“A good question,” Ms. Kevarian said. “I do not envy you, Ms. Pohala. You have, I think, convinced yourself that a spider’s web is a silk dress.” From her pocket she produced a business card and flipped it in Kai’s direction. The card floated through the air, spinning slowly, ignorant of gravity. Kai caught it in one hand. “I sympathize. I wish I could help, but I can give you little assistance so long as you feel you require none. If you tear this card in half, I will hear you. If need be, I will come to your aid.”

“And if I don’t want your help?”

“We make our own choices. If we are lucky, we last long enough to live with them.” Ms. Kevarian opened a door in the dreamspace, into a rippling emptiness. She stood edged against the deep. It burned and chewed her outline. “Be well. And be careful.” The door swung shut behind her, and vanished with a click. Kai remained, alone in her dress in the empty room. Green moonlight bloomed on the spider-head hat, glinted off faceted eyes.

Kai tried to approach the hat, but her legs would not lift, her arms would not reach. The spider head twitched, and rose, topping a body of suggestion and fear. It scuttled forward. Fine-furred forelegs touched her neck. Its mouth sang triumph, and Kai cried out and woke in her own bed, where her arms were pinned to her sides and a sliver of steel rested at her throat and a woman’s voice said, “Why shouldn’t I kill you now?”

Chapter 41

41

As Edmond Margot wrote, the stars went out. He did not need them. A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world. Perhaps the world he built lived behind his eyes and was transmitted to the page by the instrument of ink, or else it lived beneath the page somehow, his pen’s progress sculpting form out of a purer white than sculptor’s marble. He coughed blood into a handkerchief. His illness worked angrily inside him, drawing him close to the beyond. He gloried and dissolved in the heat of his blood and heart and brain.