I slammed my right hand into the snow and fell into the void between.
Between space. Between stitches of reality. Between dreams and sanity, and breath and death, a place of infinite, crushing emptiness, stripped of sight and sound and touch—anything that reminded me of being real. Nothing existed in the void. I wasn’t even sure that I did. Just a scattering of thoughts, held together by nothing more tenuous than my own will. I would fly apart if I stayed too long. Fly apart, lost in an endless scream.
I could only enter this place because of the armor encasing my right hand—armor made from a metal mined in the heart of another impossible place: a network of quantum roads called the Labyrinth—a nexus outside time and space, linking countless different worlds. Cross the universe in a heartbeat. Bend time. Bend yourself, across time. Anything could happen there. The Labyrinth was made of possibilities.
But the void was not the Labyrinth. And while the armor let me travel across earth in less than a heartbeat, I’d always been terrified that one day I would find myself trapped there, between.
I was still terrified. But for the first time, something else scared me more—and there was a fantasy in my head, a split-second wild notion, that if I stayed in the void, if I didn’t leave it, my baby would be fine. That I could just float there forever, even if it meant losing my mind.
We all think crazy things when we’re desperate.
I fell from the void to a cracked linoleum floor.
Daylight had arrived. As soon as I slipped free, the weight of the boys settled on my body like a fine black mist, a sheen of warmth that spread over every inch of me except my face: between my toes, fingers, legs; beneath my nails; against my scalp. I glanced down at my bare arms. In that dark, cold place, there had been pale skin. Now I was covered in tattoos: coils of mercury and shadow, fine lines of scales and claws. Red eyes stared, unblinking: Dek, stretching down my arm; and Mal, his face resting in the crook of my elbow.
My boys. Imprisoned on my body until sunfall. Protecting me with their flesh.
Except, they couldn’t protect me from everything.
Blood was still warm between my legs. I felt the heat and weight of it on my jeans, against my skin. I could smell it. I’d had a little bleeding in the last four months. That was normal in a pregnancy. This wasn’t.
I shook so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t even lift my head. I heard a harsh intake of breath, a scrape of metal, and the creak of leather. I also smelled chocolate baking: a warm scent, the one anchor I needed. I clung to it. I inhaled as deeply as I could. It reminded me of my mother. Strength and comfort, and heartache. I should have gone to a hospital, but instead I’d come home. Home to the farmhouse in Texas.
I rolled onto my side. I saw feet in front of me, bare and familiar. Odd, the body parts that you recognize. Stubby toes, the arch of a foot, even the delicate bones of an ankle. As distinct as a fingerprint. A cry of home.
My gut lurched again, but this was heart-borne—followed by a wail in my throat that I swallowed down and kept swallowing.
“Mom,” I whispered, and those feet suddenly became my mother, my crouching mother, my mother who was dead, my mother who had chocolate frosting on her tattooed fingertips and who knelt on the floor to look at me with shock and horror, and concern. Her hair was black and glossy, and fell past her pale face. Her eyes so blue. So beautiful.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, her gaze lingering on my gently protruding stomach—and the blood on my hands.
Oh, hell, yes. I had traveled in time. Again.
Wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last—but I had no control over how or why, or when. The armor always chose: that fragment of the Labyrinth, with its wiles and impulses, and utter disregard for all those silly human rules about time and space, and how we were stuck moving in one direction, forever. Because time didn’t work like that. Time was fluid, and we were fluid in time. If you only had the right key to unlock that particular door.
And I did. Even though I never ever wanted to use it again. Nothing more dangerous than time. Nothing with more potential to fuck you up.
But I was still happy to see my mother.
“When?” she asked sharply, grabbing my hand. “Maxine, when did this happen?”
I tried telling her, but all I could whisper was the month. I was fading. Or maybe the armor was taking me from her. I felt so far away, and I began to fall, fall backward into the floor, deeper and deeper, and my mother tried to hold me, screaming hold on hold on hold on but her hands slipped from my wrists and I called out or tried but my voice was gone—
—then, so was I—
—and I hit the floor again.
Face-first, on my stomach, exactly as I’d arrived in the past only moments before. Except now, beneath me, was a bloodstain that I’d never quite been able to clean. Blood, from my mother’s murder.