Halves

Claire held her notebook shut against her chest with one arm. Her other hand was in Mildred’s.

It had lain open on the ash for most of the night, a yard from her hand, and she hadn’t been able to reach it. She had it back now—she didn’t intend to put it down again.

Mildred stood beside her and let her hold on. Claire had stayed beside her since she and Laura had got her up off the ash, and then Marissa had joined, but Mildred hadn’t seemed to mind. A few steps off, Chloe and Dawn knelt on either side of Anna. Anna lay with her head in Chloe’s lap and her eyes shut, as she had lain since the sweep of Abi-Eshu’s hand threw her across the Ring, and Eden knelt beside them without moving, her hair spread over the ash behind her. Dawn’s ears were flat to her skull. Chloe was stroking Anna’s hair back from her forehead, over and over, as if she had forgotten she was doing it.

Ereshkigal had just said that she would keep the Law even if it destroyed her.

She had said it in the same level voice she used for everything. It had gone across the Ring and stopped every other sound on it, and it was still there, in the quiet it had left behind. Claire had read every scrap the Sky Archive held about the Queen of the Great Below. None of it had said that she could cry.

Claire did what she did when there was more in front of her than she could take in at once. She went through it in order. Both her hands were full, so she kept the list in her head, face by face, and sorted each one as she came to it.

Ereshkigal, standing a little apart, straight-backed, with the crown of bone-white gold level on her black hair. Her eyes were wet. They had gone to Sarah and Marie when she finished speaking, and stayed there; now, while Claire watched, they went back across the ash to Anna, and her face went with them. Claire had never seen a goddess cry, and she put it on the list with the rest.

Arabella, a step in from the rim, with her bloodied hand closed at her side. Her face was turned to Ereshkigal, and it was drawn so tight with sorrow that it hardly looked like hers.

Laura, all three of her, shoulder to shoulder in front of her mother. Sarah behind them, thin and white, with one hand laid flat on the back of the middle one of her daughter. Marissa was looking at Ereshkigal with her chin up.

Myra, in front of Marie, with Marie’s hand caught in hers behind her back. Riley at Myra’s side, with one lock of her hair still stretched out toward the trees, pointing down the hill toward the Hearth.

Every face went down as afraid, or as grieving, or as both. Claire’s own ears were flat. Her tail hung low and stiff behind her and wouldn’t lift.

She looked for Andy. She always looked for Andy. She had stopped pretending otherwise weeks ago.

He stood where he had stood to speak to Ereshkigal, a few paces out on the bare ash, in his wedding clothes. The mantle hung heavy from his shoulders. The circlet sat on his brow with Laura’s blue rose set into it, and the sword hung at his hip in its plain dark scabbard. Her eyes made the night as plain as noon, and she could see the ash pale on his shoes, and the green of the mantle’s lining where it showed at the hem. He was looking at Ereshkigal. His hands were loose at his sides. He was calm.

Claire let go of Mildred’s hand and pressed hers to her breastbone, where the bond sat.

He was level and steady, and while there was a bit of anxiety in him, there was no fear anywhere in it. It was not resignation, but the calm of someone standing on solid ground. Under the calm was the other thing, the one that had come up in him a little while ago, while she knelt by Emily with Emi and Katherine. She had felt it arrive all at once, so large and so quiet that for a moment she had thought the bond had broken. It hadn’t broken. It had only gone deep, deeper than she could follow, and she still couldn’t find the edge of it.

She had no place on the list for any of that.

She had done this kind of arithmetic before. She had done it at the bottom of a page in the Sky Archive, knowing she was one of the numbers, and the answer hadn’t changed. She did it again now, because it was short. The Law wanted a life for Laura’s. Laura and Myra and Riley were past its reach; Andy had told Ereshkigal so, in front of everyone, in one of Claire’s own sentences, out of her own notebook, word for word. Andy must have found the First Gate then, and crossed it.

Laura’s family in Harvey, and the Coopers in Warrenville, were on the far side of a ward that nothing on this island could reach across. JJ was in the Hearth with Mildred, and Mildred was unbound, and would not let anyone but Riley take the baby. Not that it mattered, since the Garden was beyond the ward, or so Andy had said.

That left Sarah and Marie—Laura’s mother, and her mother’s sister. The only hand that could take either of them would break the Hotel’s oldest rule in doing it, and would break itself, and Ereshkigal had just said she would let it.

Claire had been around every side of it twice. There was no way out that she could find. And Andy stood in the middle of the Ring as if there were nothing in front of him but the next thing to do.

While she watched him, one of Laura came away from the other two.

It cost her less than it used to. Claire saw the other two of her shift their weight together, to cover the space in front of Sarah, and go still again. The one of her who had left crossed the ash to Andy and slid in under his arm, and his arm came down around her and closed. She fitted against his side as though a place had been kept for her there. She said something to him, into his shoulder, too low and too close for even Claire’s ears to take out of the air. Andy bent his head to it.

Laura’s other two bodies stayed where they were, side by side in front of Sarah.

Claire looked at the one under his arm.

A thought came up then, without her asking for it, out of the chronicle.

She had begun it on the morning of the wedding, before five, out of every notebook she had filled since she came to the island: a full written record of the season, the one she had promised Andy in front of everyone she would keep. It was a great many pages already. And in her pages, Andy and Laura kept coming out the same way—two halves of one whole.

She hadn’t set out to write them like that. The first time, she had crossed it out, because it was imprecise. Two people weren’t a fraction. It had come out that way again a page later, and again after that, until she stopped crossing it out and started to wonder why she kept writing it. The morning Laura told the whole harem she could feel exactly where Andy was, in any room, at any hour, Claire had written it down with her ears flat and hadn’t liked writing it. She had been afraid then of what it meant for her. She wasn’t afraid of it now. At the end of Laura’s dance at the reception she had felt the fear in Andy go to nothing and stay there until the bell, and she had written the minute in the margin. Liesa had said, on the mound, that Laura made Andy better, but it was also true that Andy made Laura better. The schematic she had once drawn, stick-figure Andy and stick-figure Laura on one page. Laura was the Consort, sharing in the Master's Gifts. The day they saw him on the beach with Laura alive in his arms, when Claire couldn’t write anything at all and had pushed at the bond until he pushed back.

There was something else about the two of them. It came up after the first thing; she had filed it there without knowing she had. Andy had told her once what Arabella said to him and Laura, the morning after Laura came back. Claire had it written down, in blue, which was for things that had happened.

Claire looked from the one of Laura under Andy’s arm to the two in front of Sarah. Then she looked back at Andy’s face.

Her tail went still.

She knew why he was calm.

She held still for a breath, with her hand flat on the cover of the notebook. Her pen hand had found the pen without her. Then she went back through it from the top, slowly, as she would have gone through a proof someone else had handed her and that she didn’t want to be wrong. No step was missing. She went through it once more, and it held.

She didn’t know whether it would hold for a goddess. It held for her.

She didn’t look at the time. She would want it later, for the chronicle, and she didn’t look.

Claire touched Mildred’s arm, once, so that she would know. Mildred looked down at her and inclined her head, and Claire left her and crossed the ash.

Her feet made no sound on it. They never did. She went past Myra, and past the bare place where Abi-Eshu had knelt and where there was nothing now, and past Sam, who stood a few steps from Andy with Thrustworthy’s point resting in the ash. Andy turned his head before she reached him.

He had felt her coming—she saw it in his face, and the rest of it came down the bond to her: he knew she had followed him to the same answer. What reached her wasn’t surprise. It was almost relief, as if he had been carrying something by himself and had just felt someone take hold of the other end.

“You see it too,” he said quietly.

Claire was proud of him. She didn’t keep any of it back. She let him have all of it, down the bond, the whole size of it, and felt it reach him. Her ears came up. Her tail lifted high behind her, and the tip of it curled.

She had spent the season finding things out for him. She had found the Edict’s cover and where it stopped, the separate column a debt went into when the one collecting it took more than he was sent for, and the rule that a case with no precedent could not be settled by the Law alone—only by Ereshkigal herself, in person. She had given him every one of them in writing. She had been ahead of him so often that she had stopped noticing it. She had never minded. But tonight he had gotten there first, and she hadn’t even seen him go.

She opened the notebook against her forearm, uncapped the pen with her teeth, wrote, and turned the page to him.

I have nothing left to teach you.

Under his arm, Laura’s eyes went to the page and read it. Andy laughed. It came out of him short and surprised. He pulled Claire in with his free arm and held her, with Laura still fitted against his other side, so that Claire’s cheek was against his chest and the ends of Laura’s hair brushed her ear.

“Not a chance,” he said into the top of her head. “I’m going to be learning from you forever, Claire. I’m looking forward to it.”

Claire’s tail curled around the back of his leg and stayed there.

When he let her go she wrote again, quickly, and showed him. For the record: you said forever. There were witnesses.

He read it, and the corner of his mouth went up a little.

Laura had read that one too. She looked from the page to Claire and back up at Andy, and her eyes narrowed, as they did whenever she could tell she was being left out of something and meant to stop it.

Laura looked up at him. All three of her did, the one under his arm and the two in front of Sarah, and all three of her asked it at once, in her one voice.

“Okay. What did you work out?”

Claire heard it from three places on the Ring at the same moment. She didn’t think she would ever stop noticing that.

“Be patient a little longer,” Andy said. He was looking down at the one of her under his arm. “You’ll see.”

“You know I hate it when you do this,” Laura said, from all three of her mouths.

Sam leaned on Thrustworthy’s handle and looked at the one of Laura under his arm. “He always did like a dramatic reveal,” she told her.

Claire closed the notebook on the page with forever on it. The answer wasn’t written on any page. She hadn’t written it, and she wasn’t going to. She held it where it was, against her chest, and waited for him to say it out loud.

---

Andy lifted his arm from Laura’s shoulders.

The one of her under it let him go. She didn’t want to—it came up the bond to him as plainly as if she had said it out loud—and he felt her do it anyway. She stayed where he left her, with Claire at her side, and her other two bodies stayed in front of her mother. All three of her faces followed him.

“Save it for the next roast, Sam.” Andy tossed it back over his shoulder without turning around.

He heard Sam snort behind him, and he walked out across the ash toward Ereshkigal.

He could be wrong. He knew that as clearly as he knew the rest of it. If he was wrong, he was about to tell a goddess, in front of Laura and her mother and everyone who loved them, something she’d prove him a fool for. He didn’t know what would come after that. He didn’t let himself look at it, and he kept walking. Claire had come to the same conclusion. That was as airtight as it could be.

It had been happening to him since Laura said always, and it hadn’t stopped. With every step he took now, more of the Ring came to him.

He could hear everyone on it breathing, each breath by itself, and he knew whose each one was without turning his head. Sarah’s, thin and catching. Riley’s, held. Marie’s, slow, as if she were counting it on purpose. Myra’s, quick and light. Dawn was murmuring to Anna, too low for words, and Andy could hear that her throat had gone tight around it.

Under his shoes, under the ash, the stone of the Ring went down a long way. It was older than the Hotel, older than the world he came from, and he could feel the cuts in it where someone had shaped it once, long before anyone thought to write down that they had. In the ash itself, everywhere, small and asleep, lay the seeds Erin’s growth had left behind, waiting for her. And around all of it, past the blasted trees at the rim and the jungle and the beaches, a long way out over the water, he could feel the ward he had left shut, standing up out of the sea on every side, patient and whole.

None of it was new. It had all been there the whole time. He had only never been able to see it.

It was like waking, a little at a time, as a man wakes in a strange room in the dark, and the shapes around him turn into a chair, a window, a door, one at a time, until he knows where he is.

His memory had always kept everything, whether he wanted it kept or not. Now it lay open in front of him, all of it at once, and he could see across it, untethered by linear time. The hall at the bottom of the Irkalla stair. Horun in the corridor, with the brown light sliding off his robe. Arabella barefoot in the Suite, across from the couch, with her hands folded in her lap. The footbridge. He had been carrying every one of those pieces for days, weeks, months, some of them for a very long time, and he had never once been able to set them side by side and look at them together. He hadn’t been clever. While Mildred walked across the ash he had woken up far enough to see what was in front of him.

He still couldn’t see all of it. He could feel how much more there was past the edge of what had come clear, waiting the same as the seeds were waiting. He let it wait.

Ereshkigal stood straight-backed where she had said she would keep the Law, her pale face turned toward Anna on the ground between Chloe and Dawn. The tears Andy had seen in her black eyes were still there. They hadn’t fallen. The crown sat level on her black hair, and her hands hung at her sides, and she did not look around at the sound of him coming.

Off to his left, Marissa stood with Sarah and Marie. She had an arm around Sarah’s waist now, holding her up a little, and from the look on Marissa’s face—chin up, eyes on the Queen—Andy doubted she knew it was there.

He had danced with this woman once.

At the masquerade, in the Fifth Challenge, she had walked through Arabella’s silence as if it had never been laid on anyone, a bone-colored mask over the mole by her eye, and taken his hand. Hers had been cold. She had led, and he had let her, because there had been nothing in the dance to push against; it went where she meant it to go. Under the music she had told him that bringing back a mortal life had a price, and the price was a mortal life. I do not negotiate, she had said. I do not regret. But I do not take joy in it, either. And near the end: There is no blame in the law. Only the law.

He had carried that home with him and turned it over for weeks. He had believed every word of it, all the way down into her hall. She had said it to him again tonight, a few minutes ago, with her eyes on her sister.

He had stood in that hall since, in another woman’s body, and seen its walls lined with clay tablets standing on their edges, more of them than he could count, every one crowded with marks he couldn’t read. He had heard her say it from her seat. His name is written. He is dead.

The cold came off her as he got near—cold stone and dark water, the smell of a cellar in high summer. Under it, in the last few paces, there was something else, something he had never been able to feel before tonight. A weight. It wasn’t hers, not exactly, but a thing she had with her, dense and still and old past reckoning, far heavier than anything its size had a right to be. He didn’t know what it was.

He stopped in front of her, close enough that the cold reached his face. “Before you rule, I need to ask you something.”

She did not look away from Anna. “Ask.”

“Your Tablets of Death.” Andy kept his voice level. It was easier than he had expected. “The ones you write the dead in. Can they show you what the other death-realms have written? Every book, I mean. Not just yours.”

Ereshkigal’s eyes came to him. They were black all the way through, and wet, and steady.

“I carry them,” she said. “They can.”

As she said it, the weight came into focus.

Names. It was names. Every one of them pressed in and finished and closed, so many that he couldn’t have begun to count them, from more places than he had known there were, and all of them cold. He had felt it the whole way across the ash without knowing what he was feeling; now he knew, and he couldn’t stop knowing it. He made himself breathe, and the breath came in cold.

She was looking at him. Nothing in her voice had asked anything, but her face had. He could see it as plainly as he could see the crown: a small tightening at the corner of her mouth, a stillness held a moment past where it should have ended. She didn’t see why it mattered, not now, with Anna on the ground and the mothers behind him and nothing left to rule on but the one thing.

“It might matter.” Andy held her eyes. “It might be the only thing that does.”

She waited.

“Have you ever checked,” he said, heart thudding in his chest, “whether Laura was written in one of them?”

Something crossed her face and was gone. “Laura Ashford died in the river,” Ereshkigal said.

And he was on the bank.

Not this island. Willow Run, gray and rain-lashed, the footbridge slick and dark above him, the water coming down brown and fast. He had watched it from that bank in the Garden of Glass with the rain in his eyes: thirteen-year-old Laura dragging a soaked boy up out of the river onto the mud, pounding on his back until he coughed, and then the bank going out from under her and the water taking her back. Please don’t forget me, she had said, before it did. I’ll always love you.

For sixteen years he had thought she died betrayed by him. In the Garden of Glass he had found out that she died loving him. He had never forgotten her. Not for one day of it.

He had said the words himself, after. To Sam, to his parents, to Marissa in Scarsdale who wrote them down. She drowned. She died in the river. He had said it so many times that it had worn smooth, like a stone kept in a pocket.

“Her body drowned,” Andy said.

His voice wanted to go on the last word, and he didn’t stop it from going. He let it, and went on through it.

“She was thirteen. Her body drowned in the river. I know it did. I— I was there.” He breathed. “But that isn’t what makes someone dead, is it? Not in the Law’s eyes. Not in any realm. In Anubis’s hall, a soul wasn't dead until their heart was weighed and Thoth wrote down their name. Persephone wasn't bound to Hades until she ate the pomegranate seeds from there. And Horun told me. A person’s dead when her name is written in the book of the afterlife she goes to. I suppose in Hades’s case, the pomegranate served the same function.” He held her eyes. “So unless Laura’s name is in one of those books, Laura technically never died.”

He heard Sarah’s breath stop.

Behind him, through the bond, he felt Laura go still. She went still the whole way down, all three of her at once, the kind of stillness that comes over someone who has held a door shut for a long time and has just heard the latch give on the other side. She sent nothing. She did not move.

“Oh,” Riley said under her breath, somewhere behind him. “Oh, Andy.”

Ereshkigal kept her eyes on Andy, and nowhere else.

“There’s a bond between Laura and me,” Andy continued. “There always has been. Since we were babies. It’s the result of a Wish. It’s the reason she could be brought back at all, and it’s the reason I think nobody ever wrote her down.”

Ereshkigal said nothing. She listened as she had listened in the hall to the woman who came down the stair, without looking away, as still as the seat she had sat on.

Andy kept his eyes on hers. “The morning after Laura came back, Arabella came to see us.” He could see it while he said it. His mind was no longer constrained by linear time. The couch in the Suite, the blanket over their knees, after pancakes. The door sliding open, and Arabella coming in barefoot in a robe the white of morning mist, with her hair down nearly to the small of her back and nothing on her face at all, so that it had taken him a second to know her. She had sat down across from them and folded her hands in her lap.

He remembered what it had done to him, hearing it. Sixteen years he had thought of as nothing but damage, and Arabella sitting across from him in her robe, telling him those years were the reason Laura was alive.

“She told us that souls fade, after death. That’s what they do. Laura’s hadn’t.” He heard his own voice thin, and he kept going. “She said it was anchored here, to me. That my love kept hold of it. All the years I mourned her, it kept hold of her, and it grew her. So when she came back, she came back a grown woman. In her mind, not just her body. Not the thirteen-year-old who drowned.”

Every March twenty-first for sixteen years he had sat down with the red notebook and the guitar and a song he had spent the year learning for her. He had played every one of them to an empty room. He hadn’t known there was anyone there to hear them.

Behind him, he felt Laura take that in. She had been on the couch that morning with her hand gone desperate in his while Arabella talked. She had heard all of it before. It landed in her differently now, and he felt it land.

“And later,” Andy said, “Arabella told me something she didn’t tell us both.” Down the bond, all three of Laura went still again, listening.

“She said that when a soul dies, it leaves a marker. An echo, something she could follow back. She’d done it for others. Laura’s didn’t leave one.” He made himself say the rest of it exactly. “She said it was as if the moment Laura died, she slipped out the side door and vanished. She had to bring her back through me. Through the bond. It was the only anchor left.”

He hadn’t told Laura that part—he had meant to, a dozen times. He felt her hear it now for the first time, from behind him, and he felt what it did to her, and he couldn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on Ereshkigal.

And as he did, he found he could see the bond. He had felt it his whole life. He had never once seen it. Now, with the rest of the world coming clear around him, it came clear too: silver, threaded through Laura and threaded through him, not a line between them but the same light in both of them at once. And it went back. All of it went back, every day of it, to a blanket in his mother’s house and two babies reaching for each other with their hands. He could follow it the whole way, and there was no place anywhere in it where it broke.

For sixteen years he hadn’t been able to feel a thing down it. He had thought it was gone. It had been there the whole time, holding onto her.

“The bond held her,” Andy said. His voice was steady now. “The bond and— and how much I loved her. It kept her near me. It made her grow. She never went down to any afterlife. She never went anywhere. She stayed with me. So there was never a book of the dead that had her name to write.”

Ereshkigal’s face didn’t change. Her voice didn’t either. “Every soul goes down,” she said. “Every soul is written. Even ghosts. There has never been one that was not.”

“I think there was one,” Andy said. “I think she’s standing behind me.” He did not look around. He could feel exactly where each of Laura was. Andy drew a breath. “So I’m asking you. Does the Law even apply? To bringing someone back who was never written?”

Ereshkigal looked at him for a long moment. Then she lifted her chin, a fraction. “My Edict granted her passage home,” she said. “It was spent on her. A life brought back is owed a life.”

It went into Andy like cold water, and for a second he was somewhere else. The night before the wedding, with the lamp burned down to its last inch and Laura up on one elbow so that she could see his whole face. I might not survive tomorrow. She had said it plainly, without any run-up, as she said things she had stopped arguing with.

Across the river. Everybody had said it that way. Arabella had said it on the beach, when they found him there with Laura alive in his arms. She has crossed the river.

It had never been the right river.

“It brought her home.” Andy heard his own voice come out steadier than he felt. “Your Edict. I’m not saying it didn’t. It was one of the things that brought her home. But from where?” He held his hands out, open, a little away from his sides. “From wherever the bond was holding her. And that wasn’t an afterlife. It wasn’t yours, or anybody’s. It didn’t keep a book. Nobody there was writing anything down.” He swallowed hard. “The Law demands a debt when someone is brought back from the dead. But your Edict didn’t bring anybody back from the dead. There wasn’t anybody dead to bring back to life.”

Behind him, low, he heard Sam say to Erin, “Is he— is Andy lawyering a goddess right now?” Nobody answered her.

Ereshkigal went still. It was a different stillness from the one she had kept all night. Her black eyes left Andy’s face. They didn’t go to Anna, or to the mothers, or to the sky. They fixed on nothing that anyone else on the Ring could see, and they stayed there.

Andy felt her go. Her body stood in front of him exactly as it had, but the weight she carried, the cold dense press of names he had felt across the ash, stirred, and her attention went down into it. He felt it go. Down and down, along rows he couldn’t see, past more names than there were stars, into places he had no words for and couldn’t yet have reached if he tried. He didn’t try. He couldn’t yet read a single mark of any of it. He could only stand on the edge of it and feel how cold it was, and how far down she was going, and that she was looking.

Nobody on the Ring made a sound.

Laura’s fear came up the bond so hard that his own breath caught on it. And under the fear, small and frightened and new, the thing she hadn’t let herself have in a long time.

Andy. It came to him quietly, down the bond, from all three of her at once. Is it true?

I think so, he sent back. I don’t know yet. I think so.

Somewhere behind him Sarah made a small sound. Marie said something to her, too low to carry. Andy kept his eyes on Ereshkigal’s face, on the black eyes fixed on nothing, and waited, and felt the seconds go by one at a time, as he had felt them go by on a bank in the rain.

If he was wrong, there was nothing left. He knew it as plainly as he knew the cold coming off her. If Laura’s name was there, in some book he had never heard of, kept by some god he had never met, then he had just handed the Queen of the Great Below her own Law back with a bow on it, and Sarah and Marie were standing a few steps behind him.

Ereshkigal’s eyes came back to him.

They were wide.

He had seen that face rule on a man’s death without a flicker, and look at Anna on the ground. He had never seen it look like this, as if something it had been sure of for a long time had just moved under its feet. “Laura Ashford’s name was never written,” Ereshkigal said. Her voice was level. It did not rise on a single word. “Not in my Tablets. Not in any book of the dead.”

Through the bond, Laura’s hope caught, and it held. He felt it take hold in all three of her at once, as if she had grabbed for something in the dark and found it there, solid, under her hand. She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t dare.

Someone came up beside him. He knew who it was before he looked, by the silence of her feet on the ash and by what came down the other bond, the one that had always been there and that he had never once had to think about. Claire. Her ears were straight up. Her notebook was open against her forearm, and she was already writing. She finished, and held the page up to Ereshkigal at the height of her own face, as steady as a sign.

This has to be an edge case.

Down Claire’s bond came certainty. Claire did her hoping on paper, and she was past hoping now. She had followed him all the way here and checked every step of it, and she was standing beside him to say so. Ereshkigal read the page. Then she looked at Claire, at the ears and the cat’s eyes and the pen, and inclined her head to her, a little, as she might have to a scholar who had come a long way to make one point.

“It is an edge case,” Ereshkigal said. “It is mine to settle.”

And Andy heard her say it in the hall, in another voice and another time, from a stone seat at the bottom of the Irkalla stair, to a woman who had come down to ask for a man back. It is an edge case. There has never been another. It is mine to settle, and no one else’s. There had never been another. Now there was.

Back then, the name had already been written, in Dumuzid’s own clumsy hand, and nothing could strike it out. This time, nobody had written anything at all.

Ereshkigal drew breath to rule.

Andy felt it before he saw it. Across the ash, at the edge of what had come clear to him, something turned over. It was small and a long way down, as a sleeper turns when the dream thins, and it was warm, and it was Anna.

Ereshkigal’s eyes went past him.

Anna was stirring between Chloe and Dawn. Her fingers moved in Chloe’s hand. They curled, and loosened, and curled again, and then her head turned on Chloe’s lap, a little, toward the sound of nothing in particular.

“Chloe.” Dawn’s ears had shot straight up. “Chloe— her hand. Her hand’s moving. Look.”

Chloe bent over her, close, her hair falling down around both their faces. Eden knelt beside them without moving, her long hair spread on the ash behind her, and watched.

Ereshkigal turned toward her sister.

She took half a step. Her weight went onto the front foot, and her shoulders went with it, and for that one moment the whole of her leaned toward the woman on the ground. Then she stopped. She stopped with her weight still forward, and she did not take the rest of the step. At her side, her hand closed.

Andy could see everything about that hand—the tendons standing up along the back of it, white under white skin, the nails pressing into the palm, the small shake running through it that she wasn’t letting reach her arm.

They hadn’t spoken in seven thousand years. Horun had told him so in the corridor, and then said exactly how far he could vouch for it. Not a word, in all the time I lived afterwards. He had told him the rest, too, walking. She knew. She ruled anyway. The Law was hers to keep. And then, to the far end of the corridor rather than to Andy: It cost her her sister.

Andy had seen this face young. In a roofless mudbrick room under the Hotel he had watched a girl with this face rub cold hearth ash over the mole by her eye, so that she could walk out of the door in her sister’s place.

She wasn’t walking toward her sister now. She was standing in the ash with her hand shut, looking at Anna’s fingers moving in Chloe’s, and she was afraid. He could see it. He didn’t need his new eyes for it; anyone looking would have seen it, if they had known what they were looking at. She was afraid of what Anna would do when she woke and found her here.

And he could see how alone she was. It came off her as the cold did. Seven thousand years at the bottom of a stair, in a hall of names, with the one person she had dragged down there to keep safe refusing to say a single word to her, and the Law the only thing that had never left. He hadn’t understood that at the masquerade, or in her hall. He understood it now, and it was nothing like what he had expected to feel, standing in front of the woman who had come for Laura.

Ereshkigal looked at Anna a moment longer. Then she turned back to Andy.

There was regret in her face. It was the same regret he had seen in her hall, from inside another woman’s body, on the day she told Ama-Bila that Dumuzid’s name was written and that he was hers to keep. She had known then that the ruling was unjust. She had given it anyway, because the name was written and nothing could strike it out, and it had cost her what was left of her sister. It was all there, in the black eyes, and none of it had gone in seven thousand years. Andy was sure, as sure as he had ever been of anything, that she was remembering it now.

She ruled. “Your reading is valid, Andrew Cooper,” Ereshkigal said. “It is binding.”

Her voice did not rise. It carried to the rim and no farther, level all the way, and she didn’t hurry any of it.

“Laura Ashford’s name was never written. No one was brought back from the dead. The Law asks nothing for her.” She held his eyes. “No debt is owed.”

For a breath, no one on the Ring moved.

Andy shut his eyes.

His breath went out of him all at once, every bit of it, as if he had been holding it since the bell rang at the reception. He didn’t know how long that had been. It didn’t matter. He stood in the ash with his eyes shut and his hands open at his sides, and he couldn’t make them do anything, and he didn’t try. His face was wet. He left it.

Sixteen birthdays. Every song in the red notebook, and a footbridge he had gone back to every year with something in his hands for her. A boy on a riverbank in the rain. All of it had been true, and none of it had made her dead.

Then all three of Laura reached him at once.

She came at him from two directions, the one of her from behind him and the other two from in front of her mother, and hit him all at once, and held on. Arms around his waist, around his neck, around his back. Six hands in their gauntlets, every claw turned flat. Through the bond he felt her disbelief break. It broke straight across, all at once, and what came up through it was joy, so much of it and so fast that it went through him and out the other side and came back.

“I’m still here,” Laura said into his chest, from all three of her mouths at once. Her voice broke on it, and caught, and came back. “Andy, I’m— I’m still here. My mom, my aunt, we’re all still—”

“You are,” he said into her hair. He didn’t know which of her hair. It didn’t matter either. “You are. You’re still here. You’ll never go anywhere. And neither will anyone else.” He kissed the top of each of her heads in turn, and she laughed into his shirt from all three of her mouths, wet and broken and helpless with it.

Myra came in from one side and Riley from the other, and they wrapped their arms around Laura and Andy together, all of them in one knot. Riley’s hair came up off her back and wound around the lot of them, warm and heavy and tight, and held.

“Gold,” Myra said against Laura’s hair. Her blind eyes were wide open and streaming, and she was smiling so hard it shook. “You’re all gold. I can’t— the whole place has gone gold.”

“You’re squashing me, Andy,” Riley said. She was laughing. She was crying, too, and laughing through it. “Don’t you dare stop.”

Past them, Sarah stood with both hands pressed over her mouth, crying, without making a sound. Her eyes were on Laura and didn’t leave her. Marie got to her first and put both arms around her from the side. Sandra came after, with her new hands, and held on to both of them. Nothing on this island or under it was coming for Sarah now, or for Marie. He hadn’t let himself think it until this moment, and when he did his knees went weak with it.

Erin let out a whoop that went off the blasted trees at the rim and came back, the kind of noise nobody on the island had made all night, and flung her arms around Norah. Norah caught her around the waist and lifted her clean off the ground and swung her, green and laughing, in a whole circle.

Liesa ran to Sam, took Sam’s face in both hands and kissed her. Sam wrapped her arms around the Belgian woman and lifted her clear off the ground, laughing, Liesa wrapping her legs around Sam’s midsection as if she planned never to detach.

At the far end of the rim, by Emily, who still hadn’t woken and lay with her hair fallen over her face and hadn’t heard any of it, Emi threw four of her arms around Katherine. Katherine held on with both of hers. And the air around them went warm, and sweet, and smelled of cut grass and something flowering and a long summer afternoon. Andy smelled it from the middle of the Ring.

Chloe and Dawn stayed with Anna. They knelt on either side of her, Dawn laughing and crying at once and wiping her face on her sleeve, Chloe still holding Anna’s hand and laughing, and Eden knelt beside them, still, with her eyes wet. Mildred laughed out loud. It was one voice, warm all the way through, and it rang across the Ring.

Claire stood beside him with her ears straight up. She didn’t write anything. She didn’t need to; down the bond she was so proud of him that it was almost hard to stand next to.

Over the tops of Laura’s heads he could see Ereshkigal. She hadn’t moved from where she had ruled. Her hand was still shut at her side, and her eyes had gone back to Anna.

Sam came over. Liesa had let her go at last, and Sam’s face was a mess of it, and she didn’t care. She stopped in front of Andy and looked at him over the top of the nearest of Laura’s heads, and she shook her head slowly.

“You just saved the day with a legal argument,” Sam said. “You know that, right? Andy. A legal argument.”

“I had help,” Andy said, a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Sam. For everything.”

He was laughing. It had come up out of him and he couldn’t stop it, and he didn’t want to. He looked down at Claire, and Claire’s tail went up high behind her. All three of Laura were still holding on to him, and none of her let go.

And as he laughed, along the bond that ran from him to every one of them, he felt it begin.

Not in him, this time. In them. It started small and it started everywhere at once, in every woman of his harem on the Ring, the same as it had started in him: something stirring, a long way down, and coming up toward the light. Myra lifted her face from Laura’s shoulder and held it tilted up, quite still, as if something over the Ring had just come into a light only she could feel. Claire’s ears swung around toward the dark at the rim and stayed there, listening to nothing anyone else could hear. In Laura, down the bond, it came not as a light but as a widening, a door opening on a room she had never known was in her own house.

He didn’t know what it would show them, or what it was showing him yet. There would be time to find out.

He held on to all three of her, in the middle of all that noise, and let it be loud.

Achievement Unlocked (Andy Cooper) Final Stand!

Author's Note

VOTING IS OPEN FOR THE SIXTH CHALLENGE! Vote the girls according to how well they did their job during the Challenge. You score them individually here: https://forms.gle/UnPp1EGAx9fyh2jT9

Voting is open until Sunday, November 15 at 11,59am CET.

Unfortunately neither Strawpoll nor the poll function in CHYOA allows to create a poll where you score each character individually without rankings, so I had to use Google Forms for this, and in order to ensure people don't vote repeatedly, Google requires to log in before submitting votes. To be clear, NO EMAILS ARE COLLECTED. However, if you feel uncomfortable, you can cast your vote via DM here or on CHYOA.

Here's the list of girls to vote for, and what their job was. Instructions are on the page as well. Thank you!

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AMAs for both yours truly and the cast, post-season finale, are accepting submissions, here:

https://forms.gle/RxGQi6ifxidKPq359

The questions will be answered after the final Epilogue, so you have a bit of time. You can ask as many questions as you wish, and you do so anonymously or indicate who you are, as you prefer.

If you ask questions of the cast, please indicate who the question is for, unless it's for everyone.

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I'm still evaluating whether the contestants will receive final transformations or not. These are supposed to help them re-enter the world more easily and (positively) complete the path towards the archetype or harem role they started. I'm accepting suggestions, so if you want to propose something, please post it here:

https://forms.gle/eVeMajyDk8dXR9SNA

If I decide to implement final tranformations, options from the form will be picked (although I cannot promise all of them would be).

Thank you!