Divinity surprised me by touching my face. It surprised me so much, in fact, that every thought fled. She traced her fingertips delicately up the side of my cheek. My face had never been touched by a girl before.14 It wasn’t . . .
. . . unpleasant. . . .
“Jonathan,” said Divinity with a voice like a dove’s coo. “I—I know I can be a bit of a naughty child—”
“Yes—well—” I stammered. Divinity silenced me with a finger on my lips.
“It’s just, I’m afraid of Constantine,” she said, her green eyes grave. “He’s won these past five years. Dying hurts. An awful lot, Jonathan.” Her lips formed my name with pink softness. “I—I was wondering if . . . perhaps . . . you would like to team up with me? We could defeat Constantine together. Please, Jonathan. Help me.”
Common sense broke through my Divinity-induced haze. She blotted out the ruddy pages of the ruddy book! She doesn’t want you to win!
I pulled away.
“Really,” I said. “And what happens after that? We’ll just get along until the illusionarium’s over?”
Divinity smiled softly, her half-moon eyes glistening. It was the same sort of glittering smile she’d given when she’d torn the glass heart away from her illusioned man.15
“Yeah, no thanks,” I said.
“Not even—” Divinity lifted herself on her toes, her lips close to my face, “for a kiss?”
I stepped back. Divinity lost her balance and stumble-sat on one of the gold chairs.
“Not for a hundred kisses. Get out of my suite, Divinity.”
“Oh, please,” said Divinity. “Everyone knows kissing is all boys ever think about.”
“Yes, that’s right, Divinity. That’s all boys ever think about. Every bit of me can be reduced into one word: kissing. Thank you, Divinity, good-bye.”
I ushered her out of the room, and she stormed down the hall like a queen, chin up, golden hair swishing to her waist, her ears red. I had the feeling she wasn’t told no very often.
I slammed the door.
So that’s what Masked Virtue was. What kind of city was this? This was the sort of thing you read about in history books, stories of barbarous civilizations that would massacre their own people for entertainment. A Coliseum circus. I sat down on a gold-striped chair and rubbed my face with aching fingers. I couldn’t kill anyone. Not even fantillium-kill.
You fantillium-killed Hannah.
That was an accident! I never would have hurt her on purpose!
And she came back to life. So will they. It’s not real.
My fingers throbbed.
Still conflicted, I arrived just minutes later at the theater lobby, watching the scene before me from the mezzanine banister through my broken glasses. Hundreds of Nod’olians filtered in from the arched glass doors below, descending from their sea of airships. Rows of crimson masked guards ushered them into place. Like the miners and the guards and nearly everyone I’d met here, the Nod’olians wore masks. Some of them expressionlessly peered up at me, pointed, and whispered to one another. They wore clothes like ours, but worse—torn and dyed so much they were colorless shades. Their raspy voices wisped into the domed ceiling and the prisms on the chandelier jingled.
Pipes had been set up around the perimeter of the lobby below, with vents along them to release steam. Masked Virtue, apparently, began in this room, then extended into the city and airships beyond.
Constantine appeared at the mezzanine entrance behind me. We spotted each other at the same time. Taking a page from Lockwood’s book, I dove at him like a released spring, knocking him into the wall with the full force of my shoulder, stirring up the audience below.
“You!” I snarled. I punched him again and again, frustrated I couldn’t make any impact with his layers of vests and buckles. “You stay away from Anna! You keep your ruddy claws off her, you piece of filth!”
Constantine kicked me so hard in the chest my lungs felt turned inside out, and I tumbled back.
“What’s she to you?” he snarled.
“Enough. On your feet, please.”
Lady Fl—Queen Honoria—entered the mezzanine, gracing the scene in an outfit as ridiculous as her others, with lumpy, torn pieces of red velvet, high-heeled boots, and a half mask. Her graying hair was pinned around her head in dozens of tiny loops, making her head look a bit like machinery.
I managed one last kick to Constantine’s ribs before leaping to my feet and ducking out of his clawed hands. In a moment I was at Queen Honoria’s side, descending the stairs.
“So we have to kill each other in this illusionarium?” I said, bristling. “Is that what happens in Masked Virtue?”
“Fantillium-kill, Jonathan. It’s a very different thing.” Queen Honoria nodded at the landing before us, which had chairs lined up across it and a polished wood platform in the center. “Take a seat, please. Masked Virtue begins with an opening ceremony, in which I illusion. Then, you go with your miners into their ships, and the Archglass fills with fantillium, and—well, what you do after that is up to your discretion.”
“But we kill people,” I said.
“Do you want that cure or not, Jonathan?”
I angrily sat myself down in one of the landing’s chairs, next to Divinity and Constantine, thinking of the cabinet holding the antitoxin. I couldn’t see it due to the masses of Nod’olians below. They all bowed as Queen Honoria stepped up to the banister, then hoarsely cheered as she raised her hand and introduced us one by one.
Constantine stood first and strode to the railing by Queen Honoria, his cloak billowing out behind him. By the rise of rasping and unintelligible words from the crowd, Constantine the Beast was the obvious favorite. He bowed sharply, and the crowd went mad.
Divinity took his place next, gracefully blowing a kiss to the slightly more subdued crowd. Her lacy collar slipped back, revealing something on the base of her neck, half-hidden by her golden curls. I adjusted my glasses. A curved rim of hair. Very much like . . . eyelashes.
A crescent glint of something white and green glistened just below them. Divinity lowered her arm, and her collar straightened over the odd growth once again.
“Your Riven is showing,” Constantine muttered as she sat down.
Divinity gasped and hastily pulled her collar tight around her throat, blushing furiously. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her neck and had to be shaken from out of my chair to face my own introduction.
The crowd silenced as I stood by the wooden platform, staring down at the emotionless sea of masks.
Someone coughed.
Only one large man, wearing a tiny gold mask, pumped his fist in the air from the middle of the crowd below.
“That’s my boy!” he boomed.
I smiled wanly and waved to him. Edward the Pathetic Miner, my one supporter. I stormed back to my chair.
Queen Honoria then began a long speech about Masked Virtue and the Writing on the Wall and Traditions. A cough sounded next to me; I turned and found the emaciated reporter I’d met last night. He cowered, half-hunched, against the railing, as though afraid I’d bite him, and held his pen poised above his notepad, ready to spring at an interview.
“I suppose I owe that wonderful introduction to you,” I said in a bitterly low voice. “Thanks for that really great piece in the paper. That’s really going to help me in the competition. I really appreciate it.”
“I always tell the truth,” said the reporter, his pencil quivering against his notebook. “I will never lie. You can kill me and yet with my last dying breath, I still shall—”
“All right, all right,” I said, annoyed. “I’m not going to kill you already. All right? You ruddy sound like my father.”
“And who, exactly, is your father?” said the reporter, daring to pluck up courage. “Because, you see, Jonathan Gouden, I have spent the entire night looking up every parish and government record of every town and city up north and there are no Jonathan Goudens. Not one. Where are you really from, il
lusionist?”
I stared blankly at him.
The crowd burst into deafening cheers. Their cries were so loud I could smell them, perfumes with undertones of dankness. They screamed themselves hoarse. Movement stirred beyond the masked guard at the top of the stairs.
“What’s going on?” I said, confused at the suddenly excited crowd.
“The ceremony is beginning,” the reporter said. He’d suddenly gone white. “Oh . . . I hate this part. . . .”
“What? The ceremony’s been going on for the past ten minutes!” I said.
“This is the part where they make an offering,” he said. “A sacrificial offering. The queen kills a selected person.”
“What?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said mildly. “Only fantillium-kill, of course . . . which really, hardly makes a difference to the person offered.”
The cheers increased in decibels as the pipes along the walls billowed thick steam, howling and rumbling with their voices. Clouds of hot, metallic white fogged over everything. The crowd became lost in the steam and so did we. The masked guard standing around us faded to crimson silhouettes.
With the steam came the stinging cold fantillium. I coughed and inhaled, and the chemical coated my lungs with liquid ice.
The change of fantillium swept over me. The world brightened. Each individual breath from the crowd rang in my ears. The overpowering smell of perfume. Divinity’s green eyes had dilated full black, and the chandelier prickled my vision with blasts of highlights.
Calm settled over me like a blanket of snow. I couldn’t remember what I had been so upset about.
Queen Honoria, standing by the raised platform, closed her eyes and exhaled. Glimmering strands formed from her fingers. They filled out and grew opaque, then melded together and formed steel. I watched, fascinated, as it molded and blazed white hot in her gloved fingers, then cooled to a spike of a dagger the length of my forearm.
The frenzy of the crowd multiplied as the masked guards on the staircase behind parted and carried a struggling person with them. The sacrifice: a girl dressed in the best clothes I’d seen a Nod’olian wear, only a few patches sewn to her white, simple dress. Her hair was an array of soft dark curls over her shoulders.
Anna.
I curiously watched as they wrestled her to the raised platform.
Someone probably ought to do something, I thought.
Constantine was on his feet and at Queen Honoria’s side.
“I thought it was going to be the reporter!” he growled over the crowd.
“Anna,” said Queen Honoria coldly, “needs to be taught a lesson, Constantine. We spent all night looking for her. If she’s not punished for running away, she’ll keep doing it.”
Constantine’s black eyes flashed. His hand twitched, as though he very much wanted to box Queen Honoria’s head off.
He did not. Instead, he lowered his masked face, took a step back, and slowly sat down.
Queen Honoria raised the illusioned dagger. Anna gave a sob, pressed against the platform. Memories suddenly drowned me. Hannah gasping for air on the laboratory floor. Hannah trembling in the infirmary bed. Might as well just die now and get it over with—
Stronger than the pull of fantillium, something in my chest went click.
“Stop,” I said in a strangled voice. It was like lifting an anvil from my soul.
Queen Honoria raised the dagger over Anna.
“I said stop!” I yelled, leaping to my feet. I reared back and illusioned a stream of air so powerful it whipped the knife from Queen Honoria’s hands and set it spinning to the wall. It hit the base of the ceiling dome point first, vibrating with a wuhwuhwuhwhuhhh. A collective gasp sounded from the crowd below.
“I’ll be hanged if I let you do this, Queen Honoria!” I said.
Queen Honoria’s eyes narrowed at her empty hands, then at me.
“Hold him,” she said quietly, and the masked guard herded around me and pinned my arms back. With sharp gestures, Queen Honoria illusioned a new dagger, this one poorly formed in haste, with a mottled blade.
I tried to illusion wind again, and found it difficult without my arms to gesture the illusion away from me.
Temperatures, I thought desperately. I was . . . good at temperatures.
I sensed the heat of the knife, still warm from being illusion-forged, and mentally brought it to a searing point. I multiplied that point in my head. Squared it. Cubed it time and time again, the equation swirling through me. I exhaled the thoughts to the knife.
It sizzled, then glowed in Queen Honoria’s hands. Her gloves caught fire. She dropped the blade in a flash and batted the fire out in her skirts.
Just as fast, I imaged the heat of my hands and arms squared a dozen times over, multiplying into unbearable temperatures at the guards’ hands that held me. Flames sprang from their gloves. They released me.
I hastened to Anna’s side, focusing on the guards’ hands that held her down and multiplying their heat by a thousand. They jolted back, burned. The crowd stirred with excitement.
The temperature plummeted, and not by my doing. It dropped so low that as I grabbed Anna’s hand, ice froze our fingers to the platform. Queen Honoria loomed over us, smiling so coldly it matched the temperature.
“What you are trying to tell us,” she said very calmly as I gathered my scattered thoughts of warmth together, “is that you don’t really want to return to Arthurise. You wish to stay in Nod’ol forever. Is that what you’re saying, Jonathan?”
In spite of the cold, I began to sweat. At the bottom of the stairs, the reporter scribbled in his notebook like mad.
“Step aside,” said Queen Honoria.
I managed a rise in temperature—just enough to melt the ice at our fingers. I gripped Anna’s wrist and pulled her into my arms.
Queen Honoria lunged. Arrows of light streaked from her hands, and past my cheek, striking Anna in a spray of white sparks. My grip broke. Anna cried and fell back. The light faded, revealing a gash in her arm.
The crowd burst into roaring cheers. A masked guardsman threw me back from Anna, and I hit the marble stairs. Queen Honoria threw another arrow of light, this one slicing Anna’s leg, just below her skirt. The exultant cries of the crowd could have shattered windows and broken the chandelier.
I stumbled to my feet and ran to Anna again.
“What is wrong with you?” Divinity yelled above the crowd.
“What is wrong with you?” I countered. “What is wrong with all of you?”
Queen Honoria reared back to shoot another arrow at Anna, who lay on the platform, a bleeding mess.
I logarithmed the flame just as it left Queen Honoria’s hand, and it exploded into a fireball, throwing her and the masked guard across the landing and stairways. It burst into tongues of flame and set the velvet carpet alight, streams of fire arcing into the audience and walls below. Everything caught fire. Flames licked the air.
“Jonathan!” Queen Honoria yelled.
Anger had taken over. It multiplied the heat in me, sucking the warmth from my skin. The fire consuming the lobby transformed into a firestorm. Hot wind whipped us in stinging strings. The painted cupids above bubbled and burned. Divinity’s hair combs fell out and her hair tangled. Constantine’s many layers of vests and jackets snapped in the wind, and hats blew from the crowd. They screamed.
Queen Honoria tried to feverishly illusion away the blaze, but the illusion had grown too strong.
“Make it stop, Jonathan!” she yelled. “End the fire or you can forget ever going back to your precious Arthurise!”
A burning wind swept over the staircases, cinders stinging our faces. It threw Queen Honoria to the ground and tumbled the masked guard down the stairs. I alone withstood, illusioning a cool, swift airstream in a maelstrom around me. I hurried to Anna’s side, willing the cool air to gust over her as she lay on the platform. Blood streaked her clothes. She shook like a sig shutter caught in a storm.
“Han—An
na,” I said, scooping her up into my arms. She hardly weighed a thing. Blood trailed from her leg as I ran down the left staircase and into the crowd. Above us, the masked guard fought the raging fire. Divinity and Queen Honoria illusioned water, which evaporated from their fingers in an instant.
“Constantine, illusion a pump!” Queen Honoria yelled above the inferno.
“Hang the pump!” Constantine roared, leaping up the stairs. “I’m shutting off the boiler!” He disappeared into the flame.
The crowd pressed us, shoving us to the staircase balustrade. My funnel of cool air put the licking flames out before we touched it.
“It’s all right,” I said in a quick stream of words to Anna, who trembled in my arms. I wove my way through the hundreds of masked Nod’olians pressing through the arched doorways in a rush to escape the fire. “We’ll be out of this soon. One whiff of fresh air and the illusion goes away. Put your arms around my neck, there’s a good poppetje.”
I fell in line with the panicked crowd, burying us in the chaos of masks and rags. Sparks and ash rained over us.
The crowd pulled us through the bottlenecked doorway. I leapt over fallen Nod’olians, stumbled across the marble and, like the night before, made lopes across the terrace and plunged into the maze of gardens. My ears roared.
One gasp of air.
The fire and smoke and singed air faded. The soot on everyone’s masks disappeared. I dared a glance back at the lobby. The panicked Nod’olians inside pushed one another out like mad and ran from an invisible nothing. There was no fire. As soon as they inhaled a true breath of air, they slowed and looked back at the panic inside the lobby, and laughed raspily.
In my arms, Anna’s wounds faded. So did the blood over her clothes. Her skirt lightened back to white. Mended in record time. I picked up my pace, escaping into the maze as the crowd behind us poured through the theater doors, red figures among them. The crimson guard was coming.
Anna writhed out of my arms but gripped my hand as we ran, once again, deep into the maze, a tangle of hedge that descended into the metal and grit of the city beyond. The figures in red fell farther and farther behind us as we escaped into the labyrinthine city.