Into the Split: Revolution 4
Twinned Book 3: Into the Split
Revolution 4
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There is very little sleep in the end. Nikolai naps in the early part of the evening, curled together with Seth in their bed, wrapped around each other. Nikita and Heather sleep at the same time, across the end of the same bed, Nikita’s fingers resting on Nikolai’s ankle. They awaken just before midnight to the sound of an alarm, and Heather and Seth begin the long process of trying to get Pawel to rest.
Nikolai heads back downstairs to work with Nikita and Carolyn and the other Mages who have arrived since he went to nap.
Seth and Heather manage to get Pawel to nap for two hours at the most. When he returns to the kitchen, wavering on his feet, Mac hands him a coffee and says gently, “You’re not driving to Haverhill. Conserve your energy. You’re going to need it.”
Pawel blinks at the gathered group. “Is Rory here?”
Rory raises his hand where he sits next to Kit at the table. He has one hand on Kit’s knee beneath the table as Kit hunches over, drawing quickly. “I know,” he says. “I think I’m as ready as I can be.”
“Everyone has transportation,” Mac says. “We have an entire caravan readied, and we know when the ritual will start. We’ve chosen locations around the world—there are hundreds of them, no more than two hours apart in a web everywhere we can get to. There are places we can’t handle—over the water, or in more remote reaches—but we’ve done our best. Every single place selected has a history with the Dreamscape either through Emergent Shadowwalkers or through Dreamwalkers. To the best of our ability to coordinate information through Del, every single location exists in some manner in both worlds. We can’t say anything for sure about the third world.”
A moment’s quiet as they all think about that: the world that has already fallen.
It takes Mac’s quiet efficiency to get them all fed, cleaned, dressed, and out the door. She doesn’t let anyone pause to think about what they’re doing. No one packs a bag that isn’t related to the Ritual. “We’ll be back tonight,” she says when Pawel brings it up.
He starts to say something else and she gets a hand up and over his mouth. “No. We will be back tonight,” she says firmly. “You’ll call Conor and tell him that the world has been saved. We’ll have pizza and beer to celebrate, and you’ll start panicking about how there are only two weeks left of class and you somehow still have to write a final for a class you’ve barely taught not to mention grading final projects. You might also want to spend some time thinking about great gifts to buy for your TAs once we’re out of this hell; they deserve them. Oh, and either give Carolyn and Kit a great grade for saving the world, or an extension on their final project for their independent study.”
Pawel wraps his fingers around Mac’s wrist, carefully moving her hand. “Do you have a preferred rank, or should we just address you as captain of this sinking ship?”
“Not sinking, not captain, and I’m just the most organized person here. It’s nice getting to plan an op where no one’s going to die.” Mac holds up both hands this time before anyone can say a word. “This is an op where no one is going to die,” she repeats slowly. “Pizza and beer to celebrate when we’re done. Now. Let’s go heal the Split.”
Nikolai lets himself doze on the way to Haverhill. He’s tucked into the back seat of a minivan, squeezed between Nate and Seth. The drone of conversation between Alaric, Chris, Dax, and Nate about running and football eases his mind. It’s nice to hear something that for them, at least, is normal. By the time he wakes, the van is bouncing along the long road that leads to the big house of the Clan community.
They don’t stop at the house, driving as far as they can toward the Berman house before they have to get out and walk. Mac disappears with Pawel; the two are sitting on the cracked step of the house when Nikolai and the others finally arrive.
It takes time to gather, and Nikolai notes significant faces that are missing. The Mage from the New Hampshire Clan is missing, along with Thorne, and several Mages from the Burlington community. Valentine, however, is there, along with Rory.
Valentine stands near Alia, fiddling with her phone. “Elijah talked David into letting him help today.” She sounds resigned as she scrolls through something. “He headed to the site in Maine last night and they’ve promised me they’ll be here as soon as they can after everything’s done. They have more people than we do, but from what we understand, that site was the location of a significant Emergence of more than a dozen Shadowwalkers all at once, in the early days after the original Emergence. Elijah says it feels icky.”
Valentine’s mouth twists, frowning as she surveys the space around the Berman house. “I think I understand what he means.”
“Until recently, no one disturbed this place, aside from teenagers trying to prove they weren’t afraid of ghosts,” Alia says dryly. “You can blame the claw marks on my husband, but the aura is what was left after Mattie Emerged. We had no idea at the time; we blamed her family’s disappearance on magic.”
Valentine glances sideways at Alia. “I get the feeling that a lot of things we’ve blamed on each other over the years may have been due to misunderstandings,” she says quietly.
Alaric makes a low growling sound, and Corbin wraps an arm around him dragging him down and in rub his cheek against Alaric’s head. The noise shifts to something disgruntled as Alaric tries to wrestle himself free.
“We are on a timeframe here,” Pawel says, voice tight. “If you wouldn’t mind getting started.”
They form a loose circle, with Nikolai, Nikita, Carolyn, Del, Mattie, and Chelsea at the center. Chelsea curls in on herself, a slender column of darkness that Nikolai can feel standing next to him, as if she matches the air around them in ways that everyone else doesn’t. The other Mages circle around them, with Rory at a point where he can both touch Kit and the rest of the circle, and lay his hands on Carolyn’s shoulders at the same time.
“This will work,” Rory mutters. It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself, and that’s not exactly comforting.
Carolyn looks down at the sketch she holds in her hands, bright and fresh and new, drawn just the day before by Kit. Del’s meadow reflects subtle changes that Nikolai has seen since he first met her.
His Talent isn’t the same as Carolyn’s, but he still looks at that image as a focus as he reaches inside for that place where his abilities lie. He leans back into Seth’s anchoring touch, feeling the real world in Seth’s fingertips and the earth below his feet, even while the Dreamscape tickles over his skin. Nikolai inhales, and on the exhale, he lets it grow, lets the Dreaming come closer to him.
“Now,” Pawel whispers, and the sound echoes around them. Nikolai can see the one word in the air, a soft silvered blue that infuses with light.
Everything feels unreal and all too real all at once. Nikolai slowly turns toward the house and slips his hand into Seth’s. He focuses on the way their fingers curl together as the group moves toward the door that lies open and waiting.
He hopes this is working as planned but they are mid-Ritual and while Nikolai has no idea what the Mages are actually doing, he knows they don’t have time to check their phones. They have to trust that all over the world at this exact moment, groups of Dreamwalkers approach their own liminal spaces in an attempt to enter the Dreamscape together.
They will do this together.
The way ahead is made up of dual images: the scratched and scraped door that hangs open, and a brightly colored front door that is cracked open and waiting. Nikolai crosses the threshold after Carolyn, and stops inside the door as he realizes that his hand is empty.
“Seth?” he turns around to look behind, and there’s Nikita without Heather. Nikolai takes a step toward her, but Nikita’s expression hardens with resolve and she puts her hands on his shoulders.
“They couldn’t come with us here,” she says quietly. “You knew that might happen.” She nudges and he turns to walk with her.
It seems natural to take her hand, to anchor them with each other, their dual selves from different worlds. Nikita squeezes his hand as they stand in the living room.
“This was my home,” Mattie says, turning as she looks around. “As it was then, and still existing in the Dreaming I suppose, and as it is now.”
“This is where we came to find you,” Carolyn agrees. She glances at Del before crossing her arms, shoulders hunched. “I’d really hoped that with Del, we’d be able to do what we did then, and bring the others with us.”
“There are too many of them,” Del says. She offers a slight shrug of her shoulders before she moves to the nearest window, looking through what seems to be bright glass with freshly painted sills, and cracked and dirty glass all at once. “Or maybe there are too many of us, and the Dreamscape wants us for itself. Who knows.”
Nikita and Nikolai. Carolyn. Del. Mattie. And the darkness that is Chelsea, hovering near a corner as if she might melt into it.
She looks uncomfortable in the light.
“We have to assume that it went like this all over the world,” Carolyn says.
“Worlds,” Nikita corrects, emphasizing the plural.
“Worlds,” Carolyn agrees.
“My meadow is outside,” Del comments. She goes to open the window, making a disappointed sound as the sash doesn’t lift. “Door it is.” She skips lightly across the floor, pausing when she reaches the door that lies open, light spilling in around it. “There are a lot of us,” she whispers. “I can feel them. The Dreamscape can barely contain us all, and wants to spill out. But the darkness is pushing in. It’s almost too late.”
She pulls the door wide, and for just a moment, the light is blinding enough that Nikolai brings his free hand up to shade his eyes. The smell of flowers is overwhelming; Nikita sneezes three times, her entire body shaking.
“Let’s go,” Carolyn says, and follows Del through the door.
A lot of us was putting it mildly. The Dreamwalkers stand in knots—groups of anywhere from just a pair to a dozen or more. They are all ages, all races. And there are more of them than Nikolai can count.
Spreading out from the meadow in all directions are places. Nikolai sees the Berman place behind him now, the Benford home like a an image over it. He turns back, wanting to know if he could walk into the Benford home from here, but stops after a step. Not without Seth.
He sees a pond in one direction, a cliff seemingly jutting out of nowhere in another. He swears one is Stonehenge, which makes a kind of sense when he thinks about it, and that may be the largest gathering of Dreamwalkers as well. Some of the liminal places he feels as if he recognizes dimly, other landmarks or legendary locations like Stonehenge. Others are strangely simple, like the truck stop with a flashing neon sign, or the Berman/Benford house behind him. Or the big tree that Grace stands beneath.
Nikolai exhales, and tries to wrap his head around the entire world being here in Del’s meadow. Two worlds, condensed down to entry points in a microcosm that they’ve brought together.
It feels too big and too small all at once.
And it still begs the question: what next?
“There are more people here than in our entire community.”
Nikolai recognizes Brett from his world, his eyes wide as he looks around the meadow.
“We have come together, across two worlds, and we are many,” Amahle says with a gentle smile. “We are well met, and we will persevere.”
“Why is she here?” Grace is angry, jabbing a finger at where Chelsea stands behind Mattie, as if she could somehow become her shadow in the brightness.
“I want to help,” Chelsea whispers.
“The darkness is already crowding in and you bring more?” Grace’s throws their hands wide, and Nikolai follows the gesture. He can see it then, the cracks around every place they’ve brought together. The darkness that threatens to split them all apart. It moves, undulating and alive, and Nikolai imagines he can see faces and hands that grasp and grab at their homes.
He imagines he can see it crumbling.
“Can’t you feel it?” Grace asks.
Nikolai can. It crawls over his skin, pricking at him and pulling at him. It wants to tear him apart, or shove him back to reality. It wants to claim him and suck him dry.
Chelsea takes a step back. “I want to help,” she whispers again. “I don’t want to be part of them. I’m not here to—”
“We have two choices,” Carolyn shouts, and the slow murmur that was building falls silent, cutting the argument short. “We have Dreamwalkers and Travelers both here, and we need to do one of two things before we run out of time.”
Ji-eun and Amahle step forward from their groups. Nikita tugs and Nikolai joins her at Carolyn’s side. They gather slowly, the people he has come to know best from their Dreamwalker network. Even Grace grudgingly joins them, a scowl still twisting their face as they sigh dramatically.
In the distance, Nikolai sees something on the edge of the meadow. Flickering in and out, a third version of some of their selected places. The house that looms in the place of the Benford and Berman homes is larger, a third floor added on, the exterior dark with paint and fallen into disrepair.
“Our third is here,” he murmurs. “Barely, but there’s still something of it out there.”
“It feels hopeless,” Nikita whispers back. “Like it’s waiting for us to fall, too.”
“We have two choices,” Carolyn repeats. Her voice is lower now, but it still carries across the meadow and Nikolai wonders if that’s Del’s doing somehow. Del doesn’t seem to be paying any attention, dancing happily in the sun that streams down in the center of her meadow. At least the people who ring around her will keep her from wandering off.
“We can either pull our two worlds together, squeezing out the Split,” Carolyn says. “Or we can push our worlds apart completely. If we do that, it’s possible the Split will become too big and overwhelm us, or it’ll lose hold.”
“You think we should tie our worlds together,” Ji-eun says.
“What would happen to us? Would we merge into one world? That seems like a bad idea,” Brett says, glancing around the group. “Either you’ll be overrun with Shadows, or we’ll end up overpopulated. We don’t have the same number of people left that you do, but there are still a lot of us. And for the ones who are bedrock, or who have analogs, that could get messy.”
Nikolai tries to imagine a world with two of Alia and he doesn’t think anyone’s ready for that.
“Pawel thinks we might have been one world, once upon a time, and we diverged through whatever small events happened that made us different,” Carolyn says. Nikolai remembers this discussion, vaguely, and it feels right when she says it.
“We’re too different,” he says. “Your world and mine are completely different places, and even though there are similarities I don’t think they can be considered the same anymore. I think that if we pull them closer together, we wouldn’t merge. I’m not even sure anything would change, other than making it so that there’s no room for the Split.”
If there’s no Split lying between the worlds, how would they get home?
That’s not a thought for now.
“No Split means no Shadowwalkers,” Ji-eun says thoughtfully. “Yes, this is our best solution.”
“No Split means no walking death destroying the population of my home.” Brett is emphatic. “I’m in.”
“But what if—?” Grace cuts off when everyone looks at them. They cross their arms, cheeks pulled in as if they are biting their tongue. “Fine,” they say sharply. “But if we cause a cataclysm because we try to squish two realities into one—”
“Three,” Del calls out cheerily.
“I’ve read enough science fiction and comics to know this is a bad idea!” Grace mutters loudly.
“I think it’s worth it,” Nikolai says. He tries to smile when Carolyn offers one of her own, but it feels weak. “There’s a risk, yes, but the reward is higher. We need to end this, not just somehow put a bandage on it, or possibly make it worse.”
“This could still be making it worse,” Grace points out.
“How will we do this?” Amahle asks, and it’s a good question. It’s not like they have any experience in doing something like this.
“We all came from our liminal spaces.” Carolyn gestures at the overlapping places around them. “I’m not experienced on the Dreaming side of things, but if we can bring our reflections—the two or three versions of our spaces—into alignment, then maybe that’ll do it.”
“But what about the Shadowwalkers and the Split? How do we make sure to push them away?” Brett asks.
Nikita makes a small noise, her hand tightening around Nikolai’s abruptly. “That thing. That light thing you do.”
Nikolai’s mouth opens, uncertain. “When I bring the Dreamscape out?” he asks. He needs Seth for that. He needs grounding. He needs to be outside the Dreamscape because that’s what he’s bringing into the real world when he does it. “It’s kind of a weapon, yes, but we’re in the Dreamscape, Nikita. We’re already here.”
“But it gets rid of Shadows,” she says simply. “It pushes them away. And if we push them and the Split away at the same time, they’ll be gone.”
It sounds too easy.
“That might work,” Carolyn agrees.
Other than that it’s too easy to use a trick he’s been doing forever in order to survive, and expect that to save the world, Nikolai can’t think of a reason to object. It means they have to take time, while Nikolai explains to hundreds of Dreamwalkers how to pull on the Dreamscape. How to form it up into small bundles of exploding light, and push it in a certain direction. It’s different here, like it’s right there, wherever he wants it, and directing it out of the Dream seems harder.
It fills him with power, his skin vibrating with this direction connection to his Talent. Around the circle, Dreamwalkers sparkle, their Talent visible to the naked eye as they slowly take control.
Del sighs. “I have a really bad feeling about what this means for my meadow.” She crouches down, running her fingers through the grass. “Just in case,” she whispers. “Goodbye.”
Something flickers in the edge of Nikolai’s vision. He turns to look at the Berman house; it’s wreathed in Shadows, the darkness licking around the edges of it, encroaching on the meadow. “I don’t think we have a lot of time,” he says.
“They’re probably drawn to the amount of power we have in this one place,” Carolyn explains. “Which we can use to our advantage. If they’re here, we can get rid of them. Everyone go back to your own space and start building whatever it is you need to build. Dreamwalkers, if you can reach out to each other, and feel what you’re doing, try to coordinate the timing.”
The Benford house is dark, dim beyond the image of the Berman place. Nikolai hopes that Seth is still back in Haverhill waiting for him, that time is passing differently here than there and that he isn’t panicking.
He feels like if it were him, he’d be panicking.
“Del,” Nikita calls.
Del stays in the center of the meadow, her hands out, butterflies flapping around her, rising into the sky as she slowly spins.
“Guess it’s just us,” Nikita says. She holds out both of her hands, and Nikolai takes them. Carolyn stands nearby, and Mattie and Chelsea watch. Nikolai is aware of other groups of Dreamwalkers doing the same things, and that at some places, there are two groups, as if there’s one from Nikita’s world and one from his own.
It gives him hope that this will be enough. That they can be enough.
“This is going to hurt,” Chelsea murmurs.
That may be the only thing Nikolai regrets. Whatever they are now, the Shadowwalkers were people once. Pawel loved Chelsea and if this works, chances are he’ll never see her again.
Chances are Nikolai will never go home again, too.
He exhales roughly, closing his eyes and extending his senses into the Dreamscape. He can sink into it easily, feeling it rise around him. Nikita’s world and his own, and that faint hint of something else beyond. He feels those and the Shadows, and he clings to them, pulling them in.
The darkness tries to slip between, tries to pull back, and it’s a tug of war. The thing is, it’s a war he knows how to win. All he has to do is twist the dreaming into bright, sparkling particles of unreality, and push those into the darkness.
It builds under his skin, until he feels himself glowing with the effort of keeping it contained.
“Now!” someone shouts.
It’s such a relief to let it go. To open his eyes to the bright diamonds that flash in the sky, that light up the entire Dreamscape until it fills his vision with bright, white light, overloading his mind, painful and sharp like daggers in his skull.
Everything goes incredibly, intensely, bright.
And just as abruptly, it all goes very, very dark.
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