Act 3, Chapter 102: “Let go.” by Alex Weatherlight

Day in the story: 30th January (Friday), past 1 a.m.—24 hours into the time trial

Alex Weatherlight

*Sophie. Peter. Danger. Sophie. Peter. Danger… Sophie. Peter. Danger.*

“What?” Alexandra asked as I helped her into bed inside the Domain for a well-earned sleep. The message came from Gertrude, and within seconds it repeated itself so many times that Anansi blocked the connection.

“I felt it too. I'm going,” I replied, summoning the spellbook. I held it for a heartbeat by its belt and chains, exhaled, then swung it over my shoulder like a bag. “Why didn't I think of this earlier...” I muttered.

“Go!” Alexandra shouted.

An image of Gertrude appeared vividly in my memory, mind, and soul, exactly as I had made her, exactly as I knew her. Supported by an anchor, the portrait of her left inside that special Grimoire, I asked the world to move me to where she was, her location finally revealed by the shadowlight-invisible thread connecting us all.

I dodged a spear of money the instant the world stopped moving.

Wrapped in silver shadowlight, Penrose's weapon nearly skewered me the moment I arrived. I survived only through quick thinking, helped by my additional brains and the fact that Equinox was nearby, allowing me to use him as a teleportation anchor.

I found myself in what was most likely a hotel lobby. It was flooded with shallow water, broken glass, seaweed, and dead, or barely alive, fish still flapping across the floor.

In the middle of the hall, four statues of people were scattered across the ground in various states of destruction, while six others stood in a circle around Penrose in defensive position. I felt both identity and animation working within them.

Phillip held an unmoving Gertrude tightly against his chest. His hair was disheveled, his suit soaked with old and dirtied with fresh blood and he was sobbing. A ring of banknotes surrounded him, part of it flattening again after briefly transforming into the spear meant to kill me.

Everywhere, pink masses of flesh lay bloodied and reeking of rotten eggs. They twitched here and there but otherwise appeared dead. Or perhaps they were only fragments of something much larger.

A man in filthy clothes, looking every bit the drunkard, walked from one monstrous puddle to the next, holding an ornate blade surrounded by light and driving it into anything that still moved.

Ramirez was dying, cradled in Thomas's arms.

Rei Yamashiro's body had been impaled from below on a spear of coins that pierced through his jaw. Blood still poured from the sockets where his arms had been torn away, the severed limbs lying beneath him in a puddle of blood and shit.

“Fuck,” I whispered, taking it all in at once. Gertrude was dead, and through the various paper spiders scattered around the room I could now see the entire hall clearly, including her body. She looked almost real, but wasn't—her hair didn't move. It was just one solid block, which meant she'd gone back to being nothing more than a printed model.

And that meant that, at least for now, she was beyond saving. Whether Alexa's certainty that we would always continue to exist as concepts, ready to be brought back anew, held true... we'd find out later. For now, though, I could still be useful.

Nickolas, instructed by Maya from inside the Domain, was already running for the jar of soup he'd prepared after Sophie had been shot, while I made my way toward Thomas Torque.

He noticed me immediately and raised his bearded chin to meet my eyes. Ramirez was breathing in shallow gasps while Thomas pressed a wad of his torn T-shirt against the wound in his chest.

“I'm a friend of Alexa!” I shouted, forcing everyone to look at me, including Penrose and the man I had no idea who he was.

“She died,” Thomas replied, then looked back down at Ramirez with quiet resignation.

“I know. I can see that. I can save your friend, though. Keep him stable for just a second longer.” He nodded, but there was no conviction behind the gesture. I turned toward Phillip. “And you. We'll talk when I'm back.” I teleported into the Domain, grabbed the jar from Nickolas's hand, but he held onto it firmly, refusing to let go.

“Leave something for Sophie. Just in case,” he said. Only then did he release it.

A heartbeat later I was back in the hotel, this time using Equinox as my destination, and hurried over to Ramirez.

“Give him this. It's Leben's jarred miracle. It will heal him. Hopefully.” I unscrewed the lid and handed the jar to Thomas. The geezer-looking man had been watching me the entire time, but he'd stopped killing whatever those sludge-like masses of muscle were.

I slowly walked toward Penrose.

“What kind of friend of Alexa are you, exactly?” Phillip asked without turning around this time, his face focused on Gertrude’s. The circle surrounding him rippled slowly, as though preparing to attack.

*Alexa?* She asked through my mind but I'd noticed it too, an informal name.

“One that can bring her back. Release her body to me.”

“She is dead. That monster turned her into an unmoving statue and sucked every last droplet of impermanence out of her. I’m not releasing her to anyone, especially to a person I know dog shit about.”

Penrose rose to his feet, still holding Gertrude’s model—she was frozen in a cross-legged sitting position. I reached through my aura, summoning her to me. The act, however, was met by Phillip’s overwhelming determination to keep hold of her. His will opposed mine so strongly that it gave him the Authority to resist my claim.

“What the fuck do you think you are doing?” he asked, with so much anger that it seeped out of him.

*Wait a second. That message when the connection had been reestablished. Peter. Sophie. Danger. And it came from Gertrude while she was in Penrose’s presence...* Alexa kept intruding into my thoughts, but I understood well enough what she meant. The fate that had befallen Sophie—Phillip was responsible for it.

“Did you kill her?” I asked.

“He didn’t,” Thomas answered. Ramirez started coughing and slowly sat up. The drunk-looking man let his blade of light disappear and sat down on a nearby bench, calmly observing everything while sipping from a bottle of whiskey. “There was a monster in here, keeping us trapped inside. She helped get it out, but—”

“Silence!” Penrose shouted.

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The ring of banknotes around his feet rose into a wave that encircled them. Hungry sharks made of money. He held Gertrude firmly with one arm while his other hand reached into his pocket for a pile of coins.

On one hand, I didn’t want to fight him, not knowing exactly what had happened here. On the other, anger rose within me because of the message Gertrude had kept sending us in the last moments of her life, which meant it had to be important to her. And the thought of him being responsible for the attempted assassination of my closest friend made the blood in my veins boil.

There were no last chances to propose here, and knowing the man, he would not budge even an inch, offering no concessions when it came to what he deemed important. I found at least some sympathy for him for holding onto Gertrude with such determination, but I needed the body he held. So if I could preserve the fact that I was more than one person now as a secret from him, I would try to do it before resorting to pleading in Alexa's original form.

The speaker inside one of my singing blades started playing the all around the world song just before the first of his coins launched toward me with overwhelming speed.

I was already on the move. I tossed the blades all around the room, each one playing the same melody, but from a different source. Every single one had been weaponized by me, filling the area with dozens of afterimages of myself, each shimmering slightly with shadowlight, each unmistakably looking like me, moving like me.

I covered myself with a coating of shadowlight as well, making it even harder to distinguish me from the unusual crowd of an army of me.

“Thomas!” Phillip shouted, urging the big man to fight me. Torque let go of Ramirez, propping him against the wall beside a nearby pedestal, then charged into the forest of my clones, swinging his empowered body through the illusions. Every strike carried him deeper into the chaos.

Penrose didn't remain idle. He fired coins at the daggers I'd planted wherever he managed to spot them among the moving bodies. It was also clear that the overlapping music disturbed his senses.

The guitar tattoo on my body briefly glowed with shadowlight beneath the protective film already covering me and a second later, the instrument it depicted was swinging through the air before landing neatly in my hands.

Axel Gee. The name surfaced in my mind as I pulled the first string while hidden behind one of the pedestals that had most likely held the statues before they stepped down. I chose not to remove my Authority from them, letting them continue fighting on Penrose's behalf. I also left it within the body paint on Thomas's skin, for the same reason—to conceal my identity.

Axel Gee. I liked that name, as I repeated it in my mind.

The music flowing beneath my fingers was something new. A melody I hadn't found among the countless songs I'd studied while searching for effects that could help me in situations I could anticipate.

This time I needed an original artistic creation. The first of its kind where music was concerned.

As my fingertips began dancing across the delicate strings, I severed the connection between one of my brains and the guitar virtuoso I'd found in the shop where I bought the instrument. The moment that link vanished, Alexandra reconnected the brain to us inside the Domain.

The difference became apparent immediately. Where before I had to consciously control every movement I'd practiced during whatever free time I'd found over the last few weeks, now I simply thought about the melody I wanted to play, and my body followed. My arms adjusted into the proper position, holding the neck where it felt most natural, while my hands glided across the frets, my fingers effortlessly finding every configuration needed to produce the right tone.

The fight continued as the statues moved alongside Penrose and Thomas, cutting through the various afterimages of me. Phillip's control over money in its many forms had definitely improved since the last time I'd seen him. His banknotes elongated and sharpened whenever he mentally ordered them to attack, while the rest kept circling around his feet as he moved. His coins were shot across the room at tremendous speed, and each impact left behind a small crater as a sonic boom rolled through the area.

Rhythm, melody, and harmony—the three building blocks of music—were mine to command. Armed with the muscle memory of a master I had just stolen, my imagination and emotion became the foundation of a creation that would be painted in time rather than space.

The first notes of mine carried a quiet weight, lingering on questions that had no answer. I let them hang in the air, unwilling to rush them, because letting go never happened all at once. They were strong and reverberated through the room, quickly drawing the attention of both Phillip and Thomas. Despite the discord created by the overlapping sounds, my opening melody was powerful enough to let them pinpoint my position within the sea of sound.

And where that melody was a sequence of notes, the rhythm was how it was set up—the timing, the pattern, the duration of the notes, and the pauses between them—through which I expressed my intent and told my story in music.

I teleported to one of the singing knives, right into the middle of the battle, and moved between the coins fired at me, leaving even more afterimages in my wake. In cadence with my notes I placed each of my steps.

I held the guitar tightly when I stopped chasing the melody. Instead, I let it find its own path, and slowly it wandered toward simpler places. Every pull of the strings was meant to symbolize something—both loss and, finally, acceptance. Each phrase became a little lighter than the last, as though it had laid another burden by the roadside.

Each one was laced with another sound: the soft tap of my fingers against the body of the guitar. Even without singing, and with just a single instrument, harmony could be created. Where I might once have filled every pause with quick, sharp pulls of the strings, I left room for the music to breathe. The spaces between the notes began saying what the notes themselves no longer could.

I let each tone fade naturally instead of cutting it short. They drifted into one another like memories softening around their edges, no longer asking to be changed, only remembered. The melody carried the quiet grace of returning home, settling lower with every breath. Each note was accompanied by the harmonious tap of a finger or the rhythmic splash of a footstep striking the water.

I teleported again when Penrose came too close to the real me among the sea of clones.

His face was streaked with tears, his determination fading with every passing second. He still held Gertrude, but the resolve in his movements weakened as the melody I played was granted the Authority to become what it truly represented the very second I pulled the first string—the feeling of letting go.

I let those quiet pulls of the strings, carried by the speaker on my back, fill the room above the noise of every other song. Even the pauses were deliberate, meant to show that acceptance needed time. It needed silence. Somehow, even those empty notes sang louder than the superficial chaos surrounding them.

That was when I finally withdrew the Authority stored within the statues. Riding the same concept I was trying to awaken within the people around me, I felt that them becoming nothing but stone through acceptance was explanation enough for the minds listening.

At one point Thomas stopped swinging, just after I ducked beneath his massive arm and teleported to yet another blade. I let all the clone-producing songs fade away, silencing them one after another until only my ever-slowing melody remained in the air. Penrose fixed his eyes on me as the afterimages disappeared together with the final echoes of the other tunes.

His tears struck the floor. He extended a hand toward me, flicking his fingers in time with a wild sob escaping his mouth. The released coin soared through the air before smashing through part of the wall leading outside, allowing a fresh breeze to sweep into the room.

Somewhere deeper in the hall, the drunkard dropped his bottle and began sobbing as well, overwhelmed by emotions.

When I played the final notes, after teleporting behind Penrose, I didn't ask them to resolve everything. I simply let them rest where they belonged. They carried neither triumph nor regret. Only the quiet certainty that some endings do not need to be overcome, they only need to be accepted.

Phillip stopped fighting and dropped to his knees once more.

“My baby,” he whispered, and his hands released the model that had once been Gertrude. She slowly slipped toward the floor and by the time the last vibration disappeared into silence, it no longer felt as though I'd been playing a song. It felt as though I'd slowly unclenched my own hands and watched the wind carry away everything I'd spent so long trying to hold onto.

The magic I'd woven into the melody affected me too.

A one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

A single tear rolled down my cheek when I realized that all my struggles, all the guilt I'd placed on myself for moving away from Penrose, letting Jason be taken, allowing Malik to die, pursuing his brother and losing a leg, and failing to see the changes that had come over Peter had happened—but they didn't have to define me all the time.

The next second, when the world answered my command and brought Gertrude into my arms, I sent Axel Gee back into the Domain and took one final look at the place I was about to leave.

Everyone around me sobbed as they struggled to come to peace with the feelings I'd forced them to confront. The breeze drifting in through the broken wall gently pushed the water across the floor, carrying debris and broken remains with it.

I teleported home.