??!

It was like looking through a green drinking glass, everything tinted and distorted. The images flashed back and forth between the two versions of the town, showing different areas and the differences.

Sai-ee spits on his finger and holds it inside the aura. The images flip to him in a small, ornately decorated room, alternately lying on a bed and on the floor, occasionally talking to Lil. Huh. Lil’s in the images, but no one else we know is.

The images cut to other rooms, which Sai-ee is led to by Ry’ke priests and priestesses and where he’s directed to put his hands or sometimes his whole body in rune-engraved contraptions that look more like torture devices than anything half the time. As they keep playing, Sai-ee tenses up, stands to shield them from me so I can’t see.

“Lil,” he says softly.

Lil nods and imitates Sai-ee’s gesture.

Her images are happier, shopping in markets and chatting to strange but friendly-seeming people in manors and basements. That is, until Sai-ee appears. He’s beat up, depressed, unhappy every time Lil goes to see him. The images don’t seem to be chronological, flashing around through different points in time.

A woman with black hair.

Also locked in a little room.

Who is that, in Lil’s memories?

“Lemme,” I say.

Sai-ee is happy enough to let the overly personal montage shift.

In mine, I see glimpses of the black-haired woman with me, along with shots of me as a kid and me and Cass. We’re in weird contexts—it looks like in Ry’keth for large portions of it, both with me and Cass and then me and that woman. In a tent, in a small town. There’s a few other people, Asan, who spark a feeling of familiarity in me, though I’ve never met them before.

“Who is she?”

“I saw her too, in mine,” Sai-ee says. “Only for a moment.”

“I’m with her so often, even though I’ve got no idea who she is—in this reality, I mean. It feels kinda like I know her?”

“What did you write that spell to do?” Lil asks Sai-ee.

“It was a spell to reveal unknowns. So, I asked it to reveal the hidden things in our own heads. The template only works when given material to work with—like if I had an earring and wanted to know who touched it, I could write it for that. At first, I was gonna stick it through the rift…but I could check to see who ruined those buildings, too.”

“I don’t want to know what’s up with this reality as much as I wanna know what it’s doing with ours,” I say.

“I don’t know a spell for that,” Sai-ee admits.

“So let’s walk around.”

I walk in circles, looking for another rift like the one we came through, maybe to a third place.

Behind the school, I find…rows of grave markers.

Behind the school.

What the fuck?

Were those graves of students?

They stand small and solemn amidst the ash.

“Come look at this.”

Sai-ee’s holding the metal plate in the rift after all. Above it, another image of the black-haired woman floats. She’s wearing strange clothes in a strange place, machines hooked up to her. They remind me a little of the machines we saw Sai-ee pushed into, but they’re made of unfamiliar materials rather than metal—at least, from what I can see through the glass, those tubes aren’t any material I’ve seen before. On her lap is another machine, shaped like a L. Its upper half is black on the side facing her and pale silver on its back, while the bottom half—which is thicker—is covered in keys with symbols on them. Her eyes are closed, and she’s slumped in a bed.

“It’s kind of like the inside of a printing press,” Sai-ee observes. “With all those symbols.”

I’m trying to figure out if she’s okay. She looks unhealthy—maybe passed out, rather than asleep.

“But why would she have…hey, maybe they’re like runes!”

“Guys,” Lil says, tone dark. She’s looking out through the rift into the town.

Tears in space cut across the now soaked street. One arcs across the sky, leaving a wide patch on the ground where no rain falls.

Cass.

After one excruciating, panicked second, I spot him. He’s stepping away from the new tears, looking wary.

The weird thing is that they’re not appearing on our side. Just the one we’ve got.

I crawl back through it, Sai-ee and Lil following.

People are poking at the tears now, trying to figure them out.

A scream goes up.

I turn quickly to where it came from. A couple friends are pulling someone—not just someone, my classmate, Rebu—out of the gap. Her right arm, outstretched, is the last part of her to get dragged out—it’s burned like Cass’s, stark and black.

She’s dead on the other side, too.

The rips in reality keep growing, pushing further and further. We, the inhabitants of this town, are forced to huddle up in a few small locations, divided from each other. I end up clinging to Sai-ee, Lil, and Cass in a depression of grass in the school yard. Water sloshes around our ankles, and the graves from the other reality surround us.

“Sai-ee and I have an idea, but we’ve got to use a big piece of metal,” Lil says. “I think—this space is small, too—we can figure out a way through the rifts, and if we end up on that side we’ve proved we’ll be okay. Jayla, you coming?”

I look at Cass desperately.

“Don’t worry, jaybird, I’ll be fine.”

“But—”

“You can leave me here.”

I end up following Lil and Sai-ee through the rifts. Though they don’t show openings on each side, if our foot or arm or something ends up in one, the next step takes it out into the ordinary world again. We go up the stairs in the back of the little general store and reach Sai-ee’s room, where he stocks up all his magician supplies—stuff he has to get or make himself mostly, as the only powered magician in the world.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I don’t know,” Sai-ee admits.

“Come on!”

“Hey, get mad at Lil.”

“This is serious! If these rifts keep growing, I—I bet everyone except us, will die!”

“I know, I know. I am gonna try and fix it.” He grabs a big leatherbound rune dictionary from on top of his bed and flips through it frantically, only pausing to throw a smaller dictionary to Lil.

Since she’s Sai-ee’s best friend, she knows a little magic—I don’t know any, since I hadn’t studied it. I wait, hating my inability.

“Hey—” Lil says. “You think, teleportation, last resort?”

“Can’t get everyone.”

“I know—but live to fight another day. I think—maybe we could use a similar equation to the divination one to teleport to wherever the person who made this happen is. Talk to her.”

Sai-ee nods shortly. Lil starts engraving the metal.

Sai-ee’s still flipping through the dictionary, but rifts start to cut through his bedroom. There’s just open air there. It’s like the walls (and floor) have been hit by a wrecking ball. Somehow a piece of the clay flooring stays intact and floating. I stand on that with the two of them.

“Can—can I help?”

“There’s nothing fucking in here for fixing all of fucking reality, because of course there’s not! When the fuck would reality be breaking, in a sane world?” Sai-ee chucks the dictionary away, where it vanishes through a rift. All I can see now is that horrible, ashy world.

Lil’s still working, sweat dripping down her neck.

The floor drops out. We fall hard. A gray cloud goes up around our three bodies with the impact.

I look around, but there’s none of the original world. But there is. Corpses, lying everywhere.

I stare at one, unable to tear my eyes away from it, as it… disappears?

The rest begin disappearing too. But I can’t be happy about it. It didn’t equal the people standing up, walking around happily. They’re gone even more fully.

My chest hurts, and my shirt’s soaking wet with something. What weird, viscous rainwater.

The last corpse disappears. At that moment, I have a chilling realization.

This world is the real one.