Part 40 (1/2)

366.

”Yes,” Niki murmurs, tasting blood and bile, and This is what I do now, she thinks clearly. This is what happens next, and then it will end.

And the absolute gravity of the portal pulls her from herself, tears her from the dying sh.e.l.l of her body, and she doesn't try to fight.

This is how the story ends, and she only regrets that Spyder will never grasp why this is how the story ends, and that Daria is dead, and those women sacrificed in the temple of the red witches, and Marvin will have to find another girl to save from the wolves. The portal draws her in like a lover, the last and most perfect lover that she'll ever know.

Niki can hear Spyder screaming down on the bridge, Spyder shaking her limp body, and she can also hear the trumpets of the angels, and the armies of the Dragon pus.h.i.+ng their way towards the Dog's Bridge.

And then the portal closes, sealing itself shut around her.

You are brave, Niki thinks, remembering Pikabo's Kenzia's chant, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture.

By your sacrifice might worlds be saved.

But the red witch never would have understood this either; Niki knows that. She can feel the cloud walls of the portal beginning to close in about her as she ends the storm that Spyder began, and knows that the portal is sealed at both ends. And without her, or the philtre, or the house on Cullom Street, Spyder will never build another. Niki opens her arms wide as galaxies swirl about her, through her, col-liding and reforming, one star system cannibalizing another, and in the silent death and birth of universes, in the most infinitesimal sliver of a second, the collapsing star named Niki Ky winks out, and winks in, the pulsar rhythm of her being, and eternity rolls on.

And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations still dreams in her black-hole coc.o.o.n of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small s.h.i.+eld of her pulsing cephalothorax.

367.

Satisfied, she draws tight a single silken thread, one worldline held taut between her jaws, and snips it free to drift in the void. And then she collects a second, and sets it free, as well.

These things happen.

These things happen.

Her black matter spinnerets work endlessly in her sleep, dividing time from s.p.a.ce and st.i.tching the two together again.

And her daughters, grown to fat, long-legged spiderlings in electrostatic egg sacs laid in the s.p.a.ces between worlds, emerge at last from the squeezing, oscillating tidal forces of their mother's singularity to scramble across the swirl of the hole's vast accretion disk.

And to drift free across the sky.

E P I L O G U E.

Land's End.

Marvin flips open the rusted snaps on the battered black guitar case, flipping them up one after the next, and then he opens it. The morning sun glints unevenly off the twelve-string cradled in worn crimson velvet, s.h.i.+ning off wood and varnish scuffed and scratched by all the years that this was the only guitar Daria Parker owned. The one she found cheap in a p.a.w.nshop and played for spare change on Pearl Street in Boulder. But she put it away in the attic when they bought the house on Alamo Square, putting away that part of her life, though sometimes Niki would sit up there alone and pick at the strings, pretending she knew how to play, or only pretending Daria was there to play for her.

He looks up at the wide sky stretched out above Horse-shoe Cove, only a few shades lighter than the surging blue of the sea. The waves slam themselves against the granite edge of the continent, spraying foam and stranding fleshy stalks of kelp, and above him, the white gulls wheel and dip and cry out to one another.