Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

My choice, I realized as I stood at the center of the dome, was the same as it had always been. No choice at all. I had to set right what I’d done. I had to use the clock.

“I need the clock, Crow,” I repeated. “I have to go back and stop myself, find my mother and come back. I have to.”

Crow shook his head, and my panic redoubled. Not now, not when I was so close. “Please,” I whispered. “If I don’t, the world won’t ever recover. It’ll be worse than the Storm.”

“This is all I have left,” Crow muttered. “Protecting the rest of the lands from the Old Ones is all I have. But as long as I exist, as long as the gear turns, this is what I must do.”

I felt fresh hot tears sprout in my eyes. “I’m not like you, Crow. All I have is my family, and Dean, and I need them to be all right.” I made myself move despite my fear of the Old Ones. I went to Crow at the glass and reached out. I touched the very tips of my fingers to his skin. The scars were ridged and warm, and I fought the urge to run my hand over them.

“You’re not special,” he said. “You or Nikola. You’re just a girl, and he was a troubled young man who made terrible mistakes. What gives you the right to unleash the Old Ones just to put right a single error?”

His words were a hammer blow, but I didn’t let myself crumble. “I did something really horrible,” I told him. “But if you’re so worried about protecting the worlds, well—there won’t be a world much longer, not if I don’t stop what I set in motion.”

What I said next would likely decide whether I ever got to touch the nightmare clock or Crow simply shut me out of his domain, as everyone else in the world was slowly closing off from their dreams. “You can’t hold them back, Crow.” I looked up at the things outside, watched their tentacles and their great cloudy eyes rove from sky to sky, world to world, hungry. “They know it too,” I said. “They know you’re weakening every night, every hour, that human and Fae and Erlkin don’t dream. Every minute that the Gates are broken, keeping your dreams from reaching anyone except me.”

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for Crow to close the space between us, grab me by the throat and slam the back of my head into the glass hard enough to make tiny cracks. I gasped in pain, my vision blurring and my skull ringing.

“I walked the spheres with gods, you speck of flesh,” Crow growled, his tone no longer soft and measured. “And you call me weak?”

“That’s what I said,” I agreed. “Your only chance is to let me use the clock.”

Crow glared down at me. His features really were beautiful, in the way that something terrible is also beautiful—a silver-plated straight razor, a fireball, or the trapped fury of aether under glass.

“You can’t be happy here,” I continued. “Cut off. Nobody dreaming. It’ll only get worse.”

A small shudder passed through Crow’s narrow shoulders. It could have just been wind, but inside the dome, it was as still as a calm afternoon in midsummer, so I knew I was getting somewhere. “Let me turn it back,” I said. “Or I’ll use my Weird to do it without you.” I could already feel the clock in my mind, as if it had always been there. Maybe it had—I’d touched it in my dreams and it had waited patiently in my subconscious until my brain caught up with what my dreams had always known. Of course, I had no idea if I could manipulate it. That wasn’t my gift, after all. But I had to try.

Crow gave a startled laugh. “Your Weird? You mean the magic trick your blood trots out when your higher brain can’t take it another second and asks the lizard to jump in the driver’s seat? You can’t use that on this. This isn’t a machine. And your Weird is so much more than that. Your mind would break from the strain.”

“Watch me,” I snapped, and pushed. It felt natural, no pain, no struggle and not even any pressure in my skull. I married my mind with the nightmare clock so perfectly it might have been made of flesh, or I of iron.

But nothing happened. The gear ticked on, the storm continued to rumble, and outside the bodies of the Great Old Ones pressed ever closer.

I pushed harder, because it was easy now, and then all at once I was felled by the worst pain I had ever known. Worse than when I’d destroyed the Engine. Worse than when I’d plunged into the icy Erebus River afterward. It was so bad I couldn’t even think of it in terms of my own body; the pain was a separate and distinct being, sharing my skin and filling me to the brim with agony, until it overflowed into a scream.

Flashes. Light. Pictures. A dizzy lanternreel on a torn screen, projecting from the Edison box, out of focus and saturated with blood colors.

My father on his knees, a dark head cradled in his lap. My mother standing in front of great iron walls that run on and on. Cal halfway between a ghoul and a boy, the seam stitched with wire, listening to faraway screams while smoke roils around him.

Crow grabbed me and shook me, and I let go of the clock. The pain stopped, leaving me trembling and soaked in freezing sweat. I felt as if I wanted to throw up, but none of my muscles would respond to do anything more than spasmodically tremble. I had been electrified, and was now burned.

“I warned you,” he said, without a modicum of sympathy. “If you were really good with machines, you’d have me over a barrel, but you’re not. That’s not where your true gift lies.”

He had told me, and I should have listened. Crossing worlds didn’t hurt, but the nightmare clock wasn’t responding to me. Machines had always been a fight, but coming here had felt natural. “I guess …,” I began, but talking hurt. I tried again. “I guess you’ll just have to kill me to stop me, then. Because otherwise I’m not going to stop.”

“I told you,” Crow sighed, using the hem of his robe to blot the blood from my face. “Sacrificing yourself won’t change what you did. You have a gift. You owe it to yourself to try rather than throw yourself on your sword.”

I tried to sit up, but I was too spent, too wrung out. I wanted to scream in frustration. “But I destroyed the Engine,” I croaked.

Crow sat back on his heels. “You can cross worlds, Aoife. Without a Gate, without anything but your own mind. Explain to me how you can have such a gift, believe in it and not believe you can fix this?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him. I just lay there watching the top of the dome, the Old Ones growing larger and closer.

“Machinery and magic in the same mind.” Crow shook his head. “World crossing, right there.” He reached out and ran his thumb along my cheekbone, through the blood. “Amazing. Humans can still surprise me.”

I curled up in a ball, away from him. I wanted to be smaller and smaller, until I disappeared. Having a Weird that Draven and Tremaine would kill for was bad enough. If they, or the Brotherhood, knew what I could truly do, create Gates out of thin air, I’d never be safe again. They would all converge, fight over who got to use me or murder me. Depending on their outlook, I was a savior or a destroyer.

I would never be free, and neither would anyone I cared about.

“I have to …” I sat up, even though it hurt almost as much as trying to manipulate the nightmare clock. “I have to put things right.”

Crow worried his lip and looked at me. His teeth were small and square, not pointed like the ones I’d come to associate with most inhuman things. “I can’t let you,” he said. “The Old Ones—”

“I’ll put them back.” I grabbed his arm and made it fruitless for him to pull away. His forearms, on the insides, were snaked with black marks, ink tracing the scars to form words, though they were in a language I couldn’t decipher. I held on. “You told me I can do it. I can cross worlds. I can make them stop ever coming to you again. I can put them back where they belong, out in the cold, empty space where they can never escape.”