Fear

She had thrown it. Somewhere.

Cigar cried pitiably.

And then, so much more terrible, laughed and laughed in the dark.

Astrid with shaking hands grabbed the shotgun and fired it once.

She saw the edge of the field.

She saw Cigar frozen in a twisting fall.

He was in the field.

She heard the greedy mouths burrowing into him. A sound like hungry dogs eating.

“Petey! Petey! Help him!”

Cigar said, “Oh,” in a small, disappointed voice.

And the only sound in the darkness was the relentless feeding of the worms.

She sat there listening, no choice but to hear. Tears flowed. She sat with her knees together, head in twisting hands, crying.

How much time passed until the worm sounds were finished she couldn’t know. The stink … that remained.

She was alone now. Completely and absolutely alone in a darkness that seemed almost like a living thing, as if she had been swallowed whole and was now in the belly of some indifferent beast.

“All right, Petey,” Astrid said at last. “No choice, huh, brother? The crazy behind door number one or the crazy behind door number two. Show me what you have to show me, Peter.”

She saw him. Not him, not like there was light, but something, like the darkness had warped around itself. A suggestion of a shape. A little boy.

“Are you there?” she asked.

Something cold, like someone had slid an icicle through her scalp and through her skull and pushed it deep inside her brain. No pain. Just a terrible cold.

“Petey?” she whispered.

Peter Ellison did not move. He stayed very, very still. His hand touched her on the head, but only just, just barely, and he stayed very still.

The avatar that was his sister had within it an amazing complexity of lines and designs, signs inside of mazes inside of maps that were part of planets and…

He pulled himself back. Inside her was a game of such beautiful complexity.

This was what it was to be the girl with the yellow hair and the stabbing blue eyes. It took his breath away. Or would have if he had breath and body.

He mustn’t play with those complex swirls and patterns. Each time he had tried he’d broken the avatar and it had come apart. He couldn’t break this one.

It’s me, Petey, he said.

The avatar shuddered. Patterns twisted around his touch, feeling for him like tiny light-snakes.

“Can you fix it, Petey? The FAYZ. Can you make it stop?”

He could hear her voice. It came straight up through the avatar, words of light floating to him.

He wondered. Could he fix it? Could he undo the great and terrible thing he had done?

He felt the answer as a sort of regret. He reached for the power, the thing that had made him able to create this place. But there was nothing there.

It was in my body, he said. The power.

“You can’t end it?”

No.

No, sister Astrid, I can’t.

I’m sorry.

“Can you bring the light back?”

He pulled away. Her questions made him feel bad inside.

“No. Don’t go away,” she said.

He had memories of how much her voice had hurt when he was the old Pete. When he had a body, with a brain all wired crazily so that things were always too loud, even colors.

He stopped moving away. He resisted an urge to reach inside that mesmerizing avatar and take its sadness away. But no, his fingers were too clumsy. He knew that now. The girl named Taylor, he had tried to make her better, and he had torn the avatar to shreds.

“Petey. What is the Darkness doing?”

Pete considered. He hadn’t looked at that thing lately. He could see him, a green glow, tendrils like a writhing octopus reaching out through the placeless place where Pete now lived.

The Darkness was weak. His power, spread all through the barrier, was weakening. He was the thing Pete had used to create the barrier. In that panic moment with the terrible loud sounds and the fear on all the faces, when Pete had screamed inside his own head and reached out with his power he’d stretched the Darkness into that barrier.

Now it was weakening. Soon it would break and crack.

Dying.

“The Darkness, the gaiaphage, it’s dying?”

It wants to be reborn.

“Petey. What happens if it is reborn?”

He didn’t know. He was out of words. He opened his mind to her. He showed sister Astrid images of the great sphere he had built, the barrier that had pushed all the rules and laws away, the barrier made of the gaiaphage, that had become the egg for its rebirth, the numbers all twisted together, fourteen, and the twisting, screaming distortion when anything passed through from one universe to the other, and now sister Astrid was screaming and holding her head; he could see it in the avatar, funny screaming, like words that popped and exploded around him and—

He pulled away.

He was hurting her.

He’d done it. With his clumsy fingers and his stupid, stupid stupidness, he had hurt her.

Her avatar twirled away like a snowflake in a storm.

Petey turned and ran.

“Oh, God, it’s coming!” Diana screamed.

She was sweating, straining, on her back with her legs spread wide, knees up. The contractions were just minutes apart now, but they lasted so long it was as if she had no rest in between, just a chance to gasp some super-heated fetid air.

She had no more energy for crying. Her body had taken control. It was doing what it was supposed to do five months from now. She was not ready. The baby was not ready. But the enormous swell of her belly said different. It said the time was now.