The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

—

“This was a temple!”

Fanning’s hand caught her across the cheek. The blow sent her careening backward.

“You do this to me? To my city?”

She raised her hands to protect her face. Instead Fanning yanked her by the collar, hauled her up until her feet left the pavement, and tossed her away.

“I am going to take my time with you. You’re going to want me to kill you. You are going to beg.”

He came at her again, and again. Tosses, slaps, kicks. She discovered herself lying facedown. She felt detached from everything. Her thoughts possessed a lazy, unmoored quality. They seemed on the verge of some permanent and final severing, as if with the next blow they would sail up and away from her body, swallowed into the sky like a balloon cut from its string.

Yet, to yield, to accept death: the mind forbade it. The mind demanded, against all sense, to go on. Fanning was somewhere behind her. Amy’s awareness of him was less as a physical presence than an abstract force, like gravity, a well of darkness into which she was being relentlessly sucked. She began to crawl. Why wouldn’t Fanning just kill her? But he’d said so himself: he wanted her to feel it. To feel life leaking out of her, drip by drip.

“Look at me!”

A crack to her midriff lifted her off the ground; Fanning had kicked her. The wind sailed from her chest.

“I said, look at me!”

He kicked her again, burying his foot below her sternum and flipping her onto her back.

He was holding the sword over his head.

“We were supposed to meet at the kiosk!”

We?

“You said you would be there! You said we would be together!”

What was he seeing? Who was she to him? The transformation: it had done something to his mind.

“I never should have loved you!”

She rolled away as the sword came down. It struck the pavement with a single-noted clang. Fanning howled like a wounded animal.

“I wanted to die with you!”

She was on her back again. Fanning had raised the sword above his head, ready to swing. She raised her arms in forbearance. One chance was all she had.

“Tim, don’t.”

Fanning froze.

“I wanted to be there. To be with you. That was all I ever wanted.”

His arms tensed. At any second, the blade would fall. “I waited all night! How could you do that to me? Why didn’t you come, why?”

“Because…I died, Tim.”

For a moment nothing happened. Please, she thought.

“You…died.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

His voice was numb. “On the train.”

Amy spoke cautiously, keeping her voice even. “Yes. I was coming to see you. They carried me off. I couldn’t stop them.”

Fanning’s eyes floated away from her face. He glanced around uncertainly.

“But I’m here now, Tim. That’s what matters. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

How long could she sustain the lie? The sword was everything. If she could convince Fanning to give it to her…

“We can still do it,” she said. “There’s a way we can always be together, just like we planned.”

He looked back at her.

“Come with me, Tim. There’s a place we can go. I’ve seen it.”

Fanning said nothing. She sensed her words gaining traction in his mind.

“Where?” he asked.

“It’s the place where we can start over. We can do it right this time. All you have to do is give me the sword.” She extended her hand. “Come with me, Tim.”

Fanning’s eyes were locked on hers. Everything was inside them, the whole history of the man he’d been. The pain. The loneliness. The interminable hours of his life. Then:

“You.”

She was losing him. “Give me the sword, Tim. That’s all you have to do.”

“You’re not her.”

She felt it all collapsing. “Tim, it’s me. It’s Liz.”

“You’re…Amy.”

—

Fifty yards away, lying faceup on the ground, the man known as Peter Jaxon had begun to disappear.

His mind straddled two worlds. In the first, one of darkness and commotion, Fanning was hurling Amy through the air. Peter sensed this rather dimly; he could not recall why it should be so. Nor could he intervene, his powers to act, even to move at all, having abandoned him.

In the other was a window.

A shade, drawn over it, glowed with summer light. The image felt familiar, like déjà vu. The window, Peter thought. It means I must be dying. As he fought to focus his eyes, to bring himself back to reality, the light began to change. It was becoming something else: not a window in his mind but something physical. Through the dust-filled darkness was an opening, like a corridor ascending to a higher world, and through this tunnel a shining shape appeared. It teased at his memory; he knew what it was, if only he could summon the image forth. The picture sharpened. It resembled a crown, multilayered, each layer arched as it narrowed to a spiked peak. Sunlight flared upon its mirrored face, shooting a bright beam down the corridor, which was a hole in the clouds, into his eyes.