Matteo's Notes

The notes were not on paper.

Matteo explained that as he drew Jin down to sit beside him on the nothing, in the pale light of the pillar, with the others gathering round. He held out a hand, palm up, empty. Then he turned it over and breathed on it, once, softly, and the air above his knuckles filled with writing.

It rose like smoke. It rose in long luminous ribbons, folding and unfolding, lines of fine bright script in a score of different hands, some neat and some wild, some in a language Archie could almost read and some in nothing at all but patterns of light. They rustled. They drifted up and outward, and began to arrange themselves in the dark, row on row, until the whole of the upper dome seemed ruled like an enormous page.

"Fifteen years," said Matteo, apologetically. "I did not tidy."

"Good God," said Jin.

He sat quite still with his mouth open and his eyes moving. They moved as a pair of eyes move over a landscape from the window of a fast train, snatching, flicking, darting from one cluster to the next. His lips shaped numbers. His fingers, in his lap, twitched. After a moment he put out one hand, very carefully, and plucked a single ribbon out of the air as if it were a cobweb, and it hung in front of him, glowing, and unrolled itself.

"This is," he said in a hushed voice, "this is a proof."

"Is it?"

"It's a proof that the Guardian rule is not a law of the system. It's a boundary condition. You could change it, if you could change the initial state." He looked up with an expression of naked awe. "Matteo, do you realize what you've done?"

"I have been bored," said Matteo mildly.

…

It took the better part of an hour to read, and Jin did not read it all.

He did not need to. As the old man guided him through the dome, hand over hand, from one cluster of light to the next, a shape began to form. Archie watched it come, without understanding, as a layman watches a surgeon work. He saw Jin's brow furrow, and clear, and furrow again. He saw him write in the air with one finger, strike out a line, write another. Venn, after twenty minutes, lay down on his back with his hands behind his head and began to hum. Zoe sat beside Matteo with the old man's hand in hers.

At last Jin took off his glasses.

"I've got it," he said.

"Say it in English," said Venn, without opening his eyes.

"I'm trying."

"Try harder."

"It's a consent clause." Jin rubbed the bridge of his nose. "The Guardian binding isn't a punishment. It's a lock, and every lock has a keyhole. Matteo found it in the third year. The lattice holds each Guardian by their own agreement. They agreed, at the start, to stay. They didn't know it was permanent, but they agreed. And what an agreement makes, an agreement can unmake."

"They can just say no?"

"They can release." Jin leaned forward. "If every Guardian, all five, consents to be released at the same moment, the binding has nothing left to hold. It doesn't break. It simply isn't. And once it isn't, no one needs to stay."

"All five?" said Archie.

"Elena. Thomas. Gregor. Sera." Jin's eyes went to the old man. "And Matteo, who holds the Core."

"I consent," said Matteo, "very much."

"The system doesn't care about enthusiasm," said Jin, wryly. "But it will care about the quorum."

"And then?"

"And then it unravels. All of it. The five Spaces, the Mirror World, the Core. It's a cascade; there's no way to stop it once it starts." He swallowed. "It's what Matteo calls a self-destruct. It's the whole structure coming down at once, like a bridge with its piers pulled out. But if it's done properly, with everyone's consent, no one is caught inside. Everyone goes home."

There was a silence.

"Everyone," said Zoe slowly.

"Everyone. The locals, I think, will be released too. Not to the lab. To whatever comes after." Jin's voice was careful. "I can't promise what that is. But no one will be left behind."

…

"There's a catch," said Archie.

He did not make it a question. He knew the shape of these things now. In a month he had learned that every door in the Dimensions had a price, and that the price was never on the sign.

"There is," said Jin.

"Go on."

"The consent has to be given in person. Each Guardian must say it, aloud, to someone who carries the Key. It can't be transmitted. It can't be relayed. The system has to hear it." He waved a hand at the five coiling cables. "Someone has to go back."

"Back."

"To every Space. To Elena, in Thornkeep. To Thomas, in Ashmore. To Gregor, on the ship. To Sera, under the Tree. We have to find each one, and speak to them, and ask." Jin hesitated. "And they must say yes."

"What if they don't?"

"Then we don't have a quorum."

"And what if they," Venn sat up, "I don't know. Forgot? What if they've gone mad? Elena was a wreck when we met. Gregor was talking to the wall."

"We freed them. They're whole now."

"Whole and willing?"

"I don't know." Jin spread his hands. "I really don't. I'm only telling you what the proof says. It says the door exists. It doesn't say who's behind it."

"It's a risk," said Zoe quietly.

"It's a huge risk." Jin looked at her. "Every Space we pass through again is a Space that can notice us. William isn't gone. He's only locked out. And the Dimensions have been disturbed. I don't know what's waiting there. They might not be the places we left."

Silence stretched.

Matteo put out his thin hand. He laid it on Jin's, and then, after a moment, on Archie's.

"It is a great thing to ask," he said. "I will not tell you what to do. You have given me my brother's voice. I did not think to hear it again. I would not ask for more."

"We're not leaving you," said Archie.

"You could. It would be forgivable."

"It wouldn't."

"Archie—"

"I'll go back," said Archie.

He heard the words come out of him as one hears a thing dropped in another room. He didn't weigh them. He didn't look for a way round. They fell out as simply as that, and lay there, plain and heavy and true, and he felt an extraordinary lightness come over him, as if he had put down something that he'd been carrying so long he'd mistaken it for part of his body.

"I'll go back," he said again. "To all of them. I know the way. I made friends there. They'll listen."

"Not alone," said Zoe.

He turned.

She was on her feet. She had the pendant in her fist, and her face was white and set and fierce. She looked at him as she had looked at the mirror in the square. There was no pleading in it. There was no argument. It was a statement of plain, bright, stubborn fact.

"We go back," she said. "We. All of us. Don't you dare say it again."

"It could be dangerous."

"It's been dangerous since the day we signed." She put her hand on his arm. "I'm not letting you carry this one on your own. I'm done with that. Do you hear me? I'm done."

"Me too," said Venn, from the floor.

"And me," said Jin.

Archie looked at the three of them. He looked at the old man between them, with the light in his hair. He looked at the dark, and the web, and the lattice, and at the faint far gray thread of the Mirror World, slowly mending.

A month ago, he thought, I wouldn't have known how to say yes.

"All right," he said.

…

Luca's voice came down from the dome before they left.

It was a small voice now. It had lost the vast ringing quality of the moment of the lock, and shrunk to something human and nearly breaking. It came to them out of the air, from nowhere, as a man speaks through a door.

"I cannot reach you. The line is... it is very thin. But I can hear."

"Luca," said Matteo.

"I am listening. Say what you will."

"I wanted you to know," said the old man. He sat up, with Zoe's arm round his back. He turned his face to the dark, with a small crooked smile on it. "I have been writing to you. In the notes. In the margins. Fifteen years of letters."

"Oh."

"Most of it is about the weather. There is not a great deal of weather. I made some up." Matteo's eyes were bright. "And at the very end, I have written a poem. It is a bad one. It rhymes."

"I shall treasure it."

"You will hate it."

"I shall treasure it, little brother."

Matteo laughed. It was a thin, rusty, delighted sound, and it went on a long time, and when it stopped he was crying again. Zoe held him. Jin turned his face away, and took off his glasses, and polished them on his sleeve for a very long time. Venn stared fixedly at the ceiling.

"Go," said Matteo, at last. "Go on. Hurry. I will be here."

"We'll be back," said Zoe.

"I know."

She kissed his forehead. Then she took Archie's hand, and the pendant at her throat sang one long clear note, and in the dark before them, at the edge of the web, a seam of silver light began to open, tall and narrow, like a door left ajar in a dark house.

They went through, one after another, into the dark.