She frames it like she saw on a TV show once, studs at sixteen inches, or anyway the breadth of two spread hands. Without sheetrock, she panels the walls in masonite, like an old movie set facade. You could tear it apart with any crude pry bar. Maybe one day somebody will.
It’s not quite square, the little room. When she looks it over she mostly sees the flaws. But it’s her own.
Aldous found two brass numerals, backstage: the number that comes after twelve. She tacks them to her door to nowhere, and opens it, and leaves the house behind.
Thirty years is an eyetwitch once you’re measuring your age in millennia, but Longinus can’t believe he almost missed the window. They’re only doing two more of these.
He contemplated a number of ways of getting aboard, even the traditional qualification, but math always made him go soft. Folded instead into a tiny crate labelled BRINE SHRIMP, he wonders if this compartment is even vacuum-sealed. But what’s it going to do? Kill him?
Endeavor begins to tremble on the pad and, for all his cynicism, he’s excited. Cursed to walk the earth forever. Yeah, well.
One way to fix that.
The place where Regen is trapped is a manifestation of perfect order. There is no change, no entropy: his fellow prisoners labor forever, pointless tasks their prison. They want badly to keep him there too.
Miss Chamuel is an agent of chaos, her wolf a roaring fury, her sword a flaming brand. They throw everything in her path, stone and steel and creatures of nightmare, but though she bleeds they cannot stand before her.
Regen is terrified, shaking, but not surprised. He expected this from the moment they met. For a good teacher, saving your life is part of the job.
His eyes are shot; his arm is broken; the magic has left them all. But Alex takes a stance from eidetic memory and snarls:
“I know kung fu.”
Quan-Ti, immortal, hesitates.
Behind Alex, Amadeus Faust steps out from nothing and opens his femoral arteries with a circular blade. In the cage, the Chosen Ones scream.
A snap of the cloak; the sorcerers vanish. Alex, on his elbows, crawls toward the lever that opens the door. His face is white-green, his blood an empty bucket. He gets a grip with one hand. Then the other.
His body pulls it down.
A ghost that has forgotten its name has no hope of ever resting; most of them grow quieter than whispers as the centuries grind down.
But some grow louder.
Xue Si holds her candle tight as a foul and arctic wind turns its flame to streamer. “I can give you a new name!” she yells. “I can give you silence and peace!”
What a kind offer, says the wind, sharpening into teeth and tongues and cruel laughter. The next word you say will name me!
Xue Si opens her mouth. All that comes out is the tearing sound of rotten silk.
The first outbreaks of buscemitis hit Miami hard; frantic dermatologists try to establish a link to sun damage, to Botox, to anything. None of it sticks. The only characteristic all the victims share is two X chromosomes.
There’s no cure. Experimental hepburnigrafting is only a topical treatment, and really no better than sunglasses. It spreads, leaping oceans, with cases in France, Estonia and Egypt (Buscemiless, they call it “Mubarak’s Legacy”).
The HBO gangster show gets pulled. Deep in his cups and the Trees Lounge replica in his basement, Buscemi watches the news with eyes like the soul of the world.