Zoe’s new technique made it easier to heal her friends than she feared. Once again she was faced with Skein’s magical nature. The black fluid that oozed up from her body spread over their blinded faces and wiped them away as though they never were. Burns healed, eyes opened, and Bella gasped.

“Your scars!”

Zoe blinked with surprise as Bella leaped to her feet and stared at Zoe’s face.

“They’re gone!”

Zoe brushed her lips with her fingers. She held her palm up to inspect her reflection. Just as Bella said, her scars were gone. A grin grew across her face as she felt a deep burden rise from her shoulders. She wasn’t sure if the curse of Gluttony was gone, since that hunger had braided itself so intimately into her psyche, but at least she no longer carried the external mark.

With a frown, she whirled on Anton.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Anton shrugged as he rubbed at his eyes. His silver orbs floated above the flowers that swayed in the everpresent breeze.

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

“Men,” Bella said with a roll of her eyes. “How are you feeling, Zoe? The Witch kind of… absorbed you.”

Zoe shuddered. She could still feel the presence and the pressure of the people inside the Witch. The joy of her healed lips faded as the cold memory rolled over her.

“I’m fine,” she said sharper than she intended. “We need to climb the mountain.”

Bella frowned.

“What Mountain? What the hell are you talking about?”

###

It quickly became apparent that neither Bella nor Skidmark could see the Mountain looming over the field of flowers. No matter how Zoe or Anton tried to point it out, all the other women saw was a clear blue sky. Even when they walked up to the first step, Bella and Skidmark only saw a cliff edge shrouded in cold, rolling mist.

“It’s the Mountain of Faith,” Anton said after an hour of various experiments. “It makes sense that only those with a strong sense of faith can see it.”

Zoe nodded slowly.

“I suppose.”

“Well,” Bella said. “After the apocalypse and falling in love with an alien who tried to kill me in a dream cocoon… my faith is pretty shaken. I trust you guys, but do I believe? I don’t know…”

Skidmark sat down.

“I thought I was faithful… I was brought up to believe. Were they just empty words?”

Anton chuckled.

“We ate the literal god of earth, maybe that cracked some childhood foundations?”

“Shut up, Anton,” Bella said, though without much heat as she moved to comfort Skidmark. “Are you alright?”

Skidmark shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it without saying anything. Zoe couldn’t imagine what she wanted to say, or how Skidmark felt. She was missing part of the picture. With a flex of her Willpower, she rang [Our Hearts Toll as One]. The pulse started with her heart and expanded out to touch her friends. She ignored the whispering sphere of Skein as it rolled out through the flowers. No sense of resistance from them, or the bees, as though her technique didn’t register any of it as real.

At once her friend's heart rates bloomed in the back of her mind: Anton’s metronome beat, Bella’s excited but slowing down as she took in the situation, and Skidmark fluttering like a baby bird that fell from the nest.

Zoe leaned down and placed a hand on Skidmark’s shoulder.

“Don’t let the system tell you what you believe,” she said.

“Easy for you to say,” Skidmark responded.

Zoe smiled.

“There’s no Skein here, did you know that? We have Skein, and this palace doesn’t, so which of us is real? There’s no real way to know. So just because this place doesn’t register your faith doesn’t mean you don’t believe.”

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“You think I want my faith assured?”

“Don’t you?”

Skidmark smirked as pain flashed in her eyes, but Zoe felt her heart rate slowing.

“I don’t know what I want… I think I want this to be over.”

The words hung heavy in the air, and Zoe rolled her shoulders as though she might shed the weight. She couldn’t. The flowers seemed a little duller, a little drabber, as the mists of the Mountain sent tendrils through the swaying stalks. She could smell the damp, the cold, in those pale fingers.

“We all want that,” Zoe said at last. “And it’s coming.”

Bella raised an eyebrow.

“The end?”

“Yeah, whatever shape that will be. Once I climb the mountain, once I get the enlightenment, once we leave this place… I don’t know what will wait for us when we return, but from what Rue said… it will be the end of this struggle.”

Whatever that looks like, she thought to herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud.

Anton rose to his feet and rubbed the dirt from his knees.

“Let’s get started then.”

They spent another hour saying goodbye and discussing plans. Zoe didn’t want to leave her friends behind, not again, but Rue’s warning to hurry echoed in her ears, and, more than that, Zoe couldn’t ignore the Mountain’s call. At last, she embraced Bella and Skidmark — the heat of their bodies intermingling with her own — and turned to enter the mists of the Mountain of Faith.

###

Anton shadowed Zoe as she climbed the first step. Her foot hit the stone and the smell of wildflowers vanished like honey down a drain. She paused a moment. Senses disorientated as they adjusted to the new reality stretching out and beyond, but then she shook off the confusion and advanced. She didn’t need understanding, only acceptance, and momentum. Constant forward momentum. The Metal in her soul sang as she climbed the straight rails of the staircase that ascended the mountain in a sinuous switchback like some architectural worm laid low up the slopes.

Untold eons of wind and climbers had smoothed the steps ahead of her. Zoe’s feet found the depressions in the center of each step where the stone seemed to melt. She felt an odd sense of comfort knowing that the path she climbed was one trodden before her and, with hope — and a fleeting sense of bleak laughter — people after her.

Anton walked quietly behind her. His steps matched hers. He kept his silver eyes in a close orbit around them, not daring to venture into the mists that closed around them until they walked in a corridor of the cold weather. After an unknown amount of time — it felt like days, but she had no memory of walking for so long — her legs ached — her heart pounded — the heartbeats of her friends felt like distant echoes, an alarm half-forgotten, a ping on the edge of her radar — Zoe stopped and leaned against the rough slope of stone that rose almost vertically to one side.

To her other side, the mist concealed infinity. A steep drop that swirls with the cold vapors. She could only see about ten feet in front of her before the mist thickened. When she looked back she could see even less.

“Anton?” she was even more out of breath than she expected from the climb, as though her incredible stats meant nothing. “How far can you see?”

“About ten feet,” he said as he slumped down on the ground beside her. “The mist is blocking everything.”

His silver eyes orbited his head like a crown of drooping fireflies. It took Zoe a few minutes to figure out what she wanted to ask, but when the question formed it cut through her fatigue like a fragment of glass.

“Why won’t you send your eyes into the mist?”

“I don’t…” Anton frowned. “I don’t want to? That doesn’t make sense.”

He closed his eyes and gestured, and sent his eyes racing out into the mist. His features twisted into a pained grimace the second his eyes vanished from the view.

“It’s hard,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s like they’re flying through a blizzard or water, there’s so much resistance.”

He gasped and slumped over. Zoe grabbed him and helped him up. Sweat dripped from his face. Veins bulged beneath his skin. He panted for breath but hurried to speak.

“The mist canceled my technique. I’ve never felt something like that before. It was like… starving to death.”

He groaned, and Zoe patted his back.

“It’s alright,” she said. “Did you see anything?”

“Yeah. There’s something in the mist.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something dangerous?”

“Yes… no… I don’t know…”

Zoe stood. She could still feel the exhaustion of the climb like a threefold layer of gravity dragging at her muscles, but she rolled her shoulders and ignored the pressure. If anything came at her now, they would learn the hard way how powerful she had become. Her Mirrored hands formed fists, and the void hidden by the Mirrored star in her chest growled with hunger.

She watched the mists curl and flicker and press in closer. Were there shadows moving in that pale blanket? She couldn’t be sure. Did footsteps sound closer, or was it her ragged breathing making false echoes?

Uncertainty nawed at her already frayed nerves. She was ready to snap. To unleash. But she had no targets.

“Show yourself!” she shouted. “Fight me!”

She tensed. Ready for an assault. Ready even for mocking Laughter that would at least give her a direction to charge. She shifted her weight, maintained her balance, and strained her Insight until it hurt.

The most flickered, rolled, and remained silent.

Zoe’s breathing grew heavier. The stress played with her mind. Though the white vapors were bright and cold, she felt the dark heat of the Witch’s womb as they pressed in upon her. Her mind slowed, but once more an idea cut through.

[Our Hearts Toll as One] rang out into the mist.

She might as well have kicked a pebble off the cliff’s edge for all she learned. Only silence and emptiness greeted her technique, but that meant nothing. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe they could avoid her technique. Maybe they had no Skein, or no heart, for her technique to latch onto., Whispers echoed in her mind. Doubts. Fears. Heresies of the flesh as she shivered.

At last, she could stand it no longer, and she lifted Anton to his feet.

“Let’s keep climbing,” she said.

The next step punished her. Her body struggled as though she moved through molten lead. Her foot struck the time-warped stone — that sharp chime of Mirror on rock — and then she stepped again. Her footsteps rang out without echo as she climbed. The mists rolled around her, rolled back, and that six feet of visibility maintained itself as the staircase stretched nearly vertically ahead of her.

She walked a dozen more paces, with Anton behind her, and then, just as she felt she had outclimbed her fear, a footstep sounded out ahead, and another, descending toward her out of the mists.