Crap Kingdom (22 page)

Kyle was standing outside.

“Just tell me they kidnapped you or something, man,” Kyle said. “Even if it’s a lie.”

Tom told him everything, not worrying about not implicating Gark or Pira. He was more honest than he had ever been with himself.

“. . . and I was just standing there thinking, he said he invented
music
?”

“I never said I invented music. I told them where it was from and everything. If she says I invented it, that’s just her being . . . Pira.”

“I know. But I was just so mad, and you weren’t around to ask about any of this stuff. You were always here and . . . do you know what it’s like when you want to talk to somebody, and the person is there, their body is, but you know it’s not really them inside?”

“How do you think Lindsy feels?”

“Yeah, you’re right . . . but she likes that other me. I mean, she doesn’t know it’s not me, but she likes that guy, not me. She likes me for not-me.”

Kyle laughed, then said, “I don’t know, man, she was pretty into you before all that.”

“You think?”

Kyle nodded. “Hey, I’m sorry I wasn’t around more,” he said. “But you didn’t have to join the enemy.”

“I didn’t know I was joining the enemy. I was cold and I thought I was gonna die so I just . . . got on the thing’s back.”

And he realized he had started building another alternate lie-world. Because for a minute, cold but fully conscious and fully himself, he had known what he was doing and tried to make himself either think they weren’t the enemy or that it was somehow okay.

“I think, for a minute, I knew what I was doing. But then there was part of me that thought, maybe I could be their Chosen One. I mean, you turned this place around. I thought, sure, these guys might be evil, but maybe I can turn them around somehow. Or maybe I could like, work from the inside, to bring them down.”

“Well, now you’re kind of doing that, so congratulations.”

“What’s gonna happen tomorrow?”

Kyle looked at Tom for a long, long time.

“I shouldn’t tell you what’s happening tomorrow. Because, like, for all I know, as soon as I tell you you’re gonna grow wings and burst through the wall and go flying back there.”

“Dude, like I said, they brainwashed me, please believe me, I—Kyle?”

Kyle’s eyes were closed and his head was down. “Please be quiet,” Kyle said. “I’m reading your intentions.”

Tom sat still.

“Wow,” Kyle said, his eyes still closed. “You really hated me.”

“I hated all you guys, that’s just how they programmed me to—”

“I mean before that. Before you were programmed.”

“. . . I didn’t
hate
you.”

Kyle’s eyes sprang open. “Now it looks like you want to help us.”

“I do.” Tom realized he was in no way a part of the “us” anymore. He could have been at one point. But he just wouldn’t accept a gig at the Rat-Snottery.

“So I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen,” Kyle said, “and you’re going to tell me if any part of it contradicts what you know about the Ghelm and their kingdom and how it works, okay?”

“Okay,” Tom said.

“There’s this thing, double soul-swap. The goal is for J to come here and inhabit your body, or the copy of your body, in this world. When that happens, your soul, or whatever you want to call it, your experience of you, goes to the void where J lives.”

“And who’s in my body on Earth?”

“A placeholder soul. Randomly pulled out of the void.”

“Okay.”

“And once J’s in your body he gets to complete the maneuver he was going to do before he died. There’s a Vortex portal at the center of the Ghelm kingdom, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s going to get in there and use a spell called Reverse Worldflow. It’s not a spell he can just cast, though, because spell-casting is about creating a world and you can’t, by definition, create a world between worlds. So he designed this thing called a Reverse Worldflow grenade. He tosses that into the Vortex portal, and instead of the world-wind blowing out, it starts sucking in, like an ultrapowerful vacuum. It pulls the entire Ghelm kingdom down and into the portal.”

“Why does J have to be here for that to happen? Why haven’t they done it already?”

“He didn’t leave instructions for designing the grenade. He has to build it, and he has to be the one to deliver it because he’s the only one who’s ever been inside their kingdom and come back alive. Their king asked him to come, pretending it was diplomatic, pretending they’d stop attacking if J would just come and listen to them. Then, when he was there, the king tried to recruit him to their side. J said no. He escaped. And based on what he saw there, he came up with this plan.”

“And he died before he could do it.”

“No,” Kyle said, “he died trying to do it.”

“Hey, uhm, Your Majesty?” Kyle said. “Wake up!”

The king stirred in his bed, or more accurately, “on” his bed. It was tough to be “in” a bed that was just a mattress on the floor with no sheets or covers on it, in one corner of an empty room.

“What?” the king said without opening his eyes.

“Tom raised a really good point about the plan.”

“Was his point, ‘I’m a traitor in your midst still in league with the Ghelm, so don’t go through with it and leave them alone’?”

“No. It was that we can’t let the entire kingdom go down the Vortex. Just the Executive Orb.”

“What? Why? That sounds like a something a traitor would say.”

“I’ve been there,” Tom said, not able to keep silent anymore. “There are a lot of people there, I don’t know if they’re innocent, exactly, but they’re civilians, they’re not soldiers, they’re not actively planning to take over all the worlds.”

“The
All-Worlds
,” the king corrected him.

“Right,” Tom said, “and more important, there are all these slaves, races from everywhere, from all the worlds the Ghelm are planning to conquer, that they’re training as an army.”

“Surely you’re not suggesting we leave our enemy with a standing army.”

“They’re a standing army of slaves,” Tom said. “They don’t want to be there.”

“And the men who assisted in the assault on this kingdom? They were slaves as well?”

“Not all of them, but . . . the point is, if you try to get rid of the entire kingdom and everybody who may have a single ill intention against
your
kingdom, that Vortex is going to turn that whole structure into this whirling hurricane of glass or diamond or whatever it’s made of, and it’s not just going to suck everyone into another dimension harmlessly. They’re all going to be killed.” Tom always thought he was good at speaking, because he read a lot and he had a big vocabulary, but he felt like this was the first thing he’d ever said that he’d actually said as well as he’d meant to say it.

The king rolled his eyes.

“And isn’t there a chance,” Kyle said, “that, if we leave it open, it will suck in our kingdom, too?”

The king sighed and flopped his head back on the mattress.

“All right, what do you suggest?”

“Let me resize the Wall,” Kyle said, “bring it to the mouth of the Vortex, and use it to plug the hole. It’ll stop the wind and lock our enemies inside all at once.”

“No! No! Absolutely not. It is one thing to leave a remaining Ghelm population of questionable intent alive in this world, but it is quite another thing to remove our only proven line of defense and send it to another land!”

“It’s not your only line of defense anymore,” Kyle said, sounding hurt. “You have me.”

“I know, Kyle, but . . . things one relies on . . . if one relies on them too heavily, they have a way of . . . disappearing.”

“I’m not going to . . .” Kyle said, “Look, if it’ll make you feel better, that barrier I put up around the castle after I teleported everyone inside during the attack? I’ll put up a bigger one of those before I leave for the Ghelm mountain, okay?”

The king lay silent for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. Finally he said: “Optimism does not come easy to me, Kyle.”

“I know,” Kyle said.

“Trust does not come easily to me.”

“I know.”

The king sighed. “The plan is altered.”

“Thanks, Your Majesty.”

“But
not
the part that will send
him
,”
the king said, pointing to Tom without looking at him, “to a mysterious void. That part remains the same.”

“I understand,” Tom said.

“I’ve read him,” Kyle said. “He doesn’t want to hurt us.”

“I suggest you think back to what I said a moment ago,” the king said. “About trust.”

He turned over on the mattress, facing the wall. He was snoring before Tom and Kyle were all the way out of the room.

They walked through the throne room. Tom turned to go back to his cell.

“There’s an extra mattress in my room,” Kyle said.

“You sure?” Tom said.

Kyle nodded.

27

TOM AND KYLE
were standing in the crater at first light.

“Normally you fall backward,” Kyle said. “This one, you fall forward.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I mean,” Kyle said, “there’s other magic stuff going on that I have to do, but as far as what you have to do that’s different, that’s it.”

“No problem,” Tom said. He was tremendously scared. He had no idea what was going to happen, what the void would be like, but he didn’t want to let Kyle in on any of this fear. He wanted to bear it silently. Heroically, even. He wanted to bear it like someone who, standing in this very crater, had cursed his friend and his friend’s kingdom and ended up trying to destroy them, and now wanted so, so badly to make up for it.

“Let me know when it’s done!” the king shouted from over the ridge. “I’m ready to greet my old friend!” The king wanted to be there when J took residency in Tom’s body, but he didn’t want to see Tom off.

“Is there anything else? I mean, anything else you need to know about the Ghelm, or their kingdom, or—” Tom said.

“No,” Kyle said. “I mean, maybe. But either way, we have to start now. This thing’s going to take J the whole day to build, and we want to attack in the dead of night, when they’re sleeping.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Tell him to take care of me, okay? I need this body.”

Kyle didn’t laugh or acknowledge the joke. He just frowned, looked down, and started sweeping the sand Tom would land on in a very specific pattern. “You’re not your body,” Kyle said. “Your body’s on Earth. What you are right now, what J’s going to inhabit, is a copy of you.”

“So, let’s say J dies here . . .”

“You shut up!” the king shouted from over the hill.

“The you that’s you lives on in the void forever. Your body on Earth continues on with that temporary soul inside of it.”

“Okay,” Tom said. He wished he hadn’t heard that. The thought of his body going about its business on Earth, filled with an impostor living out the rest of his life, was far scarier to him than the prospect of actually dying.

“Don’t worry,” Kyle said. “He’s not going to fail. You ready?”

“Yes,” Tom said, and he realized he had just created another alternate lie-world, one in which he was ready.

Kyle stood behind Tom.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Kyle’s hands hit Tom’s back. Tom flew forward into the sand, then through the sand, into the world between worlds that was not a world at all.

28

WHEN A MEAN
kid in second grade had told Tom that there was no heaven, Tom had spent that entire night in his bed with Pokémon sheets trying to think of what else there could be after you died. Did you just float in nothing? he thought. And if you were supposed to spend eternity in heaven, did that mean you instead spent eternity in that nothing? He had closed his eyes and tried to imagine that, that blackness, forever. And then at a certain point he stopped even thinking about the nothingness and got stuck thinking about forever. Forever. The craziest thing about forever is that it went on forever. Thinking about forever there in bed in second grade, Tom felt like he might break his brain. And floating in the void after the double soul-swap, he felt like he had taken up residence in that scary broken-brained place he had imagined was “forever” when he was very small.

A long time passed before anything happened. It wasn’t forever, because it ended. Something happened. The void stopped being just unlimited black. There was the vaguest red tint appearing somewhere. That meant he could see, even if he didn’t have actual physical eyeballs.

Then the redness started to drift to one side of Tom’s eyeless vision and then to the other. Something came into focus. A light. The light got bigger and brighter. Something like a jellyfish made of light floated up to Tom. Tom was relieved because something floating up to him meant that there was, in fact, a him. And he could begin to see, within the light-jellyfish, faces. Human ones. Not physical or real: just flashes, images in the pulsating mass of light. They darted around inside the thing like a string of Christmas lights wrapped in a ball and set to “chase” mode. On the third or fourth rotation, Tom realized it was the same face. And then, coming from everywhere, an echo that slowly became a voice.

“Youyouyouyouyouyououoouuooou’re not Jason.”

Tom didn’t know how to answer without a mouth or a body.

“No,” he answered. Oh, so that was how. His voice didn’t have the strange reverse echo, and it didn’t come from everywhere. It just came from him.

“Youyouyouyouyouyouyouyooooou’re in Jason’s spot.”

“You guys have spots?” Tom said. “Even in a void?”

“Sususususuuuuuuuuure,” the thing said. “And this is a good one.”

“Oh,” Tom said.

“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII was joking.”

“Oh, sorry,” Tom said. “Ha.”

“Yoyouoououououououou don’t have as good of a sense of humor as Jason,” said the thing. “Where is he?”

“Who’s Jason?” Tom asked.

“Hihihihihihihihihis soul is usually here,” said the thing, “except recently sometimes it’s not. He’s been getting to go to his home world, a place called Earth, and act as this boy.”

“Did he say the boy’s name?”

“Tttttttttttttttim.”

“Tom?”

“Tttttthhhat’s it. Tom.”

“You mean J,” Tom said. “You’re talking about a man named J, like the letter.”

“Iiiiiiiiii’m talking about a man called Jason, whose spot this is. I’ve been here for as long as I’ve been here, and one day, he appeared. And I come by when I come by, and we share stories from being alive. He’s had lots of new stories since getting to go back to this Earth. It’s nice to hear about life in a world. We don’t even talk about what he does sometimes. We just talk about how nice it is to feel like you have a body, or to feel how an object is heavy, or very light, or how nice it is to feel time pass. I miss him when he goes, but I’m glad he gets to go and bring the stories back. I was getting pretty tired of the old one.”

“What was the old one?” Tom asked.

“Ssssssssssssssso he came from this place called Earth, and when he was a boy, he stumbled upon a portal to another world. We know about these things in my world, and in many other worlds, but Earth doesn’t know they have them. He says he found it playing in a ‘rubbish heap.’ And on the other side was this kingdom without a name, and they were very poor and very scared, because they spent all of their time fighting off attacks from a much stronger kingdom. Their existence was defined only by survival. The king of this kingdom without a name had a son, and this son befriended the newcomer, Jason, and convinced his father to let him stay. He taught Jason what little ancestral magic he knew, and Jason took to it very quickly, and had soon broken those spells down into their component parts to figure out the very fabric of magic, and was able to build grand spells of his own design. So that the kingdom might for once worry about something besides its own destruction, he created an invisible barrier around it, which their enemies could not penetrate. Contained within this sphere was a lake, and contained within that lake was the portal that took him back and forth between Earth and his new home. By night, he and teams of divers would bring ‘rubbish’ from Earth and make glorious things out of it, much the way he had taken the native magic of the nameless kingdom and made it into something better. Safe from harm, the kingdom experienced a golden age of peace and prosperity.

“The king of the rival kingdom extended a message of peace to the kingdom without a name. Jason went abroad as the rival king requested. Once there, he told Jason of a master plan to conquer the All-Worlds, if only Jason would share with him the magic he’d developed. Jason refused. He fled. But while there . . .”

“He developed a plan to destroy the other kingdom once and for all.”

“Yyeeeessssssss,” the thing said. “How did you know?”

“What’s your name?” Tom said.

“IIIIIIIIIIIIIII’ve forgotten,” the thing said. “What’s yours?”

“I’m Tom,” Tom said.

“Tththththththe famous Tom,” it said. “Jason has said, from what he has seen of your life, being inside of it, that you are very much like him. He is reminded of himself by you.”

“Really?” Tom said. Tom let himself feel proud of the comparison for just a second.

“Ssssssso then, you know the rest of the story?”

“He was killed trying to pull off his plan,” said Tom.

“Nnnnnnnot just killed,” the thing that had forgotten its name said. “Captured and tortured and then killed once he still would not give up his secrets. And he says he knew he was dead, and then he was pulled up. Pulled up, he says. Pulled up to here. And the first time he said that, I was glad to hear it, because it means I am not truly dead. I am just between places. Now, I am not so sure I am still glad. I grow weary.”

“You might get pulled out into a world,” Tom said. “Like Jason.”

“The idea is appealing. I would also settle for my friend Jason returning here. It’s good to have friends.”

“It is,” Tom said.

And then, he was no longer in between places. He was pulled up and up and up, out of the void, and into life.

He was flat on his back. His head was wet, like when he’d awoken in the nameless kingdom soaked in thinkdrink. But it wasn’t a cold wet this time. It was a warm wet.

He reached up with one hand and touched the wet spot. He looked at his hand with the eyes he now had back, the way he’d done when he was brainwashed and fighting Kyle and he’d thought there was blood on his face but it was actually tears.

This time, it was blood. Lots of it.