Page 85 of The Malevolent Eight

‘To be fair, most of those are Corrigan’s,’ I replied, and only in the echo from the other me did I realise we’d spoken at the same time.

Aw, aren’t we cute?I thought.

The Eliva’ren who’d raised the son who belonged to a different version of herself looked troubled as she reached out a hand to still the strands around us. They were vibrating at an increasing rate. ‘The potentialities are beginning to intertwine. The Pandoral realm is collapsing at last.’ She knelt before Hamun and hugged him fiercely. ‘You know what must happen now, don’t you, my darling? You know what to do?’

He hugged her back, so tightly his feet almost came off the ground. ‘I do, Mother.’

‘No weeping,’ she said, though she herself was crying. ‘Everyone has three dooms, my love, and this is the very best of mine.’ She gently pulled his arms from around her, then placed his right hand in mine. ‘Go with him now. He’ll take you to your mother.’

The other Cade grabbed my shoulder, squeezing hard enough to remove any doubt as to the sentiment– if not the words– he was about to convey. ‘Hey, shithead. Don’t fuck this up, okay?’

‘Daddy!’ the boy said. ‘You’re not supposed to swear.’

Cade looked at me, a pained expression on his face. ‘Nine years without swearing. Can you imagine what that was like?’ Then he grinned at Eliva’ren. ‘Though there were a few compensations.’

‘Go,’ she said to me. ‘Hamun will know how to navigate the strands. The two of you must follow what will at first be the merepotentialof the gate back to your world, through its varying probabilities until you find its inevitability. Don’t look back– and whatever you do, don’t let yourself be drawn into other potentialities. This realm is about to collapse.’

I felt oddly guilty for the Pandoral being who had helped me get here and was now going to witness the end of his own plane of existence. Then again, he’d known what was coming, and in that brief moment of connection I’d had to him through the bug-being I’d created from one of the insects making up his swarm, he’d reminded me, ‘Order is only temporary. Chaos is eternal. The Pandoral realm will arise again, and when it does, you stupid meatsack, we’ll come for yours.’

‘Come on, Cade,’ the boy said, tugging on my hand. Even as we slipped between glittering strands of potentiality, I paused to glance back at the other me, holding his Eliva’ren in his arms and watching existence crumbling around them.

‘Hey, arsehole,’ I called out to the me who’d experienced at least a few years of a life I’d never imagined for myself, ‘what was it like?’

He didn’t have to ask what I was referring to. For a moment, he looked starry-eyed, which was surely just the tears coming. Then he smiled, a smile I badly wished my own lips had ever had reason to shape. ‘There are no words, Brother.’

And with that, Hamun and I raced through a landscape without ground or sky or direction with the jaws of oblivion snapping at our heels.

Chapter 48

Paths of Potentiality

It’s a strange thing, to be led through a kaleidoscopic miasma of collapsing possibilities by a nine-year-old boy. I mean, all that chaos and having events that may or may not have already happened whipping me in the face like slender tree branches through a forest at once dark as midnight yet shimmering from a thousand, thousand stars was, to put it mildly, weird. But the more discomfiting sensation was simply being pulled along by someone else’s hand. For all that my life had been one long string of fuck-ups ranging from the merely embarrassing to the nearly cataclysmic, I’d always been in charge of my own destiny.

That sounds laughable right about now, I know, but it’s true. The choices– okay, idiot mistakes– I’d made had been mine, not someone else’s. I was utterly shit at taking orders, which was at least part of the reason I’d left the Justiciars and entirely why I’d skipped over every other possible career to become a mercenary war mage. I’d even ended up leading our little band of emotionally confused wonderists. And yet here I was, being led around by some kid who seemed to thinkhewas in charge.

‘Stop ruminating,’ Hamun said, yanking me to what I thought was the right but when I actually looked at our direction realised was more like forty-five degrees downwards on a perpendicular axis to—You know what? Let’s just pretend we turned right.

‘Ruminating’s kind of my thing, kid.’

He shoved me back all of a sudden, which I thought was the beginnings of a temper tantrum but turned out to be just another change of direction. ‘We’re not just moving through space, Da—Cade, I mean.’

Awkward.

Give the kid credit: he knew how to stare; this one made it clear I’d be better off pretending not to have noticed any slip of the tongue on his part. I wondered whether maybe I’d taught him that. He pointed to the curtains of shimmering strands. Their vibrations were becoming ever more unnerving as possibilities collapsed all around us. ‘This space we’re moving through is made up of potential events constrained by the choices we either have or could make.’

‘And we’re running out of potential outcomes?’

He nodded. ‘We can’t go anywhere our choices couldn’t lead to, which means we have to keep conceiving alternatives other than the ones that already haven’t worked.’

He sounded awfully smart for a kid, but I supposed he’d had a lot of time to think about this stuff. Still, I had to make it clear who was the superior intellect here.

‘So you want me to think happy thoughts?’

Hamun rolled his eyes and gave a martyr’s sigh I recognised all too well as my own. ‘Do you really want to find out what happens when your consciousness is snuffed out because it no longer has a universe in which to exist?’

‘Fine. What do we do?’

The vibrations were speeding up but the strands were shimmering less, their odd emanations of images of various possible existences being replaced by a lifeless, formless grey.

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