Chapter 33

  Jeronimy’s masterpiece loomed over him, a ramshackle mass of parts cobbled together out of scraps from the carcass of an Iterator along with a few new and shiny pieces custom made by Rasmus. Exposed wiring and tubes ran down the length of the monstrous device, sometimes coiled in long loops or connected to unseen mechanisms in the shadowy heights of the huge empty space in which it sat. The Kaleidoscope’s exterior shell was dirty and rusted, but it housed a fortune in rare metals and materials.

  It looked like a telescope, the largest optical telescope in the world. A viewport at ground level marked its lower extremity. It rose, expanding as it went, until it terminated in a lens that a cargo shuttle could park on. Beyond lay the starry void of space; Jeronimy had opened up the top of Nonpareil Nescience. He had pried it apart like a can of soup.

  And it was finished, complete at last. The plating was installed, the mechanisms operational, the arda all collected inside: white, brown, blue, green, red, yellow, grey, orange, purple. No black, for none was needed. The kaleidoscope looked at the night sky, and it saw the Voidlight.

  Jeronimy punched some numbers on the console, which appeared miniscule and insignificant down at the base of the vast machine. The Kaleidoscope swiveled imperceptibly, tracking Solesta as it fled through the night.

  His shadow stretched behind him into the dark corners of the huge space. The shadow stirred, shifted, restless with anticipation.

  “Soon,” said Jeronimy to his shadow. Soon this thing would end the world. Apocalypse machine. But if Zayana was right, that was not the end of the story.

  “Whoa like soon what bro?”

  Jeronimy turned to Emmius, and his shadow slid belatedly across the floor to stay behind him. Emmius leaned against a coolant system control valve. A cloud of glittering blue smoke oozed thickly from behind his dragon mask and hung in the air around him like a nebula. He picked lazily at the strings on his guitar. He had finally mastered the use of his robotic left hand for working the frets. It still didn’t make him any musical genius, but he had regained his level of basic competence. The occasional notes that twanged through the cavernous space conformed to a marginally coherent pattern.

  “Soon we’ll fucking activate the damn thing, what the fuck else?”

  “Oh like wow. Pretty cool.”

  Jeronimy had asked Emmius to come while he finished the Kaleidoscope, because a little luck never hurt anything, right? Well of course Emmius had been as useful as a fucking rock, and his giant white dragon angel turned out to be just a curious goof that spent its time slithering through the veins of a dead machine-god looking for a ghost or some shit.

  And Emmius was lucky, sure, but it really threw off Jeronimy’s calculations. As Jeronimy had said more than once since Emmius arrived, “what’s the point of having you around if your luck actually just makes shit even more fucking complicated?”

  Since there were no rocks or sand or dirt deep inside the Iterator, Emmius got bored. And when he got bored, he got high on crystals.

  “Can you not fucking appreciate that I just finished this thing I’ve been working on since fucking forever?”

  “Oh uh like congratulations bro. But it’s like you were either going to finish it or not so it’s like fifty-fifty.” Emmius picked out another couple notes on his guitar.

  Jeronimy gaped at Emmius, dumbfounded anew in the face of raw idiocy.

  “You want some?” asked Emmius.

  “Some fucking what?”

  Emmius reached into his ragged backpack with his robotic hand and showed Jeronimy a small brown sack that clattered when it moved.

  “Oh,” said Jeronimy. The gemstones that Emmius smoked. He hadn’t known that Emmius carried them around in pure form. That was the way to do it to avoid contaminants. Out of curiosity he asked, “what you got in there?”

  “Hmm…” The dragon mask scowled at Jeronimy as Emmius tilted his head in consideration. “Got chrysoprase, uh, spinel, which they said was ruby but it actually wasn’t, and almandine and rhodolite, which are just flavors of garnet. Some tourmaline. I just used the last sapphire, sorry bro.”

  “Okay fine, whatever. That shit’ll kill you. Doubt it matters though.”

  “Well yeah but like it’s been giving me some crazy dreams man.”

  This got Jeronimy’s attention. His shadow, bored, detached itself from his feet and slipped away into the depths of the Iterator. It liked to follow the other angel, the dragon, in an attempt to figure out what the hell it was doing. Jeronimy was no longer bothered by his lack of a regular shadow. He’d never had a reflection either, so what was another broken law of physics?

  “What dreams?”

  “Like if I’m out in the sweeps, and I’m smoking the crystals, right, then I get these weird dreams like I’m in a place with a lot of doors, man.”

  “Doors?”

  “Fuckin doors bro. Like everywhere. Just a bunch of…like, doors.”

  That sounded like the Museum Zayana was always going on about. “You ever see Zayana in there?” he asked.

  “Only like once man.”

  “You ever open a door?” Despite himself, Jeronimy was genuinely curious.

  “Like naw man. Too spooky you know?”

  “Well I guess we’ll all get a good fucking look at it real soon. Assuming we don’t die.”

  “Whoa like did Anthea tell you that?”

  “I don’t want to fucking talk about Anthea. Especially with that asshole still around.”

  Emmius tilted his head back in puzzlement. “Rasmus?”

  “No you fucking imbecile, I’m talking about Acarnus.”

  “Oh.” Emmius puffed out another thick, viscous cloud of vaporized sapphire. “Where’d Rasmus go?”

  “He just left. While you were busy rotting your brain.”

  “Oh. Did Fiora leave too?”

  “Yes. Thank the dead fucking gods.”

  “Huh. Hey bro, about Fiora, like I don’t know if you noticed but I think she—”

  “Emmius I swear to the stars if you fucking say it I will vaporize you. I will program your arm so it just slaps you in the fucking face once every minute for the rest of your gods-damn life. I will kick you right the fuck off my mountain, offer you up to the Remnant saying, ‘hey, this guy’s lucky,’ and then they’ll hook you up to their machines and try to grind you up and turn you into some kind of luck juice, and then they’ll realize what a useless piece of shit you are and they’ll feed you to the fuckin forvalaca, except it won’t even eat you cause you’re just fucking bone and arda.”

  Emmius laughed, a throaty guffaw that annoyed Jeronimy.

  “Oh, think that’s fucking funny? Maybe I’ll just call up Akkama and tell her how much you love her. Bet that’ll go over about as well as last time, right?”

  Emmius stopped laughing. “Aw man don’t be like that.”

  “Then shut the fuck up about Fiora. I don’t need to deal with her bullshit right now. Or, like, ever.”

  Emmius plucked away on his guitar, silent and unreadable. Not that being unreadable mattered for him. There was nothing to read.

  Jeronimy went to the viewport of the Kaleidoscope. It functioned just like a normal kaleidoscope. It had a secondary function, which was the point of all the arda and special materials and the programming that Acarnus was finishing up somewhere off in the old systems bus. But it was also just a regular fucking kaleidoscope you could look through if you wanted to see things the way Emmius did when he was cooked off his arda on crush.

  “The mother stone’s been having nightmares too,” said Emmius.

  “Did I ask about your stupid rocks? Here, come look.”

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  It took Emmius a few seconds to process the invitation. He stood up, left the guitar, and emerged from his cloud of blue smoke. It clung to him like a visible odor in wisps and swirls. Jeronimy noted that it was slow to disperse. He hoped it wouldn’t fuck with any circuitry.

  Emmius looked for a long time through the viewport of the Kaleidoscope. Jeronimy flipped a switch that rotated a lens halfway up, tumbling the arda. “Woah…” Emmius gasped. The view through the kaleidoscope was breathtaking enough sober; Jeronimy tried to imagine what it must be like on crush. The thought was enough to make him reconsider Emmius’s offer.

  At last satisfied, Emmius stepped away so that Jeronimy could try. As always, Jeronimy hesitated. Something disturbed him about the Kaleidoscope. All the colors, all the light…and the Voidlight, always the Voidlight, like a counterpoint in music.

  But at last he looked, as he always did.

  The colors, the arda, tumbling and turning. The mirrors and lights danced like a visual music too complex to be understood, all backlit by the blue-white light of Solesta, and in Jeronimy’s eyes by the Voidlight. The Voidlight was a dark fire, a gleam of shadow that coursed through the colors. He did not understand, had never understood, how they could be together—arda and the Voidlight. Voidlight was emptiness. It was loneliness, despair, abandonment of hope, and to Jeronimy it had a peculiar beauty. It attracted him, drew him like a moth to the flame.

  It reminded him of Anthea—the dead look in her eyes, her crazed ranting about burning books, her conviction that there was no hope, not for any of them. Jeronimy hated what she had become. She had been different from him. She had been the opposite of him. Hope and despair. Arda and Voidlight. White and black. But now…

  It pissed him off. It really fucking pissed him off. He stepped away from the Kaleidoscope, and for a moment was strongly tempted to hit the Go switch, just turn it right the fuck on then and there. He carried a remote activation switch. Just in case.

  No, not yet. But his anger urged him toward action. If Akkama were around, Jeronimy might have picked a fight with her, foolish as that was. There was no Akkama here in his Iterator, but there was someone who had hurt Anthea even more, in a way.

  “I’m gonna go talk to Acarnus,” Jeronimy muttered at Emmius. “Don’t fucking touch anything.” He stalked silently from the room; his dark form seethed.

  Acarnus was down a long narrow corridor, experimenting with the Iterator’s processors, probably trying in vain to figure out how the damn thing had been built. The processing power of the Iterators was impossible. It was absurd. Jeronimy utilized a single node from a cluster of six in a field of 144, which was one of six server fields. This was less than a fiftieth of a percent of total processing potential, not even counting the distributed arcwave network or the echo drives. (And yes, fucking yes, this Iterator, halfway stuck in a mountain, had for some gods-forsaken reason been equipped with not one but three echo drives.) And this one single node possessed more processing power than Jeronimy could ever possibly require for any practical task he could conceive of.

  On the way there, Jeronimy glimpsed Emmius’s big stupid angel as it crawled swiftly through a distant ventilation shaft. Jeronimy’s shadow, his own angel, didn’t like it much. Jeronimy shared that sentiment. That dragon had already torn up the neural conflux like a cat scratching up random shit for no reason at all. Dragons hated Iterators; maybe that went for blind dream-ghost-dragons too. More likely it was just mimicking Emmius’s stupidity.

  Acarnus was right where Jeronimy had left him. He sat cross-legged on the dusty metal, his goggles reflecting the pulsing lights of the processing node. Wires ran from his goggles to some hidden input port on the side of the huge boxy processor. Bright lines of text flashed past on a dark screen too rapidly to be read. Jeronimy, his anger momentarily lost in curiosity, stepped up to take a look. He scoffed when he understood. This was the conversation of the Iterators. They spoke to each other on private channels to alleviate their boredom and existential angst. Their conversation never ceased, though it tended toward infinite recursion.

  “I am not eavesdropping,” said Acarnus. He stared straight ahead, seeing things in his goggles. “I am participating.”

  Jeronimy laughed. “Good fucking luck.” Wait, could he actually read that fast?

  “They want to know how Nonpareil Nescience died.” Acarnus took a drink from a canteen at his side while he stared at nothing.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Maybe. This Iterator is unique in that it was equipped with echo drives.”

  “I fucking know that; I’ve already used one.”

  Another swig from the flask before Acarnus put it away. “Analysis of markings and debris on the external paneling reveals signs of high-velocity impact, as well as significant presence of minerals not found in this mountain, or in fact anywhere in this part of the world. This Iterator was not always located here.”

  Jeronimy’s mouth hung open. Implications filed through his mind, each crazier than the last. He was about to ask, where the fuck was it then, and why did anyone build an Iterator that could warp through vast distances of space, and how the fuck could an Iterator make such a dire miscalculation as to teleport into a gods-damned mountain, but someone messaged him at that moment.

  It was Anthea, and her message was simple: confirm that he had finished the Kaleidoscope; stand by for activation; do not activate it prematurely.

  “Who was that?” asked Acarnus.

  “Oh, what’s the matter? Haven’t hacked into my comm network yet?”

  Acarnus shrugged. The gesture said: why would I care about what goes on in your comm network?

  “It was fucking Anthea, remember her?” His anger spilled out; his form destabilized and soaked into the darkness and shadows in the room. The darkness writhed and shifted, expanding and contracting on the floor and walls. Jeronimy realized he had one hand in his pocket, gripping the little piece of pure-white arda so hard that it hurt.

  Acarnus turned to look at Jeronimy through his shiny black goggles. The screen of rapidly scrolling text blinked off. “Okay, Jeronimy,” said Acarnus. “Tell me. What is bothering you?”

  “You already fucking know,” Jeronimy growled at him. His voice, typically thin and hoarse, attained a low guttural quality from the oscillating shadows.

  “In fact, I do not,” Acarnus replied. He reached up and peeled the goggles from his eyes. He blinked at Jeronimy a few times, adjusting to sight without enhancements. “I am well aware that I suffered a loss of memories six months ago at Prax, and in my infrequent interactions with the rest of you since that event, it has been made obvious that you hold something against me. Something related to Anthea, and presumably the loss of her Song. I have concluded that this event must have been partially my fault. Akkama is also to blame, though I do not know exactly how, as she has been understandably reticent to provide me with the details.”

  The shadows slowed to a halt partway through Acarnus’s speech. “So…” said Jeronimy, working out what he had heard. “Wait, you just fucking forgot?”

  “As I said, I suffered a loss of memory. I had thought you aware of this. The details rema—”

  “ Fuck the details! It’s Anthea! You don’t remember about...you and her?”

  Acarnus blinked at him, thinking. “Should I?”

  “Yeah I think you fucking should you asshole since you were in love with her.” The shadows moved with renewed vigor. They rippled over the databanks, the liquid coolant systems, the boxy processor node.

  Acarnus watched the shadows carefully, cautiously. “Explain,” he said.

  But Jeronimy had zero fucking interest in explaining. He raged to himself. “By the fucking ten, we knew Akkama must have fucked you over somehow with the mind stone, but I guess we had only half the story.” Jeronimy’s voice changed and changed as his form shifted through partially formed creatures. “I guess she just fucking erased Anthea from your memories? I didn’t even know a mind stone could fucking do that! Well, that explains a whole lot right there. Do you know how much she cried because you never came to see her after she lost her fucking Song?”

  The shadows clenched, gripping cold metal, digging in like the talons of an unseen beast. Bolts popped; seams squealed; piping broke and hissed frigid liquid coolant into the air.

  “Jeronimy,” said Acarnus, his voice edged with caution.

  “Well we figured you were just a heartless bastard, but I guess it all comes back to Akkama. Of course it fucking does.” Sparks cascaded from the monitor as a passing shadow wrenched it partway off the wall. Jeronimy sensed something dark moving within him, a flicker of the Voidlight. Hopelessness? Yeah, sure, why the hells not?

  “One question,” he continued as Acarnus edged toward the door. “How did she make you her fucking lapdog? Because that’s what really pisses me off.”

  “It’s not…I made a promise, Jeronimy.”

  “Of what? To who?”

  “Of loyalty. To Akkama.”

  Jeronimy laughed, but there was no mirth at all in the sound. It echoed, weirdly distorted, in the tiny room. “And you can’t break a fucking promise, right? Yeah, I think Akkama knew that. Hey, when did you make that promise? Where? And why? Do you remember? Do you really fucking remember?”

  Acarnus was deep in thought, but Jeronimy had had about enough of this shit. That darkness churned within him. That loneliness, the blackness of space. There was something out there, in the void, one with the void. Something cruel and angry, something Grim, yeah, turning its eyes on Jeronimy, telling him to give up. Telling him that every daimon and the collective accumulation of all of their hopes and their love was nothing more than a tiny island in a vast sea of darkness, just a fucking star, not so impressive when weighed against the infinite abyss of cold uncaring space.

  We are all the stars in the sky.

  Jeronimy’s arda shone black; darkest night filled the room. A distant malevolence glimmered in his eyes.

  “Fuck all this,” Jeronimy muttered. He realized he held the backup Go switch for the Kaleidoscope in a hand that had let Anthea’s arda drop to the floor. Without a second thought, he flipped open the protective casing and hit the switch.