Fates (19 page)

Could there be choice in a universe so large?

But if everyone had choice, who would maintain the balance?

Corinthe swam through a comforting, familiar buzz, as though Luc had left a trail of warmth in his wake. She was beginning to feel more comfortable in the Crossroad, remembering that if you didn't resist, you could more easily control your path. All she had to do was lean into it, stay calm, and let her instincts lead her. The water around her started to grow thicker, like molasses. But it was blacker and tasted faintly metallic. She held her breath as she found herself submerged in the thick liquid, pushing on her chest as though it were trying to suffocate her. Corinthe's arms screamed in protest at the effort it took to move, and she fought for the surface. Each stroke was harder than the last. The water was no longer water.

It was thicker—and colder, too—and felt like lead all around her.

Corinthe managed to break the surface and inhaled deeply, knowing she'd made it out of the Crossroad. She struggled to the edge of the river, where a grid framework lined the shore. The liquid metal grabbed at her legs, clawed at her waist, dragged her backward. She just managed to hook an arm over a piece of the metal frame on the banks of the river.

She pulled.

And, suddenly, thankfully, the river released her and she was out.

Liquid metal soaked her clothes and hair, impossibly heavy. She wrung it out the best she could before she stared out over the landscape of grids and vast gears, motion and thunderous noise. She had made it to Kinesthesia.

The pain here was immense. A world of metal and fire—no nature, no growth, no life at all. Already she found it difficult to breathe. She knew she must find Luc quickly. She could not hope to last in this world very long.

Showers of brilliantly colored sparks erupted each time the enormous gears grated together, pumping out the logic of the universe, the order and the time. The world was laid out across a massive metal grid floor. Gears spun all around her, some as large as the Golden Gate Bridge, and they connected with others the size of her fist.

They moved together fluidly, shifting and changing, hooking up with new gears that rose from the ground. Some fast, some slow, but in perfect harmony. This was the heartbeat of the universe. But each pulse of the giant mechanism sent sharp pain through Corinthe's body.

The world where logic was generated.

Between the gaps in the grid, Corinthe could see more machinery churning away, and multicolored wires braided together, running between them. But beyond that, she knew, was an infinite abyss—a swirling chaos at the core of this world.

But where was Luc?

The grid was crisscrossed with metal walkways, each about three feet wide. But they seemed much narrower with spitting metal below them. The heat was intense. Steam rose from her clothing, hissed up from grates in the ground.

A low vibration shook the entire structure and gave Corinthe the impression of being on a storm-tossed boat. She barely managed to keep from stumbling. Giant pistons pumped up and down, emitting bursts of steam. Her gaze moved along the arm that rose and fell, connecting a cog to an enormous gear.

Luc was standing underneath it.

Even from a distance, she could tell he was studying her locket, trying to figure out how it worked.

Before she could call out—or decide whether she
should
call out, whether that would make him run—he turned and disappeared behind a piston the size of a house. She began to run.

Behind the piston where she had seen Luc disappear was a suspension bridge made of steel mesh, which spanned a monstrous gap over a chasm of darkness, in which thousands of giant metal teeth were grinding and gnashing together.

On the other side of the chasm was a clock tower at least twenty stories high, whose peak was obscured by thick clouds of steam. Each time the second hand moved, a tremendous tick reverberated through the heavy air.

Luc had already crossed the bridge and had made it to the door of the tower.

She risked calling his name, but either he didn't hear or he pretended not to. The suspension bridge lacked a railing, and it swayed as she shifted her weight onto it, raising her arms for balance.

Don't look down.

She kept her gaze focused on the clock tower. As quickly as she could, one foot in front of the other, she began to walk. Each time the bridge shifted, her pulse leapt. She felt as though she were crossing a vast, dark mouth belching foul steam. She couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to be pulverized by all those metal teeth.

Fear drove through her, made her insides tight. She wondered whether any of the humans she had helped ease out of the world had felt the way she did now.

The idea made her stomach swing. She hoped not.

It seemed to take hours to cross over to the clock tower, and by then, Luc was nowhere to be seen. When she felt solid steel under her feet once more, she wanted to cry in relief. Instead, she threw herself at the door of the clock tower, grateful that it gave way easily to the pressure of her touch, and pushed her way inside.

In the middle of the small, circular room, which was filled with more machinery, more pendulums and cogs, gears and pulleys, was Luc. The noise was slightly quieter in here.

“You,” he said, when he saw her. He had the decency to look guilty, at least.

“You didn't think I'd catch up with you, did you?” Corinthe kept her voice neutral, ignoring the fact that Luc was pale, that he looked exhausted and afraid. She would not make the same mistake twice.

“Look, I'm sorry.” Luc raked a hand through his hair. “I need to save my sister. And I can't risk—”

“What?” Corinthe's voice faltered. She couldn't ignore the way he was looking at her: the warmth, the pleading.

“You,” he said, after several seconds.

Corinthe stared at him, trying to decipher the meaning behind his words.

Luc moved, shifted closer to her. Corinthe reached for her knife that wasn't there. Could she fight him off if he attacked her? She was stronger now, thanks to Miranda. She would put up a good fight. But she didn't know whether she could kill him.

She didn't
want
to kill him.

Miranda had said she had no choice.

Of course
she had no choice.

Did she?

A smudge of grease streaked one of Luc's cheeks. In that instant, Corinthe remembered a task she had once been charged with: a mechanic who was to be injured so he could no longer perform his job.

All it had taken was a jack, pushed just out of balance. Corinthe didn't question why or what would happen to the man afterward, but she knew the accident had been necessary to set him onto his destined path.

The marbles—her tasks, after all—were about balance and order.

Just like Kinesthesia.

But now she wondered what had happened to him—to that mechanic. Rob. The name resurfaced suddenly. She was shocked that she had carried it with her all this time.

“I think it would be easier if we just went our separate ways,” Luc said softly. But his voice told her the opposite. His voice said
I want to go with you,
and Corinthe felt, suddenly, as if the whole shifting, spinning mechanism of Kinesthesia, as if the heartbeat of the whole universe, paused for just an instant.

“We're going to the same place,” Corinthe said. “We cannot go separate ways. Our destinies are intertwined.” And it was true—she knew it was true. But exactly how they'd been twisted together, and for what purpose, she didn't know.

Luc sighed and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. His dark T-shirt was torn and she got a glimpse of his stomach, the pattern of his ribs. It made her throat go dry. She wanted to touch him, to heal him.

Luc reached into his pocket and extracted the locket. Then he offered it to her.

“Why are you giving it back?” She hesitated for only a second before she slipped it over her head and tucked it safely under her shirt.

Luc looked sheepish. “I couldn't figure out how the damn thing worked,” he admitted. “I jumped into the river, and the current nearly took me down. I pulled myself into this place.”

“So you
do
need me after all.” It gave her a stupid amount of joy to say it and to know it was true.

Before Luc could reply, a series of shuddering bangs and shrill whistles sounded in the air. Luc cried out, and Corinthe covered her ears. The gears of the clock began to shift. Pendulums swung wildly; cogs rolled loose, spinning frantically, letting off a volley of sparks.

“Watch out!” Luc shouted.

Corinthe whirled around and saw an enormous cog bearing down on them; its steely sharp edges lit up in the flickering spray of sparks. She was temporarily stunned, frozen, and the word flashed in her head, huge, like a roar of black:
death.

Luc yanked her out of the way seconds before she would have been flattened.

“What the hell?” He had to shout over the noise. “What's happening?”

“I—I don't know!” Corinthe shouted back. This was all wrong. Kinesthesia was a place of order, of equilibrium.

Angry blue and yellow sparks began shooting from the machinery like fireworks and a loud, steely groan shook the ground under their feet. Smoke clotted the air. Pieces of the tower came tumbling down on them, hurtling through the air like giant pieces of shrapnel, severing the wires below.

A tall spray of bright orange sparks showered up in front of them. Corinthe ducked, just barely.

The giant cog screeched and shuddered, then, with an audible snap, broke free from its anchor. Something slammed into her back and she went sprawling onto the metal floor. Luc rolled out of the way. When she pushed to her feet, she saw her knife wedged into a section of steel grating right behind them.

The floor shifted, and Corinthe fought to stay upright. The smoke grew thicker and blacker. The rhythmic ticking of the clock stuttered, then became irregular, like a malfunctioning heart.

“We have to get out of here!” Luc shouted. He jumped over a writhing live wire and grabbed the knife handle, dislodging it from the grate. “Do you know where the gateway is?”

“No, but we can't stay down here!” The base of the clock was the least safe place to be, considering all the pieces of fiery metal falling on them. There were copper stairs spiraling along the inside walls of the clock, and they scrambled toward them.

Luc grabbed her arm and yanked her forward several feet just as a beam crashed through the grid where she'd been standing. She didn't have time to thank him.

They ran to the stairs, dodging electrified wires and crashing metal, and began to climb. Lucas took the lead. She watched him jump up several steps, over a fallen piece of bent steel, but before she could follow, a torn wire flipped into her way. There was no way around it. She turned back, only to find herself trapped by the spitting wire.

Lucas shouted her name and she saw him through the thickening smoke, climbing over the bent beam. The walls shook and the stairs became detached from the sides of the tower. She gripped the railing and then ran up, dodging the lethal end of the wire to jump over it. She landed with a jarring thump, but she made it over. Luc raced to her side and dragged his sweatshirt off her shoulders. He whipped the shirt away from them. Flames licked at the material, growing until they engulfed the entire thing. Corinthe watched, wide-eyed.

The tower shook violently, slamming her against Lucas. He held her tight against his chest, covering her head. A large gear broke free above them and crashed down, embedding itself into the stairs.

All around them, Kinesthesia was collapsing. Metal twisted and groaned under the chaotic mess. Live wires zapped and crackled like witches laughing with glee.

This place was the pulse of the universe, keeping everything outside it regulated and connected, and it was
falling apart.
All the worlds were intertwined, feeding off each other to keep balance in all. Corinthe shuddered to think of the consequences that would ripple outward because of this.

They fought their way to the top of the clock tower, where there was a narrow platform below the back of the face. The stairs came up to the platform from underneath, but the trapdoor wouldn't open. Debris had fallen onto it. Finally, Lucas managed to shove it open, and they clambered up onto the narrow ledge of grated steel.

“Now what?” he screamed over the chaos.

The air was heavy with black, acrid smoke. Corinthe's eyes stung, and she pulled the neck of her shirt up over her mouth. The smoke burned her lungs, made her cough uncontrollably.

“What are we looking for?” Luc asked. He had the crook of his arm covering the lower half of his face and black smudges marked his skin. There was an angry-looking gash just above his wrist.

“Anomalies. Disruptions in the pattern!” she shouted. Like the clothes that stayed frozen in the wind. The tree with blue leaves. Or the river that flowed two ways …

But as they looked around, they could see no element that seemed incongruous. For a second, Corinthe thought she could make out a figure, moving beneath the grating on which they stood … but then an explosion shook the entire tower again and Luc was knocked onto his back on the narrow landing, and Corinthe focused only on him. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up, just as a thick black wire danced through the air from above, writhing like a snake, spitting sparks and lighting tiny fires across dark pools of oil.

They backed up against the clock face. And that was when she saw it: the giant screw holding the hour and minute hands to the clock face did not have normal ridges—instead, the screw had a shape in its top like a keyhole.

Corinthe remembered the key Miranda had given her. “This has to be it.”

She yanked the key from around her neck, but her palms were sweating and it fell to the floor. She dove after it, groping blindly through the sparks and smoke. Her heart beat wildly, and she pushed aside the pain of metal digging into her knees and elbows. Luc yelled something she couldn't make out over the noise.