Hour of the Wolf

(Schooled in Magic 29)

Christopher G. Nuttall

http://www.chrishanger.net

http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

https://chrisnuttall.substack.com/

Cover by Brad Fraunfelter
www.BFillustration.com

Contents
Cover Blurb
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One: Emily1
Chapter Two: Emily2
Chapter Three: Emily1
Chapter Four: Emily2
Chapter Five: Emily1

Cover Blurb

Emily has failed.

The world she knows is gone. The multiverse itself is becoming a playground of a mad god, a once-human monster so powerful that reality itself is breaking under his gaze and all timelines are collapsing into one. Existence as we know it is over. If the mad god is not stopped, the multiverse will simply cease to be. But how can one kill a god?

Spilt in two, trapped in her worst nightmare and frozen in a single moment of time, Emily is reality’s only hope. But as she hops from timeline to timeline, meeting strangers wearing familiar faces and travelling across worlds very different to the one she knows in a desperate bid to gather the knowledge and resources she needs to stop a god, she is pursued by a creature out of myth …

And a nightmare that has walked beside her from her very first day of magic.

Author’s Note

As you may recall, at the end of Wolf in the Fold, Emily bilocated herself, with one Emily falling into Master Wolfe’s hands and the other being trapped in a nexus point. I have referred to the first Emily as Emily1 in the chapter headings and the second as Emily2.

These are not the only Emilys. As you read this book, you will encounter others. To reduce confusion as much as possible, I have attempted to refer to them by their titles: for example, Technomage Emily. I hope it makes sense.

Thank you for your time.

CGN.

Prologue

Master Wolfe giggled.

His awareness expanded, his mind expanding with it until he could see – and comprehend – the vastness of the multiverse laid out before him. Timelines rose and fell, mighty empires came and went in the blink of an eye; he saw giant superclusters of galaxies whirling around the centre of their universe and tiny subatomic particles, each so tiny they couldn’t be so much as perceived by anything less than a godlike being, spinning in precise formations that were both random chance and perfectly planned. The secrets of the cosmic all were laid bare before him, from the petty concerns of tiny little mortals to the immense thoughts and feelings of immortal transcendent entities. An infinity of voices ran through his mind, the thoughts of an infinity of living beings, each one real and singular and yet blurring together into an immensity that even he had difficulty comprehending. Nothing in his experience, from the day he’d become an entity of pure magic to the final challenger he’d absorbed into his multiplicity, granting the honour of eternal life as part of his very soul, had prepared him for being a god. He was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. He was …

The power pulsed around him, an endless sea of raw energy that was magic and science and so much more. He’d thought he would become a god, a creature of raw magic in truth, but instead he was so much more. The timelines hardened every time he looked at them, randomness itself breaking under his gaze. He stared and everything solidified, billions upon billions of potential possibilities collapsing into one; he blinked, for a space of time so tiny even he had trouble measuring it, and the uncertainties rose up to overwhelm him once again. He could see everything. He defined reality merely by existing. He was all-powerful and yet he was trapped and …

He could make a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He could lift it regardless.

His mind pulsed as it slipped into the universe, into the quantum foam underpinning the multiverse. He’d been so small, he realised dully, despite all the minds he’d absolved into his multiplicity. He’d thought himself the lord and master of all, ruler of everything he surveyed, and yet he’d been little more than the monarch of a tiny island, unaware of the vast empires surrounding his little realm. He saw himself as a tiny scuttling thing, trapped in a puddle on a beach, unaware of the ocean only a few short metres away. Waves rolled across the beach, upending everything … his mind was swept up, the power threatening to overwhelm him once again. The sheer immensity of the cosmic all daunted him, terrified him. He wanted to pull back, to drag himself free as a swimmer might escape currents dragging him out to sea, but it was already too late. He was a newborn butterfly with godlike powers, unable to return to the cocoon. He was …

Timelines pulsed around him, the wreckage of the former universe trapped in a flicker of time. It was fragile … it struck him, suddenly, that the entire universe was far more fragile than he’d ever realised. His mere presence, his omniscience, was threatening to collapse the entire multiverse into nothing. He’d wondered, over the long centuries between his first meeting with Emily and the last, why so many transdimensional creatures only extruded tiny aspects of themselves into the human realm. He knew now. They could be trapped, caught within the material universe, or they could do immense damage merely by existing. They would be …

Emily.

A ripple of discontent, of unease, ran through his mind … and the multiverse. Everyone shivered helplessly; children screamed in the night, adults flinching helplessly though there was no cause. Random events flowered into life, great sweeping cancers of unreality that came and went so quickly few ever realised what happened, even when they recovered from the aftershocks; entire galaxies blinked out of existence, stars and their orbiting planets vanishing so completely they’d never existed at all. The entity barely noticed. Something was wrong …

Emily.

A shock ran through the ever-expanding multiplicity. Emily had done something … no. Emily was a prisoner, in a hell he’d made for her personally. She was there …

No. She was missing. She was nowhere to be found.

The contradiction battered his mind. There was no longer any such thing as randomness, not to him; there was nothing that could be concealed from him. He didn’t have to look to know everything; he already knew everything. And yet, he didn’t know Emily. She was in two places at once. She was concealed within the cracks in the universe, in the Roads of Happenstance that linked timelines together; she was … he felt a surge of pure anger, entire universes evaporating under his rage, as he realised she’d done something clever. She’d concealed herself so cleverly that he couldn’t find her, which meant …

He was a god. He could do anything. And yet …

His rage stilled, his thoughts calming. She had hidden herself in the one place he couldn’t see, the one place he couldn’t touch without undoing himself. Clever, he acknowledged sourly, clever and futile. She was an insect – less than an insect – against his immensity. She could do nothing but hide as he pulled on the strings of the multiverse, reshaping the cosmic all into something more suitable for his majesty. She was nothing … and yet, he feared. An insect could sting, an insect could bite … an insect could kill. The fact she was difficult, almost impossible, for even an omniscient being like himself to see …

He narrowed his thoughts to a cold hardness that bent the universe to his will. He needed an agent, someone who could go where he could not. He needed a servant and he knew just where to find one. The ultimate enemy for Emily and the ultimate ally for himself. He had all the time in the universe to find her, all the time he needed to destroy her … a knot of time and space started to form around him, within him. He would reshape the universe to suit himself, once and for all, and then the real work would begun.

He would not rule the multiverse. He would be the multiverse.

And all creation would bear his name.

Soon.

Chapter One: Emily1

“It’s time to close, my dear.”

Emily barely noticed the librarian, a kindly older woman who had seen too much in her life to be wholly trusting of anything, as the world seemed to shift around her. The library was reassuringly solid, rows upon rows of bookshelves heaving under the weight of countless books, and yet her reality suddenly felt fragile, as if everything rested on a knife edge. Her legs trembled under her, as if they were about to send her plummeting to the floor; her body felt wrong, as if it were no longer truly hers. Sweat prickled on her forehead, a wave of fever running through her mind … she caught hold of the book trolley, clinging onto its reassuring solidity until the disorientation passed. Everything felt wrong …

“You look unwell,” the librarian said. Her tone was … wrong. Not concern, but … certainty. She spoke the truth. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”

Emily looked up. The librarian looked … cold and calculating and yet … Emily blinked and the vision was gone, the kindly old lady returning so quickly it was hard to convince herself she hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it was nothing more than her imagination. She didn’t feel well … perhaps she was coming down with a cold. Or something worse. Her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything for … hours. There was nothing to eat in the library. She would have to go home.

“I don’t think so,” she managed. Her memories were a jumbled mess. She’d barely had any sleep last night, her mother had been sick and her stepfather … her skin crawled as he recalled his eyes leaving trails of slime all over her body, as thin and scrawny as it was. The bastard was back home, waiting for her … she felt her gorge starting to rise and swallowed hard. Perhaps she was coming down with something. “I just …”

The librarian turned away. “You’d best be off,” she said, curtly. “I’ll see you whenever.”

Emily nodded and forced herself to start walking towards the door. The library was nearly empty now, the remaining patrons making their way back home. Kids and adults, people with loving homes and people who had nowhere else to go … she caught the eye of a man she knew to be homeless and shuddered inwardly, seeing her fate in his eyes. She wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the family home once she turned eighteen, she was sure, and she had no idea where she would go. There was no hope of college, no hope of finding a decent place to live … there was little hope, even, of finding a job. Her life was over and yet it felt as if it would never end.

She paused in front of the mirror by the door, staring at herself. She was thin, her baggy sweater and ill-fitting jeans covering everything and yet not covering enough … her brown hair hung around her face in unkempt ringlets, a reminder she hadn’t had time to wash it recently. If her stepfather went out on the weekend, doing whatever he did when he wasn’t at home, she’d wash it … she sighed as she studied her pale complexion, feeling almost as if she were staring at a stranger. It wasn’t her face …

Emily blinked. Another woman was staring back at her, a strong confident woman with long brown hair framing an elegant face, wearing a blue dress that flattered her curves without revealing anything below the neckline. She held a device in one hand, an odd mechanical wand, and her other hand … light sparkled around her fingertips, a trick of the light that Emily knew was nothing of the sort. She wasn’t so much beautiful as she was … Emily didn’t know how to put it into words. The stranger was strong and confident and everything Emily had ever wanted to be.

She blinked, again. The vision was gone. Her face stared back at her.

Tears prickled in the corner of her eyes. She wiped them away, an immense sense of loss sweeping over her. Images flickered through her mind, a beautiful blonde girl, a handsome young man leaning down to kiss her … her lips tingled, as if someone truly had brushed their lips against hers, the feeling vanishing as quickly as it had come. She was imagining it, trying to lose herself in fantasy … a world in which she went to Hogwarts or Cackles or one of a hundred other magical schools, a world where she was something special, a world where she had friends and a life and a future and … she found herself on her knees, without quite recalling how she’d gotten there. The sense of loss was overpowering. She wanted to close her eyes and pretend …

No. She forced herself to stand, brushing the hair out of her eyes. There’s no point in pretence.

The air outside was cold, stinking of cars and cigarettes and all the other horrors of modern life. She heard the librarian lock the door behind her, another sense of loss and bitterness flowing through her as she trudged home. The street felt drab, the handful of open shops badly outnumbered by boarded-up establishments that had been closed since time out of mind, their faded signs and posts blurring together into a grey post-urban nightmare. A handful of people were visible, trapped in their own moments of quiet desperation, but she felt alone. No one paid any attention to her as she walked past a bar, music echoing through the air as the patrons drank and gambled away their paychecks before stumbling home. Her mother and stepfather had argued, more than once, about his gambling … Emily shuddered, helplessly, as she recalled hiding in her room as they screamed at each other. It had been a nightmare and yet …

Her heart twisted as she passed a pair of prostitutes, the middle-aged women drinking and smoking as they waited for their first customers. Was that the fate that awaited her, when she was kicked out of house and home? The women probably weren’t that old, but they looked old enough to be her mother, their bodies worn down by drugs and alcohol and abuse from their pimps and johns. There were all sorts of horror stories about teenage schoolgirls selling themselves, whispered rumours passed from girl to girl in the locker room … Emily didn’t want to believe the stories, yet there was a part of her that feared they were true. She understood, better than she cared to admit. If someone offered her a way out of the nightmare her life had become, or even just enough money to forget the nightmare for a few short hours, she knew she would be tempted. There was no point in denying it.

She glanced into a shop window and froze. A girl was looking back at her, a girl around the same age as she was with long black pigtails and … a thrill of recognition shot through her, banished a second later as it dawned on her she didn’t know the girl. She was a stranger, a very familiar stranger … Emily’s head spun, her knees threatening to buckle again. She was going mad. She had to be. She was being haunted by visions out of her fantasies …

Her heart twisted as she forced herself to keep walking. The world felt weird, as if it was changing around her … she had the sudden sense she was the centre of the world, an actress on a stage mouthing her lines as the scenery changed around her. She wondered, suddenly, if the street outside her vision even existed, the thought coming and going so quickly she knew she was being silly. She was no main character, not even an Non-Player-Character. The world would exist with or without her, the universe never noticing her comings and goings. She would live and die in a world she hated, surrounded by wealth and power she would never touch … a land of boundless opportunity she’d never be able to access. 

She would never be important. Never.

She heard someone laugh in the distance, a sound that sent chills down her spine. Chad and his friends, teenage boys whose names she had never bothered to learn … jocks and bullies and outright jackasses, young men with a reputation for touching girls or lifting their skirts or molesting them in other ways, men who got away with it because they were good at sports or simply too big and strong for the teachers to challenge. Her cheeks flushed with shame as she turned, ducking down the alleyway to escape before they caught sight of her. She hated being so weak, hated being unable to stand up to Chad or her stepfather or every other vile creature in her life …  hated it. She wanted to blast them to atoms, but how could she? She was weak and powerless and …

A wolf whistle echoed through the air. Chad? Someone else? She didn’t know and she didn’t care. She forced herself to pick up speed, feeling as if someone was right behind her … it felt as if someone was breathing down the back of her neck. Her skin crawled … she forced herself to look back, half-expecting to find herself staring at an inhuman monster. There was nothing there and yet … she splashed through a puddle and saw, reflected in the liquid, the strong and confident woman she’d seen earlier. She looked disgusted. Emily felt ashamed of herself once again, ashamed of her own helplessness. She couldn’t fight. She was powerless.

Sergeant Harkin taught you how to fight, a voice said, at the back of her mind. And you trained beside Jade and Cat, true men rather than animals in human form ...

She staggered, nearly falling to her knees once again as her hands tore at her head. It was a fantasy! Jade and Cat didn’t exist … a flush ran through her as she recalled having sex with Cat, a memory so intense it seemed almost real. She was a virgin. She knew she was a virgin. And yet she could feel him inside her … she dug her nails into her scalp, the pain helping to centre her mind. She was going inside. Jade and Cat didn’t exist. Sergeant Harkin didn’t exist. Men like that didn’t exist. There were only assholes like Chad and her stepfather, men who bragged of being alpha even as they proved, time and time again, that they were nothing more than animals. She had read countless stories about decent men, but she’d never met any. The most decent man on the street might not be physically or mentally abusive to his wife and children, if rumour was to be believed, yet he was still a cheat. Emily wondered why his wife put up with it … no. That wasn’t true. 

She knew why. There were far worse men out there.

Her head ached as she kept walking, passing the school. A handful of students were clearly visible, some listlessly kicking a ball around and others just loitering … they had no hope, Emily knew, just like her. Chad and his ilk might brag of their football skills, telling everyone around them that they were going to be the next great sports star, but she knew better. They weren’t going to get out of the trap, any more than she would. They would graduate, find work stocking shelves or something else that was a dead end, and then … who knew? She didn’t want to think about it.

The hopelessness and despair poisoned the air around the school. The walls were drab and grey, barely lightened by splashes of graffiti; she wondered, idly, which student had managed to misspell a four-letter word that should have been easy to spell. The staff hadn’t seemed too worried either, although in a just world … she shook her head, reminding herself once again that there was no justice. The world wasn’t fair. She swallowed, hard, as she saw Norris scurrying out of the building, eyes flickering from side to side as if he expected to be attacked at any moment. He probably was. Chad was still out there, ready to work off his feelings by punching a nerd … guilt gnawed at her as she watched Norris hurry onwards, right towards Chad. She wanted to warn him, to stop him, to protect him. But there was nothing she could do.

Emily kept walking, circling the school and making her way home. The streets were empty now, the cold wind picking up fragment of newspaper and other pieces of rubbish and tossing them through the air. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth, cursing her stepfather for wasting his paycheck and her mother for not stopping him. She’d have to go to the Goodwill and see if they had a cheap coat before winter really started to bite, although she knew she’d be lucky if they had anything. The whole district was too poor to have many cast-offs … she shifted uncomfortably, reminded – despite herself – that nearly everything she wore, from her sweater to her underwear, was ill-fitting. She had no idea what she’d do if she grew any taller. It was going to be a nightmare getting anything more from her mother and she didn’t have any friends who might be willing to trade … the thought of asking her stepfather was just repugnant. And yet she might have no choice.

She glanced into a window and froze. The girl was there again, watching her with disappointed eyes … Emily felt a surge of sheer loathing and hatred that was directed more against herself than the vision confronting her. Her life was a mess, her future non-existent … she’d let herself hope, more than once, that her father would come back for her, but he never had. She had let herself dream that he might be a prince, or a wealthy man, or … someone, anyone, who could give her the hope she needed to make something of herself. But the odds were that he’d been nothing more than a passing stranger, a john who’d called upon a whore … Emily wasn’t even sure if her parents had been married. Her mother had said so, when she’d asked, but her mother told a lot of lies. She was so drunk, so often, that it was impossible to tell if she believed herself.

The vision changed. Two girls now stared at her, eyes wide with pity. Emily gritted her teeth in bitter frustration. She hated being pitied, for all that it was nice to have someone acknowledge her situation. It was just like the tedious land acknowledgement the principal had read out one morning in assembly, the sanctimonious babbling about stolen land that – for some strange reason – hadn’t ended with the land being returned to the descendants of the former owners. It was performative nonsense, an exercise in self-flagellation that didn’t include any actual reparations. But then, it was easy to make speeches and harder to do anything that might reshape the world. She met the eyes of the older girl and clenched her fists. It would be so easy to let herself believe …

She shook her head and turned away. There were no miracles in life. No one was going to sweep her off her feet and give her the keys to a kingdom, or even a very large library. There was no prospect of anything from further education to gainful employment, with little hope of survival, perhaps, beyond the next few years. She was a poor girl from a poor family, lacking the education to make use of her mind or the beauty that would induce people to overlook her limited education and character flaws. There was no such thing as magic. No matter how many books she read, no matter how many worlds of super-technology or wondrous fantasy she explored through the written word, she always had to return to reality. 

There was no such thing as magic.

Emily turned into her street and made her way down to the apartment block. The buildings were dark and cold, the windows largely boarded up after vandals had smashed the glass. Emily was almost relieved, knowing she wouldn’t be able to see the alien reflections any longer. The sky was darkening rapidly, casting an eerie shadow over the drab grey street. All colour seemed to be  leaching from the world, leaving nothing but a dull nightmare. 

It was her reality. It would always be. 

She paused in front of the door, bracing herself. Her home should be her safe space, a place where she could relax and be herself … where a loving mother and father took care of her, preparing her for adulthood. Instead … she wondered, numbly, what was waiting for her. A drunk mother? An angry, leering stepfather? Or … or what? She didn’t want to know.

One day, a voice whispered at the back of her mind, you’ll come home and she’ll be gone.

She took a long breath, letting her eyes wander the street as she dug her keys out of her pocket. It was a nightmare, all the darker for being so mundane. It wasn’t a war zone, nor was it a place where death could come at any moment, yet … it was a trap. She would never escape. She would live and die in the drab grey world, her life and death going unnoticed by the people around her, never making anything of herself …

It looked very much like hell.

Chapter Two: Emily2

She was in hell.

Emily cowered in the nexus point, its raw power battering against her skull. The magic surrounding her was so intense it was hard to think clearly, let alone draw on it to maintain the bubble keeping her and Frieda alive. The spells she’d cast to take control of the artificial nexus point should have been allowed to develop naturally, a process that she knew could take a year or more, but she’d been forced to accelerate their development at great risk to herself. They were trapped in a single moment of time, a bubble caught within a raging torrent of sheer power that could sweep them away in a heartbeat, if she lost her grip. The slightest mistake could see them both killed, vaporised so completely nothing would be left of them. They were doomed.

She shuddered as she felt the giant presence pervading the multiverse, a feeling of being watched as an unblinking gaze swept over her before vanishing in the distance. Master Wolfe was big now, an entity so huge that she could barely comprehend the footprints he left in his wake. It was difficult to force what she was seeing, or sensing, into something she could understand; difficult, almost impossible, to get any real sense of what he’d become. She understood magic and technology, she was hardly unaware of the basics of each even if they reached levels she couldn’t even begin to understand, but this was something different. It felt as if even putting hard numbers on his abilities was a mistake, because it would blind her to the truth. He was just too big to be easily stopped.

Her mind expanded, a child peeking into a violent adult world. Timelines spun around, above and below her, each one slowly falling to a mad god. She could feel his presence sweeping through the multiverse, taking control of each and every timeline one by one; she saw, now, just what he’d become. He wasn’t just powerful, he was the determinant of reality itself. His gaze locked reality into place, the quantum observer effect made manifest. He defined reality and ended randomness simply by looking, and he was always looking. And … she shuddered, helplessly, as she sensed the growing madness pervading the universe. It was … it was so great that even looking at it made her fear contamination. She was …

A shadow fell across the bubble. Emily froze, holding herself as still as she dared. The slightest motion might attract attention, might draw his gaze to her. She thought they were relatively safe, within the bubble, but that wouldn’t last. Master Wolfe had been a genius even before he’d started absorbing other minds into his multiplicity and now he was a god, with all the insight of an omniscient being. He could work out how to do anything … no. It was far worse than that. He could determine that two plus two made five, if he wished, and make it so. The entire universe would bend to his will. In a sense, it would always be so and always have been so.

The shadow retreated, the awareness moving away. Emily let out a breath she hadn’t realised she'd been holding. How long had it been, since everything had come apart at the seams? An hour? A day? A month? A year? She didn’t know. The magic around her was just too strong to say much of anything for sure, when reality itself was astonishingly – and terrifyingly – flexible. She knew spells that could turn a man into a toad, a woman into a bird … and yet such horrors were little more than child’s play, compared to the power Master Wolfe had unleashed. He could not only change anything he liked, he could make it always have been so. He was a cosmic editor editing the entire universe, the worlds shifting around him with every change. He was a mad god.

“Emily?”

Emily opened her eyes, unsure of when she’d closed them. Frieda was kneeling in front of her, one hand resting on Emily’s shoulder. She looked pale and wan, her face streaked with sweat; eyes tired and wary and yet tinged with a touching faith in Emily. Emily knew it was misplaced. The entire multiverse was at risk and she didn’t even know where to begin fixing it, if indeed she could. Everything she’d faced before was tiny, almost immaterial, compared to the nightmare surrounding her. The bubble felt very flimsy indeed.

Her stomach growled. It had been hours since she’d eaten anything and that meant …

“I …” She swallowed and started again. “I don’t know what to do.”

Frieda leaned back, her eyes grim. “What is he doing?”

Emily looked past her, towards the edge of the bubble. The edge looked like a soap bubble … and beyond, the maelstrom raged. It was hard to force herself to see anything beyond the sheer vastness surrounding them, but … she could see the timelines, see the worlds changing, see the cancer threatening the entire multiverse. Red eyes burned through the darkness, a howling laughter battering against her mind … she forced herself to look away, blinking tears from her eyes as she glanced down. The hammering receded slightly … he wasn’t trying to attack her, he realised numbly, but it hardly mattered. A man who stood on an ant might not mean to kill the poor creature, yet it made no difference to the ant. Master Wolfe could swat her effortlessly, kill her without ever knowing what he’d done.

An ant can be lethal, if it bites someone in precisely the right spot, she told herself. And right now, that’s what we’re going to have to do.

“He’s remaking everything,” Emily said. “I think …”

She gritted her teeth. She wanted Caleb. She needed Caleb. But Caleb was gone, lost in the dead world … so was her other self, if her bilocated form had survived the holocaust. She’d had no time to strengthen the mental link between them, no time to do anything but improvise desperately. She mourned the loss of her lover, even as she tried to tell herself he might still be alive. It was … she shuddered, helplessly. She didn’t have time to worry about him now. She hated herself for even thinking it. And yet it was true.

Frieda squeezed her hand. “You always said to break down a problem into manageable chunks and go on from there,” she said, lightly. “You could do that here too.”

Emily smiled, humourlessly. How did one break down a god? Master Wolfe had become omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. He was … except he wasn’t. He would have eradicated them both if he’d been able to see them, which suggested – very strongly – he couldn’t. The thought gave her a flicker of hope. She might not be able to best a true god, but if he was a creature of magic … hell, that was exactly what the mimic-form was. A structure of spellware, millions upon millions of spell components working together … he might have expanded his mind, yet he was still a creature of magic. And she was inside of him. Her lips quirked at the thought. He could no more see them than she could see the bacteria in her stomach.

“You might be right,” she said. The magic thrummed around her as she forced herself to stand. “If we can …”

She reached out gingerly with her mind, recoiling slightly as raw power splashed against her shields. She’d heard a joke once about a mechanic who’d complained that he did the exact same job as a surgeon yet was paid much, much, less. The surgeon had pointed out that the mechanic got to turn off the engine before he went to work, while the surgeon had to operate on a living body. She had the same problem, in spades. She had to adapt the spellware she’d created to tame the nexus point, without cancelling or weakening the structure to the point it collapsed. There was so much power around them that the slightest mistake could get them both killed … she gritted her teeth as she drew a little power into the bubble, then shaped it into something they could eat. The effort drained her. Void had taught her how to conjure items from raw magic, but even he had never done it lightly. It wasn’t worth the effort, he’d pointed out. But there was no other source of food.

Emily sat down, hard. The bubble pulsed underneath her. “Eat,” she said. The food looked about as appetising as a plate of wilted veggies and, and they’d have to eat with their hands, but it was better than nothing. “And then we’ll find a way to fight back.”

Frieda ate her share, without complaint. She’d eaten worse. Emily frowned, inwardly, as she forced herself to eat as much as she could. The taste was funny, wrong in a manner she couldn’t quite put into words … she told herself to be grateful she could feed them, at least for a few days. If they starved to death in the bubble … she put the thought aside and finished the bowl, then leaned back and reached out with her mind once again. Master Wolfe might be immensely powerful, she told herself firmly, but he wasn’t a real god. He wasn’t beyond her. He could be beaten.

Sure, a little voice whispered at the back of her mind. Keep telling yourself that.

She dismissed it with an effort as she started to study the way he absorbed and manipulated power, noting how his mind defined reality in a manner that reminded her of a child playing with building blocks. A Lego city, one that was both composed of plastic toys and living people … a world that was both independent and yet utterly dependent on the defining mind. It was just too big to be easily grasped, so she tried to take Frieda’s advice and break the problem down into manageable sections. It was still hard to find a way to bring him down. She’d once heard that whales didn’t die of cancer because they were just too large … she had no idea if that was true, as she’d never looked into it, but it was certainly true of Master Wolfe. She could take a piece of spellware apart with a virus, if she wished, yet … his spell-structure was just too large to be easily turned against him. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she tried …

The bubble flickered. She closed her eyes, cursing under her breath as she realised her mistake. The bubble had been force-grown by her will, the spells forced into their final shape by her desperation … and now she was trapped, the bubble held in place only by her living will. The moment she tried to leave, the bubble would evaporate around her … there was no way out. She couldn’t bilocate herself a second time, nor could she hand control to Frieda … not that she would even if it were possible. She’d imprisoned herself.

“Emily?” Frieda was beside her. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I made a mistake,” Emily said. She’d never faced anything like it, not even during the final battle against Void. There had never been a sense she couldn’t run … she felt like Atlas, trapped under the weight of the world. Shrugging wasn’t an option. It would get them both killed. “I may have trapped us both here.”

“Better that than death,” Frieda pointed out.

I might be able to get you out, Emily told herself. Opening a portal wouldn’t be difficult … except aiming it at the right universe would be tricky. Or would it? Frieda was a creature of her universe and it wouldn’t be hard to use her interdimensional signature to point her in the right direction. Void had done something like it, years ago. But I’ll remain trapped here forever.

Despair threatened to wash over her. Their universe was gone or, worse, the plaything of a mad god. She was trapped, unable to escape … her eyes narrowed suddenly as a thought crossed her mind. Master Wolfe had tried to convince her to join him – in hindsight, she should have wondered why he kept raising odd topics of conversation – and it was possible, just possible, that her other self was still alive. A prisoner, or perhaps part of his multiplicity … if she could make contact, she could use it as a way into the spell-structure. If … she closed her eyes again, reaching out as gingerly as she could. Bilocation was always dangerous, the two bilocated forms trying to merge back together … they were, of course, the same person. If she linked minds with her other self …

We’re entangled together, she told herself. They should be able to make mental contact at any distance, even though it was something she’d been taught to avoid. It risked madness, she’d been cautioned, or worse. If we make mental contact, if she’s already outside the bubble … might it draw me to her, or her to me?

She blinked in surprise as a torrent of thoughts and feelings ran through her. Her other self was alive. Her other self was … memories battered against her mind, each one uniquely hers and yet strange and unfamiliar. It was … a frisson of pure horror shot through her as she saw her old world, her old home, the world she’d been yanked from years ago. She had never wanted to return, never wanted to give up her magic and friends and a life of significance; she’d carefully refrained from experimenting with the interdimensional spells Void had devised, for fear she’d find herself back home. No. It wasn’t home. It had never been home. And she didn’t miss anyone there, not even her mother. The woman had never seemed to love her.

Her eyes narrowed as she studied the world surrounding her other self. It was disturbingly real and yet, there was something about it that reminded her of a funhouse mirror. Real enough, she was sure, but also distorted to the point of being very different. The world curved around her other self, a pocket dimension shaped by her mind … Emily sucked in her breath as she realised it was a very personal hell. It might be an exaggerated caricature of reality, but … to her other self it was reality. It was a nightmare devised for her and her alone.

You always believed hell was more than just fire and brimstone, she reminded herself. She had no idea where she’d picked that up, not when she’d never been particularly religious … perhaps it had been a sense that fire pits and enormous devils breaking wind night and day showed a certain lack of imagination. Why burn forever when you can be hit with something far more personal?

She tried to reach out and scowled, grimly, as she realised it was impossible. Her other self had accepted the reality around her, believing she had no way home … no. It was worse. Everything that had happened over the past seven years had been erased, leaving nothing behind. She had lost everything and she didn’t even know it! Emily knew she’d hate to go back to Earth – the real Earth – but the skills she’d picked up over the last few years would serve her well if she did. Her other self didn’t even have them …

Fuck, she thought, numbly. What do we do now?

She gritted her teeth. Frieda was counting on her. Caleb and Cat and Alassa and everyone else she’d known and loved were counting on her … if they were still alive. They had to be … she hoped that was true, even as she feared the worst. Master Wolfe was doing immense damage to the multiverse simply by existing, the waves upon waves of raw power battering the fabric of reality itself. She needed to fix the nightmare and had no idea where to begin. No. That wasn’t quite true. An idea was starting to form in her mind. It was going to be risky, but …

“Get some sleep,” she told Frieda. “You’ll need to be rested for what is to come.”

“I’ll try,” Frieda said. The faith in her words was touching. Emily felt her heart melt even as she hoped to hell it wasn’t misplaced. “Are you …?”

“I’ll try and get some sleep shortly,” Emily lied. She’d have to make sure the bubble would remain intact, once she went to sleep. If not … she’d been tired before, time and time again, but this time there were no potions to help her remain alert. She would start making mistakes long before her body gave out, plunging her into a sleep from which she might never awaken. “I just need to work out how to … how to deal with this.”

She tossed Frieda her cloak, then leaned back as the younger girl lay down. Her mind reached out once again, studying the sheets of raw power battering the universe itself. She’d known there were cracks in the multiverse, places where someone could fall through a gap and find themselves in another universe, and yet … she’d never realised just how many threads there were, catacombs under the multiverse that could be used to step from universe to universe. She felt like a mouse, peeking through the mouse hole … she told herself, firmly, that mice could be dangerous too. If she had time to study how everything worked, if she found a way to build a weapon, she might be able to turn the tables. She might be able to save everything one final time.

The shadow brushed over her again, a reminder that time wasn’t on her side. If she didn’t act fast … 

Don’t rush it, she told herself, sharply. You’ll only get one shot at this.

Chapter Three: Emily1

The smell hit her as soon as she opened the door.

Emily stopped, grimacing as the stench wafted against her nostrils. Her mother had been drinking again, drinking herself silly. God alone knew how long she’d been pouring alcohol down her throat … Emily gritted her teeth as she closed the door behind her, then forced herself to step into the living room. Her mother was on the couch, a bottle of booze in her hand and several empties lying on the floor beneath her feet. One was clearly broken … Emily cursed under her breath as she saw the shattered glass, all too aware of just who would have to clear up the mess. It wasn’t as if the broken bottle could be returned either. The glass would have to be tossed and …

“Oh,” her mother said. Her tone lacked all feeling. She was neither happy nor upset to see her daughter. “It’s you.”

Emily felt her fists clench helplessly. Her mother had done as little as possible to take care of her from the very first day, or at least the first she remembered. She’d had to learn to cook the basics just to ensure that she was fed, and she was painfully aware she was dangerously thin. A diet of cheap processed food wasn’t good for anyone. It was a minor miracle her mother had managed to clothe her back then, although now she had to purchase her own clothes from cheap shops and pray to a God who had abandoned her long ago that she found something she could actually wear. If she had money of her own …

She didn’t know her father. She feared she never would. And yet … how could he be worse than this?

Her mother put the bottle to her lips and took a long swig. “Go away.”

Emily scowled, unwilling to look and yet unable to look away. Destiny Sanderson was almost a caricature of herself, her face fleshed out and her belly bulging in all the wrong places, a ghastly sight made worse by an outfit that was clearly meant for a woman half her age. Her brown hair was matted, her eyes dead and cold even as she stared at her daughter. She’d said, more than once, that giving birth to Emily had ruined her body. Emily had seen mothers who had worked to get back in shape after giving birth and she’d made the mistake of pointing it out, the first time. Her mother hadn’t struck her, not then and not ever, but what she’d said had been so ghastly Emily would almost sooner have been hit. Her mother knew just how to hurt her daughter.

She shook her head, allowing her gaze to wander the room. The ashtray was overflowing with the remains of a dozen cigarettes, something else she’d have to clean up. She’d emptied it only yesterday … she gritted her teeth in disgust, wondering – again – why her mother chose to live in such a pigsty. The sofa stank, the armchair was covered with stains, the carpet was beyond all hope of recovery … she glanced up and noticed the dead light bulb, that had failed weeks ago, had still not been replaced. Her stepfather had promised to do it and he hadn’t … she rolled her eyes, somehow unsurprised. Just why he stayed around baffled her. She certainly wouldn’t want to remain close to Destiny, if there was a choice.

Her heart twisted as she hurried into the tiny kitchen. Someone had taken the loaf of bread from the fridge and left it on the sideboard, the plastic left open … she groaned, inwardly, at the realisation the bread was likely stale. The jam had been left open too, the dirty knife plunged into the jar and left there … she shuddered as she saw the ants, crawling over the knife and making their way into the jam. That would have to be tossed too, she told herself, as a wave of hopelessness washed over her. A jar that should have lasted for weeks, a jar that had been opened only a day or two ago … wasted. A wave of anger shot through her – her mother could have shut the fucking lid – only to fade before she could scream, let alone find a healthier way to express it. There was no point in arguing. Her mother was too drunk to care.

She heard retching from behind and cursed under her breath, hurrying back into the living room. Her mother was on her feet, staggering in a manner Emily knew meant she was about to be violently sick … Emily caught her hand and pulled her forward, half-dragging her into the toilet and pushing her towards the bowl. Her mother shuddered, practically falling to her knees an instant before she threw up. Emily looked away, trying not to hear as her mother retched again and again. The stench was horrific, the sink of half-digested alcohol and human waste blurring together into a ghastly whole. She knew she’d be cleaning that up too.

“Coffee,” her mother managed. “Now.”

Emily sighed. Coffee? It was too late for coffee. There was no point in arguing. She hurried back into the kitchen to put the kettle on, hoping her mother would have the sense to stay in the bathroom until she’d emptied her stomach. There’d been times when she’d thrown up on the carpet instead … Emily didn’t want to think about it. She put instant coffee in the mug and looked up. The apparition was right in front of her again, staring at her. A vision of an Emily who could never be …

“GO AWAY!” The scream tore itself from her throat. “GO AWAY!”

She caught herself a second later, her legs buckling so violently that she had to catch the counter to steady herself. She was going crazy. She had to be. She knew kids who’d been raised by druggies, kids who’d been harmed by the poisonous environment … kids who were slow, or had problems controlling themselves, or anger management issues. Perhaps she was going the same way. How much second-hand smoke had she breathed in, over the years? She didn’t want to know. The thought of ending up like Patty or Sam, sweet teenagers who would never be able to live independently, was terrifying. Sam was her age, or near enough, and yet he had the mental age of a five-year-old. He would never be anything more.

I won’t end up like that, she told herself. I won’t!

She forced herself to stand. The vision was gone. She poured hot water into the coffee, added milk and sugar, then carried it back to her mother. Destiny was sitting on the sofa again, the TV remote clutched firmly in one hand; her eyes were fixed on the television as if she dared not miss a single moment. Emily gave her the coffee – her mother hadn’t heard her scream; of course not – and glanced at the telly. A romantic movie, a predictable plot that was about as realistic as Harry Potter … she had never seen the movie, but she could guess the plot points. A lonely woman finding a handsome man who would always be true to her. It didn’t happen in the real world. 

The thought mocked her as she hurried into the bedroom. Everything looked disturbed … her mother had been looking for clothes again, even though few of Emily’s garments could fit her without tearing. They were just too different … she groaned inwardly as she saw her underclothes scattered across the bed, as if her mother couldn’t be bothered to put them back after trying to find one that could fit her. She wished for a lock for her door, just to ensure a little privacy, but her stepfather had forbidden it. Fire safety, he’d said. Emily suspected his motives were a little different. She’d known too many young men who were outraged by the idea of a barrier being erected between them and young women, even if they had no intention of doing anything. Assholes. Would it really hurt them to let people have a little safety and security?

Probably, she thought, as she sat on her bed. They hate the idea of being barred even if they had no intention of crossing the line.

She stared down at herself, her body feeling … weird. She didn’t like her body very much and yet … it felt wrong, as if everything was slightly out of kilter. It wasn’t like puberty, when she’d discovered to her horror that her body was going to bleed every month and if it didn’t it was a sign something was very wrong, but something else. She felt dizzy again, almost feverish. It made no sense. Perhaps she was coming down with something nasty. She hoped not. Her mother’s idea of medical care consisted of throwing painkillers at her daughter and telling her to sleep it off. 

You could just lie back and close your eyes, a voice whispered at the back of her head. Just let it all go.

Emily shook her head, staggering to her feet. Why was she so weak? She was too weak to live and too frightened to die … she had nothing to live for, nothing at all. She could just walk out of the apartment and never return, leaving her mother to choke to death on her own vomit … no one would care. Her body felt grimy as she stumbled back to the kitchen, a reminder she needed to shower before her stepfather got home. The way he looked at her … her skin crawled. She didn’t want to think about it.

There’s nowhere to go, the voice whispered. You’re trapped. Forever.

She closed her eyes for a long moment. There was no way out. Nothing to live for … nothing at all. And yet, she couldn’t let it all end. She couldn’t!

“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck it!”

“Charming,” a new voice said. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Emily jumped, spinning around so rapidly she nearly fell over. Her stepfather was leaning against the kitchen door, his eyes rising from her rear to her face … she felt a hot flash of panic as she realised she hadn’t heard him coming home, let alone entering the chamber. She was trapped, with no way out … she stared at him, suddenly all too aware he was bigger and stronger than she was. He was hardly the biggest man she’d seen – he was short and weaselly, with a face that made him look untrustworthy – but he was still strong enough to hurt her. His eyes lingered on her breasts, or what little could be seen, before looking up at her.

A wave of hatred and helplessness washed through her, a bitter surge of resentment and loathing. He had never tried to be a father to her, never treated her as anything more than an unwanted appendage. She’d caught him leering at her time and time again, as she grew into a young adult, and … her mother hadn’t cared. God alone knew why. It was a mother’s duty to look after her child … not that her mother cared. She’d crawled into a bottle long ago and stayed there.

“You’re looking good,” he said, stepping closer. She could smell his aftershave. She knew teenage boys who drenched themselves with aftershave, on the theory that it drew girls to them like moths to flame, but none of those smells had ever repelled her as much as her stepfather’s more subtle brand. It was a stench she associated with him and him alone. “You’re a pretty young thing, aren’t you?”

Emily flinched. Her hand wanted to reach for a knife, to cut him open … there was nothing within reach. No weapon, no way out … he was inching closer, backing her against the counter. She wanted to scream for her mother, but she’d probably already passed out. Her stepfather was right on top of her, invading her personal space … her entire body felt heavy and wrong, unable to move as he wrapped his arms around her and mashed his lips against hers. It was repulsive and …

She shoved him back, hard. He stumbled back, eyes going wide with shock. Emily was equally shocked. She had no illusions about her lack of physical strength, not after years of being amongst the last to be picked for games in gym and the first to be put out. Her stepfather might be weedy compared to her gym teacher, a sadist in shorts and a hoodie, but he was still strong enough to put her in her place. Except … her body felt odd, as if nothing was quite where it was supposed to be. Everything was just wrong.

“You ungrateful brat,” her stepfather snarled. The sheer entitlement in his voice shocked her beyond words, even as his face twisted into a nightmarish parody of itself. “I give you everything and this is how you repay me?”

Emily blinked. Had he been grooming her? She’d been a little girl when her stepfather had entered her life and he’d never touched her, but … he’d known she'd grow up. Of course he had … had he been waiting all along, waiting for the right moment to … her stomach heaved painfully, so violently she almost doubled over The thought was just appalling. She would sooner let Chad do anything he liked to her than let her stepfather give her a kiss. It struck her, a moment too late, that he’d stolen her first kiss …

Her stepfather marched towards her, fist raised. Emily barely had a second to react before he threw a punch at her face … instincts she hadn’t known she had took over, grabbing his wrist to deflect the blow and then twisting it hard enough to make him scream. She gritted her teeth as he yanked his arm back, then tried to hit her with the other one. She stepped into the blow and brought her knee up sharply, slamming it right into his groin. He screamed in agony. Emily stepped back as he doubled over, letting him hit the floor. Her thoughts were a confused mess, her feelings running in circles. The sheer satisfaction of knocking him down was matched by fear of what he’d do when he got up again, no matter how badly she’d hurt him. She wasn’t even sure how she’d hurt him. She didn’t know how to fight, yet she’d fought.

Her hands shook as she turned away and hurried out into the living room. Her mother was sitting on the sofa like Jabba the Hutt, eyes firmly fixed on the television screen. Emily couldn’t understand how she hadn’t heard the racket … was she truly deaf or was she pretending she couldn’t hear, for whatever reason? Emily didn’t want to think about her mother letting her stepfather have his way with her daughter, and yet … the thought was a nightmarish image that refused to die. Her mother didn’t even look up from the screen as Emily reached for her coat and pulled it on, then hurried outside. She had no idea what her stepfather would do – she had no idea how long it would take for him to recover – but she didn’t want to be there when he managed to stand up again. He’d kill her.

“Fuck,” she muttered, as she ran down the stairs and out onto the streets. There was no pursuit. No one cared enough to run after her. “What the hell do I do now?”

The cold seeped through her second-hand coat, leaving her shivering as she walked down the empty street. The darkness pulsed around her like a living thing, the buildings half-hidden and oddly translucent in the gloom. The air was utterly silent, the noise of cars and wild parties and all the other sounds of the night eerily stilled. Emily felt as if she were half-asleep, as if she were dreaming … perhaps she was. She pinched herself, hard, and winced at the pain. It was real.

She slowed as she reached the park, as empty as the rest of the world, and sat on a bench. There was nowhere to go and yet she couldn’t go home. Her stepfather would kill her. She wasn’t sure how she’d bested him and she had no idea if she could do it again. She was scared of him and yet she wasn’t, as if she’d faced worst things and beaten them … she knew she hadn’t and yet she had. It was absurd and yet … she sucked in her breath, running her fingers down her arm. It was somehow both thin and bony and yet strong and healthy. It just made no sense. The world made no sense.

How did you learn how to fight like that?

The question echoed in her mind. She hadn’t. There had been no secret martial arts training in her life. She had no military father who had taught her his ways, no grand destiny as a vampire slayer or something, anything, that came with skills she didn’t have to practice … the only destiny in her life was her mother, a drunk who cared nothing for her only child. There was no way she should have been able to do what she’d done, but she had. It made no sense. It was …

She looked up. The apparition was right in front of her, perfectly visible even in the gloom. And it was smiling.

Figure it out, Emily told herself. Her ghostly doppelganger looked encouraging. Start from first principles and figure out what to do.

She wasn’t sure where to begin. But for the first time in longer than she could remember she felt a little hope.

She just didn’t know why. 

Chapter Four: Emily2

The more Emily studied the growing disaster, the cancer spreading through the multiverse, the more she feared the worst.

It was difficult to wrap her head around the sheer scale of it. She was staring at timelines, threads running through the multiverse, that looked tiny to her and yet were near-infinite realms in their own right. Master Wolfe was destroying them one by one, entire timelines of billions upon billions of souls disintegrating under his gaze; an endless series of atrocities that made all previous uses of the word look insignificant. The worst of it was that Master Wolfe didn’t seem to know what he was doing, or perhaps didn’t even intend to do it. He was a gardener who covered his entire garden in concrete, then wondered why his plants weren’t growing.

There’s no room for evolution, she thought. Master Wolfe was eradicating randomness, his gaze freezing timelines and causing them to break up and shatter … her lips twisted, bitterly, as she realised he’d solved the ridden of Schrödinger’s cat by collapsing the quantum waveforms that depended on randomness to exist. The cat was no longer caught between life and death, its mere existence resting on a knife edge, when the box was under constant observation. And everything is dying under his gaze.

She cursed under her breath, trying to think. They were resting inside the body of a mad god, her bubble battered constantly by the waves of raw power running through an infinite spell structure, and they were running out of time. She thought he couldn’t see them, couldn’t get to them, but … it was hard to be sure. Her comprehension was so limited that he could come at her from a completely unexpected direction, warping the multiverse around her to isolate her bubble and then blink it out of existence. Her metaphors imposed a certain degree of order on the universe, but … in a sense, they were the universe. But they were also a very limited way of looking at the world. It was the difference between playing a computer game and real life. Something that worked in the context of the game simply didn’t work in the real world.

Frieda shifted in her sleep, perhaps on the verge of wakefulness. Emily’s heart went out to her. She deserved better than to be trapped in the bubble, watching helplessly as the entire multiverse died. They all did. Caleb was gone … she tried to tell herself that he wasn’t dead, that he was trapped like her other self, but she hadn’t been able to find him. They should have gotten married on the spot, she told herself, and embraced a marital bond that would have linked them together. It would have saved her now. But …

The shadow swept over them again, a wave of sheer presence so overwhelming that she cringed and cowered, bracing herself for a blow that would eradicate them before she even knew she was under attack. Nothing happened. The shadow receded, the monstrous gaze sweeping away across the multiverse … a searchlight that might or might not be looking for them. She didn’t know, not for sure. The entity Master Wolfe had become was too big for her to grasp due to the sheer scale … not that it mattered. A man out for a walk might not mean to step on an ant and kill it, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the ant. It would be dead either way.

Frieda opened her eyes. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“I’m afraid not,” Emily said. She wished she could convince herself it was a dream – or a nightmare. But she knew better. “I think I have half a plan.”

Frieda smiled, rather wanly. “Only half a plan?”

“We might have to start making it up as we go,” Emily said. Oddly, given the strange intersection of realities, shifting on the fly might work better than trying to lay down a plan before they started. “It depends on how things work.”

She scowled as raw power sparked against the bubble. It was galling to be surrounded by a near-infinite source of power, yet barely be able to make any use of it. She was a sailor on a life raft, dying of thirst though he was floating in the middle of a vast ocean. The power around her wasn’t poisonous, but there was so much of it that trying to make use of the power was like flying a hang glider through a hurricane. She had to focus to draw even a little power into her spells, knowing the slightest mistake would sweep them away into nothingness. It had taken her hours to gather enough power to go to work and she was uncomfortably aware that she would only get one chance. They might as well start mining the sun. Maybe a spaceship could reach the star, maybe it could take a sample from the corona, but it was far more likely the spacecraft and crew would evaporate far before they reached their destination.

“Go on.” Frieda sat up, putting on an attentive expression that didn’t mask her fear. The worst had happened and it was over, except it would never be over. The roaring howls pervading the multiverse around them was a grim reminder it would never end. “What do you want me to do?”

“I can’t leave the bubble,” Emily said. “The moment I try, the bubble collapses and we die.”

“Right.” Frieda refrained from pointing out Emily had told her that already. “But I can leave?”

“Yeah.” Emily forced herself to think. Frieda was far from stupid, and she’d had a very good education, but she knew nothing about quantum theory or the uncertainty principle. It had never been part of her education. Emily’s hadn’t been much better. Half of what she thought she knew came from science fiction and she was painfully aware far too many science fiction writers had simply made it up. “I can open a portal for you and send you after my other self …”

She took a breath, trying to think of a way to explain it. “Imagine there’s a cat in a box. You can’t see the cat, but you know it’s there. The cat is alive or dead; you don’t know which until you open the box. As long as you don’t look, the cat is trapped between life and dead.”

Frieda frowned. “That makes no sense.”

Emily was tempted to agree. On one hand, the cat’s objective reality was set in stone; on the other, as long as she didn’t look she wouldn’t know what the objective reality was. If a tree fell in a forest, with no one around to hear it, would it make a sound? Perhaps it would, but how could anyone be sure? They weren’t there. She had a sudden vision of hundreds upon hundreds of versions of conflicting reality, contrasting and clashing depending on who was watching … it was hard to wrap her head around. And Frieda, who was pragmatic to a fault, would find it even harder.

“It works, I think,” Emily said. “The point is that I can look at you and my other self. As long as I am looking, he can’t simply blink you out of existence by denying your existence. Just as you looking inside the box determines the cat’s exact state, my gaze determines your existence and keeps you in place.”

Frieda looked doubtful. “Him denying my existence doesn’t mean I don’t exist.”

“It does here,” Emily said. She’d met far too many people with deluded views of their own importance, and thought that as long as they refused to acknowledge reality they would never have to deal with it, but in this case … Master Wolfe had become the determinant of reality. He could tell himself that anyone within the timelines and the threadlines running through the multiverse simply didn’t exist and they wouldn’t. “But as long as I keep my eye on you, you should be immune to his power.”

“And what’s to stop him dealing with you?”

Emily hesitated. “Right now, we’re inside him,” she said. She tapped her chest. “Imagine there’s someone inside your heart. You might be able to feel his presence” – she had no idea if someone could and she didn’t want to find out the hard way – “but you couldn’t get to him without cutting your skin and tearing your way into your own heart. You’d kill yourself in the process.”

Probably, she added, mentally. From Master Wolfe’s point of view, getting rid of her and her bubble might be no harder than using a pair of tweezers to dig out a splinter. Unpleasant and painful to be sure, but hardly fatal. I may need to find somewhere else to hide.

“I hope you’re right,” Frieda said. “What do you want me to do once I’m with your other self?”

“She’s trapped in a bubble of her own,” Emily said. It was a prison, a private hell shaped by her mind. A chill ran through her. And then she woke up and it was all a dream. She’d had nightmares about that, over the first few months she’d spent at Whitehall. Was she having a dream? Was she trapped in a coma? Would she be awakened to confront, once again, the realities of life with a drunkard of a mother, a creepy stepfather and an enormous medical bill? “You break her out, get her back into the threadlines between universes. And then we can proceed from there.”

And hope that between us we can come up with a better plan, she added. The link between her and her other self could be used to channel power, which meant … they might be able to find a way to fight back. She had half an idea, true, but it rather depended on being outside the bubble. Or having someone on the outside who could do the working for her. If we can get it to work …

“Got it,” Frieda said. She stood, brushing down her outfit. “How long do we have?”

Emily didn’t know. Nexus points existed outside time and space – and inside, all times were one. They could be used for time travel because they touched all times simultaneously, something she’d done twice in her life, but navigation was extremely difficult without a great deal of prior preparation. The unique nexus point Master Wolfe had created might just be usable for time travel, yet … it was impossible to tell if putting so much stress on the nexus point was wise. They could be snuffed out … and if she accidentally killed this nexus point she’d likely kill herself at the same time.

“I suggest you hurry,” Emily said. They were relatively safe from entropy inside the bubble, she thought, but that would change the moment they started interacting with the outside universe. “Get her into the threadlines and then … we’ll work from there.”

“Got it,” Frieda said, again. “Is there anything else I need to know?”

Emily hesitated. “The bubble you’re entering looks like a world,” she said. “It isn’t. It isn’t bound by the regular laws of time and space. Or magic. You might not be able to use magic there” – her other self didn’t recall magic, which meant she probably hadn’t tried – “and reality itself is mutable. And …”

She swallowed. “It’s shaped by my – her – mind, a nightmare crafted for me personally. What you’ll see … don’t judge her too harshly.”

“That sounds bad,” Frieda said.

Emily nodded, feeling her cheeks flush. Frieda’s childhood had been far worse than hers. It was selfish to suggest otherwise, or that Frieda would judge her for her upbringing. And yet, she’d met Emily well after she’d entered the Nameless World, after she’d had two years of magical education under her belt. The Emily trapped within the bubble wasn’t that Emily. She wasn’t even the girl Shadye had kidnapped from one world and dropped into another. She was … Emily swallowed, again. If the bubble was truly shaped by her nightmares, it could be a great deal worse than anything that had actually happened.

“It is,” she confirmed. Shame boiled through her, all the worse for knowing Frieda had been through an utter nightmare. “She doesn’t know anything about magic. Or us. Or anything.”

“I’ll take care of her,” Frieda said. “You took care of me.”

Emily smiled, rather wanly. “You’re a good friend,” she said. “I …”

It struck her, suddenly, that Frieda might be the only friend she had left. Master Wolfe could have destroyed their home universe by now. Alassa and Jade and Imaiqah and Adam and Lilith and everyone else, every friend or enemy she’d made over the last eight years, could be trapped in their own private hells … or dead. Or never have existed at all. She pushed the thought aside as hard as she could. If she let herself think about it too much, she’d never be able to fix it.

She blinked away tears. “You want to be my bridesmaid?”

Frieda smiled. “It’s a poor time to ask, isn’t it?”

Emily had to smile, even as her heart skipped a beat. If Caleb no longer existed, were they still engaged? She shut that thought down too. She had to believe otherwise.

“I guess so.” Emily shrugged. “But will you?”

“If you’ll have me,” Frieda said. She winked. “But won’t they be fighting duels over who gets to be your bridesmaid?”

“Probably.” Emily tried not to wince. Alassa had warned her that their wedding was going to be the event of the season. Everyone would expect an invite. “But at least no one can deny I have the right to choose you.”

“Bet they will,” Frieda said. She took a breath, then stood upright. “Are you ready?”

Emily smiled, rather wanly. “Give me a moment.”

She stood, taking a moment to compose herself before giving her friend a hug. Frieda had filled out a lot over the past six years, after going to a school that served proper meals and provided proper medical care, but she was still thin and bony. Frieda returned the hug, then stepped back. It was time.

Emily took the blade from her sleeve and cut herself gingerly, wiping the blood with a handkerchief before passing it to Frieda. Frieda nodded as she took the handkerchief and tucked it away in her pocket, a flicker of awe and respect clearly visible in her eyes. Giving someone a sample of your blood was the ultimate gesture of trust, clear proof that you trusted them completely. More than completely. In the wrong hands, a blood sample could be used to break down anyone’s mental defences, leaving them helpless; they could be made to say or do or believe anything. It was difficult beyond words to even recognise you were being attacked through your blood, let alone do something about it. It was like being attacked by your own mind. 

“It’ll let you find her, and let me channel power through to you,” Emily said, sitting down. “Good luck.”

She started the spell gingerly, gritting her teeth as raw power washed through her. It felt as if she were playing games with live wires, the slightest mistake likely to shock her – or worse. It was normally challenging to gather enough magic to open a portal, but now … it was harder to limit the flow as the magic roared through her spellware, harder to ensure she didn’t accidentally overpower the spell. It was the kind of problem, she reflected grimly, that she would have loved to have a few months ago. Now … it was a headache she wasn’t prepared to face. The portal needed to be opened, true, but it also had to be perfectly aligned with the bubble. If it wasn’t …

The air twisted in front of them, a shimmering column of light rapidly coalescing into a square of light that wasn’t light. It wasn’t a square either … Emily knew, from experience, that it was always look the same no matter which direction she was looking from. It was …

“Good luck,” she said, again. Tears prickled in her eyes. She wiped them away angrily. “I’ll see you soon.”

Or one of me will, her thoughts added, silently. If this version of her died, the other would go on … perhaps. It had been painful enough to lose one of her bilocated forms and that had been before a mad god had started tearing reality apart. She had no idea what would happen if she died now. The two of me may never be able to integrate again.

Frieda hesitated, then stepped through the portal. Emily felt the universe jerk and swore under her breath as the portal snapped out of existence, realising she might have given Master Wolfe a shock. If he hadn’t known that she existed, and where she was, he might well know now. Even if he didn’t, he knew something was wrong …

She shook her head, then concentrated on watching her other self. As long as she kept her eye on them, they should be safe … relatively so. Master Wolfe could easily find other ways to deal with them. Emily had no trouble coming up with a handful and she dared not assuming he was any less capable. He’d been a multiplicity even before he’d become a god. He could not be underestimated.

Don’t think of him as a god, she told herself, sharply. Think of him as an immensely powerful being instead, powerful but not invincible. You can win.

She shivered. Master Wolfe might not be omnipotent, not yet, but he was so powerful it hardly mattered. Nothing about him was going to be easy, and if her plan failed …

No, she told herself. Don’t think like that. Not here.

Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to wait. 

Chapter Five: Emily1

Emily walked for hours, her feet wandering seemingly at random, before looking up and finding herself in front of her apartment. They’d carried her back home … a wave of despair washed over her, a wave of something she didn’t want to look at too closely … a flash of horror ran through her as she realised she’d left her mother alone with her stepfather. The man had been hurt by someone he’d thought he could push around at will and that meant … she swallowed hard, torn between fear and an unwillingness to leave her mother at the mercy of a merciless man. If she went back upstairs … she found her legs taking her through the door and up the stairs, her depression too strong to resist. She would face what was at the top because there was no way to escape. There was nowhere to go, no one willing to help …

She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Her mother was seated on the coach, eyes glued to the TV. The newsreader was babbling loudly, a liturgy of violence and hate and bigotry that blurred into a tidal wave of darkness, threatening to overwhelm the light. Emily glanced into the kitchen and saw nothing. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anyone lying dead on the floor or … perhaps he’d called himself an ambulance and gone to hospital or perhaps he was in the master bedroom, trying to recover from the beating she’d given him. She held her breath as she glanced into the bedroom, but saw nothing. The room was as cold and silent as the grave.

The TV was still babbling. The President was in trouble. Again. Emily glanced at the screen and froze as she saw a skeletal face, right out of nightmares, with glowing red eyes that seemed to peer into her very soul. She’d never been a fan of the President and yet she was fairly sure he didn’t look like that … she blinked, then reached for the TV remote and turned it off. The ghastly face vanished. She felt a flicker of relief, mingled with fear. What was wrong with her?

What was wrong with the world?

“Turn it on,” her mother ordered. “Now.”

Emily shook her head. “We need to talk.”

“Turn it on,” her mother repeated.

“No,” Emily said. She spoke with a confidence that seemed to come out of nowhere. “Your husband just tried to rape me.”

Her mother’s face flushed with anger. “Liar!”

Emily gritted her teeth. “I am not lying,” she snapped. She knew there were far too many people who would do everything in their power to avoid recognising an unfortunate reality, such as the simple fact they were married to a rapist, but her mother … was supposed to care. “He tried to rape me.”

“It’s always the same, isn’t it?” Her mother glowered at her. “A pretty girl draws a man and then cries rape …”

“I don’t believe this,” Emily snapped, although she did. She’d seen it before. Women blamed for their own rape, children blamed for their own abuse. “You …”

Anger burned through her, burning through the haze in her mind. “Your partner just tried to rape me,” she added. “He tried to cheat on you! With me!”

She gritted her teeth. “You don’t have to be scared of him. We could go to the police together …”

Her mother reached for the TV remote and turned it back on, flicking through the channels until she found a romantic comedy. Emily stared down at her, rage boiling through her mind. Her mother was not a very good mother, but this … despair washed through her as she recalled other men who had been arrested, for far worse crimes, only to be released to take their revenge on those who had reported them. What did it profit a battered wife or abused daughter to report their victimiser, when nothing was done and the monster returned to kill them? Better to crawl into a bottle … Emily felt sick, wondering just how much her mother had tried to hide from over the years. Her stepfather had never tried to rape her before, but God alone knew what else he’d done …

She turned away, heading for the door. She couldn’t help her mother any longer, not if she was unwilling to help herself. It was hard to convince herself she needed to try. Her mother could have taken her away, could have found work elsewhere, but instead … she had left Emily to the mercies of a merciless man. Emily took one last look around the apartment, then hurried back down the stairs. It was broad daylight. It was …

Her mind skipped a beat. It had been night, only a moment ago.

What?

She was going mad. She had to be. The world didn’t change like that … a flash of paranoia shot through her. Had she been drugged? She wouldn’t put it past her stepfather to slip something nasty into her drink. He could have put her to sleep and then done whatever he wanted to her … or worse. She could have lost all sense of time … it looked like mid-morning now, the schoolchildren making their slow way to school and the … she shook her head. Everything was just wrong. It made no sense at all.

The library, she thought, numbly. There’ll be answers there.

The sense of wrongness only grew stronger as she walked down the street. It felt like a funhouse mirror, a warped and twisted reflection of the real world, but the distortion was so minimal that she could hardly convince herself it was there. And yet, it was. Everything was slightly off, slightly out of place … it felt as if someone had come into her room, picked everything up and put it back down again. No matter how careful they were, they wouldn’t get it completely right. The world felt the same way. Everything was just wrong.

Her stomach growled as she passed a café, the handful of customers lining up for overpriced coffee and a sandwich they could have made themselves, for a far cheaper price. She had no money now; she’d spent the last of her cash yesterday and she’d never been allowed to open a credit card. There was no way she could buy something … a trio of boys ran out a corner shop, the shopkeeper shouting curses after them in a language she didn’t recognise. Shoplifters, stealing sweets and money and … she watched them go, then resumed her walk. There was nothing to be done about it. A shopkeeper who beat up the boys for stealing would be arrested while his tormentors walked free.

The library loomed in front of her, already open. Emily stepped through the door, breathing in the familiar smell even though she had no idea what she’d do there so early. Perhaps … if the world was changing, there would be a clue. Or …perhaps she really was going crazy. It was … she took a bunch of newspapers from the stand and carried them to the nearest table, sitting down to read. The stories blurred together: unemployment on the rise, police brutality on the rise too … it was just the same as always, a nightmarish reminder there was no hope for her. No better prospects, no chance to even make something of herself …

“Emily!”

Emily looked up … and blinked. The young girl in front of her was ... strange. She wore an outfit right out of a steampunk fantasy novel, as if she were cosplaying … but there was something authentic about it, as if it were real. A brown leather jerkin, a belt crammed with odd tools – some understandable, some truly alien – a set of loose trousers that concealed a frame that was almost disturbingly thin … the girl had two long pigtails, framing a round face that would have been cute if her skin hadn’t been so tight around the bone. The mere sight of her sent Emily’s mind into a spin. She wasn’t sure why.

“I …” She swallowed and started again. “Who are you?”

The girl flinched, as if Emily had struck her. “You don’t know my name?”

Emily studied her for a long moment. The face was oddly familiar and yet … she couldn’t place it. Not a girl at school, she was sure, and not someone she knew elsewhere. She had no siblings or cousins, as far as she knew, and her stepfather didn’t have any children of his own … unless he had a whole secret family somewhere else. She didn’t think so, but it wasn’t impossible. She  certainly wouldn’t put it past him. And yet, the girl facing her wouldn’t know her if it was so …

“I’m Frieda.” Frieda eyed her sadly, a hint of pity in her eyes. Emily found it worse than contempt. “Can’t you recall me?”

“No,” Emily said. Frieda was a stranger. And yet, there was something about her that was oddly familiar. Emily wasn’t sure what to make of it. She wanted to tell the silly girl to go away and bother some other random stranger, if she was out for money or food or something else, but some instinct told her to listen instead. “I don’t know you.”

“You do,” Frieda said. “You’ve just been made to forget.”

“Impossible,” Emily said. The denial was instant. And yet … she had the oddest sense of something plucking at her mind, reshaping the world around her even as she tried to grasp what was happening. “What are you …?”

“Don’t you remember Whitehall?” Frieda’s voice was low, urgent. “You studied magic there …”

Emily felt a hot flash of anger, rapidly dulled by the depression. God! She’d fantasised about going to Hogwarts from the very first day she’d read Harry Potter. She had told herself her father had been a wizard, that one day the letter would arrive and she’d go off to learn magic … something useful, something she could use to build a life for herself, something – anything – other than a drab grey existence that would end in her death, her passing as unremarked and unremarkable as her life. She wouldn’t have cared if she wound up in Slytherin as long as she had the chance to practice magic. But the letter had never come. Of course not. There was no such thing as magic.

“You’ve been made to forget,” Frieda repeated, “but you were there.”

Emily wanted to believe, really she did. The yearning for something greater than herself was almost overpowering. Had she been expelled and memory charmed? Had she been …

No. There was no such thing as magic.

“Shut up,” she snapped. The cold rage burning through her made it hard to think clearly. It was a joke. A trick. An unfunny prank committed by someone who had no sense of humour – or at least no sense of human decency. She wanted to believe, and so she didn’t. The easiest lies were the lies the victim wanted to believe and she wanted to believe this one very much. But in the end it was a lie. “It isn’t true.”

“It is,” Frieda said, quietly. She sounded as though Emily was breaking her heart. “Don’t you remember Princess Alassa? Imaiqah? Jade?”

A memory shot through Emily’s mind, so powerful it would have sent her to the ground if she hadn’t already been sitting. A blonde girl with a heart-shaped face, a darker girl with tanned skin and brown hair, a handsome young man with a smile and … Emily had kissed him. She had. Her lips tingled at the thought. And yet, she knew she hadn’t. It was no more real than her Hogwarts fantasies. There was no such thing as a true alpha male, just silly little boys insisting they were alpha and special and …

She gritted her teeth. It wasn’t real.

“They were your friends,” Frieda said. “They still are. But you need to help them.”

Emily scowled. She didn’t have friends. Not really. She had acquaintances at best. She was a socially awkward teenage girl, lacking beauty or money or anything else that would convince people to look at her. She wanted friends, yet … it wasn’t easy to open up to anyone. She wanted … she knew she was being taunted. She wanted friends and a chance to go to magic school and … she didn’t have either. She never would.

“Go away,” she snapped. She stared down at the newspaper, wondering if she could lose herself in the text. Another sad story, another hint of a world dying around her. “Just … go away.”

Frieda sat, facing her. “You need to listen to me.”

“You’re making fun of me,” Emily snarled. 

She couldn’t see any cameras, but she was sure they were there. It was just some idiot influencer filming content for her blog, making fun of the desperate teenager who wanted to be something – anything – more than she was. If someone could toss a homeless woman into a lake to watch her try to swim, just for clicks, someone else could pretend to be from Hogwarts. Frieda wasn’t even doing a very good job of it. Her outfit was hardly from Harry Potter. But wearing that on a blog would probably offend the lawsuit gods.

“Emily, you need to listen to me,” Frieda said, with quiet urgency. “You know this isn’t your world.”

Emily hesitated. Something was wrong. She knew it. And yet … she would sooner believe she’d been drugged than … than something, anything, that might imply she was from a finer world. Was she a little cuckoo, taken from one world and hidden in another … she’d read a story about that once. More than once. Perhaps her father was a mighty sorcerer who’d come back for her. Or a king of a far-distant land. Or was Emily just a magical student who’d been expelled? Or …  God! She wanted to believe. But she didn’t dare.

“This is a trap, a prison,” Frieda hissed. She reached out to take Emily’s hand; Emily drew back, somehow reluctant to touch the strange girl. “The walls are already closing in. You have to remember.”

“I don’t remember you,” Emily said. She felt as if she’d lost something without quite knowing what, the feeling fading almost as soon as she put a name to it. Tears prickled in her eyes. She wanted to cry and she didn’t know why. “Just … go away.”

Frieda looked offended, offended and dismayed. “You don’t remember me …?”

Frieda’s hand moved so quickly Emily barely had a second to realise what was happening before Frieda struck, slapping Emily so hard she nearly went tumbling over backwards. The pain hit a moment later, making her cry out in agony. She’d never been hit before, not really. Her mother had berated her time and time again, as a child, but she’d never slapped or spanked her daughter. Her stepfather had never struck her. Even at school … she had been taunted, true, but never hit. Girls rarely were. But now …

“You’re crazy,” Emily managed. The pain was excruciating. There was blood in her mouth … her blood. She stumbled to her feet, desperate to get away from the madwoman in front of her. She no longer cared if she were being filmed, if she were being set up for the Gullible Brat of the Year Award. She just wanted to get away. “Leave me alone!”

Frieda’s voice followed her as she ran to the door. “You don’t remember me? Or Caleb?”

Emily’s legs buckled. A young man, maybe not classically handsome, but … bright and clever and loving and … the sensation of holding him, loving him, swept through her. He was real. He had to be. He was … if it was a fantasy, to have a man who was both her lover and her intellectual partner, she didn’t want to stay in the real world. She could practically feel him holding her, his eyes alight with love and passion and …

She hit the ground, hard. The shock jarred her, but this time … she could feel the memories slowly coming into focus, a whole other life … she could sense something plucking at her thoughts, trying to overwrite them with memories that no longer made sense. If there was nothing wrong with her, perhaps there was something wrong with the universe; if the universe was changing, and all the tools she used to measure it were changing too, would she even know the universe was changing? But she knew now. The moment she started asking specific questions, the moment she started wondering why it had been the middle of the night one moment and broad daylight the next, the whole scenario started tumbling down.

“Frieda,” she managed. A torrent of memories shot through her, a life she’d lived. Frieda was a friend … practically a little sister. No wonder she’d been so offended when Emily had forgotten her … why had she forgotten? The memories were confused, as if everything had happened at once … she could barely put them into some kind of order. “I …”

Frieda helped her to her feet. “We need to move,” she said. The urgency in her voice caught Emily’s attention. Frieda rarely panicked, but she was panicking now. “I don’t know how much time we have.”

A shudder ran through the air. Emily felt it, something tearing at her mind … at reality itself. A headache … no, something worse. Much worse. The entire universe was screaming in agony. It felt like the end of the world.

She hurried outside and stopped, dead. The sight before her …

It was the end of the world.

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