Chapter 31

  Eric

  “What they say?” asked Jacob.

  Eric shrugged and pocketed his phone as he stepped over a chunk of rubble. “Goin’ to Skywater I guess. You know where the door is?”

  Jacob snapped; a small silent firework blossomed into the air around his hand and fell sparkling to the dust. He didn’t even look at it. “Yeah. It’s close to your place.”

  “Cool. Well, we’re almost there.” Eric led them through the ruined and empty streets back to his cathedral. He limped a little, and he nursed a long deep scratch on his left forearm as he walked, but really he was lucky to have got away with that much. Unlike Jacob.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  Jacob, strolling casually on the other side of the street, kept snapping. “What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” He didn’t look fine. His hoodie, now completely coated in gray dust, was shredded all down one side, stained with his blood. Not as much blood as there probably should have been, though. Eric was beginning to wonder if Jacob Hollow was entirely human.

  “You, uh, fight monsters down there every day?” Eric asked.

  “Nah. They only just started waking up. You know, since you came.” Snap. Snap.

  “Still don’t know anyone named Isaac Milton?”

  Jacob frowned down at the sandy asphalt, then up at the dark starless sky. “No…” he said, but he didn’t sound sure about it.

  This was not the same Jacob that had answered Isaac’s phone a few days ago. But he was close, according to Isaac. Pretty much the exact same.

  They walked in silence for a time, only broken by the scuffling of their feet on the sandy street and the irregular snapping of Jacob’s fingers, each accompanied with a slight flare of light.

  “Didn’t think it would explode like that,” said Jacob after a minute.

  “Mmm. Yeah. Thanks,” said Eric. Jacob had saved his life back there. So had his helmet, which was still down there somewhere with a huge chunk blown right the hell out of it. It had done its job, that was for sure. He liked the idea of getting a replacement helmet, given how effective the previous one had been at keeping his brains inside his skull. He’d lost the helmet, but he’d scavenged some gear down there too. One thing was a torn piece of gray tarpaulin which he had fastened around his neck so it hung down his back like a cape. Did it look cool? Hell yeah, and fuck the haters who said it didn’t. Jacob told him it was some kind of energy-absorbent superfabric. Possibly it was a piece of Eranex’s wing.

  They kept walking, their progress at one point interrupted by a fissure that ran most of the way across the street. They crossed on the crumbling strip of sidewalk that remained to one side. Part of the sidewalk tumbled away into the darkness below as they crossed.

  They came to the church, Eric’s new home. Jacob strolled in through the front door as though he owned the place. He didn’t even stop to look around until he came to the metronomes. He stood beneath them in the ever-shifting shadows and gazed up at the intricate machinery. “So this is them,” he said when Eric came up beside him. “This place was all locked up before you came. I never saw them before now.”

  “Know what happens if they get broken?” asked Eric.

  “You mean, does your heart stop if your metronome breaks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No idea.”

  “Shit.”

  Jacob laughed, and it was a bit of a crazy laugh. “I bet you’ll find out.”

  Eric led Jacob and Frisby to the living quarters in back. Here they made sandwiches because Eric couldn’t bother to come up with anything more complicated. They sat and ate while Eric cranked on some tunes. The music thumped down from the speakers in the ceiling. Jacob gazed around thoughtfully as he chewed, occasionally twitching or laughing at nothing.

  Maybe it was a weird kind of silence, but Eric didn’t feel uncomfortable. It was a relief having someone around. Jacob was an oddball, but so what? All of his friends were weird. And Jacob, though he had a stubbly scruff of beard and was probably at least half a dozen years older than Eric, seemed like he had the makings of a friend. He had saved Eric’s life, after all. Friends did that. Jacob had also made the stupid suggestion to keep going down in the first place, which had resulted in him needing to save Eric’s life. Friends also did that.

  When he had finished eating, Eric unloaded the contents of his backpack. He had found some stuff down there. More cryptic graffiti, but also an old shotgun-like weapon (ARKO). He put it next to the sword and the axe. He was getting a collection.

  They played cards. Jacob only knew games that used six-suited decks, but that was fine because that was all Eric could find. The suits in this deck were called blooms, boxes, brushes, hearts, ways, and snow. Jacob taught Eric some simple two-person games; Eric taught Jacob some card tricks. They laughed, drank juice, nodded their heads to the music, played fetch with Frisby by flinging unneeded fool cards across the room. Jacob snapped to a rhythm now, producing a miniature light show to go with the music. Eric had seen him create much more than pretty lights down there in the labyrinthine pipes and tunnels in the darkness below, but it was nice to know that if Kate’s proposed six-person band ever made it big they’d have the phototechnics on lock.

  Jacob seemed completely at-ease in Eric’s home, like a friend who’d been coming over to hang out for years. Eric liked that. He began drumming on the table to the music. Jacob’s snapping became more rhythmic, more complex. Eric returned by starting to beat box.

  Soon they were jamming to the tunes. Eric hopped over onto the drumset and followed along with the beat while Jacob just nodded his head real cool and snapped his fingers. He could do that thing with multiple snaps on each hand, going so hard it seemed like his fingers were a complete rhythm section.

  After a couple songs, Jacob had to slow down and flex his overworked fingers. Eric returned to the table and gathered up the cards like nothing had happened. “Nice,” he told Jacob.

  “Nice,” Jacob replied.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  And just like that, they were back to what they’d been doing before. It made Eric miss hanging out with Isaac. That kid was always up for some random jam sessions.

  “Hero of Time, huh?” said Jacob at one point, peering at his cards as though reading the fine print.

  “Yup,” said Eric.

  “Know what you can do?”

  “Do? Like powers and shit?”

  “Everyone can shit,” said Jacob. “I was talking about the powers.”

  Eric spluttered with laughter, coughed up some juice. “Nope,” he said as he dried his chin with his shirt. “I get powers? Cool. Don’t know what they are though. Haven’t seen ‘em.” He flicked a card at Frisby. It sliced left, but Frisby appeared in the right spot to intercept it. The angel clutched at it happily with all four claws. Eric didn’t say it, but he thought Jacob was probably full of shit. Time powers? What, like time travel? That would solve all his problems real nice, wouldn’t it? But he couldn’t possibly have time powers, because if he ever got those in the future then he’d already have used them to…

  He scrunched up his eyebrows. Wait. Shit. On the train, the phone call from himself in the future. “Shit,” he whispered. It suddenly seemed very important to remember exactly what that voice had said. It had told him to check her pockets, right? Was there a bad continuation of events on some alternate timeline where he hadn’t done that and everything had gone to shit as a result? Had he already used his powers, in the future, to fix things? His ability to do so must be limited, given how shitty that phone connection had been…

  “Um…you still there?” asked Jacob.

  “I can time travel,” said Eric quietly. Then he frowned. “No, that’s not right. I can…call my past self? I’ve only done it once, though. Maybe there’s something else.”

  “But if…oh. Hmm…that’s complicated.” Jacob frowned as he visibly grappled with the irrational logistics of past-self-communication.

  “Time travel doesn’t work,” said Eric. “Whenever it’s depicted in media, it’s almost never logically consistent. Not completely.” He remembered arguing about this with Isaac. Isaac had developed, for reasons of his RPG game, a series of rules for logically consistent time-travel scenarios. They were strict and relied on “separate timelines,” which Eric had described as “cheating.”

  But Jacob just shrugged. “How much of life is logically consistent? Especially here. A story has as much logical consistency as its author gives it. Maybe a lack of that consistency makes it a bad story, but that doesn’t matter to the heroes.”

  “The heroes…” Eric muttered. “Of what?”

  Jacob shrugged.

  “It actually sounds more fucking ominous than cool right now.” Maybe it was having just almost died, for the several-th time in the past few days. “Heroes risk their lives, right? For a reason. But what’s our reason? And why the hell does it seem like this reason was chosen for us? I literally don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  Jacob shrugged again. Frisby Wiser appeared on the table and Jacob scratched his wings with a card. The dragon chirped happily. “I don’t know about that. But I think you’re supposed to save the world or something.

  Eric groaned. So fucking cliché. “What world?”

  Jacob pointed up. Right, the big planet above them.

  “From what?”

  “The Dark World, I guess. I don’t know the details. I don’t actually know very much at all. I’m not really supposed to, or something. They should explain it all to you at Skywater, though. The Lords and Ladies. Somehow I know that.” He chuckled, but there wasn’t much mirth in it.

  Eric slapped the table. “Let’s go then.” He was tired, but he didn’t want to delay the rest of them. He could sleep when he got back. “You said you know where the door is, right?”

  Jacob nodded.

  “Anything I should bring?” Eric cast an eye over his assorted shit. Should he take a weapon? The sword? Or something more subtle, like a gun?

  “Don’t know, never been there.”

  “Well, now’s your chance. Let’s go.”

  “Actually…” Jacob hesitated. “I think I should stay here. To, uh…guard the metronomes.” Being all alone on the Hollow Moon probably didn’t allow for much practice at subterfuge. He was obviously lying. Why didn’t he want to go? He made a good point, though. Someone should guard the metronomes. Eric briefly considered the possibility that Jacob would betray him and destroy them, but he was pretty sure that if Jacob only wanted to break the metronomes, he would’ve done it already. Hell, he would’ve just let Eric die back there. Instead, Jacob’s right arm was torn to shreds, the skin held in place by bands of solid light.

  “Cool,” said Eric as though he had expected this response. “Just tell me where it is, then. I’ll try to be back soon. Then we can work out a plan. Also I’m an idiot for not thinking of this sooner, but there’s some medical shit in the bathroom if that’ll help your arm.” He hadn’t thought of it because Jacob gave no sign whatsoever of being hurt or in pain.

  “A plan?” asked Jacob.

  “For what to do next. Figure out my powers and shit. How to beat down those Darkworlders. What’s the deal with the dragon. All that.”

  Jacob nodded, though he seemed distracted.

  Twenty minutes later, Eric and Frisby stood before the door. It was freestanding in an open area that had probably once been a park or something, several blocks from the church. “Skywater” was carved into the stone at the base like a welcome mat. It was just like the door at the top of his base: heavy wood, thick and solid. It had a six-sided symbol right in the middle as though burned there.

  Eric took the pendant from his pocket and pressed it up against the symbol. The door shuddered. Eric thought he heard sounds from the other side. Frisby chirped and hopped up and down on his shoulder.

  Eric shoved the door open, squinted at the bright light, and stepped through onto a high, clear place, a great city sprawling before him.