Chapter 19

  Jimothy

  Jimothy awoke from a strange dream. Light fell like raindrops in a sparkling cascade. The sky shattered like a crystalline shell, and only a misty gray nothingness waited beyond. Michael drove through a desert, tired and afraid. Jimothy slept, asleep in his own dream. Colors dripped down from the bleeding sky like watercolors on a wet canvas. They mingled with each other and became dark. A vaguely familiar orange lizard tried to get his attention.

  He awoke in his new bed, which didn’t feel right. Too soft. Or maybe not soft enough. He wasn’t sure, except that it was wrong. Something was curled up on the bed next to him, breathing heavily. Hazel!

  He made a light in the air above him, lightbulb-bright, to illuminate the unfamiliar room. For a moment he forgot where he was, what he had been doing, why he was here, and why he could make a light over his bed just by thinking about it. Bit by bit, he remembered. The sky breaking…Mike…the Museum, and Elizabeth…the lighthouse, the blank world, the crystal, the darkness, the monsters. Thinking about the monsters made him curl up in his bed. No monsters here. No Mike either, though.

  He closed his eyes and looked at the Line. Everything here: not real. Just a dream. So why hadn’t he woken up? And hadn’t he just been dreaming? Had he ever had a dream within a dream before?

  Maybe the Line was wrong. He didn’t want to think about that. That possibility frightened him even more than the monsters.

  Eventually, he got out of bed.

  This morning was for Jim a parade of inconveniences and discomforts. It was too quiet, but he had neither a means of listening to music nor anyone to speak to. He was cold, but first he had to find the coat closet, and then none of the coats were his and it felt wrong to wear them. He was hungry, so he had to locate the kitchen, find some food, and make himself a sandwich from a pantry containing only basic, unlabeled ingredients.

  He kept getting distracted by the view outside, visible through the many windows. Was it morning? Afternoon? Midday? He thought morning since he had just woken up, but he couldn’t be sure. No sun in the blank canvas of a world outside. No shadows. No color. No life.

  He checked the top of the lighthouse. The glass chamber still contained the crystal he had put in there the night before. It turned and sparkled in the air. He needed more. More light for his lighthouse. He needed light to push back the darkness. He needed light to make color. That was obvious, right? With enough light, he could make color rain from the sky like watercolors dripping down wet canvas.

  Above the light, a lone dark door still stood over the platform of stained glass. This time there was light below the colored glass, making it glow. The door still opened out into the huge empty ocean of air that faded into a misty, neutral distance. He stood in the open doorframe for a while, observing the landscape. Some of the splashes of color he had made the day before still marked that dusty path down below. He thought he could probably make a slide all the way from here down to the ground. Probably. He tested it out by creating a curved green slope, like a playground slide, from the open door all the way to the pale grassy land at the foot of the lighthouse. But he couldn’t make it go that far. The slide faded partway down like a paintbrush running out of paint. He needed more paint to make that slide. He needed more light.

  “I think I get it,” he said. Hazel was rolling around on the stained-glass circles, but Jimothy wasn’t speaking to Hazel. He was talking to his friends, imagining them there with him. “I have to get more light. It’s like a game!” He loved games.

  Jimothy decided to go and see if he could find any more crystals, and he would also look for his friends on the way. He wondered if they had encountered monsters and darkness. He hoped not.

  Jimothy paused to grab his cane before descending to the dark, empty ground floor of the lighthouse. He stopped to watch the pool of water, but nothing unusual happened. He came to the front door and found it open. Had he closed it the night before? He thought so, but maybe he hadn’t put the board back in place to make sure it stayed shut.

  He made a light over his head to get a better look around the room. “Whoa,” he said. Black marks covered the walls up to a height about as tall as Jimothy. It looked like bad graffiti. If it was writing, Jimothy could not read it. If it was drawing, Jimothy could not tell what it depicted. He didn’t like it either way.

  He started with the nearest wall and circled the room, visualizing the black marks being erased from the dark stone as though he was covering over them with a paint sprayer. It took only a few minutes, and he fell down only once.

  Back outside, Hazel joined him as soon as his battered tennis-shoe touched the pale dust of the path. Jimothy checked and double-checked, but saw no shadows. Time to find some light–or better yet, one of his friends.

  The leftward path took him toward a line of pale trees. He used his cane to poke rocks, bushes, or random spots on the path, bestowing color upon them. Spots and swirls of color, patterns both symmetrical and chaotic, shapes and images, complex designs and gradients–if he could imagine it, he could make it appear on the blank canvas of his surroundings.

  Except for Hazel, much to the dog’s apparent amusement when Jimothy tried to colorize him. A difference that Jimothy noticed between the old and new Hazel was that the old one got tired. Eventually. Angel-Hazel could run and run and run all day long. He would stop and rest occasionally, panting like a normal dog, but he rested only out of a desire to do so, not out of necessity. Jimothy had still not seen him eat or drink anything, but Hazel seemed okay.

  But then again, Jimothy had to keep reminding himself, this was all a dream. Or something. Not real.

  The clouds distracted him. They appeared sometimes as pale gray forms against the blank sky, and sometimes as nothing more than faint black cloud-shaped outlines, like blank cutouts against a blank background.

  He stopped to inspect the trees when he came among them. Papery white bark over gray trunks, pale leaves rustling in a breeze. The haze of distance closed in more heavily here. Ahead, scattered trees dotted the next few rolling hills before it all faded to nothing.

  Hazel, white against white, flew like a cartoon character back and forth over the visible hills. He did not kick up enormous clouds of dust behind him, but it seemed like he should have.

  Jimothy created a green ball, and they played Hazel’s favorite game, the one where he chases after a thrown object, captures it, and then engages in desperate evasive maneuvers until he forgets what he was doing. Jimothy learned that he could create an object of light and maintain its existence as long as he kept thinking about it. Maintaining concentration like this proved to be surprisingly difficult, but that was okay because it didn’t matter much to Hazel, after the ball was thrown, whether it continued to exist.

  After an hour of walking, Jimothy entered the ruins of an ancient city. Crumbling gray blocks of stone, a lighter shade than his lighthouse, spread about in heaps and mounds through the sparse forest. Here and there a wall stood, or a small square structure. He passed weathered statues so marred and defaced by time or monsters as to be unrecognizable.

  The path ended at a standing wall two stories tall, which angled away to the left and right. Jimothy passed through a square aperture in this wall and carefully stepped through the piles of broken stone rubble within. This structure had been built in the shape of a decagon. It had ten sides of equal length, most of them standing. Something of color glittered on the floor, small pieces of glass fallen from a large window on the far wall. Bits and pieces of stained glass remained in the window frame there. It had been a large image, whatever it was.

  Most of the glass reflected only shades of grey, like everything else, but a few pieces displayed surprising color. The more he looked at the scattered glass, the more he saw them: red, green, blue, brown, orange, violet, and more. They looked so beautiful in this world of grayscale, like the shards of a shattered rainbow. They were the first already-colored things he had seen outside his lighthouse.

  Jimothy cleared away the nearby rubble by making a circular blue wall around him, a few inches off the floor, and expanding it outward until he stood in a large open space. It would not occur to him until later that he had pushed aside many tons of broken stone without even thinking about it.

  The broken glass scattered all over the floor was supposed to make a picture, and Jimothy wanted to know what it was. He began putting it together.

  He moved the pieces using tiny clips of light rather than his fingers. One after another, shard by shard. He began with the big ones, pieces the size of small plates. He filled them in, piece by piece, bit by bit. Jimothy understood, albeit only because other people told him, that he was excellent at putting together puzzles. So excellent, in fact, that Michael advised him to not do it in front of strangers. But no one was watching him here.

  He stopped after some time because his neck ached from looking down and because a dull throbbing in the back of his skull warned him that a headache would develop if he continued his present activities. Imagining the little bits of light moving the glass shards with such precision proved tiring.

  He stepped back to note his progress. He had recreated about a third of the entire stained-glass window. It depicted a series of figures standing below a strange sky. The figures, of which he had completed four, or about half, gazed up at this sky. They were the source of the color which he had seen at first. Each of the figures stood as a dark outline with shards of color glinting throughout. The sky looked like nighttime with stars, but also contained a bright object like a sun. But the sun looked more like a cluster of crystals, and thick rings encircled it in all directions.

  Jimothy thought it would look pretty cool as a complete window of stained-glass, with light shining through as intended. He decided to come and finish it later. Hopefully the monsters in the dark would not mess it up.

  Thinking about that made him look around to check if any shadows were spreading. Not yet.

  Jimothy retreated back through the ruins. He found them more interesting every time he stopped to look. At first, they had seemed similar to ruins found on Earth, but closer inspection revealed oddities. Some doorways were triangular or pentagonal, some too large for a normal person and others too small, some set in walls angled up or down. Jimothy saw many instances of decagons and the number ten, and he became more and more certain that there was supposed to be color here. He saw broken mosaics and ancient frescoes on some floors and walls. They looked like color photos that had been rendered in grayscale on a computer, rather than art done intentionally in grays. There was a difference, and Jimothy could tell.

  It all made him a little sad, and even the antics of Hazel could not lift his mood as he wandered through the ruins. People had lived here, and now there were no people to be seen. Their art had faded past the point of understanding. Worse, everything had been stripped of its color, as though some cosmic vampire had come along, latched its fangs onto this place, and drained it dry of all life and joy.

  Jimothy tried to put these thoughts out of his mind, but the idea of a vampiric entity draining the life and color from things stuck in his mind and made his hair stand on end. The shadows had not come yet, but he kept looking back over his shoulder just in case.

  He found a strange door near the edge of the ruins. He noticed it because it looked a bit like the big black door at the top of his lighthouse, and just like that one, it stood all alone, without a wall around it. A path led to this new door, which stood like a monolith in the center of a hexagonal white platform. The word “Skywater” was inscribed in the stone at the base of the door, just like the “Welcome” on their door mat back home. Jimothy thought that “Skywater” was probably not the same thing as “Welcome,” though.

  This door was featureless black stone except for the latch of dark metal and a silver hexagon inlaid in the middle at about eye level with Jimothy.

  He had to shake the latch around before it would open. It opened outward onto a scene of pale gray ruins in a white environment. Jimothy leaned around the doorframe to check and make sure that what he saw there was the same. Yeah, it was the same. This door led nowhere.

  He closed it, thought for a moment, and then took the white hexagon from his pocket, where it had been all night. (He remembered turning in his sleep because it was digging into his leg.) All of the six symbols glowed softly in a different color, except for the compass, which glowed black.

  Jimothy held this up against the silver hexagon engraved onto the door. A perfect fit! As soon as it touched, the black door shivered. Light shone through the cracks between the door and the doorframe. Then, nothing.

  Jimothy opened the door again and looked through. A bustling street full of unexpected life and color momentarily stunned him. People shouted and laughed; animals neighed, barked, trumpeted; carts wheeled past blazing with vibrant fabrics; an array of smells both delicious and bizarre flooded his nostrils; a wave of warm humidity rolled over him.

  He closed the door. The smells remained, but the sound disappeared entirely. Just to be sure, he looked around the side of the doorframe again. Still nothing behind it.

  Light glimmered around the edges of the door. He opened it again, just a crack, and peeked through. The same street, thronged with life and color. Jimothy saw a creature a bit taller than himself, its navy skin striped with turquoise, fins growing from its head. It wore a heavy maroon robe despite the heat, and it examined a writhing clump of pinkish matter held up in one clawed hand. Jimothy watched as the blue creature ate the squirming thing in a single shark-like bite. The turquoise stripes on its skin shimmered with colors, and its bulging white eyes flooded with gold. It smiled a sharp, toothy smile and turned to look at Jimothy as though it had noticed it was being watched.

  Jimothy shut the door. A frightening thought struck him. What if this door stayed open? What if that blue thing–or any of the others there on the street–could just walk right in? Well, that could be dangerous, but it could also be helpful. He might even make some new friends! And that blue guy, he looked a little weird, but he had been smiling. Maybe he was friendly. Maybe he was having a good day and just wanted to say hi.

  Jimothy thought for a moment about venturing through the door. It certainly looked more lively and colorful than his moon, but…maybe it was a bit too lively and colorful? And after all, even if this gray landscape made him a bit lonely and sad, it was his , and it was his job to take care of the lighthouse. He needed to do that. He needed to find more light. Who would do that if he got stuck in this other place?

  “What do you think, Hazel?” Jimothy asked, not actually knowing whether Hazel was anywhere nearby. The dog appeared at the sound of his name and pawed at the door, excited. Of course he’d be excited to go to a place like that. So many things to chase! That could be another problem.

  In the end, it was the smell of food that decided it for him. He opened the door and stepped through into the bright humidity, and he made sure to swing it shut again behind him. He didn’t like the idea of strangers messing with the lighthouse.

  The door on this side had a wall to live in, a broad wall with a mural on it. The mural on this wall depicted a scene similar to the one he had been putting together out of the glass shards: ten figures standing in a line. The city distracted him from this comparison almost at once.

  Jimothy searched but did not see the blue person in the maroon robe. There was only a mad cacophony of noise, sound, color, life. He began to wander, and he marked his trail now and then with blue lines on the floor for fear of getting lost. He planned to remove the lines on his way back so that he wouldn’t be vandalizing the streets.

  Jimothy saw an old woman in a sparkly plaid shawl with a bunch of small gray pyramids turning in the air over her head. A creature that looked like a sideways table with many hairy legs rolled down the street, careful not to run into anyone. A bunch of clothes were walking around without anyone inside. No sun shone overhead, only a pale light like an extra-bright star. The clouds appeared luminous in themselves, and provided depth to the spectrum of light from above. Two moons peeked from behind them. He accepted all of this easily. A dream, after all. According to the Line, none of this truly existed.

  But…could the Line be wrong? He had imagined a lot of things, but he couldn’t remember ever imagining or dreaming something this complicated. There were too many ideas here, all at once, and too many people and creatures doing things that he was sure he would never think of.

  A fleet of bright crimson boxes angled through the blue sky overhead, and a long-armed ape-like creature swung from one to the next, moving at far greater speed than anyone in the crowded streets below. In one side-street every other cobblestone was a mirror, but they did not reflect Jimothy as he walked on them, and the sky in each mirror looked different. He passed a shop that smelled like sunlight and silver, which he had never smelled until that moment but nevertheless immediately identified. A person made of fine white sand paused to address him, but it did so by putting its arms together and forming them into a flat plane upon which indented words appeared. It asked him if he knew where the House of Faces was. Jimothy told him no, he didn’t, but he also said that he thought that the other person looked just fine without a face. The sand person paused before continuing on. In one place Jimothy saw the crowd making way for a looming figure wrapped in a dark sheet that smoldered with glimmering embers and trailed a cloud of smoke. This concerned him at first, but the figure stalked on through the crowd undisturbed, and the crowd parting for it seemed to move out of respect rather than distress. Several well-dressed men trailed behind this figure, discussing something of great interest while running calculations on green abacuses.

  Jimothy enjoyed himself here. Everywhere he looked he found something strange, something new. He soon forgot to mark his path, but he did not forget that which drew him here: food. He checked every open stall on the street for something recognizable as food, which he soon discovered in the form of a round blue fruit being cooked over an open grill. It flattened out over the flames and gave off a scent like cinnamon.

  But he had forgotten that he had no money. He checked his pockets as he stood near the stand, but they contained nothing except for the pendant. He held it up to get a good look at it in the pale light from overhead. The six little symbols still smoldered with a steady, faintly pulsing light. What did that mean? He tapped the green paintbrush. That was his symbol. It made him feel good to know that he had a symbol there, next to all his friends’ symbols. It was like they were together in a way, even if they were apart.

  He noticed, after a moment, that the hustle and bustle around him had stilled. Conversation had ceased. An acrid smell reached his nose as one of the fruits began burning on the grill. Everyone was watching him.

  Someone grabbed his hand and pulled him off his feet. He fell onto a soft green platform of his own imagining, and he looked about in confusion as someone running ahead of him and pulling his arm carted him away through the silent crowd. This person looked like a girl with silver hair, pale skin, and veins of purple and blue running all over her body. He thought she was wearing a tight scaly shirt, but that also might have been her skin.

  “You’re beautiful!” he told her.

  “Can’t you run?” she asked. His arm twisted uncomfortably as she swung him around a corner and continued down an alley.

  “Um. No, not really. But you’re doing great!” In actuality, he was not at all sure she was doing great, because he did not know what she was trying to do, but she seemed stressed out and he wanted to encourage her.

  Jimothy relaxed as much as he could with his arm acting as a tow rope. He tried to enjoy the sensation of being pulled through the strange city on some kind of floating bed he had made. Where was this girl going in such a hurry? An intricate grid of subtle blue, pink, and purple lines covered her arm. Her fingernails glinted like metal in the daylight. And he was pretty sure she was wearing a shirt. He decided to believe this, anyway, because otherwise her torso would be naked.

  After a few minutes, she stopped, panting. She had taken them to a small empty courtyard, hidden away down a series of back alleys.

  Jimothy made the bed disappear but forgot to do anything else. He fell down onto hard-packed clay, where he landed with a grunt. “Uh, hi,” he said. He didn’t get up from the ground because he found it comfortable. He looked up at the stranger, who returned his gaze with eyes of solid silver. He couldn’t decipher her expression. “I’m Jimothy,” he continued. “What’s your name?”

  “Niri,” she said. “What is wrong with you?” Her voice was soft, high-pitched.

  “Oh,” said Jimothy. This was normal. “I have, uh, cerebral palsy and autism. So I fall down a lot and sometimes have trouble figuring stuff out.” He almost added ‘sorry,’ but Elizabeth had once gotten really mad at him for apologizing about all that. But he thought he should add something, so he said, “I like to paint.”

  “Cereb…what?”

  “Nice to meet you, Niri.”

  “Wh–you too–I meant, why were you just standing there looking at your key?”

  “My key?”

  “What are you doing here? Where did you come from?”

  “I just, uh, came through a door…”

  “From where?”

  He thought about this. “High…perion?” He pushed himself up to a sitting position and looked around. “Hey, have you seen–”

  The object of his query blindsided him, knocking him back to the ground. Jimothy laughed and tried to scratch Hazel as the dog spasmed with excitement in his arms.

  “Well…here.” She stood in front of him and offered him her hand. He accepted it and let her help him to his feet. Her hand was cool and soft and scaly, like a snake. She gave him his cane, and also one of the fruits he had been trying to buy. She barely came up to his chin. She looked young, maybe his age, although it was hard to tell. The thought came to him again that this person was both interesting and beautiful in appearance, but he recalled Eric’s warning about telling random girls that they were pretty. He had already done that, though.

  “Why did you pull me away?” he asked her.

  “Skywater can be…dangerous,” she said. “Anyway, sorry about this.”

  “About what?”

  Hazel growled. Several hulking figures slouched out from nearby doorways. They were of several fascinating races, they all held strange objects, and they looked very serious about something.

  “That key is very valuable,” Niri told him. “Don’t resist, and you won’t get hurt.”

  “What key?”

  “That key!” She pointed at the hexagon which he now held in the same hand as the blue fruit.

  “What–” He almost asked what it was a key to, but then he remembered using it to open the door back in the ruins. “Oh! Well, okay, if it’s valuable you can borrow…but wait, I might need this to get back.” And what was this about getting hurt? Who was going to get hurt? Why?

  Hazel barked. Jimothy saw that the assortment of interesting people who had appeared had covered the exits and were now closing in. Their various outlandish appearances distracted him, but he now thought that the things they carried were weapons of some kind.

  He suddenly understood.

  “Don’t worry!” he told Niri. “Hazel will protect us!” He grabbed her hand and turned to face their assailants.

  They charged; Hazel disappeared.

  Six attackers ran at Jim. Three of them disappeared in quick successive flashes of white light. A plane of solid blue light swept the others away with such force that the stone building which stopped their flight shuddered at their impacts.

  Jimothy squeezed Niri’s hand in fear. “Oh man,” he said. He turned to look at her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I…” She turned her silver gaze to the three sprawled out at the foot of the stone building across the courtyard. “By the gods,” she said. “You’re one of them. Hyperion. You came from the Color Moon?”

  “Well, I think so. I just came through this door…”

  One of the creatures at the foot of the far building groaned and began to stand. Hazel appeared and growled at it. The creature, large and hairy, froze for a moment, then laid back down on the ground.

  It dawned on Jimothy that he had sent those people flying through the air. He might have hurt them. But they were trying to hurt him and Niri, right? Did that make it okay? He tried to think of what Mike would say about that. The Bible talked about not hurting your enemies. Being nice to them, in fact. So maybe…

  “I think we should go help them up,” said Jimothy.

  “No!” said Niri. She snatched her hand away from his. “Let’s…keep going. Let’s find this door.”

  “Are you sure? What if they need help?”

  “They’ll be fine; we get thrown against walls all the time. Come on!”

  Again she pulled him by the arm. Again he fell over, but this time he wasn’t quick enough to make a bed for himself to land on. Instead, he landed on the soft fluffiness of Hazel, who appeared beneath him.

  Niri pulled him to his feet and helped him along down the alley. “Thanks!” said Jimothy.

  He tried to take a bite of the fruit with one hand while using the cane in the other. This met with predictable results, and again Hazel caught him before he fell completely.

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  “Sky’s light,” muttered Niri as she helped him up again. “You are one of them? The heroes? How can you fall down so much?”

  “I’ve actually gotten pretty good at falling.”

  “I don’t care. Where was the door you came through?”

  Jimothy described it, and Niri knew where it was. They entered the crowded streets, but this time they walked at a slow pace he could keep up with. Niri continually scanned the crowd around them, alert and watchful. Jimothy also kept looking around. There was so much to look at! But he was starting to get tired. He had been walking a lot today, and he’d made a lot of little shapes of light when putting together the stained glass. That made him tired. He didn’t want to get a headache.

  “Have you seen my friends?” Jimothy asked Niri as they walked. “I think they might be around here somewhere.”

  “Who are your friends?”

  “Isaac, and Elizabeth, and Kate, and Eric, and Heidi.”

  She looked back at him, her silver eyes annoyed. “How am I supposed to know if I’ve seen them just from their names?”

  “Oh! Right. Well, Isaac likes music and writing stories. He’s pretty smart, but also he doesn’t take things seriously a lot of the time. Um, and he prays a lot. And Kate, well her whole name is Kaitlyn, with a ‘y’ at the end of it, she likes to play with science and—“

  “That still doesn’t help, Jibithy.”

  “It’s Jimothy.”

  “Are they the other ones? You said five names; together that’s six. Are you the heroes?”

  “Um…” Heroes? Eric was probably a hero, but Jimothy didn’t think that he himself was. “I have a lighthouse,” he said.

  “Okay, look.” Niri led him to the side of the street, and Jimothy realized that for a while now she had been holding his wrist so they wouldn’t get separated. “Look at your key.”

  She let go of his wrist and Jimothy dug the hexagon out of his pocket.

  “Is. This. You?” Niri asked, pointing at the hexagon.

  “No,” said Jimothy. “Just this one.” He showed her the green paintbrush on one of the six triangles. “I like to paint,” he explained. Wait, had he already said that?

  Niri became excited. The colored lines on her skin increased in saturation, and she grinned. Rows of tiny razor-sharp plates lined the inside of her mouth instead of teeth. It was scary. “And you know these others?”

  Jimothy nodded, and he showed Niri how the other symbols on the hexagon stood for his friends. “And if you want, you can be my friend too.” He was doubtful about whether she would also consequently get a slice of the hexagon, but he didn’t mention that.

  She blinked at him. This was the first time he had seen her blink. A pale film slid over her silver eyes from the side just before her eyelids closed normally.

  “Jimothy,” she said, “how old are you?”

  “Fourteen years,” he said, “but my birthday is coming up soon!”

  She blinked again. “Whatever. Jimothy, do you understand that I was setting you up back there?”

  Setting him up? He thought back and soon realized what she meant. It had been no accident that those thugs had been lying in wait. She had tricked him. Well, he was very easy to trick.

  Niri was watching him, waiting for an answer.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. You tricked me, right?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s okay. I mean, Isaac tricks me all the time. We just had April Fools.”

  She blinked at him.

  “I’m pretty easy to trick. Are you wearing a shirt?”

  “…no. Why would I wear a shirt?”

  “Um. You know, I’m getting pretty tired. Are we close to my door?”

  Niri nodded and guided him back into the street. In another minute Jimothy stood beside her in front of the big dark door he had come through, set into the wall with the mural.

  “Who are they?” asked Jimothy, pointing up at the figures there depicted.

  “The gods,” Niri said.

  “How old are you?”

  “One-sixty-two bright.”

  “Oh.”

  Jimothy gazed up at the mural of the gods. Colorful gods. He liked that. He wondered where they were. Maybe in a library? That’s where he would have painted them. Towering bookshelves, musty and gloomy. Those gods were burning, bleeding, thundering. They were all mixed together like glass beads in a kaleidoscope. But they were also in love, some of them, and full of rage, some of them, and they cried when no one was watching, some of them, and one of them was laughing, laughing. And one of them had a book full of birds. And one of them—

  “Hey.” Niri smacked him on the shoulder. “Still there?”

  Jimothy blinked, looked around, remembered where he was. “I think I’m going to go home now,” he said. “What are you going to do? Thanks for the fruit, also. Um. I’ll try to pay you back.”

  “I stole it,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll probably get blamed for what happened to Keppeth and the others.”

  “Do you want to come to my lighthouse? There’s no one to talk to there…” Jimothy abruptly realized that he had never before in his life been in a situation where he was actually unable to speak to anyone. He’d always had Mike, and even after Eric and Isaac moved away he’d been able to talk to them all the time. But in the colorless place…

  Maybe that’s why it was colorless?

  “Go to Hyperion?” she asked. She looked up at the sky, and Jimothy saw that the underside of her jaw was gold in color. He realized that he wanted to paint her.

  “I want to paint you,” he said.

  She blinked again. Her blinks seemed intentional. Maybe she didn’t actually need to blink, or not very often, but did so as a way of reacting to things because the rest of her face lacked expression. He wondered if he should ask her about this.

  “Will I be able to come back?”

  “I guess. The door is a little way from the lighthouse, but I can take you to it whenever you want.”

  Niri nodded. “I’ll go. I’m curious.”

  Jimothy smiled. “Great! I bet Hazel will like having someone else around, too. Oh, but I think it might be dangerous. At night.”

  “Dangerous? Even to you?”

  Even to him? He didn’t know, so he shrugged.

  “Okay,” said Niri. “Let’s go.”

  Jimothy encountered a problem later, back on Hyperion. It happened when he and Niri were leaving the ruins, after he had shown her the stained glass he had been putting together and demonstrated his ability to create shapes and to colorize things. She really enjoyed the colors. She asked him to color her hand, and he had made it green. Her laugh had a bubbly quality to it. Jimothy, to impress her, colored things all around: the trees and rocks and rubble, the grass. He colored himself in funny colors because he liked to hear her laugh.

  But the problem was that according to the Line, Niri was not real. This made him doubt the Line’s accuracy more than ever. Niri seemed just like a real girl to him! Except for the eyes, and the skin, and all the other superficial things. When she gazed with wonder at the flowers of light he could create in the air, he found it impossible to also believe that this was all a dream, that she was only a figment of his imagination.

  “Are you real?” he asked her as they left the ruins. He fell again because he looked at her instead of at his feet.

  She helped him up; she had already become good at it. “What? Of course I’m real. Do you meet many people who aren’t?”

  Jimothy nodded. Sometimes, when he asked that, people said no, they weren’t real, and that made things simple. “Sometimes,” he told Niri, “I see things that aren’t real.”

  “Like in the Sea of Dreams?” she asked.

  “Well…maybe.” He considered trying to explain about the Line, but people usually had difficulty with understanding that one.

  Niri gasped and grabbed his shoulder, almost knocking him over. Geez! Liz would be more careful.

  He understood, though, when he saw what had startled her. They had just left the tree line and were heading back down the trail which led to the lighthouse. The lighthouse towered there on the dull horizon. After the color and life of the city, the sterile blandness of his world oppressed him all over again.

  A wolf stood there on a far hill, gray as the grass and as tall as the trees, its eyes burning with dark and light. It fixed its gaze upon Jimothy and Niri. It stalked toward them, silent as the dawn, through the trees and down from the hills.

  Jimothy dropped his cane and held onto Niri’s arm with both hands. Hazel appeared before them, crouched down, hackles raised at the great beast.

  “What is that?” whispered Niri.

  “I don’t know,” Jimothy whispered back.

  The swiftness of the wolf’s approach took them by surprise; in a moment it stood before them, between them and the lighthouse. One of its paws was sufficient to cover the entire width of the path. Its silvery hair stirred in a faint breeze that had not been there before. The smell of ink came with the wind, fresh ink. Jimothy shivered at the scent.

  Welcome to Hyperion, hero, said the wolf, only it didn’t speak out loud.

  “Did you hear that?” Jimothy asked Niri.

  “Hear what?”

  “Okay.”

  Speak to me, young one, said the wolf.

  “Um. Okay, sorry. Hi.”

  Hello.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Are you talking to it?” whispered Niri.

  Maugrim.

  “I’m–my name’s Jimothy. Jimothy Whyte.”

  Yes.

  The three of them stood for a moment, watching each other. Only Hazel moved, unable to decide whether to growl at the wolf or welcome it. Hazel settled for pacing back and forth on the path in-between Jimothy and the newcomer.

  “What…um, I don’t mean to be rude, but, what do you want?” Jimothy noticed a folding curtain of darkness in the sky behind Maugrim, like a drop of black watercolor dissolving in water. He needed to get himself and Niri to the lighthouse, quick. But maybe they would be safe with this wolf.

  To rid this world of its darkness.

  “Cool! That’s what I want too.”

  You will need light.

  “Yeah! I mean, I know. That crystal, right?”

  The wolf nodded. There is another source, it added. A greater source.

  “Another source? Of light?” The wolf nodded again in response. “Can you show me?”

  The wolf moved in sudden silence. It shifted itself to tower above them on the path. With a single quick motion, it brought a paw down upon Jimothy and Niri. Jimothy fell back, shocked, to the dusty ground. The wolf pinned Niri with one paw, and with another he tore out her throat. Cool violet blood sprayed across the pale dust. Niri cried out softly, then sighed as Maugrim removed the paw which pinned her. Jimothy watched as her eyes faded from brilliant silver to slate gray.

  Understanding came slowly to Jimothy. The horror of what had happened right in front of him stacked up in his mind, immune to processing. It had come too quickly, too unexpectedly. It defied comprehension.

  “What…” he said.

  Look. Maugrim lowered his head down to the path and breathed upon Niri. A light appeared over her body, and it gathered into a small bright point that rose up from her chest.

  Light.

  Jimothy opened his mouth, but nothing came out. There was nothing there to speak. He had no questions, nor concerns–only a blank, desperate void.

  Life is light, said Maugrim. The day may come when I shall take yours. Yet not this day. Maugrim raised himself back up to his full height. Use it well. We will speak again, Jimothy Whyte.

  The wolf bounded away, back up through the forested hills, again without a sound, without the slightest vibration of the earth to mark his departure, as if it was a ghost.

  Jimothy sat in the dust and watched him go. Then he turned his attention to Niri, who…

  who…

  He couldn’t. He couldn’t understand. He couldn’t accept this. He wouldn’t. Dead? Just like that? No, impossible.

  The tiny but brilliant speck of light, like a sun the size of a marble, still hovered a few inches over Niri.

  She had a shadow. It groped about sluggishly beneath her. Jimothy looked around. More shadows. It was happening again. He had to be quick. He had to get Niri to safety, even if she…

  Hazel helped him to his feet. Jimothy created a bed for Niri, just as he had for himself back in the city. He raised her up on a blue surface, very careful not to look at her face, or her neck. The marble of light rose with her. Jimothy steadied himself with the cane, then reached out and touched the light. A rush of energy flooded his mind the moment he made contact. It blinded him completely. Such brilliance! The sun itself shone in his mind; its warm energy poured over him like a waterfall of molten light. He knew, at once, that he could make so much color with this light. This surpassed the crystal as a searchlight surpasses the little flashlight Mike keeps on his keychain.

  With this light, he could paint the sky.

  But what was this light? Was it Niri? Her life? Her soul? He didn’t think he should paint the sky with any of that. He didn’t want to.

  He concentrated on maintaining the bed and began the journey back to his lighthouse. This time he made it before things got really dark, for which he was grateful. He had no crystal this time, and he might have had to use Niri’s light. Niri’s light could have lit up the entire landscape like a noonday sun for miles and miles. If it were in the chamber at the top of his lighthouse, would he even need more crystals? But he didn’t want to use it.

  Something waited for him by the front door of his lighthouse. It was a silver egg-shaped thing about the size of a football. It rested on the dusty path outside the door. A row of bright lights kept the encroaching shadows back, but Jimothy thought that the shadows would overpower light like that before the night was out.

  A pencil-shaped device emerged from the egg-thing when Jimothy came close. A network of blue lights flashed out from it toward Jimothy. He erected a belated barrier in front of him in case the light was harmful. But the machine only beeped in response. It rose up into the air, approached Jimothy, and opened up.

  Something was inside the interior compartment: a phone. A cell phone. He picked it up. Distracted by the cell phone, he forgot to maintain the floating bed for Niri. She fell with a thud onto the dusty path. He picked her back up at once, and when he again looked at the flying egg-thing, it had already closed itself back up and was humming up and away into the sky. Jimothy watched until it slipped away in-between two of the dark clouds spreading and staining the sky.

  Jimothy entered his lighthouse and made sure to close and bar the door behind him. He had to pick up the huge board with light because he could never lift it with his own muscles. Then he carried Niri up to the floor that held the guest rooms, just below his own living space. He placed her on one of the beds and finally made himself look at her, really look at her. He could only do so for a second because it made him feel sick and cold.

  The pale claw of Maugrim had torn her entire neck open in a ragged gash. Everything there was blue or purple, like her blood. It still glistened like wet paint. A pale film covered her eyes, like when just before she blinked. Her skin no longer showed gossamer traceries of veins. Now it was cold and pale and had a faint sheen, like candlewax.

  The Line told him that she wasn’t real, but that didn’t stop him from crying a little.

  The phone vibrated in his hand. “Jim, pick up,” it said in Isaac’s voice. “Jim, pick up.” It took Jim a minute to figure out that the phone was receiving messages, and Isaac’s voice was part of the alert tone.

  He opened the phone.

  IM: Jim you there?

  IM: It says “delivered”

  IM: but I don’t know what I’m doing

  JW: Isaac!

  IM: yo!

  JW: How are you doing?

  ?

  IM: All right, how bout you?

  JW: well

  JW: I feel better now that I’m talking to you

  IM: Yeah cool

  IM: oh shoot I forgot to change the text color

  IM: oh well

  IM: You need anything bro?

  JW: Uh

  JW: Is everyone okay?

  IM: Yeah we’re all good

  IM: I’ll hook you into the group chat in just a minute

  IM: hang on

  JW: Actually Isaac

  JW: wait

  IM: ?

  JW: I think I’m just going to go to bed for now

  IM: Is it nighttime on your moon?

  JW: Yeah

  JW: and it’s been a long day

  JW: so

  IM: All right, cool

  IM: I’ll let everyone know

  IM: We have officially made contact with the Jimothy

  IM: wild Jimothy sighted

  IM: Hey is your thing color?

  IM: like how my thing is “space”

  JW: it’s light

  IM: Oh, I get it. Awesome.

  IM: Jimothy Light

  IM: Whyte Light

  IM: Night Light?

  IM: Lightman

  IM: any ideas?

  JW: I’m going to bed

  IM: You sure you’re okay?

  JW: Isaac do people have light inside them? Do you know?

  IM: Like, metaphorically?

  JW: nevermind

  IM: I think they do, Jim.

  IM: Like in a way I think probably Dwayne would have like the sun inside him

  JW: the sun

  IM: But I don’t really think it’s *our* light, you know?

  IM: reflected light, more like the moon I guess

  IM: Moonman

  IM: nah

  JW: Good night, Isaac

  IM: Let me know if you got something you need to talk about.

  IM: And remember: if you die...

  JW: die with honor

  Jimothy closed the phone. Dying with honor didn’t sound like a funny joke anymore. Speaking of jokes, he remembered the “handy” pun he had thought of earlier. He remembered thinking Isaac would like that. But Jimothy was not in the mood for jokes, even if Isaac always was.

  He put the phone in his pocket and looked again at Niri, lying on the bed. He reached out for the light but stopped with his fingers almost touching it. That sensation had been both exhilarating and terrifying. He wasn’t sure he wanted to touch it again. What if it was Niri? Her soul? He didn’t want to put it in the chamber at the top of the lighthouse, but he didn’t want to just leave it here, either.

  He left the room and looked around until he found a box. A whole collection of boxes sat nested within each other in one of the closets. Wooden boxes, but lightweight. They had lids that lifted straight up. He opened box after box until he found the smallest one, just large enough to fit maybe a baseball inside. He took it, returned to Niri’s room, and boxed up the marble of light. Maybe he could find a better place for it. Maybe he could figure out what the light was. Maybe he could ask the wolf. No, he didn’t want to ask the wolf. Surely somebody back in that city knew. Maybe he would go and try it tomorrow. Or finish that stained-glass window.

  He went up to his floor and took a long, hot shower. He thought about texting someone on CHIME, maybe Elizabeth or Kate. But then he thought about Niri and decided that he just wasn’t in the mood.

  He went to bed, and he cried himself to sleep with Niri’s light in a box on his bedstand.