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A warm hand on Joan’s shoulder. ‘Joan?’ It was Nick. ‘You don’t look well.’ He looked as worried as Tom—but still not sick himself. He looked over at the wound in the world. ‘What is that thing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joan managed.
Tom glanced over at it, and then away again fast, as if he couldn’t bear the sight. ‘It feels like nothing. The absence of anything. I think it’s the void beyond the timeline. A … a tear in the fabric of the world. It’s like a tear in the timeline itself.’
Joan couldn’t suppress her own shudder as she remembered standing at the gate of the Monster Court. She’d encountered the void there—a horrifying nothingness that had surrounded the whole Court. Now, she took a deep breath and made herself look.
It was a hole of some kind, ragged-edged with a dark space within. The void.
Jamie murmured something. He was breathing a little better, but he was deathly pale.
‘I know,’ Tom said. He lifted his head to Joan and Nick to explain. ‘Holes in the timeline only exist in stories about the end of days. This shouldn’t exist. It’s an anathema.’
‘It’s like the timeline’s in pain,’ Jamie managed.
Joan could feel it too. The timeline sometimes seemed like a great beast, and right now, Joan could sense it writhing and wounded.
Nick walked to the side where Joan had sat, his easy movements a contrast to how affected the others were.
‘Frankie, stay!’ Tom said sharply when Frankie went to follow him.
Joan forced herself to inch closer to the thing. Her body didn’t want to do it; the urge to run away was a desperate twinge at the back of her neck. But she needed to understand why Gran had been investigating this, and why the thing was here—where Joan and Nick had once been.
‘You okay?’ Nick murmured.
Joan nodded. She was as close to the thing now as she could get without actually sitting in the booth. She made herself look at it directly and then flinched back.
The hole wasn’t empty; there was something shadowy inside it. And somehow that horrified Joan more than the void itself.
She clenched her hands into fists, trying to force herself to look more closely; trying not to grab Nick’s hand, trying not to gather up the others and run back out of the seal.
As she looked, the shadows seemed to coalesce into something solid. A table. The same table that was outside the hole. Joan frowned, confused. They looked the same. They had the same wood grain.
No, they weren’t quite the same. The table inside the tear had marks on it—they looked like handprints. Like someone had gripped the table’s edge.
Joan was struck with a vivid memory then of Nick pulling a knife.
I told you. I won’t kill you here, he’d said.
And Joan had said to him: You should. I’m going to come after you. I’m going to kill you.
As Nick had gotten up to leave, she’d clutched the table to control herself—her family had been just two days dead. She’d put her hands right where those marks were now.
She leaned closer. The varnish had been stripped, leaving raw streaks of untreated wood. Light against dark. She drew a sharp breath. She’d seen something like this before. She’d done this before. She’d used her power to remove varnish from the wooden banister at the boathouse.
Had she made these marks too? Had her power manifested here when she’d gripped the table?
But … how could she be seeing this? Those marks would have been made in a whole other timeline.
It’s like a tear in the timeline, Tom had said. Were they looking at the previous timeline?
Feeling weirdly compelled, Joan reached to fit her fingers over those marks.
‘Don’t!’ she heard Jamie say behind her.
But Joan couldn’t stop. To her horror, her hand suddenly felt detached from the command of her mind. Her fingers crossed the barrier, and the terrible dissonance seemed to intensify, unbearably loud. Except that it wasn’t a sound; it was a discordance in the whole world.
There was a feeling under Joan’s hand like tissue paper being torn. Stop! Joan thought. There was a pause then—in the noise; the feeling—long enough for Joan to take a breath, to hope that the dissonance had stopped. But as she released the breath, there was a feeling of pressure, and then the jagged wound in the booth seemed to explode.
