Seven: Wedding Bells!!!!!

The sun had come over the garden wall an hour ago. It lay unbroken across the fourth bridge now, end to end, and Erin walked out into it on her father's arm.

She had spent the whole morning finding ways not to. Under the awning. Under an archway, in the lee of the mound itself. Andy had watched her do it from three different places and had known exactly what it was. She knew what the light did to her body. She had not wanted it doing that to her before her own wedding.

She went straight into it now, with nothing on but the veil and the bouquet held low against her hip.

Below her, Nick came down off the mound with the basin level in both hands. He tipped the spent water into the grass at the edge of the ring, filled it fresh, and set it back in its place beside Arabella. Andy shifted his grip on the brand. The old heat was still banked low in its blackened head—patient, waiting to be asked for a fourth time. Three lamps lit and four to come. He had stopped being able to feel his own feet somewhere around the second bridge.

The tiredness went out of Erin inside a few strides, like water goes out of a cup somebody has finally tipped all the way over. Her green skin had gone dull under a long morning of shade-hopping, and between one plank and the next it came back to itself. Under the same light the other thing started, lower and slower. Andy could see it beginning from where he stood.

Then she lifted her face into the sun instead of crossing under it with her eyes down. She brought her eyes back to the mound. She found him already watching her.

He had not looked away since she cleared the first plank. He did not intend to start now.

The heat that came up in her then was not the sun's, but his. It had worked that way since her first days on the island, back to the night they had found each other again. Erin knew what his eyes did to her with the same unbothered accuracy she knew her own name. With every step inside that stare it climbed another degree. Her breath came a shade quicker. Her fingers found the bouquet's stems and tightened there. And she slowed herself down on purpose, to stay level with her father, as if some other part of her were making a real bid to get to the mound first.

Augustin held his own pace slow and even. He was sixty-one, stiff through the shoulders, and he walked like a man who had already walked this bridge a hundred times that morning inside his own head. One hand stayed curled at his side around two fingers that had not straightened in years. He kept his good ear turned a little toward his daughter. He did it without appearing to know he was doing it.

At the foot of the mound he stopped.

His hand came up partway toward his mouth and stayed there. It was the old tell. It meant a sentence was building somewhere behind his teeth and had not found the door out yet. The quiet went past the point where it was comfortable for either of them, and then some way past that. Out beyond the ring over one hundred people held still for a man who could not get a sentence out of his mouth. Nobody coughed. Somewhere behind the seats a bird went on saying whatever it had been saying all morning, as if none of this were happening at all.

Andy watched the reflex come up in Erin. Fill it. Fill it before it turns into anything. She had been doing that for both of her parents since she was twelve. But she caught the habit in the act. She closed her mouth. She waited.

It cost her something. Andy could see it in her jaw, in the small work of holding the wanting-to still.

Augustin found his own way there.

“There's my soldier,” he said. The rasp that had been in his voice all through the reception line was thicker now. “I'm proud of you, sweetheart.”

“Thank you, Dad,” Erin said. “That means a lot.”

Augustin's mouth moved. “Your mother's already crying.”

“I know.”

“Thought you'd want the warning.”

Her father's shoulders came down an inch. He pulled her in and held on once, hard, with both arms. Then he let go before either of them could turn it into something bigger than it already was. He turned and walked back down the fourth bridge to his seat at the water's edge, and he did not look back at the mound.

Erin's white sneaker found solid ground at the top of the crossing, and Liesa said her name.

“Erin Delgado.” Liesa let it sit a moment. Along the water's edge the guests went a little more still, though not one of them could have said why. “Here is the true thing about her. She will fight anybody in this garden for what she thinks they are owed. She fought me for it. Last night, on a beach, over a fire, when I told her a small wedding was enough for me and Sam.” A pause, and something came into her face. “She was on my side the second I told her it was what I actually wanted. And then she never said one more word about it. Is the whole of Erin. She argues for what you deserve until she is sure you are happy, and then she stands by you, no matter what.”

Steve, near the water, laughed. It was the kind of laugh that only comes out of recognizing a person exactly. Erin's mouth pulled into something rueful and unbothered at once—the look of a woman who has heard the joke made about her before and stopped minding it a long time ago.

Katherine came off the end of the line before Erin reached the basin. She held out both hands, palms up. Erin laid the bouquet across them. Katherine drew the stems in against her bare chest, both arms folded around them, and stepped back into her place without a sound.

“Leave behind the dust of lives,” Arabella said.

Four crossings in, that was all that was left of it. The words had been a sentence the first time through. Now they were barely that, and the garden took them as if they were a response it had known since childhood.

Erin put both hands into the basin. The water came off the ring cold enough to raise the hair on her forearms. It did nothing whatsoever for the heat under her skin.

Sam drew the fourth reed out of the bundle and squared the remaining three against her thumb.

“Try not to set yourself on fire,” she said to Erin, barely moving her lips. “Save it for the honeymoon.”

“No promises.”

Andy brought the brand down. Erin stepped in close to take the flame. Close enough that the heat of it sat on both their faces. Close enough that nobody else on that mound was going to hear a word of it.

“You have had your eyes on me for the entire length of the aisle,” she said, under her breath, not looking up from the reed. “In front of my father. In front of your mother. Whatever happens to me during the vows is going to be entirely your fault.”

“I'm not sorry.”

“I know you're not.” The reed caught, and gold came up under her chin. “That's the problem. Neither am I.”

She carried it across to the fourth lamp and set it to the wick. The wick took. Four flames stood on the dais then, with three dark cups beside them, and the line of light had finally gotten long enough to read as a line.

Katherine was there with the flowers before Erin had finished setting down the burned reed. She pressed them back into her hands. Then she reached up, unhurried, and turned a fold of the veil right way out where it had gone over at Erin's shoulder. She smoothed it flat with two fingers and let her go.

Erin took her place beside Dawn.

Dawn reached over without turning her head and hooked two fingers around Erin's wrist. Emily had done the same to Dawn ten minutes ago. It appeared to be how this line was going to work, each of them handing it along to whoever arrived next, and nobody had arranged it or said a word about it.

Erin did not look at the lamps. She looked back out along the bridge she had just come over. Her father was sitting there now with his hands flat on his knees and his eyes front—the posture of a man who has set something heavy down a minute ago and has not yet worked out what to do with his arms.

---

Nick had the basin full again before Claire reached the middle of the fifth bridge.

She came over the water in her gown on her mother's arm and made no sound doing it. Not a scuff, not a creak out of the boards, nothing. Her tail hung straight down behind her. It swung once, slowly, at about the halfway mark. Her ears were turned forward and very slightly back, which was Claire listening to two things at the same time.

One of them was talking the entire way across.

“Are those shoes all right on this? They look narrow. They're fine, you've got good ankles, you always did. Do you want to slow down? We can slow down, nobody's going anywhere. Hold the flowers a bit higher, sweetheart, they photograph better up — no, that's lovely, that's exactly right. The photographer is so tiny! Have you eaten anything? You haven't eaten anything. There'll be food after. There's always food after.”

Annabelle Freeman had not stopped since the far end of the bridge. Her left arm was laced through her daughter's right. Her right hand was free, and it was turning her husband's wedding band around and around on her finger. She had worn the heavier band beside her own for eight years. It went around once for every two or three sentences, steady as a metronome, entirely outside her own knowledge of it.

Claire answered none of it. There was no pen in her hands and no notebook anywhere in that gown. They were safe in her Inventory. And her mother had spent thirty years learning to carry both halves of a conversation across ground like this one.

Claire let her. She let her all the way to the foot of the mound, ears turned back, walking at exactly whatever pace her mother's hand asked for.

Andy had the other half of it. Through the bond, under the words, Claire sat in his chest the way she always did. What came off her was not embarrassment, and not impatience. It was the kind of enormous, weathered patience you only get from being loved loudly in public by somebody who has never learned another volume. But he could sense, too, Claire’s love and affection for her mother, and it brought a smile to his face.

At the foot of the mound Annabelle stopped and looked up at the wedding party. She found Liesa. Her hand came off Claire's arm to do something to her own hair that did not need doing.

“I should say,” she said, “before we — you know, she reads three times what I ever did, it's just that sometimes Claire needs a little extra time to ad—”

Claire put her hand over her mother's hand.

She did it without hurry, the way you put a palm over a moth in a window to keep it from beating itself apart. The ring stopped turning under her hand. Then she shook her head. Once. Giving her mother a smile.

Annabelle stopped in the middle of the word.

Andy felt Claire pull tight for a second—a wire going taut, all the way up. Then she let go and settled.

“Is all right,” Liesa said to Annabelle, gently. “She does not need explaining. Not here. She is our Claire.”

Then Claire stepped up onto the mound, and Liesa turned to the garden and said her name.

“Claire Freeman.” Liesa waited until the last of the shuffling had gone out of the seats. “Here is the true thing about her. Claire does not write a thing down until she is sure of it. Not almost sure. Sure.” She held up one hand, flat. “So when her pages come, Andy builds on them. I build on them. Every woman in this house builds on them, and not one of us checks the work first, because there has not been one single time that we needed to. Because Claire has our trust and our love.”

Liesa was not talking to the garden.

Her shoulders were turned three or four degrees off the crowd, and her eyes were not on the seats at all. Andy worked it out about a second and a half too late to do anything about his own face. Every word of this had been built and carried up here for one woman standing at the bottom of the mound in good wool and sensible shoes.

Out at the water's edge somebody's chair creaked and then stopped creaking.

“And I want to be clear what I am saying,” Liesa said. “Is not that we put up with the quiet, and the pages, and how long she takes to get a thing exactly right. Those are the things. Those are what we love her for. Not one of us has ever, once, wished her faster. Or louder. Or any different at all.” Liesa smiled fondly. “She is our Claire. We would not have her any other way.”

Claire's ears went flat and stayed flat.

Annabelle had gone entirely still at the bottom of the mound, which was not a thing she did.

Andy watched it land on her from six feet away. He did not know what she had been carrying up that bridge. He only saw what it did to her. A woman who had spent thirty years making the world hold a door open for her daughter, standing at the bottom of a mound while a stranger with a Flemish accent told her, before more than one hundred people, that Claire didn’t need that door open with them, that she had always been within with them, never outside looking in.

Her eyes filled and went on filling, as if some tap in her had been left running for thirty years and had only now been noticed.

“Oh,” Annabelle said. It came out of her small and wrecked and not at all like her. “Oh, that's—”

Claire turned around.

“That's the whole of it,” Annabelle said. “That's the only thing I was ever afraid of, and it isn't true, is it? It isn't true at all.”

She was not asking. She put her hand flat against her daughter's cheek and kissed the other one. She did not say anything else. She had finally got all the way to the end of a sentence about the thing that mattered, and there was nowhere past it to go.

Then Annabelle let go of Claire's arm.

She turned and walked back across the fifth bridge on her own, upright, at a good pace, with her chin level and her eyes wet. She sat down in her chair at the water's edge and folded both hands together in her lap. They stayed there. They did not move again for the rest of the crossing.

Claire watched her the whole way across. She did not move, and she did not turn back to the mound, until her mother had reached her chair and sat down in it.

Candy came forward on the balls of her feet with her wings half off her back—blue and black and gold.

“Okay,” she whispered, taking the stems. “Okay. That was a lot. Are we okay?”

Claire nodded, once, with her eyes still shining, and Candy gathered the flowers up against her collarbone and stepped back.

“Leave the dust of lives,” Arabella said.

Claire put her hands into the water. She held them under longer than anybody had yet, wrists and all, head down, ears still flat. When she brought them up she shook them once, and the drops went into the grass.

Sam had the fifth reed out already and turned with it before Claire looked for her. Two left in the crook of her arm now.

Andy lowered the brand. Claire took the reed in both hands, the way she took everything, as if it might turn out to be older or more fragile than anyone had said, and set the tip of it into the fire. It caught. She watched it catch with her whole face. Through the bond Andy felt something he had no name for and did not need one for. It was his soon-to-be wife finding out that the thing was actually happening.

She carried the flame to the fifth lamp and lit it.

Five up and two dark. The light on the dais had gotten strong enough to put a little warmth on the underside of the arbor. The blue roses above it had gone deeper with the sun coming off them at an angle, as if somebody had turned a dial on them by one notch.

Candy pushed the flowers back into Claire's hands and mouthed something. Claire's tail flicked once, hard, which Andy knew for a laugh.

She took her place beside Erin. Erin reached over and hooked two fingers around her wrist without being asked, and passed it along.

Out past the water, Annabelle Freeman sat with both hands folded in her lap. She watched her daughter stand in a line of women in front of a row of burning lamps. She did not straighten anything. She did not smooth anything down. She had nothing left to do for her at all, and her eyes were wet and shining and so proud.

---

Emi came over the sixth bridge using every arm she had.

Her original right hand was tucked through the crook of her father's elbow—the original pair, the ones she still reached with first. Her lowest right had found his hand somewhere in the first few yards and had simply stayed there, holding on, the way a child holds a hand crossing a road. Her middle pair carried the bouquet between them at the exact height a photographer would have asked for and nobody had. And her top left was up over her head, waving. Big, unembarrassed waving, aimed at a small gray-haired woman in the first row of chairs.

Emi's mother waved back with both of hers, which was all she had.

The last time Andy had met that woman, it had been in an apartment in Paris. He had watched her count her daughter's arms out loud in Korean and lose her voice somewhere around the last number. Then she had said the only thing that needed saying, which was that all of them were hers.

Andy knew Emi had bought the Reality Adjustment for them, but he wondered if it worked on her parents, since they already had been exposed to them. Julien and Kim Hana didn't need a Reality Adjustment to see their daughter. They already knew.

Emi’s father kept a slow, even pace beside his daughter and spent most of the crossing watching her hands work. He was a tall, reserved man in a good dark suit and small rimless glasses. He watched the six of them the way he had watched them in Paris. Carefully, from the beginning, as if the answer were somewhere in the mechanism and he only had to find where.

He had found it, that time, over tea.

At the foot of the mound he stopped and turned to face her, and Emi came around with him, all six arms going still at once.

“I had a question ready,” Julien said. “I have been carrying it since the drive.” His English was as unhurried as it had ever been. “And then I watched you come over the water, and I find I do not need to ask it this time.”

Emi's face went.

It went the way it always went—all at once, without any of the intermediate stages other people use. Her eyes spilled over while she was still laughing.

“You asked me in the kitchen,” she said. “With the tea.”

“Yes.”

“And I said yes and you didn't believe me.”

“I believed you,” Julien said. “I did not believe it would last.” He took his glasses off and put them into his breast pocket. It was the only thing about him that had moved out of its order all day. “I was wrong about that.”

Emi put all six arms around her father.

It was not a thing that could be done by halves. Two went around his back, two around his ribs, one across his shoulders, one flat between his shoulder blades. Julien Connard stood absolutely rigid inside it for about a second and a half, as a man standing while a building falls on him gently. Then he brought both of his own arms up and put them around his daughter and held on.

The air around the two of them turned warmer. Andy felt it from four feet away. The warmth first, and under it something sweet, like a garden smells at dawn. Every guest inside ten yards went quietly, mysteriously happier, and not one of them knew why.

Julien let go first. Not because he wanted to, but because one of them had to. “I love you, ma biche. You are the light of our lives.”

He walked back across the sixth bridge without hurrying and sat down beside his wife. Kim Hana took his hand out of his lap. She held on to it with both of hers and did not let go of it again.

“Emi Kim,” Liesa said.

Emi turned around on the mound with her face still wet and six hands that did not know where to be.

“The true thing about Emi is very simple,” Liesa said. “When one of us is hurting, she is already walking. Nobody asks her. Nobody has ever once had to ask her. She is up out of her chair and crossing the room before the rest of us have finished noticing, and she puts her arms around you, and then she stays. She stays until you can stand up on your own.”

Emi's bottom pair of hands had come together in front of her.

“I know this,” Liesa said, “because it happened to me.”

She said it plainly, to the garden, as you state a fact about the weather.

“It was early. We were all strangers still, I did not have one friend on this island, and I had the worst day I had ever had in my life. And I sat down on a floor.” Liesa's mouth did something complicated. “And Emi came and sat down on the floor next to me. She did not say anything clever. She did not fix it. She just sat there with her arms around me until I could get up again. Everything I have now, I have because somebody sat down on a floor with me.”

Nobody made a sound.

Emi's eyes brimmed over a second time. She reached out with her lowest left hand and found Liesa's fingers and squeezed them, once, hard, and Liesa squeezed back without turning her head.

Andy had not known that.

Skye came forward, short and grave, and took the bouquet out of Emi's middle hands with both of her own.

“You survived your Dad,” she said quietly. “I watched the whole thing. He blinked twice.”

“Three times.” Emi wiped her face with her top right hand and laughed wetly. “I counted. I had a hand free.”

Arabella smiled at Emi. “The dust of lives,” she said, and tipped one open hand toward the basin.

Emi washed pair by pair. Top, then middle, then lowest. Each pair went under, came out, shook off, unhurried, in front of an audience who found nothing about it remarkable in the slightest.

In the fourth row, Kim Hana was crying with no noise whatsoever and looking furious with herself about it. Julien had put his handkerchief into her hand without turning his head. He was watching his daughter wash her hands in a garden, with the face of a man filing something away to be thought about properly later, when there was time for it.

Sam drew the sixth reed. One left, alone in the crook of her arm, and she looked at it for a second before she turned around.

Andy brought the brand down. Emi took the reed in her top right hand and set it into the fire. When it caught she brought her top left across and cupped the flame, close but not touching, walling it off from a breeze that was not even blowing. She carried it to the dais as you carry a candle through a house at night, with a hand around it out of pure instinct.

She touched it to the sixth lamp. The wick took.

Six of them burning now—one dark cup standing at the end of the row. The light they threw together had finally gotten strong enough to be a light, and not a collection of small flames.

Skye pushed the flowers back into Emi's hands with another small bow. Emi took them and went to the end of the line and stood beside Claire. Erin leaned across Claire without even pretending to be subtle about it.

“He blinked twice,” Erin said.

“Three.”

On the mound stood Andy with the brand; Myra, Emily, Dawn, Erin, Claire and Emi beside him in the order they had crossed; Arabella at the basin and Nick behind her; Liesa forward of them all; Sam with one reed left; Harper and Laura Black in their places; Katherine and Candy and Skye along the edge.

Andy lifted his eyes to the seventh bridge.

It was still empty, and the light over the gardens had dropped another shade while nobody was looking at the sky.

There was one woman left to come.

---

Three lamps were burning on the dais when the woman with no arms sat down in the next chair.

Sumiku had taken the seat at the outer edge of the ring because it was the one nobody else wanted, which was habit. She had also taken it because from there the whole of the mound's edge stood open across the water—and that was not habit at all. She drew her wings in tight against her back and folded them flat. She curled her tail in against the outside of her own foot, out of the aisle, out of anyone's way.

Two rows over, one of Dawn-san's brothers had spent the first crossing looking at the wings and the second one looking at the bridge, which was about the usual progression.

Eden Summers arranged herself in the chair on the left.

It took a moment. She had no hands to brace with, and a very great deal of midnight-blue hair to get out from under her. What her body did with a small shift of weight was turn it into a slow, unhurried cross of one leg over the other. It was the kind of movement that empties a room. Her ankle rolled. Her shoulders came back. None of it was aimed at anybody, and all of it read as an invitation. Her body had been left no other way of moving. It had stopped apologizing for that years ago. The dress was doing its own work on her as well. It always did, the whole time she wore it. She sat in it now with her chin up and her breathing a little deeper than a woman's at rest.

Sumiku inclined her head to her, neck and shoulders, the full form.

“Eden-san,” she said. “This one is Sumiku. This one has not had the chance to greet you properly.”

Eden turned her head and looked at her, and went on looking, as if there were no particular reason to stop. She did not blink. A slow nod came, one, complete, from the top of it to the bottom.

“Yesterday morning this one was a cup on a shelf,” Sumiku said. “Last night you came into a room and a man said your name and everyone stood up. This one is glad to be sitting next to the only other stranger here.”

Out on the fourth bridge, Erin Delgado came into the sunlight on her father's arm and did not hurry through it.

They watched her cross, and watched the old man walk back over the water alone and sit down, and neither of them said anything about it. Then Katherine came off the end of the line at the mound's edge. She put out both hands, took the flowers, and gathered them in against her chest.

Beside Sumiku, the toe of a six-inch heel came down twice against the grass. Tap. Tap. And then a third movement, smaller than the other two—a neat little flick of the toe that was not part of the rhythm at all.

Sumiku looked down at the shoe.

“That was not a nervous habit,” she said. “This one has been owned by a great many nervous people. That was a word.”

Eden tipped her head across the water, toward the naked woman holding the bouquet, and tapped the ground twice more.

“It is something between you and her.”

The nod came again, slow, unhurried, and Eden's eyes did not leave Sumiku's face.

“Then this one will not ask what it says.”

Katherine kept the flowers against her chest the whole time Erin was at the basin and at the brand and at the lamp. Then she put them back into Erin's hands. She reached up, turned a fold of the veil right way out at Erin's shoulder, and smoothed it down.

Sumiku's wings came off her back half an inch, shivered, and settled.

“She did that to this one,” she said. “At the lagoon, last night. This one had been alive for one day and did not know she could swim. Katherine-san went out past the lanterns and would not come back in until this one followed.” A pause. “It was the best hour this one has had, since being brought back.”

Eden leaned her head toward Sumiku's shoulder. The tilt came out long and graceful and slower than a tilt needed to be, and stopped a hand's width short, and stayed there.

“Yes,” Sumiku said. “This one thinks so too.”

Claire Freeman started across the fifth bridge on her mother's arm. Four lamps now. The light over the gardens had come down a shade since Myra crossed. The small flames on the dais stood out harder against it than they had an hour ago.

Sumiku's eyes kept leaving the bridge.

Up past the arbor to the open sky above the blue roses. Out across the gardens beyond the ring, along the hedge line, over the tops of the far trees. Then back up to the sky. She was not aware of how often she did it.

Yesterday morning, the Master had told her that a death-kami was coming to this hotel today, for one of the women of his harem. She had not waited for him to finish being kind about it. She had told him she owed him a debt no service could repay. She had told him that if these women were to be her sisters, then what came for one of them came for all of them. She had told him she did not need his permission to stand in front of it. Last night on the sand he had tried again, more gently, and told her she did not have to fight. She had answered in eight words. This one will not watch her sisters fall.

She had meant it then. She meant it now, sitting in a garden chair in the sun with her wings folded and her hands in her lap.

Nobody knew the hour. Nobody knew the direction. So she checked all of them, one after another, including the sky. The sky had no more claim on her attention than the hedges did. She kept coming back to it anyway.

Her upper right hand closed once around nothing at all, around the place a haft would sit if there were a haft, and opened again. Hinode-no-Saku stayed where it had stayed since last night, folded away in the Inventory, where a weapon belonged at a wedding.

Beside her, Eden had been watching her chin lift. Again. And again.

Eden followed the look up, to the sky over the arbor, and found nothing in it but sky. She brought her eyes back to Sumiku's face. Then she tipped her own chin up toward the same piece of nothing, and raised her brows, and waited.

“This one is keeping watch today,” she said. “This one will not watch her sisters fall.”

Eden went very still.

“You are one of the sisters this one means,” Sumiku said. “You have been one since last night. And this one will keep you safe.”

For a moment Eden did not move at all, which from her was the loudest thing she had done since sitting down. Her body held still, as if stillness were something she had to buy and could only afford in short lengths.

Then she tipped her face up toward the darkening sky, beside Sumiku's, and kept it there.

“You intend to watch with this one.”

One nod. Slow. Her eyes never came down.

“Then this one is not the only one looking,” Sumiku said, and her wings went off her back again and shivered, and this time she let them.

Out on the water, Claire reached the mound and her mother went back over the fifth bridge alone.

Then Emi Kim came over the sixth with her father, using all six of her arms at once, the top left one waving over her head at a small woman in the fourth row. Sumiku's eyes came down off the sky and followed her the whole way.

“Emi-san sat down on the floor with this one on her first morning,” she said. “Dawn-san sat on the other side. Neither of them asked this one anything. They only sat.”

Emi reached the mound. Julien walked back across the bridge and sat down beside his wife.

“Two days ago you did not belong to this family,” Sumiku said. “Two days ago this one did not either. And today this one sits beside a new sister in a good chair and watches her sisters marry.”

Eden leaned her shoulder into Sumiku's upper arm.

The lean came out as a long, luxurious settle down the whole length of Sumiku's side, hip to shoulder. It was not an offer, but it was unmistakably shaped like one, and there was nothing Eden could do about that. Her whole torso began to shake with laughter that made no sound at all.

Sumiku laughed out loud. It surprised her more than it surprised anybody.

“Forgive this one,” she said. “That was not what you meant, and this one laughed at it anyway.”

On the mound, Emi lit the sixth lamp, and six of them burned in a row with one cup standing dark at the end.

Eden, still leaning, brought her toe down twice against the side of Sumiku's bare foot. Tap. Tap.

Sumiku looked down at the shoe, then at Eden. Then she lifted her own foot and knocked it twice against the side of the heel. She did it carefully, the way you repeat back a word in a language you have heard for the first time.

Eden's toe answered with a small, neat flick.

“This one does not know what that one means,” Sumiku murmured. “This one will learn it.”

They stayed where they were, the two newest women in that family—Eden leaning into her side, a shoe resting against her foot, both of them facing a seventh bridge nobody had stepped onto yet. When Sumiku's eyes went up to the sky again, Eden's went up with them.

---

Sam had one reed left, and nothing to square it against.

She turned it over in her fingers a few times, the way she had been squaring the bundle all morning. The light over the Inner Gardens had come down another shade. Six small flames stood on the dais with one dark cup at the end of the row—the last of them, waiting. Against the lowered light they burned harder than they had any right to.

“Last one,” Sam said, out of the side of her mouth.

“I know.”

Andy did not look at her when he said it. His free hand had closed on the brand somewhere around the fifth crossing and had not opened since.

Laura came into view at the far end of the seventh bridge with Andy's father between two of her bodies.

One of her had his left arm. One of her had his right—both of her matching his stride to the foot. The one on his left carried the bouquet low in her free hand. Jim Cooper walked between them in a dark suit with his arms held out from his sides. He looked straight ahead, and his eyes shimmered with pride.

Andy's chest locked.

He had stood with Laura on a footbridge over water more than once since she came back. Most recently on an ordinary afternoon carved out of the real world. The two of them on that same bridge at home, as themselves, with nothing happening at all. Before that, on the day a goddess stood on it and bound the two of them to each other, with a great deal happening.

But his thoughts now reached past both of those and pulled up the one underneath them.

Thirteen years old. Rain coming down hard enough to hurt—the kind that gets under a collar in about four seconds. The footbridge over Willow Run, back in Warrenville, the railing wet under both their hands. Both of them in the river. Laura got him out.

The current took her, and she drowned, and that had been the end of it.

Andy had never got anywhere with the arithmetic of that. Every person standing on this hill, every lamp on that dais, the whole enormous improbable afternoon. All of it sat downstream of about four seconds in a river in Illinois, in which a girl decided which one of the two of them was coming out. He had tried a few times over the years to arrive somewhere with that. He had stopped trying a while back.

Now she was walking toward him over clear water with both of her faces lifted. Not toward him, but toward the blue rose bush behind him under the arbor, whose flowers were the exact electric blue of her eyes and always had been.

Andy’s dad glanced down once at the water going under the white boards, as if to confirm that it was behaving. Then he put his eyes back on the mound and left them there.

“You're counting the boards, Dad,” Laura said, halfway across, with both voices at once.

“I can count. Seventy-one,” Jim said. “There's seventy-one of them. Somebody went to a lot of trouble.”

The distance closed. Somewhere in the last twenty feet the thing that had run between them since they were children got close enough to do what it always did. Andy felt her steady. He felt his own breathing go even again. He could not have said which of those happened first.

At the foot of the mound Jim stopped and took one of her hands in each of his. One hand from each body. It put both of his arms out wide, and it did not appear to bother him.

He looked at her for a long moment, and his eyes glimmered. "I love you, kiddo," he said.

“Thank you, Dad,” Laura said, with both voices. “I love you too.” And it was true.

Jim's grip tightened once, hard, both hands at the same time. Then he let go of both of her. And with his arms free there was no longer any reason on earth to keep the third one folded away, so Laura let it out.

The effort she had carried the whole length of that bridge went at once, like a held sneeze finally getting its way. Both of her shoulders dropped in the same instant. In the space of one breath there were three of her standing on the grass instead of two. The third stood half a step behind and between the others, in the same dress, with the same finished face, as if she had been there the entire time and everyone had simply failed to notice her.

Jim looked at the new one for a while.

“Huh,” he said. “Neat.”

Then he turned around and walked back across the seventh bridge, unhurried, and sat down beside Carol, who took his hand without looking at him. She had a kerchief in her hand already.

“Laura Cooper,” Liesa said.

She came forward a step and stood with her hands loose, and she did not perform any of it.

“Two things,” Liesa said. “Is not more than two.” She looked at the three of her standing at the foot of the mound. “First. Laura makes him better. We have watched this since her return. He is a good man on his own and he is a better one with her in the room, and everybody standing on this hill knows it, and not one of us is jealous about it, because we get the better one too.”

Somewhere out past the water somebody laughed once, wetly.

“Second,” Liesa said, “and this I have said to her once already, so she will have to hear it twice. It was in the bamboo, a long time ago. Sam was there. Erin was there. Laura had got it into her head that everybody would be better off without her.” A pause. “Whatever happens to any of us. Whatever comes. She is not alone in this family and she does not get to be. Is not on offer. Is not a thing she can choose.”

All three of Laura's faces went at the same moment.

She laughed through it, out loud, with her eyes streaming. Her hands came up, every one of them that was free, and not one got to a face in time.

“Low blow,” Sam said, to nobody at all. “Low blow, Liesa.” She sounded pleased, though.

Katherine came in from the mound's edge and took the bouquet out of Laura's hand. She drew it against her chest. She stayed there a moment longer than she had for anyone else before she stepped back.

Arabella looked at Laura, and said the one word.

“Lives.”

She held it a beat. Then she let the last sound go, on purpose or not, so that the word finished as something else.

“Live.”

It could have been a command. It could have been a wish. It came out of her mouth like both at once, and underneath both of them sat the thing she had been saying to every woman who crossed that water all afternoon, shorter each time, pared down until nothing was left but this.

Andy heard it. Laura heard it too, all three of her, and what they heard most was the affection in it, and the meaning.

“Live, Laura,” Arabella whispered softly. She met Laura's eyes, and held them, and then lowered her own gaze to the water standing in the basin. It was all that was left of a rite that had started the morning as a spoken blessing. It was also the truest part of it.

Laura stepped up to it with all three of her at once. All six hands went into the water together, side by side along the rim, moving in exact step.

Sam drew the last reed out of the crook of her arm. Her arm was empty after that. She stood holding the thing out with both hands, as if it were heavier than a reed, and she did not make a joke about it.

Only one of Laura's bodies reached for it. The other two stood still at the basin with the water running off their fingers. Andy lowered the brand. Laura brought the reed to it with that one hand. The dry head of it went up at once. For a second the light on her was the only warm thing in that garden.

“You're late,” Andy said, but what he really meant was I love you.

“I'm the last bride,” said all three of her, at once, in one voice with three mouths in it. “I'm supposed to be.”

She carried the flame across to the dais and touched it to the seventh wick, and the seventh wick took, and stood up beside Emi's.

Katherine put the flowers back into the nearest hand Laura had. Then she pressed her own palm flat against her chest and opened it out toward the sky, the way she had done once before at a tree hung with ribbons. Laura nodded back to her. All three of her, at the same time.

Then she went to the end of the line and took her place beside Emi. Emi reached across with her top right hand and took hold of the nearest of Laura's.

“You're the last one,” Emi said. “I have been waiting all afternoon.”

“So has he.”

The air around the pair of them turned a little warmer, and a little sweeter, and stayed that way.

On the mound stood Andy with the brand; Myra, Emily, Dawn, Erin, Claire, Emi and Laura beside him in the order they had crossed, Laura in all three of her bodies at the end; Arabella at the basin and Nick behind her; Liesa; Sam with nothing left in her arms at all; Harper and Laura Black in their places; Katherine and Candy and Skye along the edge.

Out over the ring, all seven white bridges stood empty.

Seven flames burned on the dais, in a row, with no dark cup left at the end of them.

---

Author's Note: A bit in advance, but I'm collecting suggestions for final TF upgrades and for Exit Transformations! I'm not 100% sure on the manner in which I will handle this last batch (partially depends on the final results of the endgame and the wish), but there will be the chance for the girls to get final upgrades, and possibly either get assigned, or buy Exit Transformations if they wish. Not all suggestions will be incorporated, but all are welcome, and thank you! Suggestion form is here (remember, if you suggest a TF upgrade, to indicate what TF should be upgraded, not just what the upgrade is).