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“Time for you to take a trip,” Cassie said to the woman. “I want to show you the Book of Doors.” She pulled the book from her pocket, and the woman looked at it like she was a hungry man and the book was a meal. “I want to show you the nothing and nowhere. I want to show you where the books came from.”

The woman raised her eyebrows at that.

“I’ve been there,” Cassie said. She shook her head slowly. “You won’t survive there. It’s a place where humans can’t exist. It will tear you apart.”

Drummond shoved the gun into his pocket, and Azaki tossed the Book of Mists onto the floor, and the two of them approached the woman, one for each arm, planning to carry her to the door at the side of the room, where Cassie would reveal the nothing and nowhere. But before they grabbed her the woman placed her hands on her skirt, palms down on the black feathers.

Azaki reached her first, and he took hold of her arm, and she dropped her head and smiled at him from beneath her brows.

Azaki grunted. His mouth dropped open and he released an awful scream into the ballroom. He fell backward onto the carpeted floor as he threw his hands up to his face, and Cassie saw that the skirt the woman was wearing was glowing now, pulsing dark light.

The woman shot out an arm and grabbed Drummond before he could move away, and then Drummond shrieked, a high-pitched agonized yell, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he too fell to the floor, both hands on his face.

Cassie backed away.

She had seen this before, in Drummond’s memories.

“The Book of Despair,” she said.

The woman turned on the spot, pirouetting elegantly like a dancer, her head back and her eyes to the ceiling, as if Cassie weren’t there.

Cassie looked again at the skirt of crow’s feathers and saw that it wasn’t fabric. The feathers were the pages of a book stitched together into a garment.

Before Cassie could react to that, the woman darted forward, not with inhuman speed but quicker than Cassie had expected, and gripped her with both hands, her face a contorted scream of fury, and Cassie was filled up with despair.

Despair

In Cassie’s mind, all was lost. It was over.

There was no hope. They were beaten, and she was barely aware of her own body as she collapsed to the floor, as all strength and intention left her.

There was no color in the world. Life was monochrome and austere. There was consciousness and then death, and consciousness was destroyed by the inevitability of death.

Death.

Her own grandfather, a skeleton in loose skin with blood on his lips from his coughing. The air was thick with sweat and pain. Cassie was stuck there, a room with no door, just pain and death forever, and she wailed, and this world of despair enjoyed the sound of her pain.

Then she saw the future, her despair pulling back a curtain and revealing to her what her failure meant. The whole world was empty, silent cities and barren fields. Animal carcasses lay strewn about in muddy fields where no crops grew. The trees on the horizon were hands thrown up in horror at what had become of the world.

This was the world the woman had created, and here she was, a shadow on the horizon, strolling in delight through the misery. She was a smudge of black on the landscape drawing near, her arms spread wide as she promenaded along the road. But the road was not a road,Cassie saw. The woman was walking on a path made of people, all of them crushed under her feet, all of them screaming wide-mouthed into the gray world. And the world wasn’t silent anymore, it was full of the noises of pain and agony.

This was the future for humanity, for mankind. Because of the woman.

Because of Cassie.

Because of the books Cassie had created in the nowhere and everywhere.

Cassie wailed, in the ballroom, and in the dead world where she was in her mind.

And the woman was drawn to the sound. Hungry eyes swept around like searchlights and found Cassie where she cowered. The woman’s smile of delight turned into a sneer.

Cassie lowered her eyes, knowing that the woman was advancing upon her. She knew that the woman wanted to add her to the road of bodies and bones, to the screaming path that carried her through the world. Cassie would be stuck there, for eternity, just one of millions of others.

Overhead the sky was gray and flat, and as the woman advanced birds fell heavily to the ground on all sides, squawking and flapping as pain gripped them. And below her, in the mud, insects and worms writhed and erupted to the surface, stricken by the agony inflicted by the woman passing above them.

And the woman reached out toward Cassie, her mouth agape in a scream of pure hatred.

There could be no life without pain and suffering.