The place where Regen is trapped is a manifestation of perfect order. There is no change, no entropy: his fellow prisoners labor forever, pointless tasks their prison. They want badly to keep him there too.
Miss Chamuel is an agent of chaos, her wolf a roaring fury, her sword a flaming brand. They throw everything in her path, stone and steel and creatures of nightmare, but though she bleeds they cannot stand before her.
Regen is terrified, shaking, but not surprised. He expected this from the moment they met. For a good teacher, saving your life is part of the job.
His eyes are shot; his arm is broken; the magic has left them all. But Alex takes a stance from eidetic memory and snarls:
“I know kung fu.”
Quan-Ti, immortal, hesitates.
Behind Alex, Amadeus Faust steps out from nothing and opens his femoral arteries with a circular blade. In the cage, the Chosen Ones scream.
A snap of the cloak; the sorcerers vanish. Alex, on his elbows, crawls toward the lever that opens the door. His face is white-green, his blood an empty bucket. He gets a grip with one hand. Then the other.
His body pulls it down.
A ghost that has forgotten its name has no hope of ever resting; most of them grow quieter than whispers as the centuries grind down.
But some grow louder.
Xue Si holds her candle tight as a foul and arctic wind turns its flame to streamer. “I can give you a new name!” she yells. “I can give you silence and peace!”
What a kind offer, says the wind, sharpening into teeth and tongues and cruel laughter. The next word you say will name me!
Xue Si opens her mouth. All that comes out is the tearing sound of rotten silk.
The first outbreaks of buscemitis hit Miami hard; frantic dermatologists try to establish a link to sun damage, to Botox, to anything. None of it sticks. The only characteristic all the victims share is two X chromosomes.
There’s no cure. Experimental hepburnigrafting is only a topical treatment, and really no better than sunglasses. It spreads, leaping oceans, with cases in France, Estonia and Egypt (Buscemiless, they call it “Mubarak’s Legacy”).
The HBO gangster show gets pulled. Deep in his cups and the Trees Lounge replica in his basement, Buscemi watches the news with eyes like the soul of the world.
“Write what you feel,” says the counselor, so Stoop sits down and writes a story about a pretty smart guy who had a hobby of toying with beautiful fractals and okay, maybe he switched to freelance to have more time to pursue it and then maybe he stopped doing freelance but it was temporary, but then he failed to budget for food and rent so the landlord had him dragged fighting from his filthy chair in front of the slowly turning recursive helix which is when his sister got him into this program with a counselor who says “write what you–“