Chapter Text
“It’s not possible.”
Zooble said it without looking at her.
The four of them sat beneath a sky that did not really exist and they knew it did not exist. They had entered one of Caine’s realms, a country of large, rolling hills where the light was fixed in a permanent afternoon that progressed into a fiery sunset. Orange clouds hung motionless over distant mountains and nothing moved in all that terrain, save for the grass.
Pomni sat with her knees drawn to her chest, staring out across the hill.
“How do you know?”
Zooble sighed. “Because they’re abstracted, Pomni.”
They spoke the word as if it were an old law. It was the widely accepted truth of the Circus, after all. You abstract and you do not come back.
“But what if—”
“No.”
The word landed between them and lay there. Beside Zooble, Gangle folded her hands in her lap, and to Pomni’s right, Ragatha looked down into the grass.
For a long while, nobody spoke.
The Circus had become a quieter place in the weeks since Caine’s return and the revelation of, well, everything.
Not literally quiet. Adventures still happened. Caine still burst into rooms with his impossible enthusiasm and his elaborate plans, but the others made adventures too. There were monsters and kingdoms and treasure hunts and worlds folded inside of other worlds. There were days when Pomni laughed until her sides hurt.
And yet there was a quietness to it now. The underlying layer of panic was gone, and with it the desperate searching for answers and endless need to escape. It seemed everyone had come to terms with the world and had accepted it. They were copies. The real world belonged to someone else and this world belonged to them.
Most days Pomni felt happy.
Most days.
“I almost had him.”
Ragatha closed her eye and shook her head. “Pomni,” she said.
“I did.”
She lifted her head and stood, turning to face the three of them. “He hugged me.”
Nobody answered her. They would not look at her.
“He said he didn’t want to go.”
The memory sat inside her like a splinter of wood. It never grew smaller, no matter how hard she tried to stifle it with endless adventuring and ceaseless laughter. It festered.
“He was still there,” she said. She looked at Ragatha as if somehow she was the only one who would understand her. “For a second, he was still there.”
Ragatha had been close with Jax in the old days. He would choose her first when partners were needed. She had been there for him when Ribbit had gone. She understood Pomni. She had to.
“That’s not what happened,” Zooble said.
“It is, though.”
“You were touching someone who had already abstracted, Pom,” Ragatha reasoned.
“I know.”
“You started glitching,” Gangle said. Her voice held some of that old jittery lilt to it.
“I know.”
“You almost abstracted, too,” Zooble said.
“I know.”
The words came harder each time, and her fists were clenched at her sides. Because she did know. She remembered the feeling. Reality had begun to tear at its edges and she had felt light and unburdened. It was terrifying. She felt like her mind was being wiped and she was nothing.
She remembered Zooble grabbing her and pulling her backward until she lay on her back staring up at them and Kinger. And then the white light was gone. Nothing. Just nothing.
And Jax was gone forever.
Supposedly.
“You don’t know that,” Pomni said.
“What?” Zooble said.
“That he’s gone forever. I mean, has anyone ever tried?”
Zooble was the only one looking at her now. The look they gave her was not angry and that made it worse, somehow. It was the look given to someone who could not stop beating a dead horse. Exasperation at someone who could not stop reopening old wounds.
“Pom. . .” they sighed.
He said he didn’t want to go,” she repeated. Maybe now, someone will listen.
“People say things when they're about to—” They stopped. To what? Die? “. . .abstract.”
“We’re not people. He didn’t die. He abstracted.”
The three exchanged glances. Pomni hated this: the silent conversation they were having right in front of her. The concern. As if she were becoming fragile and must be handled with care.
“He hated me for months,” she said quietly.
Gangle’s expression softened. “Pomni—”
“He did.”
“He didn’t.”
“He literally told me he hated me.”
And then he had told her that she was not supposed to love him. But she chose to leave that part out.
“And then he hugged you,” Ragatha said.
The hill fell silent again. Ragatha stood up and her voice was soft.
“We were there, Pomni.” She breathed, her hand hovering over Pomni’s shoulder before it settled there. “You didn’t almost bring him back. He almost took you with him.”
Pomni had to look away.
In the distance, the sunset and the clouds had not moved. Nothing moved in the Circus unless someone wanted it to. Neither Gangle nor Zooble had an answer for what Ragatha had said. For them, the silence must have felt like a concession from Pomni. For Pomni, it felt like suffocation.
Zooble rubbed their face. “Loo. Maybe he meant something. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was scared.”
“He was scared.”
“That’s what I just said—”
“You said maybe.”
Silence again.
Everyone had walked on eggshells around Jax near the end. They knew he was not himself anymore the moment he chose to have them stay in the Circus during the last adventure, when the opportunity was presented that they could leave. Yet nobody had done anything.
Pomni remembered the look on his face vividly. It was not cruel or smug or amused. He was crying. He was terrified. As if something had finally caught up to him. As if he had spent years running from whatever truth he kept buried in his brain.
“I keep thinking about it. I can’t stop,” she said. Nobody interrupted her. “I keep thinking that if you’d given me another minute. Or if I’d asked him to talk to me. . .”
“You can’t do that,” Ragatha said.
Since things had changed, Ragatha stopped trying to please people. Pomni liked that about her now. She was more honest about what she liked and what she did not like. She was firm. Right now, though, Pomni hated it.
“You can’t do that to yourself. You’ll follow the same path he did if you keep chasing what-ifs.”
Gangle spoke. “We can’t bear to lose you, too, Pomni. You’re the one who helped us make peace with all of this.”
At her sides, Pomni’s hands balled into fists and then opened. Tense and untense.
“But what if I could have done something?”
The question echoed across the hill and no one answered because no one knew. That was the part that pissed her off the most. No one knew anything. Not one of them could say with certainty what it meant to abstract. They knew what Caine had told them and they knew what they had seen.
The uncertainty was a crack. A tiny crack with glinting light. And Pomni had spent what felt like months staring into it. Every adventure and every meal and every quiet conversation and every damn laugh. It sat in her chest like an itch she could not scratch.
“I just can’t stop thinking about him.”
The confession sat in the evening air, eliciting a wave of sympathy from the other three. It was honest and it was simple. Pomni could feel her heart beating—and what a strange thing for a copy to feel. A strange thing for a person who was not technically a person.
Still, it beat. And it hurt.
Somewhere beyond the walls of the Circus, a woman named Abigail was living another life. Her best life, according to Caine. But within the confines of the Circus, it was Pomni’s life. These were her people, and one of them was missing. His abstracted form was right in front of him. And she cared so much it choked her.
“I can’t either,” Ragatha said. “But what can we do?”
Nobody offered a solution. There was a long silence between them.
The wind moved through the grass anew and Gangle stared down at her hands. Something about her posture had changed. She seemed smaller, as if she were trying to disappear into herself. Pomni had not seen her behave this way in weeks.
“Gangle?” Ragatha asked.
Gangle looked up and she was trembling.
“What if. . .” she swallowed and looked at Pomni. “What if you keep doing this, looking for him, and what if you find something and get hurt? What if you start glitching again and Caine can’t fix you this time? What if—”
“Hey,” Zooble interrupted. “It’s okay.”
“No. It isn’t.”
It really wasn’t.
Gangle’s voice cracked. “We almost lost her.”
None of them wanted to say it, but they all remembered. Pomni remembered. The feeling of the world unraveling around her and the sensation of becoming something else entirely.
Gangle looked directly at her. “Please don’t do that again.”
Pomni’s chest tightened and Zooble sighed.
“Nothing’s going to happen to her. She’s not going anywhere.” They looked at Pomni with accusation, a pointed glare hidden from Gangle. “Right?”
Pomni forced a smile. “Right.”
“You aren’t going to go chasing after the abstractions.”
“No.”
“You aren’t going to start experimenting with things nobody understands.”
“Nope.”
Zooble narrowed their eye at her. The hesitation in Pomni’s voice had been small. Perhaps too small for anyone else to notice if they were not looking carefully, but it was not too small for Zooble.
“Pomni,” they warned.
“I’m serious.”
“Swear then.”
The words hung between them. Pomni hated herself a little for the lie, but she just had to know.
“I swear.”
Gangle relaxed. Marginally.
Ragatha reached out and offered Gangle a hand. “Come on. Let’s head back.”
Gangle took her hand and the two of them started to walk away from Pomni. Pomni had expected Zooble to follow them, but when they did not, she looked up.
After a few steps, Ragatha slowed and glanced over her shoulder. “You guys coming?”
“In a minute,” Zooble said.
A knowing expression fell over Ragatha’s features, and she nodded. She and Gangle disappeared over the crest of a hill, leaving Pomni and Zooble alone beneath the frozen sunset.
For a long time, neither spoke. Then, Zooble faced her.
“You need to let this go.”
Pomni sighed. “I already swore—”
“You’re doing this for you, Pomni. Not for him.”
The words made Pomni blink. She stared incredulously at them, the accusation settling on her like a heavy blanket.
“I felt guilty too,” they admitted. They spoke reluctantly. “I thought. . .I don’t know. Maybe if I’d tried a little harder. If I just reached out to him a little more. . .he’d still be here.”
Pomni’s thoughts immediately went to Jax. To his arms around her and the way his voice had trembled when he said he didn’t want to go. It haunted her. The scene constantly existed behind her eyelids.
“But if Jax wanted help, he would have accepted it,” Zooble said. Their voice was firm and unwavering. “You tried, Pomni. That’s your closure.”
“I know.”
Zooble turned and began to walk away. Pomni fell into step beside them, and they relaxed.
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
Pomni laughed softly, nodding.
“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” Zooble said. They looked down at her. Zooble looked vulnerable in a way Pomni seldom saw these days. “We. . .kinda need you.”
Pomni faltered. Zooble kept walking.
“I won’t,” she said. Another lie.
Slanted shadows lengthened across the grass as Zooble glanced at her over their shoulder. “What happened to Jax is not your fault.”
That was the last thing they said before they went after Ragatha and Gangle. Pomni watched them disappear over the hill and then she was alone in the quiet country.
She should have followed them. She had promised.
But there was one person in the Circus who knew more about abstraction than anyone else. Only one person who had watched it happen over and over again. One person who knew more than he let on.
It’s not your fault. Zooble had said.
Maybe not. But that didn’t mean it was hopeless. Hope had been a dangerous thing once. But things had changed. The Circus had changed.
Pomni turned and started walking through the static evening, intent on finding Caine.