Eliza and Her Monsters(62)

There will be no Monstrous Sea pages at the end of this week. I didn’t get online to see what the fandom thought of the last ones. My will is gone. My will to draw, my will to talk, my will to do anything. Where Monstrous Sea once wrapped around my heart, there is nothing anymore.

Maybe that’s normal. The things you care most about are the ones that leave the biggest holes.





There was something distinctly un-Orcian about General White that Amity couldn’t place. Everything about him was sharp, like shards of metal fused into the shape of a man, dressed in an Orcian Alliance military uniform.

“If you kill Faust,” he said, “you will be regarded as a hero. Maybe even a legend. It won’t end our enemies’ attacks, but it will even the odds, and that’s a greater advantage than we’ve hoped for in these long decades.”

“Even the odds . . . ,” Faren said, his stilted cadence melting away. “If she kills Faust, but she’s still alive, wouldn’t the odds be tipped severely in your favor? As far as they’re stacked against you now?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” White said.

“What happens after?” Faren stared White down. “What happens after she defeats Faust? I assume you won’t be able to remove the Watcher from her. She’ll still be here, and she’ll still feel like she has to save the innocent. What enemies will you send her after then? The Rishtians? The Angels? Those are the enemies you’re speaking of, aren’t they? The clockwork kings and the demons of Orcus?”

His voice rose on the last word. Amity’s skin prickled; she had never considered she might have to fight Orcus’s Angels. White, unperturbed, stared back at Faren. “No one said anything about further enemies, Mr. Nox.”

“Nox-eys,” Faren corrected coldly. He’d never demanded—or even asked—to be addressed with Nocturnian honorifics, and that, more than his attitude toward the general, gave Amity pause. The pretense of his poor Colaarin fled completely. “I don’t for a moment believe you’ll let her come back here to live in peace once Faust is gone. Your people have spent the last half year turning her into a weapon, and years before that studying her. You know what she’s capable of. You’ve convinced her Faust is her responsibility—where does it end?”





CHAPTER 34


“This is stupid.”

Sully stands in the doorway to my bedroom, arms crossed over his chest. I lie on the bed and stare unblinking at my TV.

“No it’s not,” I say. “It’s my favorite episode.”

“I’m not talking about Dog Days.”

I turn my head to look at him.

“I’m talking about you lying here, not telling Mom and Dad exactly what they did.”

“They know what they did.”

Sully rolls his eyes. “Bullshit. They think they know but they don’t, because you won’t tell them.”

I turn back to the TV. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

He growls. “If you won’t tell them, I will.” He storms off. I ignore him until I hear the door to Mom and Dad’s office downstairs bang open, and Sully yelling out to ask if he can use their laptop.

I spring out of bed and rush downstairs. Church and Sully’s homework is spread over the kitchen table, but both of them stand across from Mom and Dad at the island counter, bringing up something on the laptop.

The post on the Masterminds site. The one I used to look at every day.

“What is this?” Mom asks, setting aside her fitness magazine. Neither she nor Dad has noticed I’m in the room.

“This is the post that made Monstrous Sea popular,” Sully says. “This website, Masterminds, is where people share things. There are a lot of people here, and for a post to get to the top of a forum like this one and to stay at the top for as long as it has is really hard.”

“And look at all the comments on it. And the likes,” says Church. “Those are all real people, and most of them are people who read and liked Monstrous Sea.”

“But they’re only a few of the people who actually read it.” Sully turns the computer around again and navigates to a new website before turning it back to our parents. The Monstrous Sea forums. “This is the website where the fans gather. You would have seen this if you hadn’t stopped looking at her website two years ago. Look at the numbers on the posts. Look at just the people who are online right now.”

They wait while Mom and Dad scroll through the forum threads, reading usernames, post titles, comment numbers. From the door I can see Dad’s brow furrow and Mom put her hand over her mouth. I fist my hands in my sweatshirt and clamp my mouth shut.

“There are millions of these people,” Sully says. “Way more than are just online here. They read the comic pages Eliza puts up every week. They pay for them. Do you know how much she makes from this? She keeps herself logged in to her bank account on her computer, and we saw. It’s ridiculous.”

“It is, actually,” Church says.

“Like, you keep hounding her about college scholarships and stuff, but she doesn’t need it. Did you guys realize that, or did you stop paying attention after you started making her go to the tax guy by herself?”

“But it’s . . . it’s just a hobby,” Mom says.