Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 1

The First Game

Prologue: The Shadow

Is this thing on? It’s on. Hello, Eternals! Ageless ones. Undying ones. People who have been parked in the same seats since before seats were invented and who are, let’s be honest, bored out of your immortal skulls. Don’t lie to me. I can see the ones in the back reorganizing the stars again. Put the stars down, Gerald.

Good news. Tonight we premiere the Twelve, and I am your host, your narrator, your lovable bastard in the booth.

Here’s the setup, for the three of you who were asleep for the last ten thousand years. Two of your own, Alex and Beth. Eternals, same as you, and bored, same as you, until they bumped into each other at the back of eternity and decided that was that. Now they want something nobody up here has been handed in a very long time: a kid. A brand-new eternal. And the council, bless their dusty hearts, doesn’t hand those out for asking nicely.

So here are the terms, and the council insists I read them out, so sit still. Twelve worlds. Twelve lives each. Full memory wipe every single time. No notes, no hints, no idea they’ve ever met. Every world is a different show, and you get to watch the lot of them, cheer for whoever you like and bet whatever it is immortals bet. If they find each other and fall in love twelve times running, the council stamps it true and the baby’s approved. Miss once, and no baby. Not ever. Sad trombone.

All they get going in is a warmth in the chest that points.

And all they get against them is me.

Introductions! I’m Alex’s Shadow. Every player brings one; it’s in the rules, page nine, very small print. I’m the part of him that never trusted being happy, with all the jokes he was too polite to make. I’m cleverer than he is, I’m better looking than he is, and for the length of this game I run every damn thing: every level, every lock, every monster, every wet street, every pie. My whole job, the one thing the council asks of me, is to keep him away from her. If a love can survive its own Shadow holding every key, it’s real. That’s the test. I’m the test. Hi.

I’ve never lost. Want the odds? The Architect ran them for me, because they run everything upstairs and they love a sum. One in a quadrillion. They showed their working. It was four pages long and I didn’t read it.

Betting’s open, by the way. Current line on Alex finding her in world one: forty to one against. I set that line. I’d take it.

So. Show one: The Deephold. Fifteen levels underground, three years on the clock, and a city on top with very good bread and one woman in it who has absolutely no idea she’s the finish line. I built every inch of it to keep him from her, and I’m not even slightly sorry.

Forty-seven million of you are watching, which I’m told is a record. It’s because of me. Say it with me. It’s because of me.

One more thing. He isn’t going in alone. His oldest friend signed up beside him. Jonathan: eternal, bored, cleverer than both of us, and he will never let me forget I said that. The two of them walk into world one together. Jonathan’s playing his own game on the small channel, with his own Shadow, and you do not want to meet his Shadow. I’ve met his Shadow. I still have a ringing in my ear.

It’s economical. Two games, one world. The Architect likes economical. They don’t care who wins, so long as nothing breaks.

Nothing’s going to break. I’ll see to that personally.

Here’s our boy, waking up holding something he shouldn’t have. I put it there. Lights down. Roll it.

* * *

Chapter 1: Two Idiots in a Dungeon

He woke up holding a rock, in the dark, with a stranger breathing next to him.

That was three problems. The fourth was worse: he already loved the stranger, and he had no idea why.

A man lay on the stone an arm’s length away, flat on his back, staring at the same ceiling with the expression of a scholar who has been handed a manuscript in a language he respects but does not enjoy. Dark skin. Mid-thirties. A long coat with too many pockets. One hand resting on a staff of pale wood laid across his chest like a sword on a tomb. The man turned his head too.

They looked across at each other, two grown men on a wet floor.

“Yo,” the man said.

“Yo,” he said back.

The water dripped. The torch made the small, busy noise torches make, like somebody shuffling papers in the next room.

“Why,” the man said, with enormous dignity, “is it always a dungeon.”

And that was the fourth fact, and it was the one that mattered: he knew this man. Not his face. He’d never seen this face. But he knew him as he’d have known the shape of his own front door in the dark. The voice landed somewhere under his ribs and said home.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I feel like I’ve complained about it before.”

“Many times,” the man agreed. “At length.” He sat up, slowly, testing each joint for complaints. “I’m Jonathan. I think. Yes. Jonathan.” He said it like a man reading his own name off a label and approving of the handwriting. “And you’re...”

The name was there when he reached for it. Nothing came attached: no mother calling it up a stair, no teacher yelling it across a yard, nobody saying it into a pillow. Just the word, clean, like a coin you find in a coat you don’t remember buying.

“Alex,” he said.

“Alex.” Jonathan nodded. “That’s correct. I don’t know how I know that’s correct, but I’d testify to it.”

Alex sat up, and his body filed its report all at once. Thirties. Used hard. A sword on its back that its hands already knew. And behind the breastbone, something that was not a body thing at all.

He put his hand flat on his chest without deciding to.

Warm. Not a fever, not a bruise. A warmth with a direction, as a draft has a direction. It pointed up: straight up, through the wet ceiling and whatever lay above the ceiling, toward something so far away he couldn’t have said how he knew it was there. Only that it was. And that it was waiting.

He looked over. Jonathan had his hand flat on his chest too.

“You’ve got one,” Alex said.

“I have something,” Jonathan said. “I’m reluctant to call it one until we’ve established what it is.”

“Which way’s yours point?”

Jonathan frowned, turning slowly where he sat like a compass needle settling. He stopped facing the left-hand wall. “There,” he said. “Sideways. Slightly up, but mostly sideways.” He studied Alex. “Yours?”

Alex pointed at the ceiling. Jonathan considered the ceiling for some time, as a man considers a bill.

“Well,” he said finally. “That’s not ideal.”

Alex laughed, which hurt, which was how he found out his ribs had opinions. It felt good anyway. It felt like the first true thing he’d done in this body.

They got up. The chamber was small and round, with one passage out of it, sloping up. By the wall were two packs. One held two bedrolls, a waterskin and food for four days if nobody was greedy. The other held a smaller bedroll, three books with no titles, and a pouch of chalk.

“That’s mine,” Jonathan said, picking up the one with the books.

“How do you know?”

“Because it has books in it, and yours has more food.” He paused, buckling it. “Which means whoever packed these knows us, Alex. Hold on to that thought. I don’t like it either.”

Alex glanced at the rock in his hand. In the torchlight it was the color of old honey, and something moved inside it, slow.

“Do you know what this is?”

Jonathan leaned in. “No. It looks expensive.”

“It feels like it wants something.”

“Most expensive things do.”

Alex held it up. “Which way’s out?” he asked it, feeling stupid and doing it anyway.

The rock sat in his palm, warm as his palm, and declined to have an opinion.

“I think,” Jonathan said carefully, “that it may not be that kind of rock.”

“What kind of rock is it?”

“The kind you find out about later, at the worst possible moment, usually while something is eating you.” Jonathan shouldered his pack. “The passage goes up. Your chest goes up. We follow the passage, and when the passage stops agreeing with your chest, we have a meeting.”

“And your chest?”

Jonathan pressed his palm to his coat. His face did something brief and private. “Mine can wait,” he said. “Mine’s patient. Yours is...” He gestured at Alex’s whole body. “Pointed.”

The passage was dry after the first twenty yards, and there were torches in it at intervals, every one lit, every one burning as if somebody had put a match to it a moment ago and stepped around the corner. Alex didn’t like that at all. Somebody had set this place up. Somebody wanted them to see where they were going.

They walked side by side. After a few minutes Alex noticed their steps had fallen into time. Left, left. Right, right. He changed his stride on purpose. Within ten paces they were matched again.

“Are you doing that?” he said.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“It’s weird.”

“It’s a soul thing,” Jonathan said, and then looked startled at himself. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“No, I think that’s right.” Alex didn’t know why he thought that, either. “It’s a soul thing.”

“Entry one,” Jonathan said.

“What?”

“I’m keeping a record.” Jonathan produced a notebook from one of his many pockets and a stub of chalk from another, discovered that chalk does not work on paper, put the chalk away with the air of a man who would deal with it later, and found a pencil. “Jonathan’s Official Record. Entry one: Jonathan wakes in a dungeon. Again, apparently.” He underlined again twice. “I feel strongly that there have been other dungeons.”

“How strongly?”

“Like a man who knows he’s allergic to something but not what. Oh, and there’s a city above us. Did I say that?”

Alex stopped walking. “No. You didn’t say that.”

Jonathan stopped too. He looked up at the ceiling as though he could see through it. “There’s a city. It’s called...” He closed his eyes. “Kogsworth. Canals. A lot of canals. Bells. An archive district that takes itself very seriously. A market on the west side with good bread.” He opened his eyes. “I know it like a map. Not like a memory. I couldn’t tell you a single person who lives there. But I could tell you how to get from the bell tower to the fish market without getting your feet wet.”

“How?”

“You can’t. Everyone gets their feet wet. It’s a known problem; there have been petitions.” He started walking again. “But the shortest route is the Lantern Bridge.”

The passage ended an hour later, or what Alex took for an hour; there was no sun to count by. It opened onto a landing, and the landing onto a stair, and at the top of the stair was a doorway with words cut into the lintel in a script Alex could see but not quite read.

“The Deephold,” Jonathan read. “Level One. What the city cannot bear to keep, it keeps below.”

“That’s cheerful.”

“That’s municipal,” Jonathan said. “There’s a difference, but not much of one.” He touched a mark under the inscription. “And that’s a fifteen. Fifteen levels.”

Alex eyed the stair going up into the dark beyond the doorway. He pressed his hand to his chest. Up. Up and up and up.

“Fifteen levels,” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“And you can’t aim.”

Jonathan turned to look at him with an expression of profound betrayal. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. I just know it.”

“My accuracy,” Jonathan said, with the stiffness of a man defending a wound, “is developing.”

“How developed is it?”

Jonathan raised his staff, pointed it at the far wall of the landing, and said a word that made the air taste of tin. A spark the size of a fist leapt from the tip, crossed the landing with tremendous conviction, and hit the ceiling eight feet to the left of anything he could possibly have meant.

They watched a little rain of stone dust settle on Alex’s boots.

“It’s at an early stage,” Jonathan said.

Alex put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t decide to. It was just where his hand went, as his feet kept matching Jonathan’s.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I can aim.”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a sword. Swords are mostly aiming.”

“That’s not how swords work.”

“It’s how I’m going to make them work.”

Jonathan laughed, and the laugh went up the stair ahead of them into the dark.

Something in the dark went quiet to listen to it.

Fourteen levels above them, a woman who did not know their names turned a page in a book that was not about them, and for no reason she could name, put her hand flat on her chest.

Alex didn’t know that. He only knew the stair went up, and the rock in his pocket had gone, very slightly, cold.

* * *