Asa woke all at once to see his mother’s face leaning over him. She smiled at him with warm satisfaction. He couldn’t tell which time-line he was in to have his mother smile like that at him.

  “Ah, perfect,” she said. “It worked.”

  He wanted to ask what she meant, but he couldn’t move his mouth. Asa found that he didn’t have a mouth. He found that he didn’t have a body either. It was like watching a holo, able to witness the environment but unable to affect it.

  “Asa!” she called, turning around. “Come here, it’s ready.”

  Suddenly, his own small child face peered down at him with big, curious eyes. It was shocking to see himself—it was like a pod-racing accident, when he couldn’t tell if he was actually hurt or not because of the sheer adrenaline. “But it doesn’t look any different than the other collars,” his child-self protested.

  If Asa remembered correctly from photos, his child-self looked about four years old.

  “It may not look any different than the other House collars, but I added something extra special to it,” his mother explained. As Asa looked at her, he realized she was younger than how he remembered her. His mother had been nineteen when he was born. Asa was only a year younger than that, now. His mother winked at his child-self and and then started tickling him. “For my extra special kid!”

  His child-self laughed, his face scrunching up with delight.

  The thing was, Asa remembered this. He remembered when this happened, it had been the beginning of the new year when his mother gave him his official House collar and said:

  “You must be very careful not to lose it,” she said, serious. “And you must never take it off.”

  Then Asa’s holo-like perspective moved, a dizzy refraction of light, as his mother’s hand came into view and then—lifted up his perspective. Asa caught quick glimpses of his mother’s study before his view settled on his mother’s neck and chin.

  “Okay, Mother,” his child-self chirped.

  “Promise, okay?” she said, her pinky finger coming into view.

  His child-self held out his pinky too, his arm stretching into Asa’s vision, and then his smaller pinky wrapped around her larger one. “Promise,” he said, his voice bright.

  Asa had always kept this promise. He had never taken it off—until Mouse had stolen it from him.

  This must be the memory that the collar itself held from the time that the the contract had been made—from the time that the spell had been activated by his mother. Madame Katusha had always said: anything with energy possessed consciousness.

  His child-self jumped off the little ladder he had climbed to see the necklace, landing loudly on the floor. Asa’s perspective jerked as his child-self moved, like an unsteady old-fashioned phone camera. Asa saw the step, the floor, his mother’s skirts. This was what the world must look like from a four-year-old’s perspective: large and endless.

  Asa could feel that the collar experienced time differently than humans. It passed its days with no impatience, no marking of time, only its inexorable and photographic memory, fueled by its low level demonic consciousness.

  This House collar recalled the day that Asa’s child-self ran home, calling out cheerfully to people he knew—even as the number of civilians milling around the downtown Station became more and more sparse. Soldiers from the Eternal Crystal Imperium army crawled all over the place, even more than usual. His child-self ran faster and faster to the House—

  But then there was a strange shaking of the visuals, which was when Asa realized that his child-self must have skidded to a stop just outside the large doors of the Vermilion House. Soldiers guarded the doors, but Asa couldn’t see their faces with the angle that the collar was at.

  “Let me in!” his child-self called. The soldiers didn’t move. “This isn’t your house! Let me in–!”

  The view suddenly changed again, turning upside down and sideways with a close-up view of the street. Asa could feel the phantom pain of getting back-handed in the face, as the memory slowly dawned on him, bleeding through him like a drop of blood in water.

  Asa could hear the loud, labored breathing of his child-self as he stood and raced away, around the corner, and—Asa realized—toward the backside of the House where the workers’ side door was. His child-self darted inside the unguarded side door into the mess of House workers that were clumping together in the halls with soldiers looming over them all.

  No one seemed to notice the child racing up the stairs and then down the corridors toward his mother’s rooms. Loud voices emanated from his mother’s rooms. He recognized Madame Katusha’s voice as she spoke sternly, but he didn’t recognize the other person’s voice. The door was already propped open, and his child-self peered around the corner of the door. The perspective of the collar only showed the endless expanse of the red velvet sofa and the large cherry wood desk and the bookshelves—and his mother lying on the floor, her body crumpled, as if she had collapsed exactly where she stood. She wore a red dress, but the redness seemed to oddly leak from the dress to her skin. Asa’s child-self moved closer, and closer, and Asa wanted to stop him, wanted to tell him to go back—

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Asahel,” Madame Katusha snapped, and then Asa’s view shook as Madame Katusha grabbed his child-self by the arm. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  But it was too late—Asa finally registered what he was seeing. The redness of her dress blended with the blood that coated her neck and face from the wound in her chest. Her eyes were closed.

  “Mom!” his child-self said. The collar’s point of view fluttered: Asa’s hands on her shoulders, shaking her. “Mom, wake up!”

  “He needs to leave,” a man’s voice said quietly, and Asa’s child-self jerked toward the stranger. Asa couldn’t see his face due to the angle of the collar but then the stranger knelt down to be level with Asa’s face.

  He had short silver hair and a scarred face. Asa realized now as he looked at this man that he was actually only a couple years older than Asa was now. Asa recognized Hanael Solom from the endless news clips of the Regent’s military—he was infamous for cleaning up the empire’s messes. No one wanted to see him coming.

  “You must leave now,” Hanael said calmly to Asa’s child-self. “This is no place for a child.”

  “I’m not a kid!” Asa’s child-self yelled. “What did you do to my mom?”

  Hanael was quiet at that statement for a moment. “This was your mother?” he said finally.

  “I just told you that,” Asa’s child-self said, his small voice wobbling with tears and defiance.

  “You’re right,” Hanael agreed. “You did say that. I should have listened.” Then he sighed, standing. “Is there no one who can—?”

  “Ariad!” Madame Katusha barked, turning toward the door, and then his mother’s friend hurried through the door.

  “Asa!” she gasped. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

  Asa’s child-self immediately burst into tears and ran toward her, and she scooped him up in her strong arms. “Why won’t she get up?” Asa’s child-self said, fisting his hands in the front of Ariad’s loose under-dress. The dress was white but covered in red stains.

  “We have to leave now, Asa,” Ariad said, starting to turn toward the door. Asa’s child-self started to struggle in her arms to get down, but Ariad already swept down the halls, further and further away from his mother.

  “No, we can’t leave her,” Asa cried. “We have to go back. Why are you leaving her?”

  “There’s nothing we can do for her now, Asa,” Ariad said. The hallway started to glow red, as if demonic energy had saturated the collar’s view, leaking across its vision like blood soaking into white cloth. “We have to get you out of here–”

  Even as Asa was remembering what happened next—Ariad carrying him, the House staff moving out of her way—the scene broke apart in front of him, shattering into demonic photons.

  It was like all of the stars in the sky falling at once.

  Asa blinked his eyes open, disoriented, unable to figure out how his body was located in space until his mother’s voice said, “Come on, kid. Time to wake up.”

  “I’m awake,” he mumbled, putting a hand to his aching head, his eyes still closed. PQ-9 frantically beeped at him, tugging the neck of his shirt. His mother’s hand jostled his shoulder, just like when he was a child and she had the day off to take him downtown to eat snacks and play games—

  Asa opened his eyes, and his mother leaned over him with her arms crossed, an amused look on her face, one elegant eyebrow raised. “Mother, I just had the strangest dream that—” he trailed off, as the expression on his mother’s face didn’t change.

  Asa sat up quickly to see that Mouse was lying limp on the sofa, his demon still resting in the crook of her body. “Oh,” he said blankly. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “Hanael has never graced my Station with the dubious honor of his presence,” his mother remarked. “I must have done something very interesting to cause that to happen.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Asa said, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain in his head from the spell. “That was my mother.”

  “What an unfortunate end for someone clearly so clever,” Galatea said, thoughtful.

  “What are you talking about?” Asa said sharply. “My mother is alive.”

  Galatea raised her eyebrows. “You saw the collar’s memory,” she said. “There’s no way she would have survived those injuries.”

  “But—she must have,” Asa said helplessly, raising his hand to press his fingers to his head. Nausea pricked his stomach caused by the pain in his head. PQ-9 beeped worriedly, pressing his metal arm to Asa’s forehead, like his mother would if she were here.

  Galatea shook her head. “If Hanael was present, then she was already dead,” she said.

  Asa froze.

  Hanael had asked, This was your mother?

  Was.

  Asa desperately searched his own memory for clues: Ariad had carried him from the House, and then he had been running on his own, and Ariad wasn’t with him anymore. Asa remembered running for a long time, until he was tired, until his feet were sore, and then he had once again finally wound his way around to the House, until—until he saw his mother again.

  So you’re the little kid who’s been demanding to see me, huh? His mother had said, her arms crossed. Well, then. Tell me what you want.

  Galatea leaned forward to tap the collar that Asa wore with an index finger, her lacquered fingernail making a strange ringing sound against the ruby jewel. Asa tried to scramble away from her, but his muscles were slow with confusion and the after-effects of demonic energy. “I didn’t get to see how she obtained this in the first place—what a pity,” she remarked.

  “What, so you could do the same thing?” Asa retorted, looking around the room, his mind still spinning with memories. He felt like a wild animal running on instinct, nerve endings firing repeatedly, his body screaming at him to escape a trap.

  “Precisely,” Galatea said, chuckling, now tapping her index finger against her cheek. “If only she hadn’t bound you to this jewel, then I could just—” she clicked her tongue loudly, as if imagining chopping off his head.

  The thought of being bound to this collar made the blood drain out of his face. It was everything he had never wanted. But his mother had done this. She must have had a reason. But he couldn’t—there was no way to ask her. Asa had been carried by Ariad, she had set him down, he had run and run and run, ignoring the sound of the Station alarm as he must have run—

  —directly into a new time-line.

  Galatea’s face brightened in the way Asa knew meant she had had a very new and dangerous idea. “But you are bound to this jewel,” Galatea said, the corners of her mouth lifting. “You’re bound to the heart that belongs to the god of demons.”