Sixty Seconds

Sixty.

The first of them stepped into the door.

It was Elena. She walked toward it in her scarred armor, with her sword at her side and her head high, like a woman crossing a courtyard in the morning. At the threshold she turned. Through the fire of the pillar she could not see him, he knew that; the light was too bright. But she looked toward it, and her gray eyes were clear.

"Thank you," she said. "For my name."

Then she stepped into the white and was gone, and he felt her go as one feels a stone drawn out of a stream. A small cold absence. A gap in the water that closed.

Fifty-five.

Gregor went next, with his hen. He had given up trying to leave her. She sat in the crook of his arm with her head tucked under her wing, and he marched to the door with the stolid dignity of a retired commander, and at the threshold he saluted. It was the crispest salute Archie had ever seen. Then he was through, and the hen with him, and a single brown feather came drifting back through the gold and settled on nothing.

Gone.

Fifty.

"Archie."

It was Thomas Crane. The big gray man paused on the sill, one hand against the frame, and looked back at the light with something that was almost a grin.

"I told Nell," he said. "I said, he'll come back for the pencil."

"I'll try."

"You do that." The Guardian's voice cracked. "Red flat barrel. You keep it sharp."

He went.

Forty-five.

Sera stood at the door for a moment with her bone harp in her green hands. She did not step through. She lifted the harp to her shoulder, and drew her thumb across the strings, and a single clear note rose up into the Core, shining and unwavering, and hung in the air like a bird on the wind. Then she smiled, and let it fade, and went.

The note stayed.

It stayed in the light round him, long after she had gone. He thought: She left that. He thought: It's the Tree. And for a moment, a very strange, a very quiet moment, he was not afraid.

Forty.

Jin came with Venn on his arm.

The thin man was weeping openly. His glasses had steamed. He walked as if every step were an effort, with his hand on Venn's shoulder, and he did not look at the door. He looked back, over his shoulder, at the great blaze of white that held the man he had known for forty days, and his mouth worked.

"I don't have anything to say," he said.

"You don't need to," said Archie, out of the fire.

He could not know if Jin heard. But the thin man stopped, and bowed his head, and then, to Archie's astonishment, folded himself at the waist in the deep formal bow of a pupil to a teacher. He straightened.

"Gamsahamnida," he said. "Thank you. Thank you, my brother."

He went through.

Thirty-five.

Venn went last of the three, and did it badly.

He stopped on the threshold. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. He turned, and looked at the pillar of light with his whole face crumpling, and a hundred words seemed to chase one another across it, none of them quite getting out.

"See you, bro," he said at last.

He laughed. It was a cracked broken thing, and it caught in his throat. But he lifted one hand in a salute, loose and easy and impossibly brave, and flashed the grin, and for one second Archie saw him as he had been in the first hour in Thornkeep, the glorious, ridiculous, golden man with a scar in his eyebrow and the world at his feet.

"I looked cool, though," said Venn. "Right?"

"You looked cool."

He stepped through.

…

In a long underground room a long way away, a red-haired man had stopped breathing.

He stood in front of nine monitors, with a hand over his mouth, and watched nine small lights flicker. Four were beginning to climb. Three were steady. Two were still.

"They're coming," he whispered. "Dr. Ferrara. They're coming through."

"I see."

"Four of them. Five. Six, they're waking, the, the brain waves are," Otis's voice broke into a laugh. "Oh my God! Look at the activity! It's perfect, it's beautiful, it's, it's exactly what the, oh, Doctor, they're awake!"

Luca did not answer.

He stood very close to the screen, with his hands clasped before him. He was watching one point of light, not a nine-fold constellation but a single point, small and gold and unwavering, in the very middle of the field. It was the last. It burned steadily, patiently, without flinching.

It had not moved.

"Otis," said Luca, quietly. "How long has he got?"

The little man's laughter died.

…

Twenty-five.

"Archie."

Matteo stood at the foot of the pillar.

He was alone. The thin gray figure with the silver-ringed eyes had made himself the last to leave but one, and now he stood on the nothing with his tangled hair blowing and his hand held up to shield his face from the glare. He was weeping. He was smiling. He seemed hardly to know which.

"I have a message," he said.

"For whom?"

"For my brother. I will give it to him when I wake." He drew a breath. "I will say: The man you sent has done what you could not. I will say: He held the door for us. And I will say," his voice broke, "that there are no more words to say what I owe him, and I will spend my life finding them."

"Tell him thanks," said Archie. "For sending me."

"I will."

"Tell him I'd go again."

"Would you?"

"Every time."

Matteo looked at the pillar for a long moment. Then he bowed, as an old man bows, stiffly, from the neck, and turned, and walked into the white.

Twenty.

…

She was the last.

She had not moved. All through the going of the others she had stood in the place where he'd left her, at the edge of the Core, with her fists clenched and the pendant blazing at her throat. Her face was a mask. She had watched each of them go as a person watches a train leave a station. She had not said a word.

Now she was alone with him in the dark, and she raised her eyes.

"Archie."

"Go on."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I can't." Her voice shook. She took one step toward the pillar, and another, and stood before it with her arms hanging. "I can't just walk away. I can't turn round and go. You can't ask me to. Not this. Not this, Archie, not this."

"Zoe."

"I'm not going to!"

"Zoe. Look at me."

She looked.

He could not see her, but she could see something. Out of the wall of white fire, as she watched, a shape was forming: a man's, faint and tall, made of gold. It had his shoulders. It had the line of his jaw. It held out a hand, palm up, in a gesture of invitation, and she saw in it the whole of the long month: the Hall, and the Tree, and the lamp in the dark.

"Go," said the shape, and its voice was warm and quiet. "Go home. It's all right."

"It isn't."

"It's going to be."

"You can't know that!"

"No," he said. "But I'd like to believe it. And I'd like you to believe it with me."

Fifteen.

She started to cry.

It came without sound. She stood quite straight, in the golden light, with the tears running down her face, and she made no move to wipe them. She lifted her hands. She laid them against the pillar, flat, one on either side of his shape, and the fire ran up her arms and she did not flinch.

"I'll find you," she said.

"I know."

"I'll find you. I swear it. I'll never stop."

"I know you won't."

"ARCHIE!"

"Go on."

"Archie—"

"Go."

Ten.

She went.

It took everything he had to say it. He felt it go out of him, the last of his strength, like water out of a cracked jar. She stumbled back from the pillar, and wheeled, and ran. The seam of white light took her in. She looked back, once, at the very threshold. A small dark figure with her hair streaming and her mouth open on his name, and the stone at her throat blazing like a star.

Then she was gone.

Nine.

He was alone.

He had not known what it would be like. He had imagined it a hundred ways, in the endless seconds of the past minute: silence, or terror, or an abyss. But it was not any of those. It was only quiet. It was a large and peaceful quiet, like the quiet of a church at dusk, with the light coming gold through a high window.

Eight.

The Core had begun to fall.

He felt it, from a long way off. The great cables drew in, one by one, like roads folding up behind a traveler. The threads of the lattice, so long taut, went slack. A castle on a crag in the evening grew faint, and fainter, and went out like a candle. A city in the rain. A ship. A Tree. He was the last thing in it. A single mind in a shell of light, holding up a door for people who had already gone through.

Seven.

I should be afraid, he thought.

He examined the thought with some curiosity. It did not seem to be there. He looked for fear, the way he'd looked for it at the Tree, and in the vault, and in the white face of a clock on a wall in Boston, and found nothing. There was only this, the stillness, the long clear gold, and underneath it a quiet joy that he could not account for.

Six.

He thought of a drafting table.

He thought of a man in a gray suit, bent over a sheet of tracing paper, who had said yes, sir a hundred thousand times, and been content. He thought of a boy in a rented suit by a grave. A man with a pink scalp and a paper cup, who had said, in a gentle voice: Good boy.

I'm not him, he thought. I never was.

Five.

He thought of a stump under a Tree.

He thought of a hall at Thornkeep, dark and cold, with a woman in armor staring at him over a sword, and his own voice shouting a name. A kitchen on Meridian-7. A red pencil, laid on a bar. A girl in a red dress at a window, turning, with her mouth beginning to curve.

Oh, he thought.

I lived.

Four.

It was very simple, in the end. He had been afraid, all his life, that he had done nothing. That he would die the way he'd lived, a gray man in a gray room with a drawing nobody saw. He had been afraid of a smaller life than he deserved.

It wasn't small.

It was only short.

Three.

He smiled.

He felt it on his face, though he had no face. He felt it all through him, in the gold. It was the biggest smile he had ever smiled, and the least self-conscious, and the last.

Two.

Zoe, he thought.

One.

Be braver than your mother.

Zero.

The light closed over him like a hand.

And the Core, and the door, and the great white singing pillar, and the five worlds, one after another, went out.