Held, Part 2

Laura knelt at the end of her chains, all three of her, and the pain went on.

It hadn’t stopped once. It came from nowhere, but it ran through every one of her at once, and each of her carried the other two on top of its own. She had learned in the last minutes that there was no getting used to it. There was only the next breath. She took it. The links held her where they had dragged her, each of her bodies inches from the next and from Myra and from Riley, and she was still leaning into them. She had not stopped leaning. Neither had the two at the ends of the row.

They had both said no. She had asked with everything she had left, and Myra had said it was given, and Riley had said she still wasn’t taking it back. Laura had known they would before she ever opened her mouths. She didn't know what she had done to deserve that loyalty, but she was still holding on. Every few breaths she reached down the bond. Every time it came back the same—Andy, alive, afraid, here and impossibly far. Every time she held on to it a little harder.

Behind her, Chloe was talking. Laura had one of her heads turned toward the rim as far as the chain at its throat allowed. From there she could see the household laid out along the edge of the ash, flat on the ground with their faces turned the same way. Chloe lay on her back among them, her head lifted. There was a ring of pale fire round Chloe’s brow. It burned without heat or smoke, cold and clean as starlight, and it lit her face from above. Her face was nothing Laura had ever seen on Chloe. Calm. Level. Unafraid.

Her voice came across the whole ring, and the whispers couldn’t touch it. It had been going for a long time now without a break. Laura had heard it over everything: over the voices, over the howling, over Anna calling names across the ash.

“We love each other,” Chloe said. “Do you understand that? Not because we have to. Not because of a rule, or a bond, or anything you could take apart with your hands.”

The man on the throne had his face turned toward her. He had not moved it since she started.

“We love each other as much as we love Andy. Different forms, but exactly that much. We didn’t think there was room in us for that much love, and it turns out there is.”

She didn’t stop for breath between one thing and the next. The words kept coming, and nothing on the ring could get in between them.

“Those three in front of you are not a debt. They’re ours. Laura held us together when he was gone. She walked us up that path when most of us wanted to run the other way, and she never once told us it would be fine, because she wouldn’t lie to us. She makes him better, and she makes all of us better.”

Laura heard her own name go across the ring in Chloe’s voice and didn’t know what to do with it. Held them together. She had been so frightened all night that she had tried to hand the whole thing to Sam, to Erin, to anyone, and they had kept handing it back.

“Myra is the one who can feel when one of us is breaking before we know it ourselves,” Chloe said, “and she comes and sits down next to you and doesn’t say a word.”

At the far end of the line, Emily had turned her head toward Nergal. She lay where the ghosts had laid her, her hair spilled gold and pink over the ash, and her face was set toward the throne, still and intent. Laura knew that look. She had put it there herself, in the Garden, with a Gift she had held back far too long. Everything Emily had, the entire Harem Harmony transformation, was pointed at him now, narrowed down to one man. Ease. Calm. The quiet loosening of every worry and every caution a person keeps.

“And Riley—” Chloe’s voice did not falter. It only went quieter, and somehow carried further. “She suffered so much and still she can smile. Riley is coming home to me. To us. She is coming home, they all are, do you hear me?”

Riley’s head turned toward the voice. The nearest of Laura saw it, the sharp turn of Riley’s chin against the chain at her throat. Riley’s mouth was open. Nothing came out.

Overhead, the whispering thinned. It went out of Laura’s ears a strand at a time. The voices that had sat at her necks all this while got smaller and further off, and then fewer, until she could hear her own breath again, and Myra’s, ragged at the far end of the row, and Riley under her breath, counting. The wheel of the Howling Ones had slowed. There were less of them now, and they drifted above the ring as if they had lost the thread of whatever they had been doing.

“They walked out here on their own feet,” Chloe said. “Nobody brought them to you. Remember that.”

And down at the line there was only Anna. Laura had seen it with the head she had turned toward the rim. Six of the Fourteen had stood in a row in front of Anna, quiet, their hands open, while Anna spoke to them too low to hear. Then the six had gone down into the ash. Slowly. Upright. Their faces turned up to Anna the whole way, until the ground closed over the tune. Now Anna stood alone at the line with her hands open at her sides and her face wet, and the ash in front of her was empty. Laura didn’t know where Anna had sent them. She had seen Anna’s face while they went, and hadn’t been able to look at it for long.

“So you are going to let them go,” Chloe said. “All three of them. You are going to let them go. Or we will make you.”

Laura could hear her own heart under it, three times over.

“Let them go,” Chloe said again. “Let them—”

Her voice cracked. Laura heard it happen. Nobody had stopped the words; nothing on the ring could have. They stopped, Laura thought, because the drain had been through Chloe again and again down that line, and there was nothing left in her to push them out with. She dragged for the next breath, and it wasn’t there. The fire round her brow sank down into the metal and went out, and the circlet lay dark on her hair, and was only a circlet.

Nergal’s face came off her.

It went to Anna, and to the empty ash in front of her. It came round to Laura and settled on all three of her. He was already rising, the whole massive height of him going up out of the stone chair, and the chains round her thickened and bit at every wrist and throat at once. His eyes glowered as they settled on the ash before Anna, and on Emily. He lifted his right hand and swept it out toward the line, once, the whole arm going out in one flat motion, and it reached the two women in the same instant.

Anna went backward. She had been standing an arm’s length from the line with her hands open and her face wet, and she was thrown back across the ash, slammed against a pillar so hard that her body left a crack in it. She came down hard on her side and slid, and stopped, and did not get up.

Emily screamed instead. Her whole body arched up off the ash against the weight that held her, high and rigid, her head thrown back, face twisted in agony. The sound went on and on. Then it broke off. Something snapped. She fell back flat, and lay there shaking.

Laura had given her that. She had given Emily the upgrade, and he had just struck Emily down for using it.

The chains kept tightening. The links bit until Laura couldn’t straighten any of her necks, and gray spots swam up in all her eyes at once. At either end of the row Myra made a small choked sound and Riley’s chains rang.

Down the line, Marissa was straining toward Anna. Every part of her the cold would let move was pulling that way—shoulder, pinned arm, her whole body—a few useless inches across the ash. Further down, a thin line of gold fire ran out along the edges of Sumiku’s wings and flared, bright as a struck match, and the cold leaned down on it until it guttered.

One of Laura’s heads had come round to Anna before she could stop it. Anna lay on her side in the ash with one arm caught under her and her hair across her face. Laura couldn’t tell from here whether she was breathing. She wasn't moving.

Laura couldn’t breathe.

At the far edge of the ring, beyond the throne, Arabella had gone still. She had been still all night, but not like this. Even her breathing seemed to have stopped. Her hand stayed shut at her side.

“That was not collection,” Arabella said.

She did not raise her voice. It carried anyway, low and exact, across the whole ring, to him.

“What you have just done to Emily and to Anna lies outside what the Law protects. The Law protects what you take in order to collect. It does not protect that.”

Laura knew what that meant, or what it might mean. If the household could stand, if they could eliminate the rest of the ghosts. If the overreach was enough. If he would be only—

She didn’t let herself finish it.

Nergal did not look at Arabella. He was looking at Laura.

He stepped down off the stone the throne stood on and crossed the few paces of ash toward her at the pace he always walked, the pace of a man behind a bier. One step. The fringe of his robe whispering on the ash. The next. Nothing else on the ring made a sound. The whispers had gone, and what was left of the Fourteen hung high over the ring and watched the household. Their touch still forced everyone on the ground. Somewhere along the line Emily was breathing in short, wet pulls, and that was all.

One of Laura’s heads could still see the rim. The household lay along it in the gray light with every face turned this way—Sam’s face white and set, Erin with her eyes squeezed shut, Chloe with the dark circlet slipped crooked in her hair. Anna had not moved. The ash in front of the line, where the six had stood, was empty. Across the ring Arabella stood with her hand shut at her side and her eyes on him, and did not move.

Laura watched him come with all three of her faces. She had seen him walk into a hall full of wedding guests once before, tonight. She had seen him lift one hand and brush the one person in the world she could least do without out of the room as if he weighed nothing. She had thought then that she knew how afraid she could be. She had been wrong. She had found out on the walk up the hill, and again in the chains, and again a minute ago with Anna lying still on the ash. Now she found out again. There was more of it. There was always more.

He stopped in front of her.

Close up he was bigger than anything had a right to be. His robe smelled of dust and cold stone. His face, so near, looked less like a face than ever, the granite of it gray in the gray light and the eyes flat and stone-colored. He looked down at the three of her, kneeling in her chains in a row in front of him, the way a man looks at a set of something he has collected and finally means to arrange.

He did not speak. He had not spoken to her once, all night. He did not say her name.

He lifted his right hand toward her three bodies, palm open, and closed it. It was the same small, unhurried movement that had bound them. The same one that had sent Andy away. Laura had time to know that much.

Then her soul screamed.

It started in the middle of her—the middle of her that wasn’t in any one body, the place where she had always been one person and never three. Something closed on that place from outside and started trying to pull it apart.

There was nothing in that place for it to take hold of. There was only her, one thing all the way through, with no seam in it to start from. It dragged at all of her at once and found nowhere to give, and so it dragged harder.

She had never had to reach across from one of her bodies to another. She was one woman in three places, all at once, without a seam, and the pull was on all of her. It was trying to make those seams. And it hurt everywhere she was.

Her backs arched. Her heads went back against the chains at her throats. Her fingers clawed at the ash. Her breath went in and wouldn’t come out, and gray came in at the edges of all her eyes at once. The links held all three.

Laura screamed.

It came out of all three of her mouths at once, in one voice. She heard it test out of her throats and go up into the dark over the ring.

It was one voice. Some part of her that was still thinking held on to that. Every one of her screamed the same scream.

Along the rim the household’s voices came up after it, her name from every mouth that could make it, ragged, and the cold pressed every one of them flat.

He did not let go. He leaned closer, and the hand in the air tightened by the smallest degree, and the tearing increased. It went on, slow, steady, without hurry, as if he meant to rip her soul apart. She understood, somewhere below the pain, what he was trying to do. She didn’t know why, or how. Only the shape of it. He had looked at the three of her and wanted her taken apart, and he meant to keep pulling until something gave. One debt, and one appetite.

She had loved being three. She couldn’t bear that, most of all. Earlier tonight, at the reception, at a table full of people laughing, she had said out loud that this was the first time in her life she had felt she could be all of herself. This body, and this one, and this one, and all of them her. She had meant it more than almost anything she had ever said. And he had looked at it and seen something he could take apart.

“Laura.” Myra’s voice. From the far end of the row, raw and close, coming out in pieces. “Laura—here. I’m right… I can feel you. Hold—hold on to me. Hear me? Hold on.”

Laura couldn’t answer. Her mouths were still open on the end of the scream. Her bodies shook in the chains, every one of them, tears streaming from her eyes, wrecked by the physical pain as well that they were all suffering, and the pull dragged at her soul a little harder.

Myra had said that to her once before, or something close to it, at the lagoon, with Myra’s arms round her and Riley’s hand on the back of her head. Laura had held on then. She had held on to the two of them until the crying stopped. But she couldn’t reach either of them now.

“L.” Riley. From the other end, hoarse, every word coming out sweet and broken and true. “Here. I’m—right here, L. Look at—look at me. Not going anywhere. Won't. Look at me.”

Laura tried with all her strength. The nearest of her turned that face toward Riley’s voice and found her, kneeling at the end of her chains with her arm still stretched out across the gap, her fingers open, her face wet. Riley was looking straight at her. Riley had always looked straight at her. Even at thirteen, even on the worst day, even when it would have been so much easier to look anywhere else.

The tearing pulled at the heart of her, and Laura screamed again, her throat raw, tears flowing from her eyes, all her thoughts splintered by the claws that tried to tear and rip through her soul.

The agony was taking her somewhere she had been before. She knew it as well as she knew her own hands. The cold. The quiet. The water had been so cold. She remembered that better than anything, better than the bridge or the rain: the cold first, and then the dark, and then nothing at all for a long time. The long fall with nothing at the bottom of it but more of the fall. She had gone down once already, at thirteen, off a footbridge in the rain, and been brought back. She knew the way down. She had told them so at the edge of the hollow. And she could feel it opening under her now, not all at once, but by inches, as the chains had pulled her from Myra and Riley, slow and patient and with no hand on it anywhere.

She had come back from it once. She did not think anything would bring her back from it again.

And she did not want to go.

She wanted the kitchen. She wanted that Tuesday. She wanted small, stupid things, the ones she had told Andy were everything she had ever wanted, and had meant.

She was so tired. Every one of her was tired past anything she had a word for. Everything hurt so much. Her soul was being shredded. And she did not want to go.

Myra was still saying her name. Riley was still saying it too. Their voices were coming from further and further away, as if the ring were getting bigger, as if the two of them were being carried off across the ash and out of her reach, and she couldn’t hold on to their voices any more than she could hold on to their hands. The claws in her soul kept trying to rip, to tear, to split her apart. The way down was opening, and the darkness was calling to her in a voice that drowned all others. She was still screaming, and was only distantly aware of it.

She couldn’t hold on to anything. The pull was dragging all of her at once, and she couldn’t hold on to herself.

So she reached for Andy.

She didn’t decide to. It was what she had been doing all night, every few breaths, since the bell. Her mind went to it out of habit now, before she knew it was going. She reached down the bond with everything that was left of her, all of it at once, and she didn’t know what she was reaching for.

Strength, maybe. Something to hold on to while the rest of her came apart. Or maybe she was reaching to say goodbye.

She had never reached for him to say goodbye. She hadn’t had the chance, the first time. The river hadn’t given her one.

She couldn’t tell which, and there was no time left to work it out, and the bond couldn’t carry it anyway. It hadn’t carried anything but where he was and how afraid he was since two days before the wedding, when it had thinned down to that and stayed thin. Whatever she sent him now, he would get only the fear in it. If she was saying goodbye, he would never know.

But she had made him promise, the night before the wedding, in the dark, that if she died again he wouldn’t break. That he would keep going. If this was goodbye, that was what she wanted to send him: keep it. Keep the promise. For all the women who had been with her when they could have run, who had said they loved her and had been hurt because of her. For the household who could still get that normal life. She didn’t know how to make fear carry a thing like that.

She reached anyway.

She thought of the photograph. She didn’t mean to; it came up on its own, out of wherever she had been keeping it. The two of them at thirteen on the hood of a car in the sun, laughing at something nobody remembered now, with no idea of anything that was coming. She would have given anything, for one more moment in the sun with him.

She thought of the dance. The end of the reception’s last song, with his arms around all of her, when she had said out loud that she was scared and he had said it back. One song. And then the bell.

Down the bond, he was there. He was where he had been all night: right here, and further off than anything she had a word for. Alive. And afraid. The fear was greater than anything she’s sensed since the bell, an enormous weight at the far end of the line, and she leaned on it like the only wall in a dark room.

He had stayed down there for a reason. She had told Myra and Riley so on the path, and believed it. Whatever he was doing, it was his to do. She wouldn't be there to see it.

The tearing went on, and the way down opened a little further under her, and Myra’s voice and Riley’s were a long way off now. I love you, Andy, she thought with all she had, tears in her eyes, knowing it was almost over.

Then the fear blinked out.

It did not ebb. It did not drain away by stages, as it had in the Garden, a little at a time. It blinkered and went out all at once, between one breath and the next. Laura was leaning on it with everything she had, and then there was nothing there to lean on, and for one terrible instant she thought—

Zero.

Every one of her went still in the chains. The reading at the far end of the bond had gone to zero. Not empty. She knew empty. Empty was what she had been afraid of finding every time she reached tonight, and this was not that. He was still there. He was more there than he had been all night. And the fear was gone out of him, every last grain of it, as if it had never been.

And then the bond bloomed.

It bloomed from his end. It went all at once, something at the far end of the line giving way, and the thread that had been thin since before the wedding was suddenly not thin. It widened. It did not widen all the way; she could feel where it still narrowed, further down, where it hadn’t opened yet. But it was wider than it had been in days, and something was coming up it toward her, fast, a pulse the thin thread could never have carried. It hit all three of her at once, and all three of her gasped against the chains at her throats.

Love.

She knew it the second it touched her. She would have known it anywhere, in any body, through any amount of dark. It was his, and it was for her, and it was so much more than the bond had been able to carry since before the wedding that it hurt going through.

For three days she had read him like a gauge. Where he was. How afraid. Two numbers at the end of a line, checked every few breaths, all through the wedding and the reception and the bell and the hill. Now there was no gauge. There was him. She could feel him as she used to before the thinning, his whole weight at the other end of the bond, and every bit of it was turned toward her.

For a heartbeat she was thirteen again on the hood of the car, with the sun on her face and him laughing beside her, and nothing that was coming had come yet.

And it wasn’t only love. There was more riding with it, a great deal more, coming through too fast and too full for her to make out. Feelings of his she had no name for. She couldn’t tell what they were. She only felt them, going through her, the whole weight of them at once, and the weight was warm. She felt it behind her breastbones. She felt it in her hands, in the fingers that couldn’t reach anyone.

And then, impossibly, she knew where he was.

All night the bond had told her where he was, and it had made no sense. Right here, and further off than anything. Riley’s sense had done the same thing in the Hollow Garden, hours ago, at the start of all this, and Riley had said it out loud: “He’s right here, and I can’t—” Neither of them had been able to finish it.

Now it finished itself. The far end of the line swung into place and stayed there, solid, plain, somewhere she knew.

He was back. In the Hollow Garden.

She had stood in its grass tonight and fought the Fourteen under its lanterns. He was not wherever Nergal had brushed him away to, not anymore, at the far end of nothing. He was down the hill, in a place she could have walked to. All three of her leaned toward it before she knew she was doing it, straining down the hill against the chains.

He had come back.

She had watched him go. One movement of Nergal’s hand, in the middle of the reception, and he had gone out of the room as if he had never been in it, and she had not been able to find him since. All night, under everything else, she had been afraid that wherever he had gone was somewhere nobody came back from. She knew about places like that. And he had come back from it, on his own.

She did not know from where. She did not know how, or what it had cost him to do it. A minute ago he had been nowhere she had a name for, and now he was in the Garden, and the first thing he had done there was tear open a bond that had been shut for days and send her this. Not his fear. This.

He was coming. The thought rose in her before she could stop it, bright and simple and terrifying: he was coming for her. She hadn’t let herself think anything like it since the bell.

Nergal’s hand stayed closed. The tearing went on. He did not let go. He did not move at all. He stood over her with his fist shut in the air and his face like granite, and the way down kept opening under her, and nothing he was doing to her stopped. But then his fist tightened. She felt it, the smallest closing, quicker than anything he had done all night, and the tearing came on harder with it, as if for the first time all night he were in a hurry. His eyes narrowed.

The pain was greater than anything Laura had ever known, but the warmth kept coming, soft, enveloping. Laura held on to it desperately, with all three of her.

Underneath it, underneath the pain and the pulse and the place at the bottom of the hill, something else woke up in her. It was quiet. It didn’t need to be loud. It was older than the Fourteen. The whispers had only borrowed it tonight. It knew her better than they ever could. It had been hers since before she could remember.

It told her what it had always told her. Don’t. Don't let yourself have this. He was a long way down the hill, and Nergal’s hand was right here, and she had seen how this went before.

Good things were for other people.

She knew that voice better than her own. It had grown up with her in her father’s house, where anything good had to be paid for first and was taken away anyway. It had taught her to wait for the bill. Every time something was good, it told her to look around for whoever was going to pay for it, and most of the time it had been right. It had told her she was the price of things: if she lived, somebody else paid. Tonight it had said all of it again in the Fourteen’s voices, and she had listened, because it had always sounded like the truth.

It was saying it now, quietly, reasonably, with his love still pouring into her. Look where she was. Look at what was being done to her. She was dying. She was never going to get the kitchen. She was never going to get that Tuesday.

She had never had an answer for it. Only other people’s.

The footbridge, in the rain. She had been thirteen. She had gone out to it alone, and stood on it loving him, more than she had words for at thirteen. Then the water. The voice had been right that night, and it had looked right for a long time after.

And the footbridge again, a month ago. The same bridge over the same river. Inanna had stood over the two of them as the goddess she was, and Laura had married him there, on the bridge that had killed her. The place that took her had given him back. The voice hadn’t had one word to say all that day.

But look now. Anna lay in the ash at the line now, where he had thrown her, and hadn’t moved.

The Sky Archive. All of them at the long tables with books open, looking for a way to save her, and Laura in the middle of them. “Why are you all here?” she had blurted. And one after another they had told her. They hadn’t come because she had earned it, or because she had suffered enough to deserve it. They had come because she was theirs.

The lagoon, with the party going on somewhere behind them in the dark. She had told Myra and Riley she didn’t even have a frame of reference for wanting something simple and happy. Myra had told her she was allowed to want the same things Andy did, and didn’t have to win the misery contest. Between them they had told her she didn’t have to carry everyone alone, or already know how it ended. She had cried into Riley’s shoulder until she couldn’t anymore. Riley had stopped betting against Andy long before Laura could. Laura had watched her do it and wished she could, and never managed it herself.

And the night before the wedding, in the dark, after she had made him promise. She had asked him whether any of it was real, Wish or no Wish. Whether what they had was built or grown. He had told her what he thought of the letter. Then he had said that if every bit of it had been put there by somebody else, he still wouldn’t give back a single day. And he had told her he loved her.

The warmth was still coming up the line. Laura turned toward it with everything she had left and looked at what it meant.

He had been sent away, and he had come back. He had come back while she knelt in chains in this ring, and the first thing he had done was open the bond and send her his love, so that she would know. He wouldn’t have done that to say goodbye. He wasn’t saying goodbye. He was coming.

She did not know it. There was no proof of it anywhere in this ring. There was a pulse, and a wider line, and a place at the bottom of the hill where he was. Everything else said the voice was right. Nergal’s fist said so. The cold under her said so.

She believed him anyway.

Because if he could come back from where he had been, then the two of them could come back from this. If he could open a bond that had been shut for days, then the women who had climbed up here with her could do what they had come here to do. Myra at one end of the row and Riley at the other, who had both told her no tonight and meant it. Chloe, whose voice had crossed the whole ring. Emily, who had looked straight at him. Anna, who had stood in front of six of the Fourteen and sent them down into the ash. Marissa straining across the ash, and Sumiku’s fire, and Erin's stubborn anger, and Arabella’s shut hand, and Sam in her blue armor, and every woman on that line who had walked up here with her when they all wanted to run.

She believed in all of them. For the first time, she believed in herself, among them.

Good things were for other people, the voice said.

No, Laura thought, in the middle of herself, the place Nergal’s hand was pulling at, and it was the plainest thing she had ever thought. For the first time, she truly believed it. They’re for me too.

The voice said it again. She didn’t listen. It had never been the truth. It had only ever been the oldest thing she had.

She was going to come out of these chains. She was going to walk up that rim, all three of her, and find him at the top of it. She was going to get the kitchen and the Tuesday and every small, stupid thing she had ever told him she wanted. She did not know any of it. She chose it.

And she was going to meet Bee.

The baby in the house that never was. Laura had fed her and dressed her, and pushed her down an ordinary street in a stroller, and Andy still had Floppy, her rabbit. Green eyes that wouldn’t settle on one shade. And the other dream, the one Andy’s own heart had made for them: the rise on the walk, the real Hotel on the horizon, and Bee not bothered at all. “That’s our house.” Then the beach, Bee sandy to the elbows, buzzing round the sandcastle with her arms out, stinging Andy on the knee with one finger and shrieking when he fell over.

She wanted that. She had wanted it since the nursery and never once let herself want it all the way. She let herself now.

The love was still coming, and now she noticed how it came.

It didn’t go from one body to the next. It came into all three at once, the same. The same warmth. The same weight. One thing, in three places, all at the same time.

She knew that shape.

It was her shape. It was what she was. She had been one thing in two places, and now three, all at once, without a seam, and the love went through all three of her exactly the same, and in each of her bodies she felt it and knew it and knew it was hers.

And she held.

She did not break free. She could not. His fist was still shut and the tearing was still going on and every one of her still hurt worse than she had known anything could. But she stopped coming apart. She took the bond and held on to it in all three of her at once, and she pulled in, toward the middle of herself, the place where she had always been one, and she held that place shut against him with everything she had and everything that had just come up the bond to her.

She knew how to do this. She had done it in the Garden, holding herself folded down into one body for the better part of half an hour while the Fourteen came out of the dark, packed into a case a size too small and keeping the lid shut by nothing but will. She held herself as one, in all three of her, and kept the lid shut.

The way down stopped opening. He was still pulling, and she could feel him pulling. But it did not open any further. She held it where it was, and he held his fist where it was, and neither of them gave.

She did not know how long she could keep it up. She only had to keep it up until he came.

Her breath came back. It came back into all three of her at once, ragged, all the way down to the bottom of her lungs, and she let it out, and took another. Somewhere far down the line Emily was crying, quietly now, and it was the most ordinary sound Laura had heard all night.

Myra’s voice came back with it. Close again. Saying her name.

Riley’s too. “L. L. I’ve got—I’m here. I’m here.”

Laura lifted her heads. All three of them, at once. She looked at Myra at one end of the row and Riley at the other, and they were both still straining toward her against their chains with their hands open, every finger spread. Myra’s face was wet and fierce. Riley was crying without a sound, her mouth shaping the same small word over and over, and Laura knew which one. She strained back. She leaned into her chains toward them and toward herself with all of her, six hands opening in the cold air, reaching. The links drew tight. They held her inches short of Myra, inches short of Riley, inches short of her own nearest hand.

Inches. She held on across them anyway. The way down started closing.

At the rim the household lay flat on the ash, every face turned this way, Sam and Sumiku and Erin and Norah watching, straining against their bonds. Anna lay where she had fallen. Emily lay shaking at the far end of the line.

Above her, Nergal’s fist stayed closed. Laura’s three faces stayed lifted. Down the bond, where the fear had been, there was only that warmth, steady now, going on and on, and at the far end of it, at the bottom of the hill, him.

She held, impossibly, against everything he was throwing at her. She held onto Andy and all he was sending her way, and she raised her faces and looked at Nergal, three pairs of electric blue eyes, and for the briefest instant, she saw him flinch.