The Fall of the Readers Read online

  Nancy let Alice have a bath. Though the water was only lukewarm, stripping out of her soaking leathers and scrubbing the salt and grime from her skin was still an unutterable pleasure. Afterward, they rummaged through a trunk of old clothes and found a boy’s shirt and trousers that fit well enough that they wouldn’t actually fall off. Nancy heated up pea soup for dinner, with slivers of ham. She talked constantly, perhaps so that Alice wouldn’t have to—about the weather, the bank failures, the letters her son sent home from where he was trying to make it in the west, and how he didn’t write often enough. When she got onto the latest cinema stars, Alice could only smile and nod.

  She excused herself early and went to her bed, which was a ratty old thing wedged into the corner of what was clearly a boy’s room, with pictures of pretty girls and baseball stars pinned to the walls. Alice surprised herself by falling into a deep, dreamless sleep almost at once.

  She awoke before dawn, to a silent house.

  There was a window beside her bed, and she forced it open, slowly, so it wouldn’t squeak. It looked out into the overgrown backyard, and the drop was only a couple of feet. Alice looked down at her new clothes with a feeling of guilt, but she couldn’t bring herself to try and get back into the outfit ruined by seawater and sun.

  In the yard, she paused for a moment, taking hold of her threads, and grinned. Then she vanished, with a chorus of quirks and the patter of hundreds of tiny feet. When Nancy finally woke, she’d find the house overshadowed by an enormous tree, whose long, low-hanging branches bore enough huge, juicy apples to fill a barrel.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  IT WAS EASIEST, ALICE found, to travel as the Swarm.

  People didn’t see her, for the most part, or if they did, they didn’t react badly. A swarmer, moving fast, was easy to mistake for a rat or a squirrel. Alice guessed that running around as a dinosaur was likely to attract unwanted attention.

  A train would have been faster, but sooner or later, she was bound to run into some well-meaning authority figure who was less sympathetic than Nancy to a girl traveling on her own, and that would lead to complications. It wasn’t that Alice was worried about the police, exactly, but she didn’t want to be forced into a situation where she had to hurt someone to get away.

  She didn’t have a map, but she figured she didn’t need one, at least at first. All she needed to do was head north, and that was easy enough, following the coast or the stars at night. The swarmers were fast and practically tireless, and in their many-bodied form, Alice felt as though she could run forever. Miles fell away under her tiny, skittering feet, roads and fields and suburban backyards.

  There was a certain peacefulness, a clarity to the journey that was refreshing. At the end of it, there’d be questions to answer and decisions to be made, but for the moment all she needed to do was run and keep running. She squirmed under fences, or tore a hole through them with Spike’s strength. When she came to a river, she changed into the devilfish and swam it. When a forest blocked her path, she took on the tree-sprite’s form and the vegetation parted in front of her.

  The tree-sprite provided her food, too, when she made her infrequent stops to rest. All she had to do was touch a tree, and it would grow fruit for her. The diet was a little monotonous, but that was somehow fitting. The days blended together, running, resting, pausing for food, and running again.

  In spite of the peace, there was one thing that preyed on her mind. Isaac. The First had promised that the friends who’d been with her were safe, locked away outside time and space with the old Readers. But what happened to Isaac, and Jen, and the other refugees? Had the labyrinthine tossed all the apprentices into the void? Alice couldn’t decide whether to hope for that or not. She ached to see Isaac again and know that he was all right, but if he’d been imprisoned, then at least nothing worse had happened to him.

  Either way, there was nothing to do but push on. Here and there, she caught sight of the newspaper headlines. The front pages were nothing but the “Madness Crisis” now. Manhattan Island had been enveloped by a fog so thick, it obscured the skyscrapers. In Seattle, enormous multi-finned creatures had been seen swimming in Lake Washington. In Rome, ancient suits of armor were reportedly floating through the streets and assembling into legions. Officials repeated the lines they’d been given, that it was all hallucinations caused by fungus or dangerous gas, but the papers paid less and less attention. Preachers were talking about the Book of Revelation and proclaiming the end of the world.

  When she entered Maryland, Alice veered west. In the rugged, wild forests of the Appalachian Mountains, she found she could transform into the tree-sprite and let the branches carry her from one tree to the next, moving much faster than even the Swarm could run. It was practically like flying.

  In the flat land on the other side of the mountains, she moved more cautiously. In West Virginia she picked a small town at random and walked into the general store. The proprietor, an old black man with short gray hair and a face like tooled leather, might have been surprised by the solitary girl in ill-fitting boys’ clothing and no shoes, but he gravely accepted the fat apples she offered him as a gift and agreed to let her inspect a map. Alice plotted a course that would intercept the Monongahela River, which flowed in lazy curves all the way north to Pittsburgh, where it joined the Allegheny to become the Ohio. Somewhere on the north side of those rivers was the Library, Geryon’s estate.

  That night, she halted in a grove of trees by the riverbank, a comfortable distance from the nearest human habitation. The lights of isolated farmsteads glowed in the distance, but there was no one to see her but a few horses. The black tide of swarmers gathered together and flowed into a girl, and Alice stretched her arms and yawned.

  She’d grabbed sleep when she felt like she needed it along her journey, though she didn’t seem to need as much as she did when she was a girl. Maybe swarmers don’t sleep. Whatever the reason, a few hours at a time seemed sufficient. She settled down against the trunk of a tree. A moment later, as she reached to the tree-sprite thread, it shaped itself around her, bark going comfortably smooth. A thick carpet of moss grew up to be her pillow.

  She’d never done this before, spent so much time in the outside world while using her powers. It felt strange, but also oddly freeing. I can do whatever I want. The thought was a little scary, to be honest. She was beholden to no one. No human authority could stop her, not for long. She could go anywhere, one tiny step at a time.

  Unless the labyrinths cover the world, and there’s nowhere left to go.

  She released all her threads except for one. The black one, the Dragon’s thread, led back to the book she and Isaac had gotten trapped in so many months before. Pulling on it got her nowhere. The Dragon had never responded to her control, or even her pleas, except when she’d nearly died in the depths of Esau’s fortress. It hadn’t spoken to her since its brief warning, before she’d left for the Grand Labyrinth. Nevertheless, Alice liked to hold the thread.

  “I should have listened to you,” she said with a sigh. “Though you have to admit you could have been a little clearer. But I still don’t know what else I could have done. I wish . . .” She shook her head, not sure what to say.

  Staring up at the stars, she could feel a faint tension in the thread. Someone else was touching it, and there was only one person that could be. Isaac was out there, somewhere. He’s alive. Alice let that thought fill her mind as she fell asleep.

  The factory towns around Pittsburgh proper were mostly empty, with police barricades blocking off many areas. Cars clogged the road, abandoned when traffic grew too dense. Houses and shops were locked up, and streetlights were dark. The great steel mills stood quiet, chimneys that normally belched smoke around the clock gone cold.

  Alice could feel the fabric of Ending’s labyrinth now. It was patchy, at first, like the edge of a sweater that’s slowly unraveling. O
nly this was the reverse—the sweater was growing, new threads weaving themselves into place as the twisted space of the labyrinth spread.

  After crossing the river on a railway bridge, Alice shifted back to a girl. Here the labyrinth was solid and complete, the fabric as firm as it had ever been in the library. If she’d wanted to, Alice could have taken it in hand, connected here to there, and stepped through to her own bedroom in an instant.

  But that would alert Ending to her presence, without a doubt. She could feel the great cat’s presence, distant but attentive, sensitive to any disturbance in the fabric like a spider squatting in the midst of her web.

  Most of the population had evacuated, but Ending was clearly unwilling to let all her new toys escape her. Alice could feel other people, faint pressures in the fabric of the labyrinth. For the most part, they were still, doubtless hiding from a world that had apparently gone mad.

  Do I try to find them? She was torn. What can I do? If she exerted her powers to help the trapped civilians, Ending would catch her sooner rather than later.

  She was still chewing on the problem when she heard a decidedly human scream.

  Before she was consciously aware of it, she’d started to run. She skidded around a signpost on bare feet and saw a short street, lined with three-story brick buildings. A girl around her own age was running toward her, dressed in a white cotton dress and a long fur coat that was far too large for her. Behind her was what looked like the contents of a garbage dump come to life, a four-legged creature bigger than a car, its body made of up broken machinery, shattered bottles, automobile parts, and scraps of radio, mixed with shreds of torn newspaper that fluttered on its skin like fur.

  “Get down!” Alice yelled to the girl, wrapping herself tight in Spike’s thread. She was in motion as the transformation took her, two legs changing into four. She felt herself grow into the shape of the dinosaur, not much larger than a pony but immensely dense and strong, with four long, sharp horns protruding from a bony crest around her head. She lowered those horns as she charged, aiming for the broken refrigerator adorned with jagged scraps of steel that served the trash-monster as a skull.

  It came on to meet her, and they collided with a scream of grinding metal. Spike was much heavier than he looked, and the unexpected impact knocked the trash-monster sprawling, while Alice, her body well-adapted to just that type of impact, was barely fazed. She didn’t give the thing time to recover. Letting Spike’s thread slip just far enough to change back into a girl, she grabbed the Swarm as well, hardening her skin. She reached into the thing’s refrigerator mouth and pried it apart, the joints howling piteously as she forced them the wrong direction. Its teeth scraped at her, tearing her baggy clothes but having no effect on her magic-toughened body, and before it got a foot up to scrape her away, the hinges gave way entirely. Alice ripped the refrigerator door free and tossed it aside, then jumped down as the trash-creature collapsed, bits and pieces falling off as it decomposed into its component junk.

  She landed with easy grace and turned away from the ongoing crunches and pings of the monster’s metallic demise, to find the girl staring up at her from where she lay in the street, openmouthed and wide-eyed. Alice raised her hands in what she hoped was a non-threatening manner.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re safe now. If you stick close to me, I’ll get you—”

  She went no further, because the girl screamed again, scrambled to her feet, and ran. Alice instinctively looked over her shoulder, then came to a belated realization. It’s me, isn’t it?

  I can’t blame her. If, before I knew about magic, I’d seen a girl turn into a dinosaur and back, I’d have been . . . well, probably fascinated. But I’d know I ought to be terrified, anyway.

  She’d had a dream, once, that she’d changed into the Dragon and hadn’t been able to change back. The people of the city had surrounded her, throwing stones and calling her a monster. Is that what I am to humans now?

  She hadn’t chased after the girl. There were hundreds of people still in the city, and there wasn’t time to help them all. If I can get back to the First and undo the binding, I can save everyone. But guilt still gnawed at her as she ran.

  She didn’t know exactly where the Library was—the first time she’d come there, Mr. Black had driven her in his ancient Model T, and every other time she’d left, it had been by portal—but she could feel the center of the labyrinth, where the fabric was densest, and she went in that direction. Before long she passed beyond the suburbs and into the dark forests that surrounded the estate. The trees swayed as they carried her from one branch to the next, Alice riding a rolling wave of vegetation as she shaded her eyes against the sun and looked for the broken roof of the place she’d called home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  REUNION

  SHE’D BEEN PLANNING TO avoid the library entirely, hoping not to attract Ending’s attention, but as soon as Alice got close to the house, she was forced to change her plans. She could feel someone human through the fabric of the labyrinth, deep in the manifold aisles of endless bookshelves, and there were only a few people it might be.

  The library’s doors stood open, as they were never supposed to. Inside, the once-orderly shelves looked as though they’d been hit by a hurricane. Many had toppled, like endless rows of dominoes, and books lay in drifts on the floor.

  The front of the library looked wild, like the back of it always had. It was still changing, little by little—even as she watched; a distant shelf toppled with a groan and a crash. Dust puffed into the air like smoke rising from an explosion, sparkling in the light.

  Nothing alive was in evidence, no magical creatures, not even any of the ubiquitous library cats. Alice felt along the fabric of the labyrinth, carefully, and detected no sign of Ending’s presence or attention. She started toward the distant hint of human presence, threading her way through the now-twisted aisles.

  Time was hard to reckon, but she guessed it was nearly an hour before she came to a half-tumbled circle with nothing in it at all. It was the spot, she realized, where the Ouroborean had once chased her. It had originally been a jungle, but now there was only a half-circle of shelves and a cluster of dry, dead trees and crunchy, desiccated fallen leaves.

  Something was huddled in there. A lumpy shape, a faded gray-blue, that made Alice’s heartbeat quicken. She ran over, bare feet crunch-crunch-crunching in the leaves.

  “Isaac!” she said.

  He raised his head blearily. He’d been curled up under his ancient, battered trench coat, and his glazed eyes still looked half-asleep. He blinked. “A . . . Alice?”

  He barely had time to raise his arms before she was on top of him, wrapping him in a fierce hug. He smelled of sweat and dust, and his clothes were filthy, here and there crusted with dried blood. When he smiled, his teeth stood out a brilliant white in his grubby face.

  “Oh, thank all the powers,” Isaac said. He pulled away long enough to look at her for a moment, then hugged her again, even tighter. His voice was a murmur at the nape of her neck, thick with emotion. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m okay.” With a start, she realized his shoulders were shaking. “It’s all right, Isaac. I’m okay. I . . .” She blinked back tears. “I was scared for you, too.”

  “It’s been weeks,” he said.

  “I know,” Alice said. “It’s a long story.”

  A quarter of an hour later, they were sitting opposite each other beneath a dead tree, and Alice had told at least part of what had happened to her. Once she’d started talking, Isaac had pulled away from her, and now he sat carefully apart as though embarrassed by his emotional moment. He had several canteens full of water, and Alice drank greedily from one as he thought about what she’d told him.

  “So,” he asked eventually, “the others are . . .”

  “Alive,” Alice said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“But trapped. They’re better off than I was. They don’t know they’re trapped, and they won’t until we get them out again.”

  “I suppose that’s something to be thankful for.”

  “What about Jen and the others here?”

  Isaac looked at the ground. “After Ending came back and we knew things had gone badly, I started helping people escape into the books. A lot of them ended up on Flicker’s world; Pyros said he would get the ice giants to help take care of them. That’s where I left Jen. She hadn’t woken up yet, but Magda said she was getting better. Emma went with her, too.”

  “What are you still doing here?”

  “Some of the people who were taking shelter got scattered. I’ve been trying to track them down and get them through a friendly portal. And . . .” He paused, then looked up at her. “I hoped you might come back. I knew it was stupid, but if you were going to come back to anywhere, it was going to be here.”

  “Isaac . . .” Alice’s heart flip-flopped like a landed fish, and she swallowed. “How did you know things had gone badly?”

  “Ah.” Isaac cleared his throat. “You’d better come out.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then, silently, a small gray cat padded out from beneath a dry, cracked log.

  “Ashes!” Alice said.

  “Look.” The cat’s voice was barely a whisper. “If you’re going to tear me in half, just do it, all right? I won’t stop you. I just—”

  Alice, who had been bending over to scoop him up, froze. “Ashes, what are you talking about? Why would I ever do that?”