Page 58 of The Book That Held Her Heart

This is where they save me.Arpix’s lips muttered the words without sound.This is where they save me.It had to be. Where Clovis and her brothers emerged from a side street, swords in hand. But that wasn’t how it worked. It wasn’t how real life worked. People didn’t turn up in the split second you needed them most: they were a week early or a day late. Even now, under the shadow of the gallows arm, Arpix couldn’t shake off the shackles of his rationality. Statistics didn’t lie, they were just misunderstood. A million-to-one shot might not even happen if you took a million tries.

Impatiently but without malice, one of the executioners positioned Arpix on the trapdoor where an “X” had been helpfully scorched into the planks to mark the spot. The noose descended around his neck, prickly, rough. Arpix fought to keep a ridiculous complaint about it being too tight from his lips.This is it. They have to save me now.

It had to be now. Once they dropped him, he was dead whether his neck broke or not. His throat would be crushed. Undoing the rope wouldn’t save him. It had to be now.

“And this one…” The executioner paused, looking at his list. “What’s his name?”

“Skinny,” Janks called out.

“And Skinny, of no fixed abode, guilty of trespass and attempted theft.”

“A filthy stealing Amacar!” a woman shouted.

“Hang them all.” It sounded like a child.

“Wait!” Arpix said.

The executioner walked to the lever, a length of wood over a yard long, hinged to the platform. Throwing it would release all three trapdoors together.

“Don’t…” the old man whispered.

But he did.

The drop was more like misstepping off a curb than a proper fall. But Arpix heard his neck break.

Time is an illusion. Lifetimes doubly so.

Collapsing the Wavefunction: A Compendium of Maybes, by Boris

Chapter 26

Clovis

Something tugged at Clovis. She yawned hugely, batting a lazy hand at the irritation, still wrapped in sleep. She had been dreaming that she was falling, but the nightmare had given over to dreams of sunshine, blue skies, and smooth fingers interlocked with her own.

Something tugged at her. A faint, sourceless ripple of worry ran through her. She hunched in on herself.

Fear, like other weaknesses, was something Clovis admitted to herself, but not to others. To deny such things would be to omit them from strategy and tactics, leaving oneself vulnerable. To share them would be to put those weaknesses in the hands of potential enemies, and everyone she had ever met was a potential enemy.

Heights frightened her. The library, as she’d experienced it for the first twenty years of her life, was flat. Spilled water did not run. Falling from any elevation more than that of a reading desk was a rarity. She had faced her fear in the Mechanism, but somehow the heights and drops of the real world had still had surprises to offer her. Surprises that had remained undiscovered until very recently, when she’d reached her second chamber. She’d had her revelation when standing up for the first time on top of a bookcase many times taller than she was. The unfamiliar quantity of “down” on either side pulled at her with a worrying, sick-making urgency. There had been some new ingredient in the mix. Perhaps the slight wobble of the shelves beneath her feet. Perhaps the anxiety drifting up from herbrothers. Or maybe just the cold hard knowledge that a fall in the real had so much more bad stuff to offer than the forgiveness of the Mechanism did.

There had been little time to investigate the fear, however. The huge mechanical killing machine pursuing her had required her to jump endlessly from shelf top to shelf top, and her fear of falling had been pushed aside by a fear of being ripped into pieces. It hadn’t been until she and her brothers escaped the library entirely and met the mountains that Clovis’s abstract fear of dropping had been augmented by actual experience, at which point her vertigo had solidified.

She’d found that in the heat of battle, such as when chasing down the human king’s army in an attempt to save Arpix, she could shoulder the feeling aside, focusing on her prey while her body obeyed her orders. But when she’d jumped into the pool in the Exchange, an unexpected fall had seized her. No water reached up to take her weight, just an endless plummeting that had drawn a howl from her mouth and made her forget all about the hands she had been supposed to hold on to.

She’d fallen, tumbling, expecting at any moment a crushing impact. Instead, the softness of a dream had received her, and she lay now, still enfolded in the remnants of it, not wanting to open her eyes.

Something tugged at her.

“What?” Clovis sat up sharply, her fingers now encircling the wrist behind the intruding hand.

Half a dozen small figures scattered shrieking into the mist. The human child whose wrist Clovis held bent its head of dirty blonde hair and sank small teeth into the meat of one of Clovis’s fingers.

Clovis snarled and with her other hand dragged the head back by the hair, revealing the grime-streaked face of a young girl. A skinny one.

The girl snarled back, and one of her accomplices ran out of the mist, swinging a length of timber at Clovis’s head. Clovis rose so that the blow landed across her shoulders. The shock of the impact shook the weapon from her assailant’s hands, and the young boy had retreated into the mist by the time Clovis reached her full height.

“What were you doing?” Clovis lifted the young female by her arm until they were face to face.

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