For the first, possibly only, time in his second life—maybe in his entire life—Gerard Keay existed in a single, solitary moment.
Ordinarily his every breath was simultaneously one he was taking for the first time, one he would take someday, and one he had taken a thousand times over. He could see every point in his life from every angle and every near-death experience that every person in the world had ever had. The whispers and echoes even suggested to him that, with a little effort and concentration, he could see every near-death experience that every person in the world would or could ever have, including the one that would eventually get so near as to tip them over the edge…if he so chose. Which he did not. As himself, he didn’t want to know about future suffering…and as a servitor of the End, it did not please his master simply to know that such things would happen, only to taste the fear of someone experiencing it—or anticipating that experience. Since he wasn’t the sort to sit behind a crystal ball wrapped in a turban and put on a mysterious voice to “caution” people about their impending doom, looking into the future was useless.
But right now, standing in the Panopticon built for Millbank Prison, staring at the body of someone he’d tried to consider a friend watching him with the eyes—eye—of someone he knew to be an enemy, he wished he had used it, just once, to see how this turned out.
Except. Except he couldn’t have. Whether because of the journey out of, or through, or alongside time or because of the way the Panopticon was warded to protect Jonah Magnus’ original body or for some other reason that he couldn’t quite manage to put his finger on, this moment existed solely and entirely in and of itself. Gerry couldn’t sense any of the moments strung along his past like beads on a necklace, nor see the black marks of death on any of the people in the room. Yet he wasn’t without power—he’d sensed the instant before the gun went off, felt the death of Peter Lukas add to the energy rush he’d got from destroying the two Hunters, tasted the disgust upon looking at Elias Bouchard’s body and realizing that nothing had truly died when Basira shot it—so it was only warded against being seen or felt or known from the outside, not from any other power wreaking havoc when it got here.
He just didn’t know what to do with that.
“Basira, what did you do?” Daisy demanded, her voice full of dread.
“Exactly what I meant for her to do.” Basira—or Jonah Magnus piloting Basira’s body—pushed to her feet and stood in front of them, as though this were an everyday workplace briefing, an image marred only by the splatters of blood on the jacket of her charcoal suit. “You see, Peter Lukas brought her here to destroy…that.” She gestured grandly at Jonah Magnus’ corpse without taking her heterochromatic gaze off of the rest of them. “He told her that doing so would destroy me, destroy my hold on the Institute, and put Basira—a mix of the Lonely and the Eye—in the proper position to take control of the Panopticon herself. Basira, of course, didn’t truly believe him.”
“Was he telling the truth?” Martin asked in a barely controlled voice that told Gerry he was having a hard time resisting the urge to compel Jonah—it seemed easier to think of the person speaking to them Jonah despite the outward form—despite knowing it wouldn’t work.
“About the first part, perhaps,” Jonah said carelessly. “I don’t actually know. Nobody’s ever tried before. The second, however—no, that is by no means how it works. Basira would no more have been in control of the Panopticon than she was of the Institute at any point in the last few months. Still, it’s immaterial, because she wisely chose not to trust Peter Lukas, and instead shot him. She is quite a good shot. And the instant she had shot him, she also shot Elias Bouchard.” A smirk curled Basira’s mouth. “Which is precisely what I wanted her to do.”
“Why?” Melanie began, and then stopped and stared at him. “Your eye. That’s how you fucking change bodies all the time—it’s tied to your eye. You just transferred it into Basira’s head.”
“A simplistic explanation, but it will do,” Jonah agreed. “The transfer is triggered by the death of one host body, and automatically takes over the next. I wasn’t entirely sure how well it would work without both eyes, but as you can see…it’s done admirably.”
“Let her go.” Daisy spoke sharply and firmly, but Gerry could hear the tiny note of pleading in her voice. He really, really hoped Jonah couldn’t.
“I’m afraid it’s far too late for that, Detective,” Jonah said, and even Gerry thought it was weird to hear the word Detective directed at Daisy out of Basira’s mouth. “Haven’t you heard that the eyes are the window to the soul? Well, I have, metaphorically speaking, closed the shutters. I’ve taken over Basira’s life force. I—nngh.”
He contorted, the same way Michael had when the Distortion tried to reassert control—the same way Martin did when he was fighting back the Eye—the same way Gerry knew he himself did when he was being punished for not giving the End what it wanted. There was a struggle going on. When he—no, she looked up, there was something—a relaxing of the posture, a determined set to the jaw, a flash of fear in the eye—that said Basira had gained the upper hand, at least for a moment.
“Daisy,” she gritted out. “Kill me. It’s the only way to get him out—aah—”
She contorted again, rolling her head on her neck, and resumed the posture that said Jonah was back in control. More calmly, he said, “Yes, that is true, but I will simply move on to the next body.”
“Don’t care,” Daisy growled. “Try to take me over, I fucking dare you. I’ll gouge you out of my head myself.”
“Ah, but it won’t be you, Detective,” Jonah said silkily.
“You think I’m going to let anyone else get close enough to you?” Daisy took a step forward. Gerry could read the grief on her face. He didn’t see the black marks on any of them, which could have meant they weren’t going to die, or could have meant there was no way they survived. Or could have meant that part of his power was suppressed here, in this place where only the Eye was allowed to see, and that seemed the most likely.
Which was fine. He would rather not know for sure. At the same time…
“It’s not proximity.” Jonah spread Basira’s hands out and smiled. It was not a nice smile. “I can control whom I take over, should there be more than one…option in the room. And if I simply transfer my consciousness into Martin’s body, well, I can use him as intended—to start my ritual—without having to resort to threats.”
“What?” Jon and Melanie shouted in angry, terrified unison.
“To bring the Eye into the world?” Martin raised his chin slightly and stared Jonah down with a triumphant smirk. “Nice try. It wouldn’t work. I’ve been Marked—”
“By all fourteen Fears,” Jonah completed.
“Thirteen,” Martin said, but there was a flicker of uncertainty in his expression, just for a moment.
“I had suspected—or rather hoped—you didn’t know about that fourteenth one,” Jonah said, almost pleasantly. “Not that you understood, of course, but even if you had…oh, you would have continued to believe you weren’t of use anyway. Either way, it meant you came here, just when I needed you.”
“What are you talking about, old man?” Gerry growled.
The look in the grey eye was cold as it skimmed over Gerry. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. Even without Basira’s memories.”
“I don’t actually give a flying fuck if you do or not, you body-stealing bastard.” Gerry glanced at Martin, then at Daisy, very briefly. They needed a plan here. None of them had one. They weren’t even sure what they were planning against, which meant there was only one thing to do. Stall.
“He asked you a question,” Martin said, his voice low and dangerous. “What are you talking about?”
“The keystone of the ritual I devised to—oh.” Jonah sighed with pleasure in a way that made Jon and Martin shudder. Even Gerry felt slimy at the way that sigh caressed the air.
Daisy snarled. “If you even think the word tingle, I will snap your fucking neck.”
“You would do that to your partner?” Jonah tried to raise one of Basira’s eyebrows and seemed annoyed that he couldn’t seem to manage it. Evidently Basira’s muscles didn’t work that way.
“Not my partner,” Daisy snapped. “She made that very fucking clear. And it sounds like Martin is strong enough to force an answer out of you if he tries hard enough, but the effort might kill him and then he’d be no use to you, yeah? Can’t go into a dead body. So tell us what the fuck your plan is. Not like we can stop it anyway.”
“That is true,” Jonah agreed. “It’s far too late for that. If you’ll all get comfortable…”
None of them moved. Jonah didn’t seem bothered by it. “Fine. Then I’ll begin.”
He steepled his fingers. It probably would have been more effective if he’d been leaning his elbows on a desk and resting his chin on the tips of them, but it would do well enough. “I suppose we should start at the beginning, as I’m sure you’re curious—why does a man attempt to destroy the world?”
“Power. Immortality.” Martin’s expression didn’t change, but Gerry heard the faint, gentle hiss of static in his words. “You’re not special in that regard. And if you tried to tell me there was any other motivation, I wouldn’t believe you. The Magnus family was rich but never rich enough, powerful but only in specific circles, important but never the kind another wealthy or powerful family would seek an alliance through marriage with, so you never had the opportunity for the kind of legacy the others in Smirke’s circle meant to build, did you? It was always about you. You meant it to happen during your first lifetime, and you failed, so you had to resort to…” He made a peremptory gesture that nevertheless conveyed his disgust at the unequal eyes. “This.”
The grey eye flickered with anger, and Gerry tensed, wondering—but before he could do anything, Jonah dropped his posture and placed one hand on his hip, looking not at Gerry but at Melanie with narrowed eyes. Gerry hadn’t even seen her start to move. “I would advise you not to do that, Melanie. I may need Martin, but I do not need the rest of you.”
Melanie froze. Gerry didn’t need to see her face to feel the burning hatred radiating off of it. Martin wrapped his hand around Jon’s, but made no other move. “Go on, then. We’ve established we’re more curious about the last three years than the previous two hundred. Is this why you appointed me to the Archives in the first place? To use for your ritual?”
“Oh, no,” Jonah said, relaxing and returning his gaze to the group at large, as pleasantly as if he hadn’t just threatened all of them. “On the contrary, you were…almost an unnecessary complication, at first. No, I had intended to use Jon.” He flicked his gaze to Jon briefly. “You came to me with the Mark of the Web already on you…Sasha had it too, of course, but I knew that Gertrude had, ah, marked her out as a potential successor and I was not about to risk my plans being delayed any further. So I selected you as the Archivist. My intention was to watch you, see how you handled the first inevitable attack that came your way, and then proceed. As for you, Martin, I appointed you as an Archival Assistant in hopes it would draw more attention to them. You were, ah, rather well known in our community as a troublemaker, and I was sure that anyone who knew you were working closely with the new Archivist would assume—correctly, as it happens—that a Beholding ritual was in the works, and attempt to stop it. It also had the added benefit of ensuring you could not quit and join another Fear’s ritual, knowingly or unknowingly.”
He spread out his hands briefly. “Of course, it hardly took any time before you came to Jane Prentiss’ attention, and led her—as I had hoped—directly to the Institute. When she attacked, I was watching from the beginning, my hand on the release lever. You performed well enough, Jon. I had intended to wait longer, to make sure the worms were all the way in and that you felt that fear down to your bones…but, well, circumstances dictated otherwise.” He flicked a contemptuous gaze at Gerry, just for a moment. “Still, it was enough to move ahead with.
“It took me some time after the attack to locate you, actually, and I do congratulate you on that. But when you and Melanie took your trip to Sheffield, I was watching you quite closely. I knew, of course, that Martin had likely filled you in on a great deal, although I was uncertain of how much. Still, the fact that you went willingly into a situation you knew was dangerous told me two things—first, that your curiosity would drive you into most places, and second, that your desire to protect those around you would drive you the rest of them. I tried to sow the seeds of paranoia between you, but even I admit that that was never particularly likely to succeed. The Stranger’s insertion into the Institute was a boon, of course, but as it remained primarily out of your orbit I was less concerned with it and more interested in the Spiral. After Sasha’s encounter with it, I thought it would be easy to nudge it to Mark you. In the end I had to bring one of its victims to the Institute—poor Helen, I had to put her in a cab myself, she was so confused—but she served her purpose. Between that and your first desperate flight through its tunnels, the Spiral has Marked you very deeply indeed.”
Jon put a hand on his side, but said nothing. It was as though they were all transfixed by the monologue. Jonah continued. “Jurgen Leitner was unexpected, and I admit I somewhat overreacted to that situation. I was still, of course, pretending at the time that I was unaware of just how much you knew, which was useful. I did not lie when I said I was concerned he might have told you too much too early, but it was nothing to do with the Fourteen and everything to do with what I worried Gertrude might have told him about my plans. I justified it to myself with the thought that I had meant to send you out into the world anyway. From there it was simply a matter of feeding you a few carefully curated statements to put you in the path of other Avatars. I was quite annoyed that Martin intervened and confronted Jude Perry before you could, but he was at least generous enough to hand over the late Mike Crew’s information so that you could, at least, get that Mark.
“I had not, I confess, paid a great deal of attention to Martin at that point. All of your assistants were little more than a means to an end, and while Martin had the potential to be either far more useful or far more of an obstruction, I was confident at that point that I could remove him without difficulty if necessary. But when you all gathered in my office to get me to confess to Gertrude’s murder, I certainly took notice.” Jonah’s gaze shifted to focus more on Martin than the rest of them, although Gerry could tell they were all, somehow, still pinned by it like flies in amber. “I had known you had some connection to the Ceaseless Watcher, but I had no idea how strong it was. I also had not realized just how many Marks you had yourself. I counted seven in total—the same number that Jon had. I still intended to use Jon for my plans, but I did begin watching you. And then the Stranger came after Jon, and you sacrificed yourself for him.
“Of course, by now I’m sure you know that I was always aware of where you were and what was happening to you. I knew that one of two things would happen. Either you would survive somehow, or Orsinov would in fact skin you and use you to attempt the Unknowing. I confess that I thought that the more likely outcome, and I had already laid my plans to isolate Jon from the remainder of the staff, to use your fate as a way to push him to acquire more Marks, perhaps to stray further afield from the Institute. Instead, the Spiral freed you and returned you to the Institute. And in that moment, I changed my plans. Your powers were growing quite strong, stronger than I think even you realized at the time, and it seemed to me you would make a better linchpin for the ritual. So I sent you to follow Gertrude’s path, knowing that something would attack you while you were gone.
“As soon as Miss Montauk met you at the Amtrak station, I knew you would be in a…desperate situation, shall we say, in addition to getting your own Hunt Mark. Rather than risk you heading to an embassy for assistance afterwards, I contacted an old friend who was able to get to America quickly and suggested he pick you up, that several weeks trapped on a boat with no sign of land or other vessels—only the empty sky and the fathomless depths of the sea—would be an amusing and novel way of tormenting someone. He fell for it, of course. He was always easy to manipulate with a bit of ‘fun.’ I even told him not to introduce himself to you, as you’d be more likely to trust him if you pieced together half stories and vague references and came to the entirely erroneous conclusion that I had sent Peter to pick you up.” Jonah smirked. “You still believe that, don’t you, Martin? But ask yourself—why would Peter have bothered to keep you company? Let alone point out the ‘sights’? No, it was not Peter Lukas you encountered. It was Simon Fairchild, and those weeks you spent knowing there was nothing between you and drowning but a bit of leaky wood Marked you sufficiently enough with the Vast.
“I admit that the Mark I worried the most about was the End. I was not yet aware that your…” Jonah glanced briefly at Gerry, and the expression was actually probably the most Basira-like face he’d seen since bursting in here as he continued, “…friend was here, but even so, you weren’t truly afraid of him. The biggest problem I faced was that if I put the End in your way too soon, you would simply die, whereas if I did so too late you might be powerful enough to see it coming, and perhaps even to guess why. But the Hunters took care of that well enough. I wonder if you realized it? No, of course you didn’t. But if you had ever listened back to the tape you brought back from that incident, perhaps you, if not the others, would have been able to sense it—the exact point during your father’s statement where your breathing stopped in the background. The point where, in fact, you did bleed out, Martin. The timing was just right, and you once again came through with flying colors.”
Gerry’s stomach lurched, and Jon swayed on his feet, but Martin remained impassive and steady as Jonah went on. “I could see from the debriefing we had immediately prior to the Unknowing that it was fortunate for me that the time before it was so short. Your abilities were coming on by leaps and bounds, and I was concerned that meeting face to face might result in you learning something you shouldn’t. I had initially planned to go into hiding, but when your colleagues surprised me with the police, well. It was easy enough to cut a deal.
“All that remained, then, were the Flesh, the Slaughter, and the Web. The Flesh was easy enough; I simply wrote to Jared Hopworth, and he attacked with remarkable haste. Of course by that point you were well able to defend yourselves against him and his ilk, but it was terrifying enough that you didn’t know that for sure, so the Mark was made. I was thoroughly unconcerned about the Slaughter. I had initially trapped Melanie for no other reason than because I knew Jon was hiding with her, and perhaps as potential leverage against you should I need to use it, but by the time I had chosen to use you, I knew she would eventually Mark you herself.
“That left only the Web, and I admit, I was rather hard pressed to think of how to put you in its way. Jon and Sasha, of course, were both Marked by it, and they were beginning to lean into it more than they did the Eye, but not nearly quickly enough to Mark you. Melanie made most of her progress towards the Slaughter while you were away, or before your powers were sufficient to truly see it, whereas even Jon’s shifting allegiance was done directly under your nose, and in such a way that you were bound to detect it before it was enough to actually Mark you. I racked my brain to find a way to get the Web to do more than lurk around the outskirts of the Institute, but nothing seemed foolproof enough. Unsurprising, really, that something that thrives on manipulation and maneuvering would be difficult to manipulate in turn. But then Annabelle Cane set the bait out herself…and you took it, Martin, without a moment’s hesitation.
“And not a moment too soon, either. Peter felt you were getting too close to figuring out his plans, and decided to make his play for final control of the Institute. I had, of course, proposed a wager, allowed him to attempt to turn any employee of his choosing to the Lonely, and said that if he succeeded he would gain permanent control of the Institute. Really, Basira was the best choice for that from his point of view. She had the fewest tethers, she felt the most abandoned, and even before she began working closely with Peter, she thought she had nothing to lose. If only he hadn’t tried so hard.” Jonah laughed, rather cruelly. “Or just done what I asked him to do in the first place. But no, he had to try and get her on his side, convince her this was to save the world. He set off with her to find this place, while you set off for Hill Top Road. Melanie and Jon followed you to rescue you, and once I was sure you would arrive on time, I broke out of prison and came here to meet Peter and Basira…and to wait for you. I had intended to call you to me, but as it turned out, there was no need.
“And so there was only Basira’s decision. Peter told her that destroying my original body would let him—through her—control the Panopticon and see how close the Extinction was to genesis. He offered to let her kill me. Of course I knew what choice she would ultimately make. Could she have chosen anything else? And now…” Jonah spread out his hands. “Here we all are.”
Martin drew in a ragged breath, and Gerry could see that he was trembling slightly. For several seconds that Gerry could practically feel, nobody spoke.
Finally, Melanie broke the silence. “Why?”
Jonah blinked. He looked faintly annoyed. “I’m sorry?”
“Why this?” Melanie gestured emphatically at Martin and Jon. “Like, I get that you’re a sadistic bastard, you probably get off on torturing people, but the Ceaseless Watcher doesn’t get anything out of pain, so what was the point in traumatizing Martin over and over and over? How does that help you take over the fucking world?”
“Ah.” Just like that, Jonah was all self-satisfied smiles again. “That’s certainly simple enough to explain. It was Gertrude Robinson who gave me the idea, actually. She was unlike any other Archivist ever seen before—almost single-minded in her devotion to take down the rituals—and over the years, I couldn’t help but watch with fascination. It made me wonder why no ritual ever had succeeded before. It was possible there had been a long line of Gertrude Robinsons, but I found that hard to credit. Could it be, then, that there was something in the very concept of the rituals that meant they couldn’t succeed? She was clearly having similar thoughts in that last year, all of which culminated with the People’s Church. When I saw that she was making no preparations whatsoever to stop it, I realized she was putting into practice a theory, and one she couldn’t afford to be wrong. She was going to wait, and see if the unopposed ritual succeeded, or if it collapsed under its own strain as mine had all those years ago. Knowing Gertrude, I’m sure she had a backup plan if she had miscalculated — but she had not. The ritual failed. And all at once, I realized what needed to be done.
“You see, the fact of the matter is that the Fears can never be truly separated. Where is the line where fear of senseless violence crosses over into fear of being hunted, or the mask of the Stranger turns to the confusion of the Spiral? Even ones that seem to be in opposition cannot exist without one another, for how can you fear the Buried if you don’t know there is an alternative? The rituals intending to bring only one into the world were always doomed to fail. We call them by their own names, but in the end, they are all Fear, and they are all one. The only way to bring them through is to recognize all parts of it, and welcome it. So I crafted a new ritual, one that would invoke all of the Fourteen at once—with the Eye to oversee, of course. We mustn’t forget our roots. And that is where you come in.”
“You had me Marked with all fourteen Fears so I would be a conduit for all of them,” Martin said, his voice laden with horror. “So I could—what, channel them all?”
“Of course.” Jonah’s smile took on a decidedly cruel curve. “The moment I knew it would work was the moment I saw that the contracts had changed—that you were the Archivist, Martin. As I told you at the time, that had never happened before…because it never mattered before who the Archivist was. The timing wasn’t right, the groundwork wasn’t laid. This time it was—and the Ceaseless Watcher selected its own standard-bearer.” He sighed, almost wistfully. “It’s a shame—I had enjoyed the potential irony that the so-called Chosen One was, in the end, simply someone I chose. But I suppose, in the end, the irony is even greater—because you chose it.”
“Like hell he did,” Melanie spat.
Jonah lifted both eyebrows, evidently having decided to take the best alternative to a single arched eyebrow that was readily available to him. “Didn’t he? Did he not press on to investigate the hints of the Corruption he saw in that building? Did he not make an appointment with Jude Perry despite knowing what she was? Did he not sacrifice himself, again and again, to keep the rest of you safe? You had the knowledge that it would be safer to walk away—and still you chose to stay. Whether you want to believe it or not, your choices have led you here.”
“You talk too much, you smarmy bastard,” Tim growled.
But not enough, Gerry thought. He had laid out his entire plan, told them exactly what he was planning and what he had prepared Martin for, been talking for what seemed like twenty minutes straight…and they still had no idea how to stop him. Or at least Gerry didn’t.
“You’ve failed,” Martin said defiantly. His eyes flashed green, and Gerry did at least have the small satisfaction of seeing that take Jonah a bit off guard. “Because there’s one choice I won’t make, and that’s to join you. By my grandfather’s love and my grandmother’s courage, by the might of the sea and the strength of the stone, by all that is and will be, I defy you, Jonah Magnus, and I will never willingly help you to doom the world.”
The power that crackled through those words was different than the one that usually accompanied Martin’s compulsions—closer to the whirring of a tape recorder—and Gerry knew that it was the spell Alastair had woven that gave him the power to say it. And for a moment, he thought it had worked, that it had given them an edge.
Jonah, however, simply smirked. “That’s not really an issue, is it?”
Sasha’s hands curled into fists. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I have all Basira’s knowledge, and skill. And most crucially…” Jonah reached to the small of his back and withdrew a heavy steel object. “I have her gun.”
All of them made various noises of shock and alarm, and Basira’s brown eye flashed with panic. Jon, with a bravery Gerry knew he didn’t believe he possessed—or maybe just a desperation—moved in front of Martin, but Gerry saw the panic in Daisy’s eyes and knew who it was for. Sure enough, Jonah tipped the gun towards the ceiling—towards Basira.
He meant to shoot her in the head. Meant to kill her with a single bullet, and transfer his eyes to Martin. And none of them knew enough about that process to stop it.
“No,” Daisy snarled. She leaped for Basira, but Jonah easily eluded her. He was having more trouble raising the gun, though. Evidently Basira’s remaining eye—something Jonah Magnus had never had to deal with—meant she, or part of her anyway, had survived the transfer.
It gave Gerry a bit of hope that, even if he managed to get his eye into Martin, Martin could fight him off long enough to…what?
“Jon,” Martin said in a low voice. He reached out, took Jon’s hand, and squeezed it tightly.
Jon looked up at him. Most of the others were watching Jonah, so Gerry was pretty sure he was the only one who saw the sudden look of raw, naked terror that suffused his features. “No,” he whispered, so softly Gerry was sure only he and Martin could hear it.
“It might be our only chance. You promised.” Martin took his eyes off of Jonah long enough to meet Jon’s, and that brief eye contact said more than the greatest romantic speeches in history.
And Gerry refused—refused—to have those be his little brother’s last words.
Time—
—fractures, shattering into a thousand crystalline shards radiating out from a central point, and Gerry realizes that this is the moment everything has led up to, the fragile tipping point between eternity and oblivion, the truest point of inevitability. There is no path that could have been taken, no universe that has or will ever existed, where someone has not been brought to the very edge of the end of the world, be it Martin or Jon or Sasha or Tim, or someone long dead or someone as yet unborn, someone is presented with the moment of knowing that their next action will cause the apocalypse, and while the exact moment in time may not be so certain, its existence is a fundamental part of the universe, and the End both hungers for and fears it. At the same time, there are just as many paths leading away from this point as leading to it, just as many ways it can go, and this moment will not come again, so they need only find the path that leads away and all will be—all will be—all will be, and that is all they can ask of it. They can save the world, if they can only find the right way out.
His vision flickers, and the moment that Martin turns to face Jonah and Daisy crouches to lunge for the gun and Melanie and Jon square up to sacrifice themselves, a moment he sees through his own eyes as well as each of theirs, is the same moment as every other, and he stands in the center of a rapidly twisting kaleidoscope of mirrors and images, past and present and yet to come all happening at once and indistinguishable from one another. He sees a series of men—tall, short, fat, thin, middle-aged and barely out of their thirties, all unknown except the one he knows as Elias Bouchard—stand before him with expressions of pride, surprise, or smug satisfaction, all of which fade rapidly to terror as he pulls out a knife or a gun or a vial of poison, then to shock as he uses it on himself, then hears their screams abruptly cut off as his vision arcs through the space between them and lets him see another body, at once well known and but half remembered. He sees the ghost of a man he knows has the face he will have when he gets old kneeling in front of him with worry in the echo of his green eyes as he reaches for his face, sees an ancient and obviously sick man’s eyes flare with anger as he draws a knife to plunge into his hand, sees a woman in a sleeveless shirt lean forward with a knowing smirk as she holds out her hand for him to shake. He sees a hundred moments of triumph or laughter or just resignation as they pass a lighter around while a book hangs suspended over a pot. He sees the collapsing tunnel beneath the Mermaid Inn and feels the mud choking him so that he can’t even sing the next verse of the song that might save them, sees the solid curtain of darkness enveloping him and making his glasses worse than useless, sees Melanie lunge at him with a knife she got from God knows where and plunge it into his shoulder. He sees a knife press into his wrist, sees a flash of purple as a book in a mess of a bargain bin catches his attention, sees the fog swirl around him and make everything unfamiliar and strange. He sees the empty sky and sea out the window of a boat, sees something thick and white press into his eyes, sees a mound of flesh shambling towards him with malicious intent. He sees Jon cup his face in his hands, stare into his eyes, and solemnly promise to kill him if he ever crosses the line fully from human to monster, and feels the relief coupled with the determination to do everything in his power to keep that from happening flow through him. He sees a woman wearing the remains of a red dress and a body riddled with holes smile beatifically at him and ask Do you hear the singing, sees a mannequin wearing a ringmaster’s costume and a Pagliaccio lean over to run a plasticine finger along his cheek and croon You know all about the power that can be written on a skin. He sees a pale, almost skeletal man with long black hair streaked orange and white land a sudden punch on his eye, which explodes into cold, agonizing pain such as he hasn’t felt in a long, long time—
—and snaps back to the present and to himself as he realizes what to do.
He circles behind Daisy, brushing her arm to get her attention as he does so, and moves up on Jonah’s—Basira’s left side, the side that still has her eye on it. Not taking his gaze from Jonah’s eye, he begins to sing. “Sally is a gal down in our alley…”
Melanie shoots him a quick look of confusion. Jonah, too, seems momentarily distracted from his attempt to shoot Basira’s body, although he recovers when the gun lowers and starts trying to raise it again. Daisy and Tim seem to get it first—a surprise, he would have thought Melanie and Martin would pick up on it quicker—and not only join in on the response portion but start moving as well, backing up and circling around Jonah/Basira as they sing. When the first chorus hits, though, Martin suddenly straightens, grabs Jon’s hand, and pulls him back as he begins to sing too. He lets Tim have the second verse, which is fine; it doesn’t matter what order they go in, only that they all take a turn before it gets back to Gerry.
There are probably better songs he could have picked, but it needs to be one with something they can all sing and with enough verses for them all to take one, and if it’s good and confusing, well, that works too. Certainly Jonah has no idea what’s going on, and he’s torn between struggling with Basira for control of the gun—she’s fighting him, Gerry is pleased to see—and trying to keep track of all of them.
Gerry lets the song buoy him. He feels the air around him grow colder, hears the rush of air he’s used to hearing when he draws on Terminus, and as he looks at the figure in the center of their milling circle, he sees the tendrils of black uncoiling from the back of Jonah’s eye and venturing throughout Basira’s body. The glow of life inside her is fighting back…but he can see that it’s losing. They’re not fully entwined yet, the death being visited on her by Jonah is used to enveloping and overwhelming and is only at a disadvantage because there’s half as much power as usual and it’s never had to do this before, but this is not a fight Basira can win on her own.
Luckily, she isn’t.
“Whatever you are planning,” Jonah says through clenched teeth as he struggles to wrench the gun upwards, “it won’t work.”
Sasha nearly stumbles over her verse, but manages to recover. “I left my gal to go a-sailing…”
She’s the last one in the rota. Gerry gathers one last burst of strength to himself and circles behind Jonah, feints to the left, and braces himself as they sing the chorus. He pops up in front of Jonah just as he manages to get the gun under Basira’s chin and has the satisfaction of seeing the look of shock and fear flash through his eye. Without conscious thought, he puts the same menacing ice into his voice as he did when speaking to Liliana Blackwood for the last time.
“Help me, Bob, I’m bully in the alley…bully down in Shinbone Al’…”
He reaches into the space in front of Jonah Magnus’ cold grey eye, clenches his fingers, and pulls.