Chapter 36

  Kaitlyn Carter

  The claws of Eranex were chill and unyielding. They clutched Kate firmly as though warning her about trying that thing with the lightning again. It didn’t matter; Kate didn’t feel like trying that thing with the lightning anymore. She didn’t really feel like much of anything. She could hardly even enjoy the exhilaration of flight as Eranex swooped down into the dark interior of the Hollow Moon. They plummeted toward some unseen gravitational center amidst the starry world of flickering streetlights. The inside of the moon was an enclosed space vast almost beyond comprehension, yet the darkness and scattered lights, the broken walkways and dead machines and mangled infrastructure of gnarled and twisted support beams, all conspired to instill a sense of claustrophobia. Kate had been here before, though only up near the surface, and she hadn’t liked it, not one bit. Because there was no sky down inside the moon.

  Eranex dropped past dozens of platforms, ramps, stairs, elevators. Kate glimpsed some of the mechanical monsters she had fought with Eric, as well as bigger, deadlier varieties. The intended progression of difficulty was evident, leading up to the dragon’s lair.

  She wondered, numbly, whether Eric would save Leah. Would she, Kate, see him again? Or would Eranex kill her?

  The terrible beast took her through the broken glass roof of a monumental structure, which Kate recognized as a church once she was inside. It was a gargantuan imitation of Eric’s cathedral-like home, the interior ruined and burned, the stained glass broken or melted into lumpy pools. The left lens of Kate’s glasses was shattered, so half of her vision was in multifaceted fractures. It smelled like Eranex: oil and metal, dust and smoke and exhaust fumes. It was cold.

  The dragon dropped her onto the cracked slate-tiled floor, blackened beyond any original coloration. Kate tumbled as she fell. She sat up smeared with soot, but unharmed. Her guitar, which had come along for the ride, clanged on the stone nearby. Kate reached out for it, but the darkness of Eranex towered suddenly over her like some curiously menacing construction crane looming in the night. Kate yelped in alarm as a claw of torn and jagged metal dropped from above and crunched the guitar into scrap.

  Kate tried to voice a protest, but only a dry croak escaped her throat. She swallowed and grabbed for the medallion around her neck. It was fine; she could make another guitar. But her medallion was gone. She stood up, but had nowhere to go.

  NOW, said the dragon, who settled her great mass down on the broad open space of floor with a grinding crash, WE SPEAK. APPOINTED HERO AND APPOINTED VILLAIN.

  Kate crossed her arms and turned away. “I h-ha-h-have n-nothing to s-s-sa-say.” Her voice sounded tiny and pathetic, echoing like the squeak of a stuttering mouse in the cavernous ruin of the cathedral.

  NOTHING? If Kate didn’t know better, she would have thought that Eranex sounded put out. THE FAIR MAIDEN WILL NOT SPEAK TO HER CAPTOR?

  “W-wh-w-why sh-should I? Aren’t you j-just g-going to k-ki-k-k-kill me!?”

  NOT AT ONCE, said the dragon. UNLESS YOU WISH ME TO. She was disappointed!

  Kate turned and looked up into the dim red glare set high in the smoky haze. The red glare was cracked apart into a dozen fragments in her left eye. “W-well f-f-fine! I’ll t-ta-t-talk! I h-hate you!” The red glare recoiled somewhat, as though surprised, and that made Kate even angrier. “H-how could you d-do that to Eric? G-give him s-such a c-cr-c-cru-c-cr-a mean choice?!”

  IT IS MY ROLE.

  “W-w-well…” Kate could think of no reply suitable to express how she felt. She felt like this: mad, and afraid, and lonely, and frustrated. She stomped her foot, which was childish of her, but what else could she do with her guitar broken? She wanted to scream, but not in front of the dragon. She didn’t want to give it any satisfaction.

  So she sat back down on the sooty floor. She wondered where Navi was. Had Eranex killed her?! She said, in a choked voice, “I g-guess m-m-my role is j-just to just d-d-die now.”

  The red glare in the darkness lowered itself down to her level, and the black smoke cleared enough that Kate could see the two distinct reddish lights of her eyes. IF YOU COULD CHOOSE, HERO, WHAT ROLE WOULD YOU PREFER? It was hard to tell with Eranex, but it sounded a bit like a real question, as though Eranex were asking out of genuine curiosity.

  “I…” Wake up Absolem, save her moon from the storm worms, play in a band with everyone, finish the Narrative, see her dad, meet those fascinating daimon, help Rosma like she’d promised, save the world. These were things she wanted to do. But they weren’t a role. A role was something like ‘hero’ (Eric) or ‘villain’ (Eranex). Something you were, maybe even if you didn’t want to be. But what if she could choose?

  “I would w-want my r-role to be…the Scientist!”

  The red lights tilted to one side in the murk. SCIENTIST?

  Kate nodded up at the dragon. “A scientist learns things! And v-verifies them through r-rigorous experimentation. And then she solves problems through application of the knowledge.”

  CURIOUS, said Eranex. THE SCIENTIST AND THE DRAGON. IT DOES NOT SOUND LIKE A FAIRY TALE.

  Kate ignored this. “I w-want to learn! I want to s-see all the s-s-stuff! I want to see what’s behind all the horizons!”

  THE TROUBLE WITH THE HORIZON, mused Eranex, IS THAT YOU CAN NEVER REACH IT. SO IT IS WITH RESOLUTION. SO IT IS WITH QUESTIONS, AND WITH THEIR ANSWERS. THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER.

  “S-some stories have a r-re-r-resolution,” Kate countered. She glared up at the dark. “Ours will! I’ll m-mmmake sure of it! We can have a h-happy ending.”

  The eyes in the dark swung slowly to one side, then to the other. REALITY IS UNLIKE YOUR FAIRY TALES, HERO OF SKY.

  “B-but we’re in a story, aren’t we? Right here and right now! You s-s-said it yourself! You’re p-playing a b-bad guy, and in this kind of s-s-story the bad guys never win!”

  I WAS NOT SPEAKING OF THIS NARRATIVE, said the dragon. She sounded…sad? YOU WILL SEE, KAITLYN CARTER. LIFE IS NOT AS YOU IMAGINE, NOR IS LOVE. IT IS NOT SIMPLE. IT IS NOT EASY. THERE ARE NO HAPPY ENDINGS. THERE ARE NO ENDINGS AT ALL.

  “‘I will see?’ Aren’t you g-going to k-kill me?”

  OH, YES. MOST CERTAINLY. BUT HELP WILL COME FOR YOU SOON, AND YOU WILL NARROWLY ESCAPE MY WRATH. THE VILLAIN WILL BE THWARTED, THOUGH AT GREAT COST. SO IT GOES. Eranex sighed, not in Kate’s mind like how she spoke, but audibly, a cold smoky breath that washed over Kate and filled the hollow church, making Kate gag and cough.

  “…what?”

  Eranex lunged forward, seized Kate in a cold iron grip, and carried her somewhere down below, where she was unceremoniously stuffed into a barred stone cell. The cell had no door nor lock; Eranex simply dumped a pile of huge and heavy metal blocks in front of the entrance.

  HEED THIS, HERO. THE PURSUIT OF IDEALS IN THEMSELVES WILL LEAVE THEM FAR FROM YOU. SEEK NOT A HAPPY ENDING, FOR YOURSELF OR FOR OTHERS. GRASP NOT FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE. ACCEPT SUCH AS YOU ARE GIVEN.

  And then, after a pause as if she was considering how to conclude her anti-pep talk, she said, LIFE IS NOT AS YOU IMAGINE. NOR IS LOVE. AND NOR ARE YOU.

  The dragon departed, trailing her shroud of darkness away as she moved somewhere up above.

  Something was waiting for her in the cell: the dal segno. It floated three feet off the grown and pulsed slowly with a very faint red glow. But that was all; the rest of the cell was dark, cold, empty. She explored it thoroughly. It was roughly hewn into hard, damp stone. Small enough that she could almost touch either side by stretching out her arms. It was absolutely barren. The entrance was a rough doorlike shape that might have been clawed out of the wall by the talons of Eranex, blocked by huge metal objects she didn’t even consider trying to push out of the way. Besides this, there was a single small window barred with horizontal strips of rebar. Outside glittered the streetlight-speckled dark of the interior of the Hollow Moon. An unseen light somewhere below glanced off the rebar and lit the cell so slightly that Kate could just barely make out her hands if she held them in front of her face. It was chilly and damp, and her sky dress and lab coat weren’t cutting it.

  She had her phone for light, but she couldn’t contact anyone. No signal down here. She left it in her pocket.

  She spent minutes or hours leaning against the cold wall, one hand on the rebar as she gazed through the window. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about her conversation with Eranex. She wondered about her father. “The sun is rising somewhere”—that’s what he would say.

  She sighed at the window. Then, self-conscious, she sighed more dramatically, as appropriate for a Damsel in Distress awaiting her shining knight while trapped in the dragon’s lair.

  “Is it so vexing, Hero of Skies?”

  The voice was so unexpected, and so eerie, that Kate squawked and fell back from the window. But she recognized that voice. Or at least, that type of voice. It was a Lady of Skywater! Nobody else had that horrid whistling rasp.

  “H-hello?” she said, back at the window in a moment. “A-are you a l-lady?”

  “Unseemly question.” This was followed by a sort of gasping, choking sound. Was that laughter? Had the Lady made some kind of joke? Kate tried to remember what ‘unseemly’ meant.

  “I am Lady Rains,” the Lady continued.

  Of course! The voice had sounded sort of…drippy. But wait. Lady Rains was with the Frozen God. Kate felt her excitement wane. She remembered now. Rains had come to the Hollow Moon to kill Eric before being taken by Eranex. Eric had thought Eranex killed Lady Rains. Apparently not! Lady Rains was in a cell nearby, down and to the right of Kate’s. But the Frozen God hadn’t given up trying to kill them.

  Kate realized there had been a minute of silence. Had it been awkward? Was ‘awkward’ even something the Ladies could feel? “Hello, Lady R-r-rains,” she said. “Are y-you…going to t-try to kill me?”

  “I obey the Mercykiller,” she replied, which was one of the names of the Frozen God. “I shall ask.”

  “Okay…w-wait, you c-can talk to them?”

  “She cannot see us here. I am speaking to her.”

  Kate’s mind raced. Her phone was defunct, but if Lady Rains could contact the gods, then the gods could get some help for her! If only it were someone other than Rosma!

  “She says,” rasped Lady Rains, “that this situation demonstrates why you should avoid making foolish, impulsive promises which you cannot keep.”

  Promises? Oh! She meant Kate’s promise to help her, and help all the daimon. Kate pushed her face against the rusty rebar. “I m-mmmeant it! I w-will help her!”

  A brief pause, during which Lady Rains silently conferred with her god. How were they communicating? Telepathically?

  “She says, ‘what, even as thou languish imprisoned by a dragon intending to slay thee?’”

  “Y-yes! B-because my p-prince will c-come save me! It’s how these s-sto-s-stories go.”

  “She says, ‘make thine own stories, foolish girl. Have I not told thee? Help thyself.’”

  “H-hey! M-ma-maybe I will! Maybe I’ll h-help myself, and then help you!”

  “She says, ‘thou mindest me of Fiora.’ And she said unto me that I am to aid your escape from this dark place, if I am able.”

  Kate beamed. She didn’t know how Lady Rains might help her escape, but one ally in this ‘dark place’ was mathematically infinitely more than she’d had before. According to some branches of math, anyway.

  She was just about to start asking Rains questions that would aid in formulating an escape plot when she heard another familiar voice beyond the bars of her cell.

  “By jove, ought to be someplace hereabouts. Jolly grim place, this. Could use a spot of—”

  “Elmer!” Kate spoke as loudly as she dared. Then, because she knew Elmer, she added, “k-keep it down!”

  “Why Ka—oh!” His initial shout of greeting dropped away as he took the hint. “Dear me! My apologies.” His voice, now in a merry whisper, moved up from below until his cheery face appeared outside her cell, complete with bright blue top hat and thick curly moustache. “I say,” he whispered, “we’re here on a rescue mission, dear girl.”

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  “Is it he with a hatful of sky?” asked Lady Rains from down below.

  “Egads!” exclaimed Elmer, alarm written on his ruddy face. “Is that a Lady?”

  “It’s Lady R-rains,” said Kate. “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Why, myself and Amelia! She will be distracting the beast, you know, while we make our escape! She’s so daring. Marvelous woman!”

  “Elmer!” Kate whispered. “I c-ca-c-can’t fly! Eranex b-broke my guitar. And t-took my medallion!”

  Elmer frowned and preened his moustache with one hand. “Well, we can go by rainbow then, I suppose.”

  Kate was too overstimulated for a moment to respond coherently. After a few seconds she managed to squeak out, “By rainbow!?” She had seen him riding rainbows before. Somehow, she had forgotten to ask him whether she would be able to do the same.

  “Well yes, dear. I can see you have the dress still. So that should be all right. But—tsk!” He clicked his tongue in vexation. “But it’s so dry here, dear. We can whip up a storm right enough, you and I, but the trouble with rainbows is that one requires…er…” His gaze wandered down and over to where Lady Rains’ voice had come from.

  Lady Rains.

  “I will assist,” said Lady Rains. “Only free me from this cell.”

  “Splendid!” cried Elmer, forgetting all about keeping quiet. It didn’t matter, because just then the terrible roar of Eranex sounded from somewhere up above. It rattled the gravel inside Kate’s cell. Flashes of light, various in color and brilliance, beamed out from somewhere overhead. Elmer appeared unperturbed. “Here we are, then. Let’s see now…” He frowned and stroked his moustache as he inspected Kate’s barred window.

  “Right-o!” he said. “Stand back a moment, dear.”

  Kate couldn’t see exactly what he did next, but the result was that the entire wall containing the window came apart. It didn’t fall like stone; it separated like a cloudbank pulled in two. The side facing Kate remained stone, but the inner edges of the widening gap were the brilliant blue of a summer sky.

  Kate burned with curiosity about just what Elmer had done, and how, but those were questions she could save for later. The masses of stone that had drifted apart like clouds returned to being stone as Kate stepped forward into the gap, and Kate saw that Elmer had done the same to the cell below for Lady Rains. The hulking, hunched, dripping sharkskin figure of Lady Rains leaned out of the gap and turned the dark aperture of her face up toward Elmer and Kate. Elmer waved at her.

  Eranex roared again above. A rapidly strobing orange light followed, stuttering through the dark overhead. “Oh dear,” said Elmer. “That means we had better hurry! Come then, let’s have some rain.”

  Lady Rains wasted no time. She sang an eerie, compelling song that Kate had heard before at Skywater. Equal parts haunting and heartbreaking, the song of Lady Rains was a wordless keening wail that sounded almost, but not quite, like a noise that a human opera singer might be capable of producing.

  It began to rain. A sprinkle, a drizzle, a steady shower, but not a downpour as it had been at Skywater. Not enough to obviate rainbows. Kate fought back the flood of questions that arose, like: where was the rain coming from? If they were at the gravitational center of the moon, was it falling from all directions? This was not the time for questions.

  “Now we only need a spot of light,” chortled Elmer, clearly delighted at this turn of events. “I’m sure Amelia will catch on. She’s rather quick on the uptake, if you take my meaning. Ah, there it is.”

  A brilliance erupted from overhead, like a small sun shining in the dark core of the Hollow moon. And sure enough, it made rainbows. Off in the distance, refracted light transformed into arcing rivers of stacked color. It was beautiful, and therefore weird and incongruous in the depths of the Hollow Moon.

  “Now watch, dear,” said Elmer with a smile. He hopped up onto one of the distant rainbows. And suddenly, just like that, in a trick of perspective, it wasn’t distant anymore. It was a rainbow ribbon beneath his feet, just wide enough to be stood upon. As soon as his feet touched it, the colors brightened, solidified. “Like that!” Elmer declared.

  “…w-wha-w-what!?”

  The light from above began to fade, coinciding with another roar from the dragon. “Better hurry, dear,” said Elmer with a concerned glance upward. “Think about how rainbows make you feel!”

  Kate had no idea what Elmer had done or how. But she had to try! So she selected a rainbow out in the dimness beyond the rain, and she tried to imagine herself in third person, jumping up onto it, and she jumped, and she squeezed her eyes shut and believed really really hard that she could just hop up onto a rainbow, even without any music at all, and she thought about how rainbows made her feel—how pretty and photologically interesting they were…

  She landed on something like a thick, taught, springy sheet of plastic, like a soft trampoline. She almost lost her balance and fell off before she opened her eyes. She was standing on a rainbow.

  “That’s the ticket!” Elmer declared happily.

  It was about a meter wide. But Kate knew, somehow, that it would be as wide as she wanted it to be. Because it was under her feet, but it was also far away, to someone looking from a different angle. It was in more than one place at the same time, and it was being more than one thing at the same time, depending on perspective.

  A stuttering red light flashed up above before she could begin to wrap her mind around this. The sudden darkness silenced all rainbows save those on which Elmer and Kate stood. Lady Rains kept singing.

  “We had best away, my dear!” said Elmer. “Up we go!” And he was off. The brilliant rainbow beneath his feet raced in a soft curve up into the dark, carrying him away.

  “C-co-c-come on, Lady Rains!” shouted Kate. “L-let’s go!”

  Kate heard a wet, leathery flapping behind her, but she didn’t turn to watch. She focused on the rainbow, willing it to rise up just as she had seen Elmer’s do. It was because she had just seen him do it that she could do it, too. The rainbow under her sandaled feet quivered like a living thing, thrummed like a huge guitar string. It seemed to gather its energy, and then it swept her away in a smooth curving arc up into the huge open space of the Hollow Moon. Kate should have fallen right off; there really wasn’t anything tethering her to the rainbow, after all. But, somehow, maybe because it was how she had seen it in her head, she stood firm. Her lab coat billowed behind her and tugged at her shoulders, and a cold wind howled at her face as the beaming colors beneath her feet shot forth like a rapid, ever-breaking wave.

  “Well done, dear,” said a voice nearby. It was Amelia, ensconced in a yellow glare. She cradled one arm as though it was injured but otherwise matched Kate’s speed while standing in a casual slouch.

  But Eranex wasn’t going to let them go so easily. The song of Lady Rains was suddenly silenced. Kate chanced a look back into the darkness but saw nothing. A moment later, with terrifying speed, the red eyes of Eranex rose up from below. Nothing else of her could be seen within her enshrouding blackness that blotted out the distant streetlights.

  “My, she’s fast,” observed Amelia. She spoke with a slight wince of pain, but the tone of her voice was the same as usual: vaguely disdainful boredom. “I’ll slow her down.”

  Kate began to ask whether Amelia would be okay, but she dropped away into the dark. Kate kept going, up and up, though she had no idea where. She saw nothing all around her but the streetlights and the trail of Elmer’s rainbow. She hoped he knew where he was going.

  Elmer slowed down for her to catch up. He laughed. “Marvelous, isn’t it?” He did a barrel roll beside her; the rainbow streaming behind him twisted into a tight helix. “Watch yourself, dear.” He pointed ahead to a crossroads of walkways looming out of the murk. Kate avoided them with ease. Flashes of bright light, like the colored lightning of Theia, illuminated beams as Kate passed them.

  “I do hope she’ll be all right,” said Elmer with a concerned glance down below.

  “How much f-farther?” shouted Kate.

  “I’ve no idea!” Elmer replied. “Now, observe!” He popped off his blue top hat with a flourish, reached down, and trailed it through the rainbow at his feet as though he were scooping it up. And that must have been exactly what he was doing, for he promptly swung the hat in a great arc over his head, scattering rainbows through the darkness. They were real rainbows, glowing in the distance. But of course, rainbows didn’t really exist; they were a trick of the light. Just refraction. But they also did exist, not in the distance, but right inside Elmer’s hat. Kate could see plain as day the way they slid out of the blue top hat like ribbons, bright and solid.

  Once again, Kate thought she almost understood what was really happening. In her distraction, she nearly flew into a ramp that spiraled down through the abyss.

  “Now you try!” said Elmer.

  “I d-don’t have a h-h-ha-h-a hat!”

  He shrugged and spread his hands as if to say, so what? “You like scarves,” he said.

  Scarves? She did like scarves. Trying not to think too hard about it, Kate crouched down and grabbed the rainbow. Was it a liquid? A rubbery plastic as she’d first thought? Just pure light? Thick vapor? Or was it a kind of luminous fabric? It was each of these; all of them and none of them. It was whatever she decided it to be.

  So she grabbed up a handful of the shining silk and slung it around her neck. It was a scarf, soft and beautiful, seven bright colors.

  “Superb!” declared Elmer. Kate smiled back. She laughed. This was amazing.

  Then, Eranex. She rose from below like a surfacing leviathan in the dark, crashing through the beams and bridges that criss-crossed her path. Kate looked frantically back while dodging the thickening infrastructure, but she didn’t see Amelia.

  Fire roared up at them. No, ‘fire’ wasn’t quite right. Real fire wasn’t that thick, that red. Real fire wouldn’t splash like a liquid upon the metal walkways and dissolve them into billowing clouds of cold rust.

  “Now see here,” said Elmer in a tone of mild offense. He tipped his hat at the dragon, only he tipped it back instead of forward. A rainbow—the brightest and most solid one yet—shot down at the pursuing dragon like a Death Star planet-killing laserbeam in seven colors. The sight of Elmer like that, blasting the dragon with a tip of his hat whilst riding a rainbow backwards, was so silly, and just so very Elmer, that Kate bit her lip to keep from giggling.

  And the rainbow was mighty. It cleaved through the red fire that came to meet it, and Eranex roared with a terrible cry of pain when it blasted her through her protective film of darkness.

  Kate decided to join in. She took her scarf in one hand, and she raised it up overhead, because it wasn’t silk anymore, it was a crackling lightning beam, and she was like the mythological Zeus about to smite a monster. She threw it down at Eranex, and the rainbow lightning shattered upon the dark beast, and it was one of the most exhilarating things she had ever done, and one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen. And Eranex bellowed.

  Eranex didn’t exactly say anything; Kate didn’t hear any words booming into her mind, but there was a definite sense of sudden foreboding. A calm before the storm, the frozen moment before something really terrible. It said: my turn.

  The dragon ascended, and its darkness came with it, but the darkness wasn’t fast enough to hide the skeletal head, the glowing eyes, the teeth of wrenched and tarnished steel beams, the cold blood-red flame bleeding from its jaws.

  Elmer made a barrier of rainbows from his hat, but a gout of red flame ate holes in the scintillant wall like acid through paper, and the rainbows shattered as the dragon crashed through, in a single swift strike Eranex took Elmer Sky in her jaws.

  Kate heard the crunch, and she felt the sound in her bones. She saw the visible half of Elmer Sky go limp. He dropped the bright blue hat; it vanished away into the darkness.

  Eranex spoke. She repeated herself. LIFE IS NOT AS YOU IMAGINE.

  And whether or not it had been the dragon’s intent, on hearing her words, Kaitlyn Carter suddenly understood. Whether or not life was as she imagined, the rainbows were. And so was the sky.

  Because the thing about the sky was that it was all perspective. “Sky,” like rainbows, didn’t even actually exist! Unlike time, space, light, gravity, or motion, which were all real things that could be measured and calculated and captured with raw numbers and objective data, sky…was all imagination. Sky wasn’t a real thing. It was a projection: hopes and fears and dreams. It was about perspective. It was about things becoming what they might only appear to be; seeing constellations in the stars or animals in the clouds. Imagined form from formless chaos, made real.

  And so. The seven colors of the rainbow could be the strings of a bass guitar (and they were), and they could be huge (because rainbows can appear to be huge), arcing across the inner darkness of Eric’s moon. And she could be a butterfly, if she wanted to, because the flaring of her lab coat looked a bit like painted wings, and the view through her cracked lenses was like the multifaceted sight of a lepidoptera.

  And she could play the strings, spilling light and sound into a place meant for neither, and she could strike down the murderous evil dragon because its icy darkness was like a wrong note that didn’t belong in her rainbow, in her sky.

  Eranex tumbled back into the lonely emptiness where she belonged, like a bat that forgot how to fly.

  Kate never remembered what exactly she played on her rainbow guitar that spanned the inner sky of the Hollow Moon. She never really remembered flying up and out onto the surface, though she must have done that.

  The first thing she remembered was landing on the gritty barren soil somewhere on the Hollow Moon, and being found shortly thereafter by Jacob Hollow, who’d been watching for her. He had Navi with him. Kate couldn’t really hug Navi, so she settled for the scruffy college-age vagabond looking guy called Jacob. She sobbed on him because she couldn’t get the sound of Elmer’s death out of her head.