The Scent of Ruin

Erin smelled it before the path ran out. Plaster dust, damp and chalky, like a house the day after a wall has come down to the studs, and under it something colder that she couldn’t name and didn’t try to.

After they had emerged from the elevator and left the main building for the Dance Hall, she had come up the whole slope a step behind Sam’s shoulder, with Norah on her other side and Sumiku a little ahead of them both, wings folded down tight so they wouldn’t catch the hedges. The lanterns had carried them the whole way, one and then the next, each hanging still on its hook.

The last lantern hung a few yards short of the garden doors. Past it there should have been light, and music, and the long pale line of the Hall.

Sam stopped.

Erin nearly walked into the back of her plate. Then she didn’t care about that at all, because she could see it too, and the breath she had been drawing stopped halfway in and stayed there.

The garden doors were still there. Both of them, tall and closed, most of their panes still in them, standing in their carved frame at the edge of the floor—and nothing around the frame. No wall to either side. Nothing above. They stood alone in the dark, a doorway drawn on the air and never rubbed out.

Behind her the others came up off the path and stopped, one after another, in a ragged line along the edge of the floor. Norah. Laura, all three of her, with Myra and Riley close on either side. Emily, Katherine with Eden against her hip, Chloe, Marissa, Liesa. Sumiku had already gone still a pace ahead. Thirteen women who had last stood on this floor for a wedding, some of them in wedding dresses, with a hundred-odd guests around them and a band playing, and none of them went past the doors.

The dome was gone. Erin looked up for it without meaning to, and there was only the night, flat and black, and a wind moving high up where the glass used to be. The walls were gone with it: the pale stucco, the gold filigree along the top of every panel, the pillars, the long bar. What was left was the floor. It ran out from the doors farther than her eyes could follow in the dark, open on every side. Around its edge, at the height where the walls had been, the sconces still hung in the air where they had always hung, a long ring of them—round and small and dark, every one, as if the house had lost its power and nobody had come to say why.

Glass lay over everything. The dome’s glass, in shards and in slivers and in long curved pieces the length of her arm, catching what little light came off the lanterns behind them.

By the garden doors, Mildred was on one knee on the floor, gathering broken plaster into piles. She had four of them going already, neat and square-cornered, and she was building a fifth. She did not look up at thirteen women standing at the edge of what she was cleaning. She took another piece of plaster, turned it over in her hands, and set it on the pile.

“Oh—” Chloe’s voice came from somewhere down the line, high and cracked. “Oh, no. No. No, no, no, no—”

Nobody told her to stop.

“It had walls.” That was Emily, beside her, in the voice of someone reporting a fact to a clerk who has written it down wrong. “It had walls when we left. The top came in, I know the top came in, I saw it. But it had walls.”

Sam hadn’t moved since she stopped. Erin was close enough to see what happened to her face, and it was only a small thing—her jaw set, and her eyes lost their focus for a second. Then Erin understood. Every woman on this edge was grieving at once, and Sam could feel every one of them now, not just the weight of it but each of them separately, placed and named. Chloe there. Emily there. Laura there, all three of her, afraid. It came into her all at the same moment, and she took it the way she took a hit in the plate: rocked, and stayed where she was.

“Okay,” Sam said. Her voice came out rough, and she cleared it. “We start here.”

Nobody asked why. She told them anyway, because that was Sam. “This is the last place any of us saw Andy. Whatever he left, if he left anything, it’s here. So we start here.”

Sumiku moved first. She crossed the edge of the floor with care, stepping around the glass, and went to the garden doors and stood beside the kneeling Mildred with her back to both of them, facing out into the dark they had climbed through. Her tail curled once around her own ankles and was still. Mildred went on stacking plaster at her feet.

Norah was looking at the floor, and then at the far side of it, and then at the nearest heap of broken stucco, and Erin watched her do the thing she did with a spreadsheet: read it top to bottom, twice, and not like the total.

“Look at the pillars.” Norah lifted her chin toward the nearest heap. “The dome came down while we were still in here. I watched it come. The rest of this didn’t. Look at the pillars.”

Erin looked. The nearest pillar hadn’t fallen so much as burst. It lay across the floor where it had gone over, snapped in three places, and its middle had blown outward in chunks that were scattered twenty feet in every direction. Beyond it a whole length of wall had come down at once and smashed flat, stucco and filigree together, as if something had leaned on it from the inside until it gave. The gilt was torn and twisted all through the wreck. Where the bar had been there was only a mound of splintered wood and broken bottles, half buried under a slab of wall. Nothing lay where it had been put. Nothing lay in any order at all. And under the rubble, wherever the floor showed through, there was glass.

“See the glass under it all?” Norah said. Her voice was flat. “The dome was already down when the walls fell on it. So the walls came down after we were gone. And nobody knocks a room down like this with a crowbar, or with his hands. This is Nergal. He did it.” She swallowed. “Not a piece at a time, either. Look at it. Whole sweeps at once, a wall at a go. He just let it come down on everything.”

Sam let out a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I see it.” She didn’t say anything else, and it was worse than if she had.

Laura made a sound, all three of her together, low and short, as if something had caught under her ribs and she had decided to keep it there.

“We were dancing in here,” she said. “Less than two hours ago. We were dancing.”

Sam stepped onto the floor. Glass cracked under her boots. After a second, the rest of them followed.

The first thing Erin understood, once she was out on it, was that the room had not been emptied. It had only been knocked open. Wherever the falling walls had missed, what the wedding had set down was still where it had been set down.

A round table stood a dozen steps in, and by some miracle it had kept its cloth. White linen, a scatter of dust and glass across it, two chairs still pushed in and one shoved back, as if its owner had stood up in a hurry. On the cloth, beside a glass of something gone flat, lay a camera, heavy and black, its strap wound twice around its body.

Erin knew it. Everyone knew it. It had been at Carol Cooper’s eye all afternoon.

Laura walked straight to it, the gown’s grass-stained hems dragging through the dust together. At the table the nearest of her put out a hand and rested it flat on the camera, not picking it up. The other two stopped behind, one at each shoulder.

“Andy’s mom had this in her hand the whole ceremony,” Laura said. “The whole thing. Every one of the vows. I kept seeing her lower it to wipe her eyes and then put it right back up again.” All three voices were steady, which was how Erin knew they weren’t. “She was going to show us every one.”

Chloe had come up beside the table. Her face was wet and she wasn’t doing anything about it. “She will.” Chloe sniffed, hard. “She’s going to make us sit through every last one. You know she is. She’ll have a spreadsheet for them.”

Laura didn’t answer that. The hand on the camera stayed where it was.

The cake stood on its own table farther in, tall and white and uncut. Most of it had survived. The top tier had slid half an inch off true. And standing in it, driven down through the icing and into the tier below, was a long shard of the dome’s glass, curved, taller than Erin’s forearm, standing up out of the cake like a blade left in a stone.

Emily had drifted toward it without seeming to decide to, her hair swinging around her. She reached for the glass. Her hand stopped an inch from it and hung there, not quite shaking, and then came back to her side.

“Nobody even got to cut it,” she said, to no one.

Out in the middle of the floor, all by itself, a single shoe lay on its side. A woman’s shoe, satin, with a low heel and a little strap. Erin had no idea whose it was. Neither, from her face, did anybody else. It had come off someone as they were taken, or as they ran, and it had stayed where it fell.

Liesa went to it. She bent and picked the shoe up and turned it over in her hands, once, as if there might be a name written inside. Then she carried it back across the glass to the table where Laura stood, and set it upright on the cloth beside Carol’s camera, and straightened the strap so it lay flat.

It was the kind of small, useless tidiness that only made the table look worse, one shoe and one camera set side by side for whoever came back for them, and it was right anyway.

She looked down, because something was under her foot that wasn’t glass. It was stiff and square and it gave a little, and she lifted her foot off it and saw the white border of a photograph, and inside the border a baby with damp eyes and a fat fist wound around the ear of a teddy bear.

She knew that photograph. She had pinned it up herself.

It was not the only one. Now that she was looking, they were everywhere—across the floor between the heaps of plaster, under the glass, face up and face down, hundreds of them, scattered like leaves after a wind.

Andy at three, frowning beside a cake with a 3 in blue icing. Andy on a soccer team, second row, knees filthy. A gap-toothed Andy with a black eye, grinning as if he had won it. Andy and a small dark-haired girl seen from behind, running flat out into a backyard. They lay across the floor in no order at all, a whole life tipped out of its box, and the glass lay on top of them.

Katherine crouched down first.

She did it without a look at anyone: she simply saw what needed doing and went down on her heels in the dust and began. One photograph, lifted clear of the glass by its edge and turned face up. Then another, laid square on top of it. She brushed the plaster off each with the side of her thumb before she stacked it. Eden came down the floor after her with the slow, rolling sway of her hips that was the only way her body would carry her anywhere, and stopped at her sister’s side and stayed there, close enough that Katherine’s shoulder touched her hip every time she reached.

Emily knelt beside them. Then Chloe, still crying, wiping her face on her wrist between photographs. Then Marissa, and Liesa, the four of them spreading out across the floor on their knees and working inward, picking up Andy’s life one square at a time.

Erin stood where she was and couldn’t make herself help.

She knew every one of those pictures, and the knowing was what kept her standing there. She could have told them which row each had come from and why it had been hung beside the one next to it. She and Claire had sat on this floor with the whole lot spread out around them in a fan, Claire’s notebook open on her knee, Claire’s tail flicking every time Erin argued for putting an unflattering one in. He’ll hate it, Claire had written, under a picture of Andy in a cardboard crown at somebody’s party, and Erin had said, “Good, that’s the point,” and pinned it up at eye height where he couldn’t miss it.

That had been in the days before his birthday, when the whole household had lived in this room. Sam had run it, with a squad of Mildreds doing whatever she pointed at. Norah had done the sound and the lights. Liesa had done the flowers and sat up hand-sewing a banner, and Chloe had polished every surface in the building twice, and Myra had filled party-favor bags by touch at a long table, when she still could not see, counting under her breath. Erin had done the Wall. She had done it with Claire, the two of them working through his life from the cradle up, and it had taken them days.

The baby with the teddy bear was still lying by her foot, the print of her sole across one corner in plaster dust.

Sam was standing over a heap of stucco with a photograph in her hand, looking at it without seeing it. “I was Stage Boss in here. For his birthday. I knew where every cable in this place went. I had a chart.” She put the photograph down on the nearest clean patch of floor, carefully, face up. “Wasn’t a lot of chart for this.”

Chloe laughed, wet and awful, and covered her mouth.

“I fed JJ right there,” she said, and pointed past the cake, toward a stretch of floor where there was nothing at all. “At the breakfast. There was a chair in the corner, by the—” She stopped, because there was no corner. There was the floor, and then the dark. “There was a corner,” she said, much more quietly, and went back to the photographs.

Riley, a step behind Laura, looked where Chloe had pointed. Her hand had come up to the ends of her hair and was holding them.

Laura’s three faces were all turned the same way, toward the garden doors, standing by themselves in the night with Sumiku and the Mildred beside them.

“The night of the Masquerade, Mildred announced us. At the door. Master Cooper. Consort Cooper. Consort Cooper.” All three of Laura’s voices were soft. “It was the first time I ever heard somebody say my name like that out loud.”

Erin remembered. She remembered the forest-green dress, too, the first thing she had worn in more than a month, and how strange it had been, that whole evening, to have anything touching her skin at all. And she remembered the last time she had stood out there, only a few hours ago, fourth of the seven dances, when Andy had given her the bond and she had asked him to tell her from when she’d need to carry it. “As of now,” he had said, as if he were signing something. She could still feel where his hand had been.

Myra had stopped walking. She stood a little apart, one hand on her cane and the other pressed flat to her breastbone, and her three tails had gone low and still behind her. Erin didn’t have to ask. There were twelve women on this floor feeling what Erin was feeling, and Myra had no way to keep any of it out.

Norah stayed on her feet. She was still pale from the Garden, and she didn’t kneel, but she had drifted to the edge of the gatherers and was toeing photographs gently out from under slabs of plaster so the others could reach them.

Erin went the other way.

She didn’t decide to. Her feet took her across the floor toward the north side, where the ground was heaped highest and the plaster lay in a long drift, knee-deep in places, running the length of what had been a wall. The Wall had filled that side, from the baseboard up to the tall arched window above it. There was no window now. There was no baseboard. There was a drift of white rubble with the dark beyond it, and in it and around it and sliding off it, the rest of the photographs.

A strip of Polaroids still clung together where she and Claire had taped them in a row. Andy at his graduation in a crisp suit, the smile tiny but not going anywhere. Andy at karaoke, eyes shut, singing into a spoon. And almost at her feet, face up, her own debut—green from head to foot and doing her best to glare at the camera—with the caption someone had printed across the white border in black marker, in big square letters: OUR SEXY CELERY.

On any other night it would have made her laugh.

She went down on her knees in the plaster.

It wasn’t a choice. Her legs simply stopped holding her, and she let them, and knelt there in the dust with the plaster grinding under her knees and didn’t feel it. Her skin never took dirt. The plaster slid off her and left nothing behind. It seemed a stupid, pointless thing for her body to be good at right now.

She heard someone come up behind her over the glass, and she didn’t turn.

Marissa knelt down beside her and held something out in front of her, low, where Erin couldn’t help but look at it.

It was a rooftop picture. Andy and Claire side by side, the wind whipping both the catgirl's hair across her face, both of them squinting into a sunrise with their eyes screwed half shut, as if neither of them had any idea anyone was there with a camera. Claire’s ears were flat back against the wind.

Erin took it in both hands.

She didn’t know how long she looked at it. At some point Marissa had moved around behind her and her arms had come around Erin from the back, both of them, her chin set on Erin’s shoulder, holding on. It was not the careful hold of a therapist, but the plain, hard grip of someone who had no intention of letting go—and Erin didn’t think Marissa had decided to do it any more than Erin had decided to kneel. It was just where Marissa was now. Her breath was warm on the side of Erin’s neck. The hold was tight and steady and asked nothing.

“Claire and I built this,” Erin said. It came out low and hard and ugly, and she didn’t care. “The two of us. All of it. We sat right there and did it one picture at a time.” She turned the Polaroid over and back. “And she doesn’t know. She’s in the Forest looking for him, and she doesn’t know this is gone.”

Erin had no idea how she was going to say it to her. Where you even started, with something like that.

Marissa’s arms tightened. “Yeah,” she whispered, close to Erin’s ear. “You did. The two of you.” A breath. “I’ll be right with you when we need to tell her.”

Something in Erin’s chest eased half an inch under the weight of those arms.

She looked up from the Polaroid, along the drift of rubble, to its middle. There. Dead center, where the arch of the window had been highest and the photographs had grown thickest around it, where the eye went first whenever anyone walked in. She could have found it in the dark with her eyes closed.

“I hung the middle one.” It was out before Erin knew she was going to say it. “Myself. Nobody else touched it.”

Then she was moving. She took Marissa’s wrists, gently, and unwound them from around her, and put the rooftop picture into Marissa’s hands for safekeeping, and went forward on her knees through the plaster to the center of the drift, and put both hands into it.

It was heavier than it looked. The slabs had broken along their paint lines, and under the top layer the pieces lay packed tight, mortar and lath and fragments of the gold edging from the window’s arch, and she dragged them off and threw them behind her and dug.

The first layer came away in slabs. Under it the stucco had broken small, and she had to go slower, feeling for glass with her fingertips before she closed her hand on anything. Her knuckles still remembered the last time she had grabbed at something in this room without looking. Dinah had cleaned them up in the Garden without a word of comment, which from Dinah was a comment, and Erin had no intention of making her do it twice.

Photographs came up with the plaster. She set them aside as they surfaced without looking at them properly, and then looked anyway. Middle school: braces, a haircut someone should have been arrested for. A Halloween picture, blurry, a small girl dressed as a vampire with her head thrown back in a howl. A roller rink, Andy out in front, hair blown straight back, laughing with his whole mouth open and a girl’s hand held tight in his. Every one of them had been hung within an arm’s length of the middle, because that was where they belonged. She and Claire had built the whole Wall out from that center the way rings grow out from the heart of a tree.

She could hear the others behind her—the soft sound of photographs going onto the stack, glass shifting under a knee, Chloe’s breathing slowly coming down. Nobody came to help her dig, and she was grateful, and she didn’t know how to say so.

Riley was the one who spoke.

She had come across the floor while Erin worked, close enough to stand at the edge of the drift, and Laura had come with her, and Myra. Riley’s arms were folded tight. Her voice, when it came, was the voice she had tonight for everything: sweet and low and absolutely level, because it had no other way to be.

“Erin. The middle one,” Riley said. “Where did it come from? It was on the Wall the whole time, and I stood in front of it, and I never once asked anybody where you got it.”

Erin’s hands stopped in the plaster.

“Arabella,” she said. It came out clipped, one fact and then the next, the way she gave bad news. “When Claire and I were putting the Wall together, there was an envelope. Just sitting with the rest of the stuff she’d had brought in for us. Plain. It had one word on it. Private.” She pulled a slab of stucco loose and set it behind her. “We opened it anyway. It was that picture.”

Nobody said anything.

“We almost didn’t put it up.” Erin dragged another piece loose. “We argued about it for a long time. Claire filled pages. I said it would take him apart. She said maybe he needed to see it. That he’d forgotten what he looked like when he was happy, and somebody should remind him.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and left no mark, because nothing ever did. “In the end we both said yes. And she handed it to me, and I climbed up and hung it right in the middle. By myself. I wanted to be the one.”

She put her hands back in the rubble.

The gilt was the worst of it. It had come off the arch of the window in long curled strips, and they lay tangled through the plaster like ribbon off a present, sharp at the torn ends. She worked them loose one at a time and laid them aside. Every one of them had been up there over her head the night of the party, catching the light, when the whole household had crowded in here in the dark and then shouted at him all at once as he walked in, and he had stood there with his mouth open, as if he had forgotten his own birthday existed. There had been three cakes. She had told him exactly what she thought of the first one while he cut it, and Norah had told him what she thought of the second, and Chloe had defended the third against both of them. Later, with the guests from the other seasons packed in around the stage, he had changed into Andi right there in front of everyone to try on the koala-ear headband Harper had brought him, and the whole room had roared.

This room had held so many of their good nights. She hadn’t understood how many until she was kneeling in what was left of it. She laid the strip in her hand down with the others, flat. It curled slowly back up. She went back into the drift with both hands.

It was under the thickest part of the drift, down near what had been the baseboard, flat on the floor, where it could only have got by falling first, before the rest of the wall came down over it. She saw the back of it before she knew what she was seeing: a larger square than the rest, the paper gone slightly gray at one corner. Face down in the dust.

Her hands were shaking. She hadn’t noticed when they started.

She slid her fingers under it and lifted it clear and turned it over.

Andy and Laura, on the hood of a sun-bleached car. Thirteen. His shirt too big for him and his hair too long, his arms locked around her, holding on hard. Laura laughing straight into the lens with her whole face, dark hair across her mouth, her eyes so blue they looked lit from behind. Neither of them knowing anything. Both of them happy.

Thirteen. The age Laura had been when she went into the river.

On his birthday he had stopped dead in front of it. All of them had closed in around him and held on until he could stand to look at it.

Erin started crying. It didn’t build. It was simply there, all at once, running down her face and dripping off her chin onto the plaster.

“Found it,” she said. Her voice broke on it. “There. I found it. I found it.” She stayed on her knees a moment longer with the photograph in both hands. Then she got up, clumsily, plaster sliding off her in sheets, and turned around, and Laura was standing right there.

Erin held it out.

It didn’t take a decision. There was only ever one person on this floor it could go to.

Laura took it with the hands of the body nearest, carefully, as if it might come apart on her. The other two of her came in close on either side, close enough that all three were looking down at the same small square of paper, and for a long moment none of her moved at all. Erin could see her breathing. All three of her, at the same time, not quite steady.

“Look at us,” Laura said. The three voices came out together, almost too quiet to hear. Her eyes were wet. “Look at how happy we were. We didn’t have any idea.”

Across the floor, the gathering had stopped. Emily had sat back on her heels with a photograph forgotten in each hand. Chloe had both palms pressed to her mouth. Liesa had gone still, which for Liesa took effort, and her eyes were wet. Katherine had stopped with her hand flat on her stack. Behind Erin, Marissa knelt in the plaster with the rooftop picture held flat against her chest, keeping it for her the way she had been asked to. Norah had turned her face half away, jaw tight, which was as much as Norah ever let anyone have. Out at the garden doors, Sumiku hadn’t turned around, but her wings had drawn in closer to her back. Only Sam was still looking out at the dark past the edge of the floor, and Erin knew her well enough to know that was not because she didn’t want to see. It was so the three of them could have the middle of the room to themselves.

Riley came around to stand at her right, shoulder to shoulder with the nearest of her, and Myra came around to her left and stood there the same way. Neither of them spent long on the photograph; they both knew it already. What they wanted was her face.

Riley leaned in close. “Hey. Talk to me. How bad?”

Myra’s free hand found Laura’s back and rested there. “You’ve gone very quiet inside,” she said. “Everything else in this room is loud, and you’ve gone quiet. I don’t like it. Tell me where you are.”

Laura drew a long breath, all three of her.

“I’m here.” It came from all three of her at once. “I’m not okay. But I’m here, and I’ve got it, and I’m holding on to it.” She didn’t look up from the picture. “That’s what I’ve got right now. Is that enough?”

“That’s plenty,” Riley said. It would have had to be true, coming from her.

Laura didn’t give the photograph back, and Erin didn’t ask her to. It belonged to her and Andy, and it would go back up on a wall for them both one day, if there was a day and a wall to put it on. She couldn’t make herself think past that if. She held it against herself in both hands, the edges of it pressed flat against her shirt, and the three of her stood in the middle of the ruin with Riley on one side and Myra on the other, and none of them moved.

Behind them, Katherine had finished.

She had got nearly all of them. Not the ones under the heaviest slabs, and not the ones the wind had taken off the far edge of the floor before anyone arrived, but hundreds—a stack higher than her hand was long, every photograph turned face up and squared, every one brushed clean. Eden stood at her shoulder, swaying slightly, watching her hands. Katherine looked around for somewhere to put the stack, and found the stump of the nearest pillar, the round stone base that had been left standing when Nergal burst the rest of it. She carried the stack to it and set it down in the center.

She went back for a length of the curled gilt off the floor and laid it across the top of the photographs, and pressed down on it with her palm until it sat flat, so that the wind that moved through the open floor now couldn’t take any more of them.

She stood back and looked at it. Then she looked at Erin, and nodded once, the kind of nod that closed a subject and opened nothing, and Erin nodded back.

The only sound after that was Mildred.

She had not stopped once. Through all of it—Chloe crying, Erin digging, the photograph coming up out of the plaster—she had gone on kneeling by the garden doors and building her piles, and there were seven of them now, each one squared off at the corners as neatly as the last. Sumiku still stood over her with her back turned, looking out at the lanterns on the path. As the room went quiet, Sumiku’s head came around, and then the rest of her, until she was facing Mildred and not the dark.

Erin followed her look, and saw Riley’s go the same way.

One by one the rest of them drifted toward the doors, the way people drift toward the only lit window on a dark street. Katherine left her stack on its pillar and came with Eden a half-step behind her. Norah came slowly, picking her way. Myra tipped her head toward the Mildred as she walked and frowned slightly, and Erin remembered that to Myra, Mildred was only ever static, a patch of noise where a feeling should be. Whatever this one was feeling as she stacked plaster in the ruin, none of them was going to know it.

Down in the Hollow Garden, before the fight, Riley had stood in the grass with her son somewhere behind the Gentle Hearth’s walls and had nearly refused to stay on the line, because it was Mildreds holding him and not her. Chloe had talked her down, and Riley had gone back to her place on the line, but Erin had seen what it cost her. Now Riley let go of Laura’s shoulder and crossed the floor, straight across, glass and all, and stopped in front of the kneeling Mildred.

Chloe was already up off her knees and going after her.

“Where is he?” Riley said. She didn’t soften it. “Nergal. Where did he go?”

Mildred set down the piece of plaster she was holding. She placed it on the pile with care, as if it mattered to her where it went, and then she stood up and folded her hands at her waist and looked at Riley, and she did not answer the question.

“The new flesh-thing is safe,” she said. “He is in the Gentle Hearth. He slumbers. No one takes him but his spawner. That has not changed. It will not change.”

Riley’s breath went out of her all at once, as if someone had cut a cord she’d been hanging from. Her hand came up over her mouth and stayed there. For a second she didn’t move at all; then her shoulders came down, slowly, an inch at a time, from wherever they had been all night. Chloe reached her and put a hand on her arm, and Riley covered it with her own free hand without looking at her.

“Okay.” Riley’s voice came out through her fingers. “Okay. Okay.”

She stood like that for a while, with Chloe’s hand under hers, while the rest of them waited. Erin didn’t mind the wait. Riley had been carrying JJ around inside her head all night, through every minute of the fight, and she had finally been allowed to put him down. Nobody on this floor was going to hurry her.

Only then did Mildred answer what she had been asked.

“The one you asked for is waiting at the Verdant Arches,” she said. “In the ring of stone. He has been there since he left this room.” Her flat, pleasant voice didn’t change at all. “Nothing grows there now.”

Laura made a small sound behind Erin, all three of her at once. “The Arches?” Laura said. “He went to the Arches? But those are Erin’s—”

She stopped there.

Erin didn’t hear the rest of the room after that. She turned on Mildred. She didn’t remember crossing the floor, but she was at the garden doors, close enough to see the fine dust of plaster on Mildred’s folded hands, and she could feel her own pulse in her throat.

“What do you mean,” Erin said, “nothing grows there?”

Mildred turned her head and looked at her. There was no hurry in it.

“Everything that grew in the ring is dead,” Mildred said. “The wisteria is dead, on every arch. The jasmine is dead. The grass is dead, to the edge of the stones and past it. The moss is dead in the cracks where it lived. The trees are hurt. He put his hands on them, and they died outward from his hands. There is only stone there now, and the stone is bare.”

Erin knew those arches the way she knew her own palms. She had made them. She had pulled the old dead growth off those stones by hand and coaxed the wisteria up them a finger’s width at a time, and asked the jasmine where it wanted to go and let it go there, and lain on her back in that grass in the sun with her eyes shut, doing nothing, feeling it grow under her. She had sat up there with Claire and Marissa on a blanket reading fan mail out loud until they were crying with laughter. She had told Andy things under those arches she had never told anyone, and planned out whole futures for all of them, and not been embarrassed. It was the first place she had ever made that nobody had asked her to make. It was the only place on the island that was hers.

She wondered, stupidly, whether the stones would even know her now, with nothing growing on them.

Behind her, Marissa had drawn in a breath and not let it out. Marissa had sat on that blanket too. So had Claire, and Claire was somewhere in the Forest now and didn’t know about this either. Erin added it to the list of things she was going to have to tell her.

And out in the Garden tonight, with her hands flat in the turf and the Fourteen coming at the line, something enormous had died somewhere far off, all at once. It had gone through her like cold water through a wall. She had convulsed with it. She had asked Laura, fast, whether it was Andy, and Laura hadn’t known, and there had been no time to find out what it was.

She knew now.

“That’s what I felt,” Erin said. It came out quiet. “In the Garden. While we were fighting. That was it. That was my Arches.” She heard herself, and couldn’t stop. “That was mine, dying, and I wasn’t even there. I didn’t even know it was mine.”

“Oh, Erin,” Laura said. The three voices came from somewhere behind her, close. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what it was either. I would have told you.”

Erin’s hands had closed. She didn’t know when. Her fingers were digging into her own palms hard enough to hurt, and she let them.

“Nergal killed it,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice. She had never raised her voice in her life and she wasn’t going to start now, for him. It came out low, and flat, and cold all the way through. “Every living thing I put in that ground. He put his hands on it and he killed it for the fun of it, because he could, because there was nothing in his precious rules that said he couldn’t. And now he’s in the middle of it. In my place. Waiting for us to come to him.” Her jaw was so tight it ached. “He wants us to walk in there and see it.”

Myra came to Erin’s left. Emily came to her right. Erin could feel Emily the way you always could, whether you wanted to or not—the kind of easy, wide calm that came off her like warmth off a stone in the evening, pressing gently at the edges of everything. It pressed at the edges of the anger, too. It didn’t get in. Erin didn’t want it to.

Marissa came in last, from behind. Her arm went around Erin’s waist before she could possibly have thought about it, the same way it had in the plaster, and held on.

Erin let it stay. She kept her fists closed.

It was Marissa’s arm that made her notice she was shaking. Not her hands—those were clenched too tight to shake—but the rest of her, a fine steady tremor running through her from the knees up, like a wire pulled too tight. Marissa just held on, and after a while the tremor slowed, and Erin could think again.

What she thought was: I know the way up there better than anyone on this island.

She had walked that hill more times than she could count. In the dark, in the rain, carrying seedlings, carrying nothing. She knew where the path went soft after a storm and where the roots came up through it and which of the arches you could see first from below. Nergal had got there without taking a single step on it.

She lifted her head. “I’m going in front,” Erin said.

Heads turned. She didn’t look at any of them except Sam.

“It’s my ground,” she said. “My Sanctuary. I know every foot of that hill. I know where it’s going to be slippery and where you can see the ring from and where you can’t. And if there’s anything left up there that’s still mine—anything at all—I want to be the first one it sees.” Her voice didn’t rise. “I’m not asking, Sam.”

Sam looked at her for a long moment, then she nodded, once. “Fine,” she said. “You’re in front. I’m right behind you. Not a step back—right behind you. You stop when I say stop, and if I say get down, you’re on your face before I finish the word. That’s the deal.”

“Deal,” Erin said.

Behind Sam, all three of Laura had turned to look at her. Laura was the one they had made leader tonight, down in the Garden, whether she liked it or not, and for a moment Erin thought she might say something—might take the front herself, or ask Erin whether she was sure. She didn’t. She looked at Erin for a long moment across the glass, and then all three of her dipped their heads together, once, and that was all the permission Erin was going to get and all she needed.

Mildred had waited through all of it with her hands folded. When it was done, she spoke again, as if she had only been holding the last of what she carried until someone had room for it. “You should know the rest,” she said. “The Host is there with him. She has been facing him since this room. And Anna is there also.”

Marissa’s arm went still around Erin’s waist.

Anna. Erin could see her, clear as anything, standing in this room on the night of the birthday in front of the Wall, talking quietly with Emi in front of the pictures of Andy’s whole life as though the two of them were the only people at the party. Anna had looked at that Wall for a long time. She had been at the wedding tonight, too, somewhere in the middle of all the happiness, and now she was up on that hill, in the ring, with him.

“Anna,” Marissa whispered. It wasn’t loud enough to be a question. “Oh, no. Not Anna. Not up there, with him.”

“She’s not by herself,” Chloe said. She had her hand in Riley’s now. “Arabella’s there. Arabella won’t let her be by herself with him, not for one second. You know she won’t.” Her voice wobbled on it, and she said it again anyway, more firmly. “She’s not by herself.”

Norah had been standing a little outside the knot of them, arms folded, gray and upright. She let out a short breath through her nose that wasn’t anything like a laugh.

“Good.” Norah uncrossed her arms and settled the crystal sticks at her hips. “Let him have an audience. That kind always gets careless in front of one. I’d like to be there when he does.”

Nobody told her she was being optimistic. Erin wasn’t sure she was.

Riley let go of Chloe’s hand. She stepped up in front of Mildred again, close, and Erin saw her face in the lantern-light and understood what she was about to do a second before she did it.

“Thank you,” Riley said. “For JJ. For telling me about him first, before anything else. I needed that first.” Her sweet voice was rough at the edges. “Thank you.”

Riley couldn’t lie. Everyone on this floor knew it, and so, Erin suspected, did Mildred. Every word of that had been meant all the way down.

Mildred opened her mouth to answer.

What came out was not one voice. It was many—the same words begun in a dozen throats at once, none of them quite in time with the others, like a choir heard through a wall. “You are—” it said, all of them at once, and stopped. For one moment the Mildred’s pleasant face wasn’t pleasant, or anything; it only held still over whatever was under it, as if it had been caught with its hands full.

It smoothed over all at once, and was a face again.

“You are welcome,” Mildred said, in one ordinary voice, as though nothing had happened. She did not look at Riley when she said it. She looked a little past her, at the dark. “He will be there when you come back for him. Go and find the one you asked for.”

She knelt again. She picked up the next piece of plaster from the floor, turned it over once in her hands, and set it on the pile. Riley stood there a second longer. Then she turned away, and her eyes were wet.

Erin found that the hair on her arms had stood up, and it stayed up for a while. She had heard that many-voiced sound once before tonight, from the Mildred in the Garden, and it had been no easier the first time. Chloe had stepped forward to meet Riley and taken both her hands. Myra had gone quite still, her head tipped toward the kneeling Mildred as though listening for something under the static. Nobody asked Mildred if she was all right. Erin wasn’t sure any of them would have known what to do with the answer.

Sam put her fingers to her mouth and whistled once, low.

“Okay.” Sam turned to face all of them. “Listen up. Erin’s in front. Me behind her. Sumiku, Norah, with me. Then Laura, Myra, Riley. Then Emily, Katherine, Chloe, Marissa, Liesa, Eden. Nobody straggles, nobody runs ahead, nobody plays hero on the hill.” She looked at Laura. “You good to walk?”

Laura had tucked the photograph into her Inventory, where it wouldn’t bend. All three of her nodded.

“Then we walk,” Sam said.

They sorted themselves the way they had on the lantern path, without a word, only faster. Marissa let go of Erin last. Katherine took a single look back at the stack of photographs on its pillar, weighted flat under its strip of gold, and then turned her back on it and fell in beside Eden. Myra’s cane found the floor ahead of her. Riley walked with one hand at her side, the ends of her hair curling and uncurling around her fingers.

Erin opened the garden doors and went through them.

They stood by themselves, in their frame, with nothing on either side, and there was no reason on earth to walk through them instead of around. She did it anyway. It felt important. On the far side, Sumiku fell in behind Sam without a sound, wings close, the long blade upright at her shoulder, and the rest of them came through after, one after another, glass cracking under their feet until it didn’t.

Behind them, Erin could hear the small, even click of plaster going onto a pile: Mildred, alone on the floor of the Dance Hall under the open sky, still working.

Ahead of them the ground rose into the dark toward the top of the hill.

“Then I hold all of it,” she had told Andy tonight, on this floor, when he had pulled her and Laura aside at the very last. “I’m not going to make you a speech.” She had meant the bond, the whole household, all of them, if he got cut off. She hadn’t known then what else there would be to hold. The Wall, in pieces on a pillar. Claire, not knowing. Her own ground, dead. She was carrying all of it up the hill now, and it was heavy, and she was not going to put any of it down.

Erin had no idea what she was going to feel when she set her foot on bare stone up there. She had felt the Arches die from the other side of the island without even knowing what they were. She might stand in the middle of what was left of them and feel nothing at all. That scared her more than anything else tonight. Or the ground might still know her, dead as it was. She didn’t know which would be worse.

She would find out when she got there.

Erin led them up.