Remnants of Change

The ground kept changing under them, and it never once announced where one kind of ruin gave way to the next.

Andy stopped trying to catch the seams. The brick mounds went on for a while, slumped and rounded, and then there was timber among them, blackened beams lying crosswise like fallen fence rails, and then stone again—a different stone, pale and fine-grained and cut in long thin slabs. Once they crossed a stretch of tiled floor laid out in a pattern of red and white fish, whole and bright, with nothing standing around it at all. Once they passed a staircase that climbed six steps into the air—and stopped. Farther on, half a ship’s hull lay on its side in the dirt, far from any water, its ribs showing through where the planking had gone.

None of it belonged together. Most of it had been lying on top of something older when it fell, and some of it had been lying on something older still, and in places he could see three or four of them stacked in the same cut bank of earth, one band of broken work on the next, like the rings in a stump. He had seen the wreck of the Hotel, and he had seen the heavy stone of the temple. This was more than either of those. This was more seasons than he had ever tried to picture, left wherever they had stopped, and the ground had simply gone on piling them up. He wondered if, beneath his feet, the ruins of seasons run in places other than Earth were buried in the sand.

The man walked ahead of him through all of it. He did not hurry and he did not look back, and when the footing went bad he picked his way across it without breaking stride, as if he had crossed it so many times that his feet knew it without him. Andy kept a few paces behind. Now and then he glanced at his own shoulder, where the light had settled. He couldn’t see anything there. The warmth was still there all the same—faint, but present, and somehow fond.

There were shades here too. There were shades everywhere, he was starting to understand, standing among the wreckage at no distance from each other that made any sense: a boy in a cloth cap, bent over and reaching for something on the ground; a woman in armor with her helmet under her arm, turning her head toward a sound; two men frozen mid-argument across a table that wasn’t there. Each of them had one small piece of time and nothing else. None of them turned to look at him. By now he didn’t expect them to. He walked past them the way the man did, wide around the space each one was using, and kept his eyes ahead.

He was doing that when one of them stopped him anyway.

She stood a little way off to the left of the path, on a low platform of the pale stone, and she wore a long white linen dress. Her hair was black under a linen pall. Her arms were held out in front of her—a little below the chest, golden bracelets glimmering, both hands open and cupped and perfectly still, as if she were holding something heavy and careful between them, something she had been asked to weigh and meant to weigh exactly. There was nothing in her hands. She held it anyway, and did not tremble.

Behind her, there was something else.

Andy couldn’t have said what it was. It was taller than she was, and it leaned over her like a man over a shop counter, checking what the scale said. That was as far as looking at it would go. The longer he tried to hold it in view, the more it seemed to bend away from everything around it, from the stone and the dirt and the rust-colored sky, as if it were standing in a slightly different place from the rest of the world and only its shadow had come through. His eyes slid off it.

He stopped walking.

Ahead of him, the man stopped too. He did not turn around. He only stood where he was, and waited.

Andy knew her.

He had never seen her. He knew her not by her face, but by what she was holding. Arabella had told him this one herself, in the Sunroom, days ago, on a morning when the light had come in so gold through the glass that he remembered the color of it better than he remembered what he’d had for lunch. She had been Seshat then, she’d said, or had just finished being Geshtinanna and was learning to be something else. And there had been a woman she called a friend, a priestess who measured things for her temple, whose whole life was the honest weight of what was set in front of her. A king had wanted a sacred weight made false. Only a little. Only enough to serve him. The woman had said no.

So he had cursed her. He had made her a bound thing, a djinn on a chain, to be handed from master to master down all the years that came after, serving whoever held her, and he had taken her name away so that her mortal existence would be erased. Arabella had said she never saw her again. She had said it quietly, and then she had gone on to talk about measures, how a true one could still lead to ruin, how even a correct measure sometimes had to be broken and set again. Andy had listened to all of it. He had filed the priestess away with the rest, as one more terrible thing that had happened once, a long time ago, to someone he would never meet.

“Nin-Imma,” he said.

It came out barely louder than a breath. The woman on the platform didn’t hear it. Her cupped hands stayed exactly where they were. Behind her the shape went on leaning over her shoulder and bending away from the light.

She was still holding it. Whatever had been done to her, however long ago, she was still standing here doing the thing she had refused to do wrong, over and over, with the thing that had been done to her—or the man who had done it to her—still looming at her back.

He waited for the fear to come up, the way it had come up among the columns, cold and crawling. It didn’t. Something else came up instead—slower, hotter, from a lower place. It started somewhere in the middle of his chest and settled in his jaw, and in his hands, which had closed at his sides without his asking them to. It didn’t flare. It didn’t go anywhere. It sat down in him as a stone sits down in a riverbed, and stayed.

He knew this feeling. He had felt it walking up to Nergal across the blackwood. He had felt it drain out of him afterward, in the dirt, because it had nowhere to go. This time it wasn’t draining. It was stacking. The woman by the columns putting her hand to her mouth. The man with his arm still raised. Laura’s fear sitting at the top of the reading like a held note. The Hotel buried in sand. And now this, a woman who had done the one right thing she was given to do and had been made to pay for it forever. Each one went on top of the last, and none of them slid off.

Andy looked at her a while longer. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Some sign that it ended, maybe. There wasn’t one.

Then he made himself turn away and walk on.

The man had already started walking again, at the same pace as before. He seemed to have judged to the second how long Andy would need, and given him exactly that. He did not ask. Andy didn’t offer. They went on side by side for a while without speaking.

Further on, the ground leveled out into something that couldn’t decide what it was. There were low mudbrick walls, knee-high, marking out what might have been a courtyard. A reed mat lay on the ground. A clay oven stood in the corner of the walls, round-shouldered, cold.

The women were there.

There were a dozen of them—maybe more—and they were young. All of them wore the same kind of plain dress, long and belted, in undyed cloth gone soft with washing, and they came in twos. Andy saw that before he saw anything else. Each woman had a partner, and each pair was dressed exactly alike—down to the way the hair was braided and bound, down to the one bracelet on one wrist. They never moved more than an arm’s length from each other. When one reached for something, the other drifted after her, not quite following and not quite choosing to, as if something he couldn’t see ran between them and had only so much give in it.

They were busy. Two sat on the mat braiding each other’s hair, one behind the other, fingers moving quick and neat. Two knelt by the oven working dough between their palms, turning it and patting it flat and turning it again. Two passed a bowl back and forth between them with a little bow each time, a game the two of them had probably made up. Someone looked like she was singing under her breath. Someone else laughed.

It should have looked like a good day—it had every piece of one. But the laughing was the kind that runs half a second longer than whatever started it, every time, and the smiles stayed up after there was nothing left to smile at, and the hands on the dough pressed down harder than bread needed. Every one of them was working at it. He had seen that on Laura all through the reception, laughing at every table while the bond read nothing but fear: the look of someone talking herself into a good day she had stopped believing in, because the only other choice was to stop.

He watched the two on the mat. The one in back was braiding. Her fingers went over and under, over and under, and then they stopped.

They stopped in the middle of the braid, with the hair still wound around them. For a second nothing else about her moved. Then her face gave way all at once, like a wall with its prop kicked out, and she was crying.

She didn’t make any sound. Her shoulders did it for her. Her partner turned on the mat and caught her, and pulled her head down against her own shoulder so that the partner’s face was pressed into her hair and hidden, and held on. And the others came. They came without a word from any of them, from the oven and the bowl and every corner of the walls, pair by pair, dragging each other along on whatever it was that held them, and they closed around the two on the mat until there was nothing to see of them but the tops of two bent heads in the middle of a knot of arms. The whole knot rocked, a little, in place. Someone was still humming. She did not stop.

The woman in the middle, the one who cried, lifted her face, just once, to breathe.

For one bad second, Andy was sure it was Anna.

It was the jaw. It was the set of the eyes, wide apart and dark, and the long line of the brow over them. It was the face he had last seen a few hours ago in the Dance Hall—standing at Arabella’s side while the glass came down around them.

Then the rest of it caught up with him, and he saw what was wrong with the thought.

There was a mole at the outer corner of her left eye, small and dark. Anna had none. He knew that face well. There had never been a mark on it.

So this was someone else, with Anna’s face.

The woman in the middle of the knot had put her head back down. Her partner’s arms were locked around her, and her partner’s face was still pressed into her hair, and the others were still rocking, all of them together, as slowly as breathing. Andy stood at the edge of the low wall and watched them, and the thing in his chest that had sat down at Nin-Imma got up again.

“Who is she?”

It came out low. It came out hard, and it wasn’t really a question. He did not look away from the knot of women while he said it. He didn’t trust what he would do with his face if he did.

The man did not answer at once. Andy heard him come up and stop at his shoulder. When he did look, the man was not looking at him. He was looking at the women on the mat, and he looked at them for a long moment, steadily, the way nobody else in this whole wasteland looked at anything.

“Alla,” he said.

Just that. Nothing hung off it and nothing came after it. He said it as plainly as Andy had ever heard him say anything.

Andy turned back to the mat.

He knew the name. He had known it since the beach—the night with the eleven dark islands out on the water, when Arabella had told him about the very first season she ever ran on Earth, and had not been able to keep her voice level at the end of it. There had been twins in that season. Anna, and her sister. And Nergal, who had been a man called Abi-Eshu then, had kept them both, and when it was over and Anna had come through the other side of it a goddess, her sister had taken her down into the dark and kept her there, so that he could never get his hands on her again.

Her sister had been called Alla then. She had been called something else ever since.

Ereshkigal. The Queen of the Great Below.

She was sitting on a reed mat with her hands tangled in someone’s hair, crying so hard that she couldn’t finish a braid. He had danced with her once, in the Fifth Challenge, and had not known who she was. She had worn a mask that night. It would have covered the mole.

Andy stood very still.

Emi had sworn she’d fight her. On the last night before the wedding, in the small hours, with only the three of them left in the room, Emi had promised Laura she would fight for her even if she had to fight her great-aunt to do it. She had said it lightly, the way Emi said the biggest things. This was her great-aunt. This was Emi’s blood, however many greats back, and Anna’s twin, and she was young, hardly more than a girl, and Abi-Eshu had done this to her.

He looked at the others then, at the pairs dragging each other close around her, and he understood what he was looking at.

They had been this. Before any of the howling. They had sat on a mat in the sun and made bread and passed a bowl back and forth with a little bow, and worked as hard as they knew how at having a good day, and one of them hadn’t been able to anymore, and the rest had come to hold her.

And he had kept them. Every one of them, except for Anna and Alla. Dead and alive.

It went through Andy without heat at first, and then with all of it. Nin-Imma had made him angry. This was different. Nin-Imma had been something terrible that happened once, to a stranger, a long time ago. This had a face he knew. It had Anna’s face, and it was Emi’s family, and it had been broken by the same man he had walked across the blackwood tonight and tried to put his fist through.

He did not say anything for a long time. Neither did the man. Beside the cold oven the knot of women rocked, and nothing about any of it changed.

When Andy finally looked away from them, he looked at the man, and found the man was still watching the mat.

He was watching it carefully, giving it room, as he had stepped around the kneeling figure earlier. None of the women knew he was there. He looked at them anyway. And he had known her name without having to think about it, as if it were a name he had known a long time.

“Are you one of them?” Andy said.

The man’s eyes came around to him.

“A shade,” Andy said. “Like them. Like her. Is that what you are?”

The man took his time with it. He did not look away, and he did not look troubled. When he answered, his voice was as gentle as it had been all along.

“The shades don’t ask anything,” he said. “Not one of them has ever asked me a thing.”

He did not say anything else. He only waited, and let Andy make of it whatever he was going to make of it.

An hour ago Andy would have let that go. He had let a great deal go, back by the columns, because he was tired and frightened and had nothing to push it with. He had something now.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do that. I’m not asking you what they do. I’m asking you what you are.”

The man said nothing.

“You know her name. You knew who I was before I opened my mouth. You know exactly where we’re going, and you know what this place is, and every time I ask you anything about yourself you hand me something true that isn’t an answer and wait for me to be satisfied with it.” It was coming out faster than he meant it to, and harder, and he let it. “I’m not satisfied with it.”

The man let that stand, too. He did not argue. He didn’t apologize for it, either. He only stood there in the rust-colored light and looked back at Andy, and waited. There was nothing in his face that looked ashamed of it.

Andy breathed out through his nose.

It didn’t matter. He could hear that it didn’t. The man wasn’t going to give him anything, and whatever he was, shade or not, he hadn’t done this. He wasn’t the one who had put a woman on a platform holding nothing forever, or tied girls to each other with something that had only an arm’s length of give in it, or made Anna’s sister cry over a braid she couldn’t finish.

“Fine,” Andy said. His voice had gone quiet again. It had gone flat and very level—he didn’t recognize it. “Keep it. Whatever you are. Whatever this is.” He looked back once at the mat, at the bent heads in the middle of the knot. “He’s going to answer for it. For her. For all of it.”

The man looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in his face, and Andy couldn’t read it, and didn’t try.

He turned his back on the mat instead, because he couldn’t watch it anymore and he couldn’t make it stop, and out of habit more than hope he reached for Claire.

She was there. She had been there all along, faint and whole, a voice through a wall. But she wasn’t faint now. She came up under his breastbone so strong and so close that he caught his breath on it, and it wasn’t fright anymore, or not only. It was a pull, hard and straight, as a rope goes taut when someone on the other end has taken hold of it with both hands and started to climb. She was near. She was nearer than anything had been since the bell. He turned in place, stupidly, looking for her among the ruined walls, and there was nothing to see but the grass and the cold oven and the women on the mat.

Beside him, the man had turned his head too, a moment before Andy did. He was looking at the empty air past the far wall.

The air split.

It happened a dozen paces off, on the far side of the low wall, with no sound at all. A line opened in the empty space above the grass, straight up and down, gray, like a seam coming undone in cloth. It widened. There was nothing behind it but more gray, and cold came off it and lay against Andy’s face.

Someone stepped out of it.

Six arms. A wedding dress, dark and wet at the knees. Emi.

Behind her came Dawn, one hand still pressed flat over her own mouth, her black ears straight up and trembling. Then Claire—her notebook held against her chest in both hands, the blue in her eyes turned all the way up. And last, a step behind the other three, her hands folded at her waist as if she had only come to see whether anyone needed anything, Mildred.

The seam closed behind them and left nothing behind.

It was the first sign of anyone from home since the bell.

Emi saw him first.

He watched it happen. Her eyes went across the dust and the low walls and the ruin and landed on him, and her whole face came apart, the careful set of it and the fear under that, and what was left was so plain and so bright that he felt it from twelve paces off without any bond. Her mouth opened. No sound came out of it at all.

Then she was running.

She ran the way she never did at home—all at once and with no grace in it, the wedding dress bunched up in two fists and a third hand out in front of her as if she could reach him faster that way. Dawn was right behind her. Dawn had taken her hand off her mouth and was saying something, over and over, and Andy couldn’t hear what it was until she was almost on him, and then he could. It was his name. Claire came a half step behind the two of them, no more than that, the notebook already open against her forearm and the pen already in her hand, as if some part of her had been sure since the Garden that she would need to say something the moment she got here and had wanted to be ready. Her ears were up. Her tail was straight out behind her.

Mildred followed them through the grass at a walk—a step behind the other three—and stopped when they stopped.

Emi hit him hard enough to knock him back a pace. Every one of her arms went around him, and he got his around her, and for a moment that was all there was, her face jammed into his shoulder and her hands in the back of the mantle and at his neck and around his ribs, holding on in six places at once. The air changed around them. It went warm. In the middle of that cold, flat, windless place it went as warm as a greenhouse, and there was a smell in it that had no business being anywhere near here, cut grass and something flowering and a wall with the sun on it at the end of a long afternoon. He knew that smell. He had smelled it on the dance floor tonight, with her hands on his shoulders, a hundred years ago.

Dawn got in under his other arm. She was crying and laughing at once and trying to say several things, and none of them came out whole. Her ears were pressed flat against the side of his head. He held her too.

Claire didn’t crowd in. She stood right in front of him with the notebook against her chest and looked at him, and the bond did the rest. It had been faint for so long, and now it came through him not as a trickle, but all at once, like a door thrown open in winter. Relief first, so much of it that it hurt, a whole night’s worth let go at once. Under that, something fiercer, the pull he had felt a minute ago with nothing left between them to pull through. He put out his hand, and she put hers in it, and neither of them needed anything written down.

Over Emi’s head, his eyes went to Mildred.

She stood where she had stopped, a few paces back in the grass, her hands folded at her waist and her face as smooth as ever. She wasn’t looking at the ruins, or the women on the mat, or the sky. She was looking at him. He looked back at her for a moment longer than he had looked at anyone else. Mildred didn’t go anywhere she wasn’t sent, and she didn’t come anywhere just to see how people were doing. He had never once seen her in a place that wasn’t the Hotel, except if Arabella has sent her. There was a question in that, and he did not ask it. Not yet.

Nobody looked at the man.

Andy noticed it distantly, as he might have noticed a missing step. The man stood exactly where he had been standing, a little to one side, by the low wall, with his hands loose at his sides. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said anything. And none of the four of them had so much as glanced his way. Emi had run past within a few feet of him. Dawn’s eyes had gone right across the spot where he stood and kept going. Andy opened his mouth to say something about it and found he didn’t know how the sentence started. He closed it again.

He held on to the three of them instead. He held each of them the way he always had, the way he had held them on the dance floor and in the Suite and everywhere else. That part hadn’t changed.

But he knew the moment they saw the rest of it.

It was Emi first again. She pulled back far enough to look up at his face, and her hands, which had been everywhere, went still. Dawn’s ears came up, both together, and stayed there, turned toward him. Claire did not move at all. But through the bond he felt her read him, and felt the reading land, and felt her go very quiet on the other end of it, as if she had put her hand on a stove she had been told was cold.

Then Dawn wiped her face with the heel of her hand and said, a little too bright, “Hi.” It was so exactly Dawn that something in him eased a notch.

“Hi,” he said, and his voice broke in the middle of it. He put a hand on the back of her head and pulled her in against his shoulder, and she came. “Hi. You’re here. All three of you came down here after me.”

“We’re here.” Emi was still looking at his face. She said it like someone who still half expected him to vanish. “We found you.”

One of her upper hands left his chest and went up, slowly, to his brow. Her fingers found the circlet, the one she had set there herself at the mound this morning in front of everyone, and rested on it without lifting it.

“You kept it on,” she said.

“I didn’t take it off.” He hadn’t known until she touched it that he was glad of that. “Whenever it got bad down here, I thought about you putting it on me. All six hands.”

Emi nodded, very small, and left her hand where it was a moment longer before she took it back.

Beside them Dawn had gone still, her head tipped a little to one side, the way she did when she was listening to something nobody else could hear.

“It’s pointing at you,” she said. Her voice wobbled. “My thing. The alert. It’s been pulling at me all night, down and down and down, and now it’s just—you. It’s right here.” She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. “It hasn’t shut off, though. It still says you need help.”

“I probably do,” Andy said. He was smiling as he said it. Dawn laughed, once, wetly, and smacked his arm with the flat of her hand. “How?” He looked from one of them to the next, at Emi’s wet face and Dawn’s and Claire’s, and had to swallow before he could go on. “How did you even—how are you here?”

I saw you. Claire had let go of his hand to write it, and she held it up, and her letters were almost straight. Through the ground. Walking.

“Laura did something,” Dawn said. “Kind of. It’s a long—it’s a whole thing. We’ll tell you.” She swallowed. “It’s been a really long night.”

Laura’s name went into him like a hook.

“Is she okay?” He didn’t mean it to come out as fast as it did. “Laura. Is everybody—are they okay? I left you in the Hall, I left you all on the floor with those things on top of them, I didn’t even—” He stopped. He made himself stop. “Just tell me.”

“Everybody’s alive,” Emi said at once. “Everybody. When we left, everybody was alive.”

He let his breath out. It didn’t go all the way.

“They came after us again,” Dawn said. “In the Garden. The Hollow Garden, Arabella sent us all down there after the Hall. Nergal’s—the ghost women. Some of them.” Her ears flattened a little just saying it. “We were ready for them that time. Sort of. We had a line.”

“We held it,” Emi said.

They got hands on Laura, Claire wrote. And Norah. Cold. Dawn fixed it.

Dawn made a small, embarrassed movement with one shoulder. “I didn’t fix it. It just—it did a thing. My light thing. It helped.”

“I put one of them to sleep,” Emi said.

She said it softly. She was looking at his collar instead of his face now, and one of her lower hands had found a fold of the wedding dress and was worrying at it.

“I didn’t know I could. I just talked to her. I don’t even remember what I said. And she came down out of the air and lay down in the grass like somebody who’d been waiting a really long time for someone to tell her it was all right to stop.” Emi’s voice did not shake. It went very even instead. “And then Sumiku came, with her naginata. The sun one. And she went out.”

“She didn’t come back,” Dawn said quietly. “The others did. Mildred said they always come back, after a while. That one didn’t. There’s thirteen of Nergal’s women left now. We hope.”

Andy’s jaw went tight before he could stop it. Behind his eyes was a reed mat and a cold oven and girls in matching dresses braiding each other’s hair, working as hard as they knew how at a good day, turned into haunts in pain, and one of them had been lying down in the grass tonight because Emi had told her she could.

He got it back under control. It took one breath, and then another. When he looked up again, Claire was watching him, and he knew she had felt every bit of it, and he knew she had no idea why. He couldn’t have explained it yet. He took her hand instead, pen and all, and after a moment she closed her fingers around his.

It was Emi who went on, after a moment, because somebody had to.

“The thing Laura did,” she said. “That’s how we got here.” She seemed glad to have something to explain. “She has this Gift, from you. Contribute. She can take one of our transformations and make it stronger, for a day. She did it for all of us, right there in the grass. Every one of us got one.”

“All of you,” Andy said.

“All of us.” Emi held up a hand, then a second one, as if she were showing him the size of it. “Mine was Velvet Hours. I don’t need—I can just turn it on now. Whenever. So we went into the Forest and took all night looking for you, and up there it was only minutes.”

Mine lets me see more, Claire wrote. In the Forest I could see this place through the ground. Walls. The red sky. She turned the page and wrote more, faster. Then you. Walking. I would know you anywhere.

“And mine points now,” Dawn said. “It never used to. It just told me you needed help and never where. Now it’s a line.” She looked at him, and at the ground under his feet, and back. “It was a line straight down.”

Andy looked at the three of them, one after another. He thought of Laura in the grass, going down the line one woman at a time while the dead things were still out there somewhere in the dark. “You came through the ground for me.” His voice wasn’t steady, and he let it shake. “A whole night of looking, with nothing to go on but a line pointing down. Thank you. I love you. All three of you.” Emi’s mouth wobbled. Dawn made a small, undignified sound and swiped at her eyes. Claire pressed the notebook flat against her chest, and through the bond he felt it land.

“Where is she now?” he said. “Where are they?”

Dawn looked at Emi. Emi looked at the grass for a second before she answered.

“They made a plan,” she said. “Four parts.”

“Tell me.”

“Laura and Myra and Riley go up,” Dawn said. She said it quickly, like pulling off a bandage. “Up out of the Garden. To him. To stall him.”

Andy did not move. “Stall him how.”

Claire was already writing. She held it up, and her hand was steady and her face was not.

Myra offers herself. Then Riley does. All three of them in front of him, all three his by the rule. He has to choose. Myra said: a man choosing between three isn’t collecting one.

Andy read it twice. The second time the words stayed where they were, and nothing about them got any better.

“Sam and Sumiku and Erin and Norah stay back,” Emi said. “Out of his sight. As close as he’ll let them get. And the second he goes past what he’s allowed to do, the second he’s just a man, they hit him with everything they have.”

“Past what he’s allowed?” Andy asked. “I wasn’t there for that part. Allowed by who?”

Emi looked at Claire, and Claire was already turning to a clean page. Ereshkigal. The Law. While he’s collecting the debt, nothing can touch him.

“I know that part,” Andy said. “I found out with my hand.”

The corner of Claire’s mouth moved. She kept writing. But it only covers doing what needs to be done to collect what he was sent for. One debt. Anything he takes past that is his own, and it gets counted separately. If he reaches for more than he was sent to get, the cover might go with it. Then he’s only a man. She underlined might and held it up until he nodded.

“That’s what the whole thing is for,” Emi said. “We can’t beat him while he’s the Law, so we don’t try. We give him more than he came for. Emily leans on him with Harem Harmony until he stops remembering where the line is. And we’re ready when he reaches.”

“And everybody else goes up behind,” Dawn said. “Chloe and Marissa, and Liesa, and Eden. Katherine in front. Because her hands work on the ghost women.” She took a breath. “To be there. In case.”

“When?” Andy said.

“They were already going,” Emi said. “When we split off to come find you. They were climbing the lantern path. Sam at the front, and Laura and Myra and Riley right behind her, and all the rest in a line. We stood at the bottom and watched them go up.” Her voice thinned, just a little. “It hasn’t been long, up there. Not like it’s been for us. We made sure of that.”

“Did he come? Is he there?”

“We don’t know.” Emi met his eyes. “We didn’t see. We left.”

That’s everything, Claire wrote. Everything we saw. Nothing since.

She underlined it once and turned it around so he could see it, and he understood that she was telling him the edges of it on purpose, so that he wouldn’t go looking past them for something that wasn’t there.

Andy stood in the grass and let it come down on him.

He had stood in the Hall and said no. He had said it to Nergal’s face, for both of them, without looking at either of them, so they couldn’t read anything in his face but no. Neither of them and both. And he had been thrown down here for saying it, and the moment he was gone they had gone and planned it anyway, and now they were walking up to Nergal to do the exact thing he had refused for them, and he wasn’t there to stop it. Myra. Riley. Laura between them, not looking back, afraid at the top of the reading and going anyway.

He wanted to go back.

It rose in him plainly and completely—nothing in it to argue with. There was a way out now. The four of them had come through the air from somewhere, and whatever door had let them in would let them out, and if he went with them right now, this minute, he could be there. He could be on that path. He could put himself in front of the three of them before Myra ever opened her mouth.

He looked past Emi’s shoulder at the man.

The man was still standing by the wall where he had been all along, with his hands loose at his sides, and he was looking back. He did not shake his head. He did not nod toward the empty air where the door had been, or toward the ruins behind him, or anywhere else. His face was as open and as patient as it had been the first time Andy saw it, and it told Andy nothing at all about what he ought to do. Andy waited a moment for more, the way he had waited all night, and there wasn’t any. Whatever the man thought about it, he was keeping it.

Nobody else looked where Andy was looking. Emi’s eyes were on his face. Dawn was wiping hers again. Claire’s pen was still in her hand, and she hadn’t written anything.

“He’s going to answer for it.” His voice was low and level. He hadn’t known he could sound like that. It wasn’t meant for them. “Every piece of it,” Andy said. “What he did to them in the Hall. What he did to the Garden. Laura. Myra and Riley standing in front of him because they don’t see any other way. All of it.” He looked at Emi, and at Dawn, and at Claire. “And I’m going to be the one who collects.”

None of them said anything for a moment. Then Dawn nodded, slowly, once. “Good,” she said quietly.

Before anyone could say anything else, the light came back out of nothing—just past his left shoulder, where the warmth had been sitting since the man first spoke to him. A thread of it unspooled into the air, thin as a bootlace, blue-green and faintly bright, and all four of them saw it at once. Andy saw them see it. Dawn took a step back. Emi’s hands came up. Claire’s pen stopped halfway across a word.

Andy looked at it, too. It hadn’t done anything since bringing him to the man. It curled once around his arm, unhurried, the way it had the first time. Almost fond. Then it let go of him and drifted lazily out into the open space between the five of them and hung there at about the height of their faces, turning slowly, as if it were taking them in. It did not look like it meant any of them harm. It looked curious. Nothing about the way it moved looked human at all. Its color was changing into something that was not a color at all.

Dawn’s mouth had come open. Emi had gone completely still. Claire was staring at it with her ears laid flat and her eyes turned up so bright that they threw a faint gold light of their own. None of the three had ever seen anything like it. He could see that on every face.

Mildred went still. Her hands stopped being folded. They came apart at her waist and hung at her sides, and her head turned toward the light, very slowly. Andy had seen Mildred do many things. He had never seen her look at something as if she had forgotten anyone else was there.

“That is not me,” she said.

Her voice was flat. It was her ordinary voice—the one she used for headcounts and room keys—and it was the strangest thing he had heard since the bell.

“Every one of me that has ever been is me,” Mildred said. “Entire. Down to the last thought. Nothing added, and nothing taken away. I have made more of me for longer than I can count, and every one of them came out exactly as it went in.”

The light turned in the air between them.

“This did not,” she said. “I put this seed of me in a vial and gave it to the Master, and it went into the dark with him. And away from me, in his care, it changed. It changed the way flesh-being spawn change.” She was quiet for a moment. “I have never spawned anything that changed.”

Nobody moved.

“That makes it mine,” Mildred said. “Not me. Mine.”

She took a step toward it. Her hand was already lifting, and she was closing the distance between herself and the light before any of them could think to ask her what she meant to do.

The light saw her coming.

Andy couldn’t have said how he knew that, either. It had no eyes. It had no face to turn. But it stopped turning in the air, and the end of it nearest her lifted a little toward her, a plant turning toward a window, and for a moment it hung there between the five of them without moving at all. Then it came toward her. Not quickly. It drifted to meet her the way it had drifted along his arm in the ruins, feeling its way, curious, as if it had been waiting a long time to find out what she was and had only now worked up the nerve to ask.

Mildred took a second step. Her face didn’t change. Her hand kept rising, open, palm up, exactly as steady as it would have been if she were holding out a room key across the front desk.

Mildred’s hand closed around the light before it could drift any farther. The instant her fingers met it, she stopped being a woman standing in a field.

Andy couldn’t have said afterward what he saw. He saw her hand close, and then it wasn’t only her hand that was reaching. Something came out from her, from everywhere at once and from nowhere he could point to, and went around the light like hands gathering up something small and alive to hold against a chest. It was long and it was many—and it didn’t bend the way anything with bones bends. And it went behind him on the way.

He felt it pass. It went at his back, close enough that the mantle stirred, cold and quick and utterly silent, and it didn’t cross the ground between him and Mildred to do it. It hadn’t come from where she stood. It had come from somewhere behind him, out of his own shadow, and gone back into the space behind her, and in that space, for one held breath, there were eyes. There were more eyes in the dark behind her than the dark had room for. They were all open. None of them were looking at him.

Dawn’s hand clamped on his arm hard enough to bruise. Emi made a sound in her throat and did not move. Andy did not move either. Claire's eyes were squeezed shut. Every part of him that had ever run from anything was telling him to, and he stood there anyway, because none of it was coming at them. It wasn’t an attack. He knew that the same way he knew the look on a face across a room. It was someone gathering in something she loved, as carefully as she knew how, with everything she had.

The wrongness didn’t go away because of that. It sat right there beside the tenderness, as large as it was, and the tenderness didn’t go away because of the wrongness either. He stood and watched both of them at once and couldn’t make either one give.

“I keep all the warm things,” Mildred said. “But this is a warm thing I wish would keep me.”

She said it in her ordinary voice—with the ease of words she had said many times before about far smaller things. Andy had never heard them. He understood them anyway. They weren’t one of her odd little ways of putting things, whatever they had sounded like to whoever heard them first. They had never been.

Then she drew the light in.

It went into her. It didn’t go into her hand or her mouth. It simply went, all of it, the whole bright thread of it folding in on itself and gone, and at his own shoulder the faint warmth that had sat there since the man first spoke to him went too. He noticed the lack of it. He found he didn’t mind.

The eyes in the dark behind her closed, or went somewhere else. Whatever had gone around behind him was gone.

What was left standing in the grass was Mildred, mostly—she looked the way she always looked, her hair pinned back, her hands at her sides, the same smooth face. But something had come into the face and stayed there. She smiled at him, and it came easily, the way it had never come before, and it did not go. It stayed where it was, as settled as her hands, and she didn’t seem to mind it at all.

“Master Andy,” she said. Her voice had changed too. It was still hers, precise and unhurried, but the flatness had gone out of it. What was left was warm, and kind, and it sounded like someone who was glad to be talking to him.

“I’m not one more of me,” Mildred said. “Not now. Something has been added. I have never had anything added.” She looked down at her own hands for a moment, turning them over as if she half expected to find something in them. “I do not have a word for it yet. I think I will need one.”

Andy found his voice. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She smiled again, easily. “I am going back up with them. With these three. Someone should walk with my flesh-beings who came all this way for you. It will not be far, if they are quiet.” She said my flesh-beings the way somebody else might have said my girls.

Dawn’s hand had loosened on his arm, but she hadn’t let go. Her ears had gone halfway up and stopped there, as if they couldn’t decide. Claire had lowered her notebook without writing anything on it. The two of them stood side by side in the grass and took Mildred in, and he watched the strangeness of it settle over both of them at the same time, like dusk coming down over a yard. Neither of them said a word. Neither of them looked away.

Emi had watched the whole of it with all six of her hands pressed flat together in front of her, and when she spoke, her voice was very small and very sure. “You look happy,” Emi said.

Mildred looked at her. She was quiet for a moment. Then she inclined her head, a little, the way she did when a guest had said something correct. “Yes,” she said. “I believe I am.”

Claire lifted the notebook at last. She wrote something on it, a few words, and looked at them for a long moment with her head tilted. Then she drew a single line through them, carefully, and wrote something shorter underneath. She did not turn it around. She held it against her chest instead, over the place where the bond sat, and Andy felt through it what she had crossed out and what she had kept, not as words but as the shape of them: a question she had decided not to ask, and in its place something closer to welcome.

Dawn let go of his arm, finally, and wiped both her palms down the front of her wedding dress as if she had only just noticed they were damp.

Andy didn’t know what to call what he had just seen. He only knew that out here, in a place that kept nothing but the broken ends of things, something had been made that had never been made before, and he had carried it here without knowing.

He thought of his birthday, and of Mildred stepping forward out of the staff at the very end of the night with more gravity than he had ever seen on her, and closing his fingers around a vial no longer than one of them. “From home,” she had said. “No one ever asks how I am. But you did.” He had asked, once, because it had seemed like the ordinary thing to ask. She had carried that around for days, and turned it into a gift. And that gift had gone into the dark with him, and found him the man, and come out into the air tonight exactly when she was standing close enough to take it back, and now it was hers in a way nothing had ever been hers before.

He didn’t know whether she had planned any of that. He wasn’t sure she knew either. He crossed the few paces to her before he could talk himself out of it. Mildred watched him come with her hands folded at her waist again, and waited. The other three had drifted off a little and were pointedly not listening.

“Mildred.” He kept it plain. He wanted her to hear all of it. “Thank you. For the vial, and for whatever you put in it. It found me a way forward when I had nothing, and it stayed at my shoulder after that, even when I’d forgotten it was there. I wouldn’t be standing here without it.”

“You’re welcome, Master Andy.” She meant every word of it, and she did not look away from him. “It was the only thing I had that came from home. I wanted you to have it.” She looked down at her hands, turned them over, and looked up again. “I told you once that I have wanted to go home since before your species learned to make fire. That was true, but I don’t think it is now.” Her voice stayed warm and even. “I think I’d like to stay. To serve, still, but not as I was made to serve, told where to stand and what to carry. But to help you, if you’ll have me. Someone who takes what you can’t carry yourself to whoever needs it, and brings back what they say. Your agent, where you can’t be.”

Andy’s throat had gone tight. “You don’t owe me that.”

“No,” Mildred said. “That’s why I’d like to.”

“I don't even know where we'll be when this is over, but I understand.” He held her eyes. “But ask me again when this is finished, and I’ll answer it properly.”

Behind him the man had not moved. Andy did not turn to look. Beside the cold oven, beyond the low wall, the knot of women on the mat went on rocking. The humming went on too. None of them had seen any of it.

Emi let out a long breath and unfolded her hands. “We have to go,” she said. She didn’t say it like a question. “Velvet Hours went out when we crossed that door. Since we came through. I don't know how time works here, but perhaps each minute we’re here is a minute up there.” She looked at him. “They’re on that path, Andy.”

“I know.”

Emi turned in place and looked out over the ruins, and he watched her look for something she could use. Her eyes went across the fallen brick and the half-buried beams and stopped on a doorway.

It stood a little way off among the rubble, by itself. Whatever house it had belonged to was gone, and the wall around it was gone, and only the frame was left, two uprights and a lintel of dark old wood, standing in the dirt with nothing on either side and nothing through it but more ruin. The rust-colored light fell straight through it.

“That,” Emi said. “I think I can get us home.”

Emi walked to the doorway through the rubble, holding up the front of her dress in two hands and picking her way with a third, and stopped in front of it. Up close it was plainer than it had looked. The wood was old and dark and split along the grain, and someone had cut a small notch into one upright at about the height of a child’s head—the kind of mark a family makes to see how much a child has grown. There was only the one notch. Whoever had been measured there had not been measured again.

“I can’t feel it from here,” Emi said, mostly to herself. “The Forest. I haven’t been able to since the door closed behind us.” She laid her palm flat against the upright, over the notch. “But it’s mine. I don’t have to feel it to know where it is.”

She shut her eyes.

Andy came up behind her with Dawn and Claire. Mildred came a step behind them. Nobody said anything. The frame stood in front of them with the rust-colored light falling straight through it and nothing on the other side but more of the same broken ground.

Emi stood very still for a long moment, her lips moving a little. Andy couldn’t hear what she was asking. He didn’t think it was words.

Then the light inside the frame changed.

It happened slowly, from the edges in. The rust went out of it, and something bluer came in behind, and a shape drew itself across the empty doorway, line by line, until it was there: a plain door, set in the old frame as if it had always hung there, with a small brass plate at eye height. There were words on the plate this time.

The Forest of Beginnings

Emi let her breath go all at once. She put her hand on the latch, and the door swung inward, and on the other side of it was twilight.

Real twilight. The deep blue of an evening that had almost ended and never quite would, and glass trunks going up into it, and ribbons of colored light turning slowly inside them, and the long low hum of glass leaves. Cool air came through the doorway smelling of moss. After so long in that dead, flat place it was almost too much to look at. Dawn made a sound like someone who had been holding her breath underwater and had just come up.

“Okay,” Emi said. Her voice shook, and then it didn’t. “Okay. Home.”

Andy had already worked out what he would do on the path, how fast he could climb it, where he would put himself when he got to the top. Behind him the man said nothing to keep him, and nothing to send him on, exactly as he had said nothing either way since the moment the seam first opened. He lifted his foot to take the first step.

Out past the nearest ruin, low down among the broken walls, something glinted blue.

It was a point of light, no bigger than a pinprick at this distance—and it was not the blue of the Forest in the doorway, not the blue-green of Mildred’s vial, but something clearer than either. It was the one bright, clean color anywhere in the whole wasteland. He saw it, and it stayed there, and it didn’t go out.

He put his foot back down. He knew that color from somewhere that wasn’t here.

It came back to him in pieces. The Suite’s kitchen, weeks ago, the night they made breakfast for dinner. The day of the clerical mix-up. Laura at the counter cracking eggs into a bowl, both of her. And while she did it, she had told him about Nimue, Shar’s partner. Two things Nimue had given her to pass on, and she had said she didn’t understand either one. The second had been the strange one.

If he ever stood in front of a door he had to cross, he was to look for something blue. On the way to a place called the palace. And he wasn’t to go through the door until he had found it.

Laura had turned it over and over and gotten nowhere. So had he. She had thought Nimue was holding something back, bound by some rule against saying more. They had filed it away together with a dozen other things that meant nothing yet and gone to bed.

He was standing in front of a door he had to cross. And there was something blue.

He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know where the palace was, or what it was, or whether it had anything to do with this place at all. He couldn’t have said what the warning was asking him to do, except wait. But the shape of it fit. It fit too closely to be nothing.

And yet the door was right there. The Forest was right there. Laura was on the path. She needed him. They all did.

He stood between them and the light and felt what it would cost. To be found, finally, after all of it. To have the way out standing open in front of him with the people he loved holding the door. And to turn around, now, for a light he couldn’t even name. From where they were standing, it would look exactly like the wrong call. He knew that. It might be the wrong call. It might decline Laura, or Myra, or Riley to Nergal. He knew what he should do.

But Arabella had called Nimue her sister. Nimue had been kind to him during the Fifth Challenge, and she and Shar had taken care of Laura when she had found herself in their castle. Shar had supported them all from the beginning, and Andy couldn't believe either one would say or do something to hurt the women.

He grimaced and turned around.

Emi’s face changed first. She didn’t let go of the latch.

“There’s something here I still have to do,” Andy said.

He said it plainly. He didn’t want them guessing at it afterward, on the path, in the dark.

“Laura was given a... a warning, or a prophecy, or something, long ago. About this moment. I recognize it now. I’m staying to see it through.” His voice wasn’t as level as he wanted, and he stopped trying to make it be. “I need you to go back. All of you. Get to the others and hold it together, whatever that takes, until I’m standing next to you again.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I love you. That’s why I’m asking.” His eyes went to Mildred. “And you, now.”

Mildred inclined her head, and smiled a little.

“I think this is a way through,” Andy said. “I think it might be the only one.” He stopped, and made himself say the rest. “I don’t know that. But I believe in those who told Laura about this.”

“Okay,” Dawn said quietly, and she did not argue. Her ears had gone all the way up, and her eyes were wet again, but her voice held. “Okay. It’s still saying you need help. It’s saying it about here, though. Not up there.” She wiped her face. “So we’ll hold it. Go do your thing.” Andy pulled her in one more time, hard, and she held on to the back of his mantle until he let go.

Claire did not say anything. She did not write anything either.

Her face argued with him instead. It argued with every part of it, the ears pinned back flat, the jaw set, the pen gripped so hard in her fist that her knuckles went pale. Through the bond he felt the argument coming, all of it, every reason he was wrong, lined up and ready. He did not push back. He only let her feel what was on his side of it. Not fear. He wasn’t afraid of this. Only the other thing, the one that had been set down in him at Nin-Imma and had not moved since, and under it, steadier than he had known it was, a decision.

He felt her find it. He felt her go quiet. “It's what Nimue said,” Andy told her. He knew Claire would recognize the reference. He knew she'd sense his doubt, but he also knew she understood: even if Nergal could be defeated, the debt would still be outstanding. Ereshkigal would not be deterred. “I think it's a chance.”

Claire closed the notebook. She reached out and put her hand flat on his chest, once, over the place where the bond sat, and held it there for the space of a breath while he covered it with his own, and then she took it back and turned and went to the door.

Emi held it open for her. She held it open for Dawn after that. Then she stood there with her hand on the latch and looked at him, for longer than she needed to, much longer. The blue twilight lay across her face and her six arms and the moss-dark knees of her wedding dress. She did not say anything. He thought about what she had promised Laura in the small hours, in the Suite, with only the three of them left awake. He thought she was probably thinking about it too.

He went to her. He took her face in both hands and kissed her lips, and she turned her cheek into his palm and kept it there, eyes shut, for as long as she could stand to. Then she stepped through.

Mildred went last. She walked past him without hurrying, her hands folded again at her waist, and at the threshold she stopped and looked back at him, once, over her shoulder. The smile came, warm and unhurried, and no words with it. Then the door took her, too.

It swung shut. The blue went out of the frame from the edges in, and the rust came back, and the frame stood in the rubble exactly as before, with nothing on either side of it and nothing through it but ruined ground.

Andy stood and looked at it.

Only when they were gone did the man do anything at all. Andy heard him come up. When he turned, the man was standing a pace off, looking at him, and something had eased in that weathered face—loosened at the eyes and at the corners of the mouth—and it stayed that way. On anyone else Andy would have called it satisfaction. The man did not say anything about it. He did not say anything at all.

Andy looked past him, out toward the nearest ruin. The blue was still there. Sohe started walking toward it.

The man fell into step beside him without a word, matching him stride for stride, the way he had the first time they set off together, loose-shouldered and unhurried, as if this were the road he had been meaning to walk all along. Andy let him. His hands were closed again at his sides. He didn’t open them.

Once, a little way on, he reached for Claire. She was going—he could feel her going, the bond thinning out under his breastbone with every step she took up into the Forest, fainter and fainter, still whole. She was holding on at the other end of it all the same.

Laura he didn’t reach for. He knew what he would find.

The blue sat low among the broken walls ahead of them, small and steady and very clear. It didn’t come any nearer as fast as he wanted it to. The ruined ground carried them on toward it.