and melted into the sea around them. Decaying?
Those were Verso and the citizens who didn’t want it.
Maelle beat a hasty retreat to the here and now. Her palms sweated.
Sciel studied her. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m having some trouble,” Maelle said.
She could have Verso back. She could drag him right out onto the sand, right here, right now, and show him all the repairs she’d made to his world. Make him see things differently. If she gave him the ability to age then maybe… Alicia shuddered.
Maelle could try a different way. She reached for the sea of chroma again, giving a wide berth to the tangles of chroma in the distance. This time she looked for something very small. Sciel’s almost-daughter, never named. Like a fish in the fluid of the womb who’d slipped away before her life ever began.
She was not there.
Maelle surfaced to the here and now again. Sciel watched her closely, the hope in her expression now tinged with something else. Words failed Maelle. How would she even begin to tell her?
Maelle shook her head.
Sciel’s look of hope fell. Maelle sat with Sciel for a long time, in the cove where she met Pierre, and held her while her shoulders shook.
#
She just couldn’t do it. She ran into the same impasse with the Year 34 gommage victims. She tried other revivals. People she knew well, people known only to history. People from the first gommages or only a few years lost. She could not go farther back than one year. Maelle did experiments on the chroma itself, prodding its nature, demanding it tell her why it wouldn’t give any more people back.
Week after week, her frustration mounted. Anxiously she checked on the souls she’d better leave alone. Week after week, they shrank.
So that was it. With nobody left to repaint, Maelle tried to go back to life as a girl from Lumiére. She walked through battle-pitted streets and wary citizens kept their distance. Guillaume never forgave her for letting him die. She spent long dark nights clutching the quilt, her eyes to the ceiling, remembering. Faces that melted in the gommage. Those months on the Continent when she killed everything that moved and what it felt like to kill. Verso’s lies. And yet, and yet … on one of her walks she spotted a group of children playing jacks out in the street, and sunlight lanced through the patio umbrellas.
She could cobble together a new man. For raw material she could combine everything Sciel knew about Pierre, his possessions, interviews with other people who’d known him, a generous amount of inference. The man would truly be a person, not like the dead things they’d used to storm Lumiére. Like Pierre’s twin. He might grow to think of himself as Pierre.
Maelle paid a visit to Sciel with an armload of notes. Sciel was lucky and her house hadn’t lost its roof in the battle. Sciel greeted her and led her into the big front room. Tapestries hung on all the walls, sand yellow, sky blue, seafoam green; rugs on the floor, a shawl draped over the couch. A loom stood in the corner with a half-finished rug on it. Maelle accepted Sciel’s tea automatically, staring. All that time fighting together and she never knew Sciel liked to weave.
She laid the sheets of her proposal out on the low table and they talked about it until late in the night. Sciel chose.
Sciel chose to offer Maelle a job on her farm. So, for a time, Maelle spent her days laying out the water lines, feeding the fish, checking water temperature and acidity. She ended her days with sore shins and slept deeply.
A few months into the work, Papa’s legs got tired and he pulled up a chair. What a relief that was.
One day when Maelle checked on the strawberries, she spotted flower buds. Pierre’s notes about light quality had been right. The other farms in Lumiére were recovering, too, and the big farms had just gotten a new crop of wheat in. Sciel’s strawberries set fruit and ripened. Maelle and Sciel hauled buckets of them to the kitchen and baked strawberry everything, tarts, pies, shortbreads, trifle.
They invited their old comrades in arms to a feast. The expeditioners, even the ones who’d died the first day of the mission, seemed not to mind Maelle that much. Alan had lightened up massively now that his daughter was alive. Gustave was there — they’d started spending time together again, though they still weren’t talking about important things.
Maelle sliced the pie and served some of it to him.
Lumiérans didn’t observe birthdays, but in her secret heart, Maelle enjoyed knowing she’d just turned seventeen.
#
Maelle sat on the harbor wall with her legs dangling over the water. Gustave sat beside her at a little remove. The setting sun glinted on the winches and scaffoldings behind them in the city, and on the deeper scars, the melted tower, the blue ooze, the flung, floating chunks of rock. The great fissures in this reality that she couldn’t fix.
Gustave had been quiet for a while. She watched with dismay as his head dipped lower and lower. He nodded and jerked upright.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” she said.
“Nngh.” He rubbed his eyes. “Nightmares.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He waved it away.
An awkward silence followed. Gustave broke it first. “So … how’s work?”
“We’re going to branch out into tomatoes. They tend to do well. Uh, how is work for you?”
She and Gustave had needed several tries to scrape for this meeting. Since everything, Gustave had become an extremely busy person. He had three scared shitless apprentices to care for, and maybe he had a girlfriend, they were still figuring it out, and Lumiére desperately needed a structural engineer. Gustave could be calculating loads and installing braces on damaged foundations every day for the next several decades and still not repair all the holes she’d punched in his home. He got to try. That was her success.
Lune would ship out again soon. Her crew, Seba, Bastien, and some younger volunteers, was packing surveying instruments and food into the ship now. The goal of the first civilian expedition would be to map some of the coastline and make contact with the locals. Not too much. Monoco would go with them as far as the River of Rebirth, where he had business.
The conversation fizzled.
Finally, Gustave gestured at her. “Tell me why, when you got so much of what you wanted, you look like that?”
Was it happening again? She made an effort not to touch her face. No, he meant she’d grimaced. But it would happen. She felt loose, and once while getting dressed her face had caved in. Sometime soon she would lose her face in public.
“I can’t stay!” she burst out.
“Maelle?”
She’d fessed up at last, her stay here came with a catch. A relief, actually. “Holding onto a form in this world is too hard. I’ll fall apart.” She eyed him, he wasn’t buying half of an explanation. “Like the Curator. He stayed too long, and…”
“Oh. Ew. Oh, Maelle, don’t do that.”
The water made soft sounds below their feet. A gull called.
“It’s been a pleasure knowing you,” Gustave said. “I guess after a few hours go by for you out there, we’ll all be, you know…”
She had to finish confessing. He deserved that much. “I can’t leave.”
“What?”
“Papa will destroy this world the moment I step out. For my own good.” And he was less than an arm’s length away.
“What the hell?” Gustave started to get up.
“He’s following the rules!” Maelle put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. “We’re supposed to view our creations as less. When something goes wrong, we do what we need to do.”
She’d overheard conversations about it at the dinner table. Every once in a while one of her parents or Clea would botch a reality, take the canvas out to the workshop, and put it down.
“Why didn’t you— Argue with him! Get him to wait a few days! That’s…450 years? 450 years!”
She had made so many mistakes. But when she followed through with her plan, she’d make things right. “I’m going to make a deal with what’s left of Verso,” she said.
“Resurrect that miserable man?”
There was still just enough time. “The other one,” Maelle said. “He’s a little ghost boy.”
Gustave looked baffled.
“If my family can accept the terms, it’ll last longer. I’ll never, ever be able to come back.”
It was getting dark now and the first star had come out. She felt the roughness of the stone on the harbor wall, the reality of it. The commitment ahead of her would take a while.
Gustave was deep in thought.
He jolted like he’d had an idea. “Go to college,” he said.
What did college have to do with anything?
“I mean it. You’ve got what it takes.” He tapped the side of his head. “Talk to him. Tell him to send you to college far, far away. Take the canvas with you so she can’t have it.”
Her guardian, her mentor, her favorite. It pained her that she couldn’t tell Gustave everything. I’m being watched, she should say. Whether to live a short happy life here or a long uncertain one outside had been the wrong question all along, she should say. She was a monster. She was Lumiére’s monster, by adoption, and they were her people. What did she owe her people?
“That’s a good idea,” she said. Which was technically true.
“Great!” Gustave clapped her on the back. “Enjoy college. And learn sign language.”
He hesitated before speaking again. “I’ll still miss you, though.”
The lantern behind them turned on. The city bustled with sound, the people, the machines, the water. Gustave’s shoulders rose and fell with breath. He was due for a beard trim, there were haggard lines on his face, his clothes rumpled with actual weight when he moved. All the tiny dings on his prosthetic from rough travel on the Continent, even though she’d created it anew. Real. But also not real. Human.
He was human and struggling to wind up to a point. “I know some people are giving you a hard time. About your power. When you … I panicked. Because … what if you missed a part?” That distant look returned, from when she revived him. But only briefly. “I made a bad first impression.”
That dear old man. If he was apologizing to her he had it backwards. Gustave, the Lumiérans, the Gestrals, the Grandis, all of them the tens of thousands of reasons she was going back in.
Gustave wasn’t done. “I should have said thank you. Thank you for my life back.”
#
Maelle asked Esquie for a ride just for the joy of it. Flying brought a rush as always and a blast of cold, clean air that tasted like ozone. The world stretched out below them, hills, valleys, and sea.
They alit in Yellow Harvest. Maelle bade him farewell with a fond pat on the arm. She’d miss him and all the others.
Her boots crunched on strewn leaves as she turned away and the scent of wet earth and bracken rose around her. She must remain on her guard. She and her friends had cut off the source of the nevrons, but many of them still roamed the Continent. Yellow Harvest held a perpetual chill of autumn in the air. Limestone cliffs contorted over her head, topped by the skeletons of the land-based corals. She ran a hand over the stone. Memorizing it.
Her every attempt to bring back someone who had been dead longer than a year had failed. Sciel’s husband. Lune’s brother. Alan’s wife. Countless aunties and uncles and parents and lovers and friends and teachers and expeditioners who’d tried to build a better world for the next generation. Her Dumas parents. Her experimental conclusion: the ones who had disintegrated were gone forever.
Gone forever as individual selves, but the chroma persisted. Chroma circulated in the world the way it should now that Papa no longer impounded it all in the Abyss. Chroma fell as rain over the ocean and was swallowed by sea creatures, who were snatched up by a sea bird who fed the chroma to its chicks. A deer fell in the forest, its chroma seeped into the soil and was taken up by an orange tree that swelled its fruits. Some chroma descended all the way into the molten rock at the bottom of the world and flowed like molasses for tens of thousands of years until it came up as volcanic rock. A little lichen on the rock put down its holdfast and the cycle began again.
Verso had once told her this place wasn’t worth her life. Well. He’d never said anything about half a million years of community service.
Maelle drank in a last, good look at the sky. She conjured her sword and cut a portal to the place between worlds.
#
Soap-bubble colors of taut reality skimmed over the surface of the place. The ground felt off the level and Alicia caught her balance. Unstable air prickled her skin, looking for a way to eat into her. But she was made of outside world stuff.
There he was. The boy. As if cast of bronze, about eight, so broken off from the whole soul a little while before Alicia was born. She thought she could recognize features of the grown man in him, the same hunch of the shoulders, some detail of the way he pushed the brush.
“Hi, Verso,” she said.
The boy startled, regarded her with that eternal blank look. Unable to stop working for long, he turned back to his canvas.
The reason Mama kept crawling back. As long as part of Verso’s soul remained between worlds, any painted version of him to inhabit the canvas would be so compellingly crafted as to suck the viewer in forever. Alicia understood much too well. She was, in fact, like her mother, and she’d come to the brink of madness in this place.
She sat down cross-legged next to the boy. The ground felt strangely waxy. It was cool in here, not cold. Could she … yes, she could redecorate. She could conjure an atelier. One of Sciel’s nice tapestries would help, and a pot of cyclamens on a dresser. A big window.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The boy didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m sorry for everything we’ve done to you. We shouldn’t have turned this world into a battlefield just because we couldn’t talk to each other.”
Quite a one-sided conversation. There was not much of him left.
“You want to stop,” Alicia said. It wasn’t exactly a question.
The boy nodded.
“I want those people to stand a chance.”
She leaned back, resting her hands on the strange ground. They sat together in silence for a while. When she was a little kid learning to paint and turning out mediocre, Verso had always been there. The big kid. The perfect one. As the scale of his raw sorcerous power became clear, an astonishing amount, Mama thrilled. Mama loved power more than anything, more than Clea’s skill.
Art faction recruiters would come over for dinner. Military men who spoke of first strikes on the Kaiser’s wizards. After Verso’s suitors went away, Alicia would press her ear to the door of the den to listen in on the family discussions. Her parents’ raised voices. Verso’s raised voice back. Verso would come out and he wouldn’t explain, he’d smile to Alicia as kindly as ever, but in his eyes she saw a stag in the hunt, the hounds closing in.
“Brother, you made a mistake.”
The boy lowered the brush and stared at her. Reality itself wobbled and he hurried back to work.
“I should have been the one to die that night. I brought home the poison book. It blew up in my face. Now our whole family is torn apart because what were you thinking?”
The grief welled back up in her throat. The rage that she’d thought was over. She buried her face in her hands.
#
Verso had dragged her behind an overturned table. Alicia’s face and shoulders burned from the explosion, she had scrapes and bruises from their retreat across the floor, her heart pounded. They were safe—safe as anyone could be with magefire billowing down the hallway, licking up the walls. Both of them were safe.
She clawed at her face. It burned!
“You’re okay.” Verso knelt over her. He pulled her hands away from the wound.
She didn’t feel okay. She tried to say so, but Verso wasn’t looking at her anymore. He looked right through her, as if transfixed by something far away only he could see.
He stood up.
Alicia’s disbelief cost her seconds. She grabbed at his ankle and it slipped out of her grasp.
He stepped out of their makeshift shelter, took one faltering step, then another, down the hall, back to the drawing room where she’d only wanted to read the book the nice writer gave her today. The sight would be seared into her memory forever: a man surrounded by flames in a darkened mansion, making no effort whatsoever to escape.
Alicia crawled down the hall to him, she couldn’t crawl fast enough, her throat hurt, why was one of her eyes all hazy—
A tendril of magefire reached out to Verso.
Why wouldn’t he get out of the way? She tried to call to him and let out a croak.
Fire caught his sleeve. He lifted his hand and watched the fire eat into him, curious even.
Papa and Clea shouted, feet pounded up the stairs—
Verso seemed to regret whatever he was thinking because he tried to pat himself out. But magefire was sticky. The fire advanced to his chest. Then he started to scream.
#
“Why?” Alicia said in the space between worlds. “Were you in trouble with another faction? Debt? Were you that reckless and it was all an accident?” She took a ragged breath, then another. “Why didn’t you tell me what was wrong? Maybe I could have helped. You couldn’t even tell your own sister?”
Power blazed off of her like the rippling air over a bed of coals. So her power looked like hot coals, that figured.
The boy stared at her for a long time. Then he lifted his hands and shook his head.
Of course he had no idea. He had split off years and years ago, long before. Alicia didn’t know. Could never ask. She and the boy sat together in their shared bafflement. What had been the cause of Verso’s secret despair?
Afterward, Alicia went through a carousel of doctors, bandage changes, medicinal syrups. Mama visited her bedside, and through her burned throat Alicia tried to tell her. Mama sneered. Her perfect son would never have died by his own hand. Mama disappeared into her study more and more after that.
Between worlds, Alicia’s form blazed with the fullest extent of her power. Not at all a sorcerous prodigy, but enough.
The damned book was her fault. Verso was not her fault. She could only save the ones she could save.
She glanced at the boy. She should talk faster because Papa would suspect. Overbearing as he was, he loved her. She counted on him now to defend this world from the Painter’s Council, to prolong her soul.
“You would have wanted me to move on from that. You didn’t give me a clue how! I found a job. That you wouldn’t have approved of, but this is what I want.”
She held out her hand for the brush. “Let me do it.”