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Nyx drifted.
She had the sense she’d been drifting for some time, and the equal sense that the knowledge should bother her. But as soon as she grasped the feeling, it slipped away. The whole of her attention was captivated by the knots and lines of power that surrounded her. They formed a brilliant glowing matrix in the darkness, shimmering white strands that stretched between even brighter nodes.
They were woven together prettily enough, but it was a cruel kind of beauty. They didn’t belong here. She was certain of it, even if she couldn’t focus long enough to remember where here was. She trailed fingers that weren’t truly physical down one of the glowing strands.
It was a piece of a net. She remembered that now and, having remembered, it was all too easy to see the half-destroyed structure of it around her. A net she had been dismantling because it was keeping her from something. Something she wanted desperately.
There wasn’t much of it left—only twelve lines, seven nodes between them. She was close. So close to finishing. It would only take a few more cuts, a few more unraveled knots, and she would have what she wanted.
What...what was it she wanted?
She had a sense of laughter, chime-like and aristocratically brittle, and though she didn’t actually hear it, the remaining lines of power rippled in sync with it. The sound made her angry. The power that didn’t belong here made her angry. She reached for one of the nodes. She flinched as she did, an instinctual reaction, but she kept going.
Her fist closed over the node. It was more of a knot, and though the fingers that worked at it were not physical ones, they still burned as she coaxed the bound threads to loosen, little shocks of pain flickering through her.
Stubbornly, she persisted, her nerves on fire as the knot unraveled. Its brilliance dulled and winked out, the threads that connected it to the nearest other knots burning out as well. She ignored the pain, reaching for the next knot, and the next, until she was numb and her entire world had narrowed to the need to be rid of this foreign power.
Shakily, she tore the final piece apart. As the last bit of magic dimmed, she could swear she heard a voice say, “Poor choice, daughter mine.”
Then the light winked out and she was alone in the vast darkness. Alone, and confused, and with no idea how to leave wherever here was.
Nyx Fortuna was lost. Not lost like she sometimes was when Viktor dropped her in the woods, but lost in a different way.
When she was alone in the woods, she could use her surroundings to anchor herself and find her way home. It was supposed to prepare her for a time like this—a time when she didn’t know where she was, and had to do her best to orient herself with what was around her.
Except it wasn’t working, because what was around her didn’t make any sense. Her environment didn’t feel truly physical. It was an endless sea of black, the only landmarks in sight the hundreds of disconnected nodes floating in the black depths. She stood on one of those nodes now, and the placement of the others around it felt familiar. Nothing connected them, but if she imagined lines between them, the resulting structure would form a net.
A net, like the kind her mother liked to weave from magic. She stretched mental fingers, her own power washing over the nodes and—there. Faint echoes of Elena Fortuna’s magic. This had been a Hiding, then. Something larger and more complex than Nyx had ever imagined a Hidden could build.
But then, she had only just started working on Hiding multiple things at the same time. Upping the difficulty and complexity of Nyx’s workings had been her mother’s twelfth birthday present to her that morning.
So what was this? Some kind of test to see if Nyx could find her way out of the working’s core?
She’d stood within the matrix of a Hidden web before, but it had always been one of her own making, so the way out had been well-marked. She couldn’t see the way out of this one. Even though this wasn’t her own Hiding, finding an exit route should have been simple, because this Hiding wasn’t functional anymore. Her mother’s power was gone, so why was Nyx still stuck here?
What was it Viktor always told her? If you find yourself in entirely unfamiliar surroundings, and no one is looking for you, choose a direction and start walking. Do not deviate unless safety dictates that you do so. If you think you are trapped, find the nearest perimeter and make your way to it. Map the confines of your cage.
She spun in a circle, trying to see an end to the nodes, to determine if they formed a perimeter. To her left, she counted five nodes but couldn’t see any past the fifth. Hoping that meant that the fifth node represented the outer edge of the matrix, she crouched, readying to leap to the next node.
“Don’t jump.” The voice startled her so badly she nearly fell off her perch. She searched, looking for the speaker, but saw no one.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Tobi.” The voice sounded like it belonged to someone a few years younger than her, while simultaneously sounding as if it belong to someone decades older. If she was forced to pick one, she’d say both, and that didn’t make any sense.
Neither did the fact that Tobi clearly seemed to think she should know who he was.
Which was hilarious, even if he probably didn’t know it. Nyx’s world consisted of her mother, Viktor, and Seth. Them, and the random strangers she met every time she and Seth ran away. Even if Viktor never let them stay gone long.
“I don’t know a Tobi.”
“No, I guess you don’t right now.” She still couldn’t pin down the age, and it almost sounded like more than one person talking in the same voice. It echoed around her. “But you will. You’re nice and you found me my moms, so I’m going to help you.”
She’d…what? She was pretty sure she would remember if she’d run across a lost boy and helped him find his mothers.
This was either a really vivid dream or… “Seth.” His illusions kept getting better by the day. She didn’t know how he’d faked her mother’s magical signature, or how he’d gotten her into this illusion without her remembering it, but she was seriously going to annihilate him in their next sparring match for this.
“Seth’s here,” the voice calling itself Tobi said. “But if you want to talk to him, you’re going to have to wake up.”
“Uh-huh,” Nyx said. “And I suppose to wake up you’re going to tell me I need to hop on one foot in a circle six times while chanting some nonsense words?”
“No,” Tobi said patiently, almost like he’d expected that reaction. “That would never work.”
Nyx frowned. Seth never kept trying to fool her once she’d figured out what he was doing. He would just come back with something more ridiculous than hopping on her foot, and tell her that was the price of dropping the illusion. She rarely ever did what he told her to. She had a stubborn streak and a lot of time. With the combination of the two, she could usually make an illusion so difficult for him to hold that he was forced to drop it.
But he always made the ridiculous requests anyway. Except now, he wasn’t. So if Seth wasn’t doing this, was it one of her mother’s tests?
“You need to wake up,” Tobi repeated. “So I need you to jump off the point you’re on. Not to any of the other points, just step off.”
She looked down and swallowed. Nothing below, just empty abyss. She looked up and saw the other nodes. They weren’t too far away. If she jumped, maybe she could—
“Please don’t climb.” Tobi sounded weary. “You climbed last time and it took us forever to get back here.”
“I don’t remember that."
He sighed. “I know. Trust me? Your friends are worried about you and I’m getting tired.”
Nyx didn’t have friends. At least, not any other than Seth. And a disembodied voice telling her she did have friends, and that they were worried about her, made her think that maybe this wasn’t a test from her mother after all. Maybe it was just a dream.
If it was a dream, stepping into nothing wouldn’t kill her. If it was one of her mother’s tests and she failed it, well, it would hardly be the first time she’d disappointed Elena Fortuna.
She took a breath and stepped off the node.
***
Nyxi?”
Seth. Nyx’s heart skipped and she opened her eyes. Seth’s face hovered above hers, but something was wrong. Those were his almost-black eyes, staring worriedly into hers, but his face wasn’t right. It was…older.
A lot older. This wasn’t Seth. This was a man.
She scrambled back and hit a wall, her legs tangling in sheets. They were softer sheets than she’d ever had, on a bed twice the size of hers.
“It’s okay,” said the guy who sort of looked and sounded like Seth but couldn’t be Seth. “You’re okay.”
He wasn’t the only person in the room. A boy, maybe eight or nine, stood in front of a woman with auburn hair. Feathers threaded through the locks, almost as if they grew alongside them. Her hands rested protectively on the boy’s shoulders.
Next to them was another woman, pale skin and blonde hair, her body packed with muscle. Then a tall, fit Black man with a wealth of slender braids that just brushed his shoulders, and next to him…a griffin.
Viktor’s voice whispered in her mind. Your mother and I, we won’t always be here to protect you.
Protect her from what, she’d never been clear on. But this—being in a room full of strangers, one of whom was a mythological creature and one of whom was a creepy older version of Seth—seemed like something she might want to protect herself from.
Another whisper of Viktor’s voice. If you’re backed into a corner, make an exit and run.
She flew off the side of the bed and bolted for the door. Or tried to. Her body felt all off. She tripped over herself twice and then Seth—no, not Seth—was there. His hands gently but firmly gripped her shoulders and he was talking in that quiet, easy way that always made everything feel right in the world. Except it was wrong because his voice was deeper than it should be.
She turned, twisted and threw her weight to get out of his grip. Then she stumbled all over herself again because her body felt so wrong. She righted herself and looked up, straight into a large oval mirror, and froze.
That reflection couldn’t be her. It belonged to a woman and Nyx wasn’t a woman, she was twelve. But those were her eyes, silver-grey and wide as a startled deer’s. And when she raised her hand to touch the strange black thorns that pierced her cheek in a spiral pattern, her reflection
did the same.
Seth’s reflection came up behind hers in the mirror, his hand reaching for her shoulder. She flinched and he backed off.
“It’s okay, little Guardian,” said the Black man, his voice soft and melodic. It was unnaturally persuasive, that voice, lulling and almost hypnotic.
She struggled against the honey-coated words that assured her everything was fine when nothing was fine.
“What’s wrong with her?” the blonde woman demanded.
“She’s lost,” the boy said, and Nyx recognized his voice. Tobi.
“She’s standing right there,” the woman argued.
“She’s not lost here,” Tobi said, walking to stand in front of Nyx. “She’s lost here.” He tapped his temple, then held out his hand to her. “Now that you’re awake, I can show you the way back.”
Nyx swallowed. He looked so small, but serious, his countenance a little eerie, as if something more than just a boy looked out at her from behind his eyes. The hand not held out to her was clutched around a misshapen lump of fabric that looked like it was trying to be a stuffed animal.
She didn’t know what made her reach out and take his hand.
A cool wash of magic flooded through her and she was back in that place with the nodes, except it was different this time. She still stood on one, but it was removed from the labyrinth of others, and she was far enough away that she could see them all, floating above a shape below.
The shape wasn’t anything she could describe or draw, but she knew, on some instinctual level, that it was her. And most of it was missing. A third or so of it was filled in and glowing softly, but only a few scattered pieces shone in the rest. It looked like one of those children’s puzzles that came on a board. Not only was her board mostly unfinished, but the puzzle pieces had been broken into smaller and smaller bits and their edges filed smooth.
“I’m broken,” she whispered.
“Your memories are,” Tobi said.
She looked at the pieces, floating around her like the debris of an obliterated asteroid. She felt the echoes of her mother’s magic, how it had once connected all the broken bits, the broken pieces of her. Her mother had Hidden Nyx. Hidden her memories…from herself.
She thought of the node she stood on, of Seth looking so much older, herself looking
so much older… “I’m not twelve anymore, am I?”
“No.”
She was just standing on a broken chunk of memory from a time when she’d been twelve. A chunk that needed to be fitted back into the board below, like all the rest. She looked at the glowing section of unblemished memory. Her life after the Hiding.
She rubbed her arms. “You’re…some kind of healer, right?” She’d never met one. Or, she supposed she had, but twelve-year-old her—and it was all kinds of weird to know she wasn’t twelve right now even though she very much felt like it—never had.
“Some kind,” Tobi agreed.
“Can you fix me? Put me back together?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, which was answer enough. His next words held that double-echo, the sound of others who were older than the boy talking through him. “The mind isn’t the body. Bodies within each species are more or less the same. Each physical person is built upon a template that has existed for millennia.
“An individual may have some variations—small-scale mutations or anomalies—but the core concept remains the same. Each mind, on the other hand, is unique. From the moment a child begins learning, their experiences shape them differently from others. There is no template to follow with memories.
“We could force the pieces into the mold and make them stay, but they won’t be in the right places. The paths between them will be all jumbled. It would become a maze and you would be lost, skipping from time to time. You might never find your way out.”
Nyx swallowed, suddenly very aware of the patch of time she stood on. She looked at the board again, at the pieces glowing in the incomplete section. Slivers, mostly. “Some of the pieces went back where they should.”
“Fragments. Ones small enough you could reabsorb them and instinctively put them back where they belonged. Come on.” He tugged on her hand, pointing at the section of her memories that were whole. “It will make more sense to that you.”
Nyx resisted. It was one thing to know in theory that she was older, but the her that
she was right now felt like stepping into Future Her’s shoes would make Current Her cease to exist. What was this other her like? What if she wasn’t a good person? What if—
“Your friends are worried about you,” Tobi said, gently squeezing her hand.
Her friends. The people in that room were her friends. And Seth was still with her. Time hadn’t changed that. He was her constant, and she was his. So everything would be fine.
She returned the squeeze of Tobi’s hand and let him guide her down. It was his magic she felt moving them now, unlike the free fall she’d done earlier to wake up, and she wondered why he hadn’t guided her this way before. Had he needed her permission to enter this part of her mind? Had she had to bring him into it with her?
The node they stood on descended with them, like a hover platform that grew smaller and smaller as they approached the unbroken part of her mind. Then her feet were on solid glowing ground, the node a small sphere in her hand, and she was herself again.
Twenty-six years old, staring up at the floating space-debris sea of her ruined memories. She looked away from them, back to the boy beside her.
If Seth had gone to Ankira for Tobi… “How long have I been out of it?”
“Five days.”
Relief hit her. Only five days. It wasn’t so much to have lost.
“Seth came to get me on the second, but I couldn’t find you then. Or the next day, or the next. Not until today.”
Because she’d been inside the Hiding as she disassembled it. He hadn’t found her until she’d cut the last thread and her mother’s magic was finally gone. On the one hand, it had allowed Tobi to find her. On the other hand, she’d never intended to destroy all of the Hiding at once.
She’d lost ten hours on Lehine, battling her mother as Elena fought Nyx’s efforts to reclaim her memories. But this time her mother hadn’t fought her. Not really. Nyx had simply gotten hooked on tearing down the net, cutting the strands, telling herself, “Just one more.” And it had been one more after that, and one more after that, and she hadn’t been able to stop.
Especially since she would swear her mother had been laughing at her the entire time. It had infuriated Nyx, until her focus had dwindled to nothing beyond the Hiding and her determination to have it out at all costs.
So she wasn’t surprised she hadn’t noticed anyone trying to wake her.
“Thank you for coming
to find me,” Nyx said.
Tobi nodded, only fidgeting a little. The last six months with Ankira and Diana had made him more accustomed to being thanked for what he did, but he still wasn’t used to being appreciated.
“You said you can’t fix this.” Nyx looked at the glowing sphere of memory in her palm, then at the mostly-empty puzzle board before her. “Do you know how I fix it?”
He hesitated, clearly not wanting to answer.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “Just tell me.”
His voice shifted again, taking on that chorus-like sound it did when the Congregation was really sitting up and paying attention. “We don’t know if you can. Not without getting lost in yourself, and there’s no guarantee we can pull you out again if that happens. We’ve been here for hours, waiting to find a version of you we could reason with. Your earlier selves are extremely stubborn and distrustful.”
Hardly shocking, considering what she knew about her life. “So I need to get lost for a while to fix it. How long are we talking? A couple days? A couple weeks?”
Tobi’s silence was not encouraging.
“A couple months?” she ventured. The last thing she wanted, after having lost the memories of the first eighteen years of her life, was to turn around and lose an actual few months of it to what essentially amounted to a medically-induced coma. Especially not now, when she had a mass-murderer stashed in the Station’s Heart and impossible promises to keep regarding a certain Harvester.
“Years,” Tobi said finally. “Almost as many as there are memories.”
That…couldn’t be right. “But the pieces that are back in place—they didn’t take that long.” Nor had she gotten lost in her own mind when she’d remembered them.
“They are extremely small pieces of a whole,” Tobi/the Congregation said. “Pieces you were likely already reaching for, instinctively needing to recall and managing to free from this”—he gestured at the broken
sea above her—“web.”
Frustration bit at Nyx. She’d spent years wanting to know who she was. She’d spent six months knowing about the Hiding and desperately trying to regain what had been taken. She’d finally found a way to undo it all, a way that was supposed to fix everything, and now this. “I don’t understand. When Seth put the pendant on that let him circumvent the Hiding, all of his memories just came back. This”—she gestured to the sea above, then to the empty board—“why is it separate?”
“We have a theory.” Tobi/the Congregation didn’t sound like they wanted to share it. “Some number of us worked with Hidden, before the near-elimination of your line. Based on that knowledge of how your magic works, we might be able to explain what you are currently experiencing.”
“I’m listening.”
“The mind isn’t the body, but it is like the body. It can be broken the same way a body can. The net that was cast around your memories was meant only to contain them—to Hide you from you—in the same way a physical net cast around a person contains their body.
“But if the person caught in the net fights it, and their captor draws the net tighter in an attempt to contain them, eventually it grows tight enough to cut. And if the captive keeps fighting and the net keeps clamping down, and the strands of the net are too strong to break?”
“Then the person inside the net breaks,” Nyx finished for him.
“The cohesive whole of your memories was fractured. It appears that, once broken, the pieces became woven into the threads of the net as opposed to resting within it. You have cut the cords of the net, but your memories are still attached to it.”
“Then the Hiding is still active?” That couldn’t be possible. She’d felt her mother’s power dissolving as she cut the strands.
“No. It is more that the skeleton of it remains, and your memories are still stuck to it. Which is fortunate, because that is what is holding them from dropping back into your consciousness all at once. Without it, you would have no choice but to attempt to reincorporate them en masse. Given the chaotic tangle they are in, we are not certain the attempt wouldn’t fundamentally break your psyche.”
Her stomach dropped. “That’s comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.” Apparently the Congregation part of Tobi didn’t have a sense of humor. “As it is, now that you’ve broken the bonds, even the skeleton will begin to degrade. As it does, as pieces break free, you may find yourself confused again until you can place the piece where it belongs.”
“What do you mean by place it? And how am I supposed to do that when I might not
even remember any of this?”
“For the first, instinct.” He nodded at the puzzle board. She walked onto it, the piece of memory cradled in her hands, and tried to think instinctively. But that wasn’t how instinct worked, so she cleared her mind as much as she could, walking blindly around the space until she felt a tug and followed it. Like playing hot-or-cold with pieces of her brain. She let that tugging sensation guide her until the memory island leaped out of her cupped hands. It settled onto the board, sinking and melding and filling up one of the thousands of hollow places inside her.
She looked up at the sea above her—hundreds of blinking islands and specks of dust and jagged pieces—and knew what Tobi would tell her.
“I can’t fix this, can I?” she said softly. Not without losing more years of her life to the process. How much time would she have to spend with each fraction of memory in order to find out where it belonged?
“Everything broken can be put back together. But it is not always worth the time to fix something old, when something new can be made.”
Despite everything, a smile tugged at the corner of Nyx’s lips. “Are you telling me I should focus on the future instead of the past?”
“If you want to be certain of having a future? Yes.”
“But you said this is all going to fall down bit by bit anyway. What does that look like?”
“As pieces break free, your conscious mind will naturally latch onto them, in an attempt to categorize them and fit them back where they belong. If the pieces are small enough, you may simply find yourself arrested by a poignant memory—I believe this is what Seth described you experiencing before, each time you’ve recalled specific events.
“But if the piece that falls free contains a longer time period, say a span of days or weeks as opposed to a moment, you may once again think yourself twelve, or eleven, or nine, or so on.”
Nyx didn’t like any of the possible outcomes attached to that scenario. How was she supposed to function if at any moment she could be yanked out
of the present? If she was receiving an Arrival and suddenly became a version of herself who didn’t know what the Station was or how she’d gotten there, it could be catastrophically bad.
“How fast is this going to happen?”
“We can’t say at this point. We have a baseline of the skeleton’s composition at present. If we check it daily over the next week, we should be able to establish a rate of decay and give you a better idea.”
Rate of decay. Because there was a corpse rotting in her brain. On some level, she understood that all of this—the debris field above, the “skeleton”, the puzzle board—were just constructs her mind had created so that she could comprehend what was happening. She wasn’t actually in a physical place surrounded by physical things, so she didn’t actually have a skeleton inside her that wasn’t her own. But knowing that what lingered was only the inactive remnants of her mother’s magic didn’t make it feel any less…gross.
“I know you said you couldn’t put me back together, but can you at least stop the decay? Or, I don’t know, put something in place to hold it back?” So she could choose to reabsorb memories at times when she could afford to be lost to the world and potentially confused about when she was in time.
“I’m sorry, but we work with the body, not the mind. Finding you without damaging anything was difficult enough. Any attempt to alter what is here may irrevocably damage your mind.”
“So that’s it? There’s nothing I can do?”
“This was done by a Hidden. You are a Hidden. Our best advice to you is to try and recreate what was done.”
Recreate what was done. Hide herself all over again. Or, better yet, not have spent the last five days cutting her mother’s Hiding to pieces.
The poetic injustice of it was so thick that Nyx started laughing. She was still laughing when Tobi pulled her out of herself, until she was no longer looking inward, but out on her room. The concerned faces of everyone she cared about in the world looked back. Even then, she couldn’t stop laughing. When she doubled over, tears leaking out the corners of her eyes, it was Seth’s voice that broke everyone else’s stunned silence. “Could you guys give us a minute?”
“Nyxi?” Seth crouched in front of her, his dark eyes concerned.
“Don’t worry,” she managed in between gasps of the laughter she couldn’t quite quell. “I’m not having a psychotic break. Yet.”
“Yet?” he repeated.
The reminder that she would, in all likelihood, have one if she couldn’t recreate her mother’s Hiding finally sobered her. She pressed her fingertips against eyes gone dry and grainy, and gave Seth the short version of what Toby had told her.
By the time she finished, Seth’s jaw was clenched and he had a look she knew all too well. “Don’t,” she told him. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Get that look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You do. It’s the this-is-all-my-fault look. The if-I-hadn’t-wanted-Nyx-to-remember-this-wouldn’t-have-happened look. It would have happened. There is no scenario in which I found out how to undo my mother’s Hiding and I didn’t go for it. So stop looking at me like that.”
He blew out a breath. “You know you’re a real pain in the ass sometimes, right?”
“I know. That’s why you—”
“Little Guardian,” Morgen called from outside the room. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but there is an upset unicorn-dragon out here about to set someone on fire.”
Nyx launched to her feet, tapping back into the Station’s senses as she flung the door open. A rush of information and sensation slammed into her, as if the Station was trying to make up for the last few days that she’d been unaware of its happenings.
She shut it all back out before the flurry of information made her trip over her own feet. As it was, she still ran into Morgen. Or rather, she ran into the arm he flung out to prevent her from running down the spiral staircase that was no longer there.
Nyx peered over the edge. Temerex pawed angrily at the floor, sparks flying each time her hoof struck the ground. She saw Nyx and straightened, letting out an excited neigh that was followed by an image of Temerex on the second floor with Nyx.
Nyx sent back an image of Nyx on the ground floor with Temerex instead, and looked behind the unicorn-dragon to where Griff and the others waited. “Do I want to ask what happened to the stairs?”
Griff, currently in what she thought of as his medium-sized form—roughly the size of a full-grown St. Bernard—removed his spectacles, polishing them on his feathers as he answered. “Temerex, in what I believe was a state of extreme concern over your well-being, attempted
to climb the staircase. She became stuck and was resistant to attempts to help extricate her. I was worried she would injure herself. Removing the staircase was the most logical solution to the predicament.”
Nyx looked at Tem. “You tried to climb a staircase? A spiral staircase?” She sent an image of Tem with her legs stuck between the ladder-like stair steps.
Temerex blew out an indignant breath that came with an image that was the absence of Nyx, with a general sense of panic, fear, and loneliness behind it.
Well, shit. Nyx conjured the stairs back into existence and went down to stroke Temerex’s neck.
It had been less than two weeks since Temerex had been rescued from her isolation on Amentia Furor and abandoned by the man she thought of as her father. Then Nyx had disappeared on her for the last five days. Of course she was panicking.
“I’m not going anywhere, okay? I promise. This is your home now.” She sent an image of the two of them turning gray together and hoped it translated. It seemed to, because Tem blew out a breath, lipped at Nyx’s shirt, then sent Nyx an image of the two of them running outside.
“Give me a couple hours?” She sent an image of the sun in the middle of the sky over an empty field, then one of the sun later in the sky with Nyx and Tem in the field. Tem bobbed her head, then bumped Nyx’s shoulder. It was going to take Nyx some time to stop flinching every time the mare did that, since she kept having visions of being accidentally gored by the unicorn-dragon’s affections. She patted the finely-scaled neck and watched as Tem turned and trotted to the door that led to her outside enclosure.
“Why does it seem like she actually understands you when you talk?” Morgen asked.
Nyx shrugged. “The whole image communication thing was weird at first, but I think I’m getting a handle on it.”
“Image communication?” Morgen echoed.
“I don’t know what else to call it. Is there an official term for beings that communicate via mental pictures? Some kind of visual telepathy or something?...
