Beth Wonders's Arc

Chapter 29 of 29

The wall held, but Beth knew it would not for long. She stood over the dry fountain and pressed her palm to the north stones. She felt the taste of her world seeping out through a hundred hairline seams. Two hungry things circled beyond the barrier. They had watched the pink one drink. Now they knew the flavor, and they knew the way in. Feeding them one by one would strip her world bare. "You cannot hide the smell," Harriet said from the window. She had not left after all. "They already know it. You can only change what they taste." Beth turned. "Change it how? I built this. It tastes like me." "Then stop being the only flavor here." Harriet stepped down onto the floor in her scuffed boots. She waved once, out of habit, though no one was frightened now. "Bring in something they crave more. Make your world dull by comparison." The void chef poured itself through the crack before Beth could answer. Its starry body coiled on the cold floor, star-shaped eyes glinting. "I heard my name in the shape of that idea," it said, flat and dry. "You want a decoy. I have tasted every flavor in the cosmos. I know what a hungry thing cannot walk past." "You already own a piece of my finished world," Beth said. "You'd trade me?" "I'd trade you a lure. One time only. Payment later." It drifted to the dry basin. "Fill this with running water. Not magic. Water. I flavor it. They drink the false thing and go." Elijah spoke from the shadowed corner, quiet and plain. "And when they come back hungrier?" "Then you have a night to fix your seams," the void chef said. "That is the whole offer." Beth had no magic to bargain with, and no better plan. "Do it." She carried water in cupped hands from the aurora spring until the basin filled. It rose in the tall stone column, a shimmer of silver-blue rippling upward, catching the light in bright bands. The void chef pressed its body to the water and held still. When it pulled back, the falling water smelled like nothing Beth could name. Sweet and vast and wrong. Even Elijah stepped away from it. The two cosmic things came fast. The first slid through the seam as a figure in a red suit, stardust swirling under the cloth, its face blank. The second wore a bright ring around its head and pale orange skin. Both stopped at the shimmering column. Both drank. The false flavor pulled them in whole. They swelled, satisfied, and drifted back out through the crack. The room went quiet. Beth sank against the wall, shaking. The decoy had worked. Both mouths were fed and gone. "One night," the void chef said, coiling toward the window. "Seal your seams by dawn. The lure will not fool them twice, and by morning you will owe me for the trick."