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“She’s okay,” Sam said, glancing at Evie. “I know she’s okay somehow.”
“How do you feel?” Evie asked the others. The extreme pain had ebbed to a dull tension, like a headache trying to come on.
“Better,” Jericho said. “A little odd.”
The others nodded. Ling did not have her crutches here, and Evie supposed it was because she and Henry had created a bubble of a dream for them to inhabit. Hadn’t Henry said that Ling could walk unaided in dreams?
The dead were everywhere, standing in the broken fields, not moving or thinking, staring off into nothing, a story without an end. There were thousands of them, too many for the land of the dead to house for long. Theta held her breath as a listless ghost woman, face eaten by rot, shuffled past in search of something that could not be named. Theta felt a touch of the woman’s restlessness inside her own soul. The dead woman stopped and sniffed but
, seeing nothing, moved on.
Theta exhaled. “Sam. Your power seems to be working.”
“For now,” Sam said. “Whatever we’re gonna do, we’d better do it fast, before Marlowe and the generals start invading—or those dead get wise to us.”
“Look!” Ling pointed to a long rift on the horizon. The giant, breathing wound stretched wider with each groan on its way to permanence.
“The breach…” Memphis said.
Henry’s eyes widened. “That’s what we have to heal?”
“Don’t be a baby,” Ling grumbled.
“How is it possible for you to insult me in two worlds?”
“Practice.”
The rift was a wonder to behold, though, like being present at the creation of a new universe, and Ling marveled that so much death and such new life could exist in the same place at the same moment.
“This is a lot of atomic energy,” Ling said. “If you could harness all that, the power it generated would be enormous.”
“So we’re existing in two universes at the same time?” Evie asked. She wanted to be sure she understood.
“Yes,” Ling said.
“And they’re connected?”
“Yes,” Ling said in an annoyed voice. “I don’t have time to teach a science class.”
“So if we destroy the Eye in this universe…”
“It should destroy it in our world,” Ling confirmed.
“And what happens if we die in this world?” Sam asked.
Ling swallowed hard. “As I said, it’s all connected.”
A palpable current ran from the Eye through the Diviners’ bodies and back into the land of the dead. Every second they spent here empowered the King of Crows and fed the widening breach. The longer they stayed, the more they were being threaded into this world. If they stayed too long, they might not have the power to get out again.
“Why aren’t we burning up, like the other Diviners did?” Theta asked.
“I imagine the dream state Henry and I created is keeping us protected for now, like being inside a womb. That along with Sam’s ‘don’t see me’ act.”
Henry gestured to the swirling, expanding breach. “At least it’s a womb with a view.”
“You want me to kill him for you?” Theta asked Ling. “I got firepower.”
But Ling’s thoughts were on solutions. “I don’t know how long we can keep it up. I don’t know how long our bodies can withstand the damage the Eye inflicts. Pretty soon, we’re going to end up like the others,” she warned.
