The Spark

The Verant did not leave the ash. Andy had half expected them to, once it was said. He didn’t know why. But they stayed where they were, bowed over the place where she had stood, and the thin high cold stayed with them, and the Ring stayed exactly as still as the verdict had left it.

He could feel the ash in the creases of his palm, pressed there against Laura’s skin. He hadn’t wiped it off.

Nobody else had moved much. Anna was weeping into the light with her face turned up to it and Dumuzid’s arms still locked around her. A pace behind them Herman stood with the lantern hanging from his hand, his eyes on the bare stone where she had stood. Sumiku’s forehead was down on the edge of the stone again, her four hands flat beside it. Claire stood at his other side with her pen over the white space under the name she had written, and the pen had not come down. Around the rim the women of his harem were where the night had left them, holding on to one another, wet-faced, every one of them looking at the light.

Then something came out of the light.

It took him a moment to call it a hand. Head-on the Verant were one shape and no more, the suggestion of a figure standing upright in its own pale glow, and nothing about that shape had changed all night. Now part of it reached out over the ash, slow and unhurried, palm down, and held there. At the very edge of his sight, where they were three, he thought all three of them had done it. When he looked straight at them again there was only the one hand, and it hadn’t moved.

Its light lay on nothing but itself. The ash under it stayed gray. Andy reached for it with the new sense, as he had reached for everything else on the Ring tonight, and the sense went out toward that hand and found nothing to take hold of, as a hand finds nothing at the edge of a drop.

Beside him, Laura’s hand tightened in his. He felt her stop breathing, all three of her at once.

Then he saw it.

It didn’t rise out of the ash. Nothing lifted, or gathered, or came together out of the gray. It was simply there, floating in the air between the Verant’s hand and the stone, as if it had always been there and only now could anybody see it.

A spark of green. Brilliant, and bright.

Everyone on the Ring went still.

Andy felt it go around the stone, as he had felt every breath on the Ring tonight, one at a time: each of them stopping where they stood, or knelt, or held somebody, and not starting again. Through the bond he shared with Claire, something came to him that was not grief, but astonishment, so sharp and sudden that it caught in his own chest. Her pen had stopped against the page.

Down the other bond, Laura’s bewilderment came into him from all three of her at once. She didn’t send him anything. She didn’t have anything to send. She was looking at it the way he was, with every pair of eyes she had, and she didn’t know what it was.

Off to his left, Sam made a sound that wasn’t a word. Then she found one.

“Oh,” she said. It came out of her low and rough. “Oh, hell.”

Nobody answered her.

Behind Anna, Herman hadn’t stopped like the rest of them. He had turned—all of him at once, toward the green light over the ash, like a compass finding north. The small wings at his heels lifted off the stone and beat once, and settled. The hand with the lantern in it came up an inch by itself and stayed there, as if it had started on something it had done a great many times before and only then remembered that nobody had asked it to.

His face had changed. Andy couldn’t have said into what. “There you are,” he said softly, as if a weight had suddenly been lifted from his chest.

Across the ash, Ereshkigal’s eyes opened. They had been shut since the verdict. They opened now, and went straight to the green spark over the stone, and stayed there. Her hand was still closed at her side. She didn’t reach for anything, and she didn’t look away. Andy couldn’t read her face at all.

He looked back at the spark, and he was on the beach.

He was standing on the Ring with Laura’s hand in his and the cold of the Verant on his face, and he was on the sand anyway, the morning she gave him her real name. The sun had come all the way up by then. The water was too bright to look at for long, and the eleven islands sat out on it—dark, each one by itself. He’d had a piece of shell in his palm, and he had been turning it over and over with his thumb. And after a long silence, she had asked him.

Do you think I have a soul?

He had made himself wait before he answered. He had wanted to give it the time it deserved, and he remembered how still she held herself while he took it, so still it made him aware of every part of his own body that couldn’t be.

Yes. I do.

She hadn’t blinked. Only the corners of her eyes had softened. Why?

You’re asking me, specifically?

I have never asked anyone else. Not once.

The spark hung over the ash. Nobody on the Ring had moved.

So he had told her. That she was haunted by the same things as the rest of them. That she couldn’t make peace with the things she’d done, even knowing she had done her best. That she grieved her brothers and sisters, and worried about what happened to her when the show was over. You could have been anything, he had said, and you made yourself a person. If that doesn’t count, nothing does.

And she had stared at the sand in front of her as if she were waiting for something to crawl out of it and spell the answer. I was made, not born. I know every name that ever lived and every word they ever spoke, but I don’t know what happens to me when I die.

She had never been able to find out. None of them had—not one of the twelve, Arabella and her eleven brothers and sisters, in all the time they had lived. However many times she had felt one of them die, or dissolve, or try to stay in the world as a ghost, it had never worked. Nobody had ever come back to tell them. The Producers who made them had never said. So the twelve had believed the only thing there was left to believe, that there was nothing after.

When a Host ends, she had told him that same morning, we don’t leave ghosts.

He had promised to remember her—it was all he’d had to give. He looked at the green spark over her ash, and he knew what it was.

It was her.

Not her body. That lay on the stone where she had stood, gray and soft, and it was never going to move again. Not her memory—the Palace would vanish, now or soon enough. It was the other thing. The thing she had asked him about on the sand with the sun on the water, the thing he had said yes to without one word of proof.

Arabella’s soul.

His throat closed. The new sense in him had been opening all night, a little at a time, and it went out to the spark now without his asking it to and took it in whole. It found warmth there. He knew that warmth. He had felt it in her all night, thin and getting thinner, until it went out under his hand. Here it wasn’t thin at all.

He looked at Herman. Herman had known before he did. It was in his face, and in the lantern held an inch too high. When someone has to cross from one place to the next and can’t find the way on their own, he had said at the foot of the Gate, I walk them over. He had kissed her forehead on this stone a little while ago, and told her safe travels. Andy didn’t think he had believed, then, that there would be anything of her left to travel.

His eyes stung. He let them.

She had believed there was nothing after. She had walked out onto this stone with her shoulders straight anyway. She had been wrong. He had never in his life been so glad of anyone being wrong.

He couldn’t have said it out loud. He sent it instead, down the bond, to Laura, who stood close against his side with her hand in his and had seen everything he had seen and didn’t know what it was.

It’s her. It went down the bond broken, like it would have come out of his mouth. Laura. It’s her. It’s Arabella’s soul.

He felt it reach her. It landed in all three of her at once, and her hand closed on his so hard the bones of his fingers ground together, and he didn’t mind. She had one, Laura sent back. It came small and clear, as if she were holding it in both hands. Andy. She had one.

She did.

The nearest of her turned her head and looked up at him. The other two didn’t take their eyes off the spark. Her face was wet, and she didn’t ask him how he knew. She just held on to his hand, and let her breath out at last, and he felt it go out of all three of her together.

At the edge of the ash Anna had stopped weeping. Her wet face was turned to the spark now, her lips parted, and no sound came out of them. Dumuzid looked from her face to the green light and back, and held her, and didn’t ask.

On the Ring nobody spoke. The green spark hung over the ash, brilliant and bright and perfectly still, and the Verant held their hand out over it, and didn’t move, and looked at it for a long time.

Andy felt the whole of their attention resting on the spark, all of it, the way it had rested on her while she went to ash: held perfectly still, as if there were nothing else on the island or anywhere past it worth looking at. The thin cold lay over the Ring. The wind came over the rim and stirred the blasted trees and went away again, and the spark didn’t stir with it.

Then one of the three voices came forward.

He knew it at once. It was the newest of them, the one that had run ahead of the other two when the Verant said her name a little while ago, and said there had been no test. Andy had thought then that he was hearing them fond. He had been. This was more than that. The other two didn’t hurry after it this time, to catch up with something it had already begun. They came in under it, low, and let it lead.

“Good luck,” the Verant said.

The two words went out over the ash and stopped.

Andy had heard them talk all night. Clay and riverbanks, potters and valleys, a song played ten thousand times. They had a way of reaching back across the whole of history for the right word and setting it down where everyone could see it. There was nothing like that in this. It was not an oracle’s word at all, but what anybody might say at a door, to somebody going out of it into the world.

“And a good life,” they said.

The newest voice held on to the last word a little longer than the other two, as if it didn’t want to give it up yet. It was the fondest sound Andy had ever heard come out of them. He hadn’t known they had it in them.

He understood, then, that it was leaving.

He wanted to say something to it. He didn’t know what. He had already given her the only thing he’d had left to give, on this stone, with her hand in his—her own name, whispered where only she could hear it. There was nothing after that. He stood with his mouth open and Laura’s hand in his and the ash in his palm, and found he had nothing to say, and said nothing.

Between one breath and the next, the spark was gone.

It didn’t fade, or rise, or go out. It didn’t go anywhere that he could see. It was there, brilliant and bright over the ash. Then it was simply not there. All at once, the same way it had come. The air over the stone was only air. The cold the Verant had brought was still there. It lay on his face and the backs of his hands, as it had all night. Nothing else was.

Andy took a step toward it before he knew he had moved.

Laura’s hand pulled taut in his and held, and he stopped, one foot forward on the bare stone, his free hand half lifted toward nothing. He looked at his hand. He let it fall.

It was the second time tonight. He had watched her go once already, with her fingers coming apart in his. He had not thought there would be anything left of her to watch go again.

Behind Anna, Herman let the lantern down to his side.

He hadn’t taken one step toward the spark. Andy had watched him not take it. Whatever crossing it had been making, it hadn’t been his to walk, and he had stood there with the light in his hand and let it go without him. His face was wet, and under the grief on it there was wonder, as plain as anyone’s.

Somewhere on the far side of the Ring, Dawn made a small sound and put both hands over her mouth. Myra had turned her blind face to the place where the spark had been, and kept it there, and her lips were moving. Claire’s ears had flattened all the way back.

The Verant drew their own hand back. It went into the light and was gone, and the shape was only one shape again, upright and bowed over the ash.

For a while nobody on the Ring said anything at all. Then Sam did. Of course it was Sam. She had never in her life waited to be spoken to by anything, however old it was, and she didn’t start now.

“What just happened?” Her voice was rough, and too loud for the quiet, and she didn’t bring it down. She had let go of Thrustworthy’s guard. Liesa’s hand was still in hers, and she was looking straight into the light, as she would have looked at anybody she wanted an answer from. “Where did she go?”

The light turned toward her. Andy felt it turn, that whole vast attention coming around to rest on one woman with a sword in front of her and her wife’s hand in hers, who didn’t step back from it.

“Arabella yearned for one thing above all the others,” the Verant said. “She yearned for it all her life, though for a long time she did not know what to call it. At the end, when her siblings were gone, most of all.” The light held still. “A family.”

A pause.

“We have granted it.”

The words sat on the Ring. Andy heard them, and couldn’t make them mean anything yet. Granted it. She was ash on the stone. He could still feel the grit of her in the creases of his hand.

Andy had stood in the Heart, with the torchlight lying on the twelve-sided table and the twelve tall chairs standing around it in the order they were made, and Horun at the threshold with his hands closed at his sides. This is the Heart, Horun had said. It’s where the twelve of us met. It was the only place we could be a family. And then, across more years than he could hold in his head, it had emptied, one chair after another, until nobody was left at that table but her. He had thought about it since. How long she must have been alone at that table. How much longer she had been alone before it was empty, every time another chair went cold.

Across the ash, Ereshkigal’s closed hand opened. It was a small thing. Her fingers came apart at her side and stayed open, and that was all. Her face didn’t change. Her eyes were still on the empty air over the stone. But Andy reached for her with the new sense without meaning to, and something in her had let go, like a breath held too long, and under it there was something he hadn’t expected to find in the Queen of the Great Below. It was very like gladness. She did not seem to want anyone to see it.

“Granted it how?” Sam said. She was still looking at the Verant. Her voice cracked on it and she pushed on through. “She’s gone. We all just watched her go.”

The Verant didn’t answer her. They turned.

Andy felt it come. The attention lifted off Sam and came around across the stone, slow and certain, and settled beside him. On Laura, all three of her, standing close at his side with her hand in his.

“Laura Cooper,” the Verant said. He felt her go rigid.

They had never spoken to her before. All night their attention had been on the ash, and on Arabella, and on the eleven out past the rim. Now it was on Laura. All of it. He felt her bear it, all three of her, and not look away.

“The child growing in you,” they said, “has carried her soul since the beginning.”

Somewhere behind him somebody who hadn’t known caught her breath, and didn’t let it out. Most of them hadn’t known. Laura had meant to tell them all after the wedding—after the day she had not let herself believe she would live through.

The child. A girl, Laura had said. Just one. Somehow, between both of me. And it had been Arabella who told her first. Two days before. Arabella had looked at Laura and known what was there before Laura did. She had said so outright—and then made a face, Laura told him, like she was struggling with the idea too.

“On your world, some say a soul enters the child when it is born. Others, when it takes its first breath. Some believe the soul enters one hundred and twenty days after it is begun, and others, when flesh first takes shape,” the Verant said. The newest voice was still a little ahead of the others. “We were considerably early.”

Laura let go of his hand. All three of her moved at once. Three hands went to three bellies and lay there flat, each palm pressed close, at exactly the same moment. There was nothing to see, not yet. But she held her hands there anyway, every one of them, and didn’t move.

---

Her breath had stopped in all three of her. She couldn’t find where to start it again.

Through the bond Andy’s shock landed in her, and it landed hard. Under it was his grief, which hadn’t gone anywhere. And under the grief there was something else, coming up slowly, that was almost joy and didn’t seem to know yet whether it was allowed to be.

She knew how that felt. She had not let herself want this child, not out loud, with the debt hanging over her and the wedding coming and every day of it counted. She had said a girl to Andy once, in a whisper, in case it was taken off her if she said it any louder. She had wanted her anyway. She had wanted her as you want something you have already decided you can’t afford.

Someone came across the stone toward her.

It was her mother. She had been standing in Marie’s arms and Sandra’s when the spark went, and now she had let go of both of them and was walking across the bare stone, carefully, as if she were still learning where her own feet were. She came to Laura’s side. She didn’t say anything at first—she only looked. She put her hand over the hand of the one of Laura nearest her, flat on Laura’s belly, and held it there.

“Oh, sweet girl,” Sarah whispered.

Laura had heard those two words from her mother a hundred times. More. She had sat in the chair beside her in the cottage, morning after morning, and heard them come out of her with I’m sorry in front of them, over and over, a loop that never let her mother out. There was nothing in front of them now. Her mother’s hand was warm, and it was shaking, and it stayed where it was.

“Mom,” Laura said. It came out of all three of her at once, barely a sound, and it was all she had.

Her mother’s thumb moved once across her knuckles. It was all the answer she gave, and it was enough.

Across the ash, Anna had turned her face back into Dumuzid’s shoulder when the spark went. She lifted it now. She looked across the stone at Laura’s hands, all of them, and her mother’s over one of them, and Laura watched Anna’s wet face crumple and give way entirely. Dumuzid’s arms stayed around her. He looked over her head at Laura with the same bewilderment he’d had for everything since he came up out of the dark, and held on.

Anna had loved Arabella for longer than Laura could begin to imagine. Laura had heard her tonight, crying Ara across the ash, and coming up off her knees, and falling a step short. She had been too late to catch her. She was looking at Laura now as if she had just been handed something she had dropped.

A pace behind the two of them Herman stood with the lantern hanging from his hand and his free hand pressed flat over his mouth. He was looking at Laura’s hands too. Laura had seen him kiss Arabella’s forehead on this stone a little while ago, and step back, and watch her go to ash without once looking away. He didn’t look away now, either.

Off to Laura’s left, Sam laughed. It came out of her once, wet and cracked, and she wiped her eyes hard with the back of the hand that wasn’t holding Liesa’s.

“Of course,” she managed, to Laura. Her voice was a wreck, but glad. “Of course it’s you two.”

Sam had known. Sam had been the first person Laura told, before she was sure, before she had even let herself say the word out loud to Andy. Myra had known, and Marie, and Riley, and Emi, and Chloe. Her mother had known, in the cottage, back when her mother couldn’t answer. Most of the others hadn’t. Laura had meant to tell them after the wedding, and the wedding had turned into this. She saw Dawn standing in the crook of Marissa’s arm with both hands pressed over her mouth. Erin had hold of Norah’s sleeve and wasn’t letting go of it. Claire’s ears had come straight up. In Marissa’s other arm, Chloe had spread one hand over her own belly without seeming to know she’d done it, and was laughing and crying at the same time.

At the edge of the stone, Sumiku lifted her head.

All night she had kept her forehead down to the ash, her four hands flat beside it. Tonight she had prayed aloud, in Japanese, to the woman she had known by another name: Amaterasu-no-Ōkami. Now she raised her face, and turned on her knees, slowly, and folded all four of her hands. She did not bow to the ash this time. She bowed to Laura, deep and long, to the child under Laura’s hands, and stayed down.

Nobody had ever bowed to Laura in her life. She didn’t know what to do with it. She stood there with her hands on her belly and her mother’s hand over one of them and let Sumiku do it, because it wasn’t really for her.

Andy turned back to the Verant.

Laura felt him do it. She couldn’t hear his thoughts—the bond had never done that, not even now; she got his feelings, all of them, and only the words he chose to send. What she felt was him gathering himself, the way he did before he made himself ask a thing he was afraid of the answer to. She watched the back of his neck. There was ash on the hand at his side, gray in the creases of his knuckles. He didn’t send her anything. He asked out loud, so all of them would hear.

Laura held her breath again. She didn’t know which answer she was afraid of.

“What will she—” He stopped. He had to start again. “What will she remember? Of Arabella. Of any of it.”

The light did not move. When the Verant answered, it was the three voices together, level. “Nothing,” they said. Laura’s hands pressed harder. “Nothing of the life that was Arabella’s,” the Verant said. “Unless someone teaches it to her anew. She will begin as clay begins, smoothed under the palm, before anything has been pressed into it.” A pause, so slight Laura nearly missed it. “Without the guilt of the past. Without its regret.”

The guilt. Laura had watched that guilt tonight. She had watched it take Arabella down onto her knees on this stone, in Laura’s own mother’s arms, over a season she had run before Laura was born. I ran that season, Arabella had said, with her face wet. I could not even look at your face. She had been carrying it for thirty years. She had carried all of it, every one of her brothers and sisters, and a man who broke, and the child he hadn’t wanted, and none of it was going to be there anymore. And how many other seasons had she carried like that?

“Good.” Andy’s voice came out raw. “She carried it long enough.”

The Verant were silent over the ash. It wasn’t the long, deep silence they had kept before they spoke of her, but a short one, the kind a person leaves when they have heard something said right and want it to stand by itself for a moment.

“She will not be a Host,” they said. “What We wrote into the twelve, We have not written into her. The rules of the game will not bind her any longer. We have granted her one further boon: her soul is marked so that Harem Hotel will never claim her, unless she chooses otherwise.” The light seemed to lean, very slightly. “She will be free to make her life whatever she wishes it to be.”

And then, on the last two words, the newest of the three voices ran a little ahead of the other two. “At last.”

Laura had heard the Verant say, at this same spot, not an hour ago, what the twelve had been made for. The first of them were made to run the Harem Hotel. Nothing more. That was the whole of what We wrote. Nothing more. Not to be kind, or to be cruel. To keep the game. And Arabella had kept it, for longer than there had been anyone to write down how long—and then, at the end, she had done the one thing the game was never written for, and brought a drowned girl back up out of the river.

The girl stood here now, with her hands on her belly.

The tears came then. They came down all three of her faces at once, and she didn’t lift a hand to any of them. She couldn’t have; her hands were busy.

Free. Laura had been free for about an hour. Tonight, on this stone, the Queen of the Great Below had looked into her Tablets and said that Laura Cooper’s name had never been written, and the debt Laura had lived under since the river had simply stopped being there. She knew what it was to stand under something you never chose and then find it gone, and not know what to do with your hands. She thought of a child who would never have to find that out.

Andy didn’t turn around. Through the bond she felt him crying, and felt him feel her, and neither of them sent anything.

Around the Ring the women of the household were crying and laughing at once.

Laura could hear it go around the stone and come back, like the sound a crowd makes when it has been holding its breath too long and lets it all go together. Some of it was for Arabella, still, and some of it wasn’t. Dawn had taken her hands down from her mouth and was laughing into them instead, with her ears flat and her face soaked. Norah had sat down on the stone where she stood; her knees had decided it without her. Liesa had her face pressed into Sam’s shoulder and her free hand on her own belly. Myra had turned her face toward Laura and was crying openly, and Riley had both arms around her from behind and her chin on Myra’s shoulder and her eyes on Laura.

Emi was still kneeling beside Emily.

She had been there all night, as long as Emily had been down, with Katherine beside her and four of her hands on Emily somewhere: her hair, her shoulder, the inside of her wrist where the pulse was. Emily hadn’t moved—her breathing was slow and even, and that was all. Emi lifted her head from her and looked across the stone at Laura, and then at the empty air over the ash, and then at the Verant, and her face was calm.

“I promised her I’d remember her,” Emi said. She didn’t raise her voice. It carried anyway. “In the Inner Gardens. I told her I’d remember her, whatever happened. I still will.” She took a breath. Her voice stayed level, and it cost her; Laura could see it cost her. “And if somebody has to teach it to her, all of it, then I’m going to be one of the ones who does.”

The Verant didn’t answer. Laura didn’t think Emi had been asking them anything.

Emi looked down at Emily again. She touched her cheek, once. Then she looked at Katherine, and Katherine nodded and slid closer and took Emily’s hand in both of hers, and Emi got up off her knees and went across the stone to her grandmother. Herman saw her coming and stepped back out of her way without a word.

Anna saw her coming. She took one arm from around Dumuzid and held it out, and Emi walked straight into it, all six of her arms going around the two of them at once, and Anna’s hand came up and cupped the back of her head.

“Emi,” Anna whispered into her hair. Her voice broke on it. “Emi.”

“Grandmother.” Emi’s face was in her shoulder. “Grandmother, did you hear—”

“I heard.”

Dumuzid had gone still with the two of them pressed against his chest. He looked down at Emi, at the black hair under Anna’s hand, at the six arms, with the same bewilderment he’d had for everything since he came up out of the dark. Anna lifted her face to him. She said something in the old language, and Laura found, as she had found a little while ago and still didn’t understand how, that she knew every word of it.

“She is one of my descendants,” Anna told him. “One of mine. From long after.”

Dumuzid looked at Emi for a long moment. Then he bent his head down to the two of them.

“Then I have missed a great deal,” he said, in the same tongue. His voice was rough, as if he hadn’t used it in a very long time. “A great deal.”

Anna laughed. It came out of her through her tears, broken, and Laura had never heard her laugh like that, and wondered how long it had been since anyone had. If anybody on the Ring might know, Laura thought, it was Herman. Behind them, he had shut his eyes, and Laura watched his shoulders come down an inch.

The air around the three of them went warm.

Laura felt it reach her across the stone. It was warm and sweet, and it smelled of cut grass and a long summer afternoon, as if somebody had opened a door onto a garden that wasn’t there. It did that when Emi loved something past the point of keeping it to herself. Laura had felt it once before at this Ring, with Emi’s arms around her. Dumuzid lifted his head at the smell of it, startled—like a man who has caught the smell of a field he used to know, and can’t think where it’s coming from.

Near Andy’s elbow Claire’s ears were all the way up. She had her notebook in her arms, and she shut it, and pressed it flat against her chest with both hands, over the page where she had written Arabella and nothing under it, and held it there.

Riley was still looking at Laura. Her eyes were full. Her chin was still on Myra’s shoulder, and her hair lay quiet down her back for once, and when she spoke it was to Laura and nobody else. “Do you think she’ll look like her?” Riley said. “When she’s grown?”

Laura opened her mouth—and didn’t know. Andy turned from the Verant then and came back the one step to her. Before he got there, before his hand found hers, something came down the bond from him—not a feeling this time, but words, images.

The baby. It came slowly. In the nursery. In the dream house. A pause, and then the rest of it, as if he had been carrying it a long time and only now found where to put it down. When I held her, Laura. She was—I knew her. She felt like somebody I already knew. Achingly. I never told you that.

Laura remembered the baby.

She remembered the photograph on the stairs first, the one neither of them remembered being taken: Laura in a hospital bed, and Andy in blue scrubs, and a newborn with a full head of dark reddish-brown hair. Then the baby herself, standing up at the crib rail when the door swung open. The hair in wild soft tufts, the same dark reddish-brown. And the eyes. Green, but not just green: a peculiar, refracted brightness, the kind of color that was never quite the same twice. Laura had looked into them over the top of a board book while the baby gnawed on its corner, and thought she had never seen a color like it.

She remembered the baby wriggling out of Andy’s arms to be put down, with an impatience that was both brand new and instantly recognizable, and staggering off across the rug on legs that had never walked before, straight for the leg of the crib, with all the purpose in the world.

She had seen that green again tonight.

Her eyes, Laura sent him. It went down the bond all at once, and she let it. The baby’s eyes. Andy, they were the same green. The spark. They were the green of the spark. And then, because it was true and because she couldn’t stop it: They were Arabella’s eyes.

Andy’s hand found hers. He laid it over the hand of the nearest of her, flat on her belly, beside her mother’s. His fingers were cold, and there was still ash in the creases of them, and she didn’t care at all. Her mother looked at his hand next to her own, and then up at his face, and didn’t move hers away.

She told me once, he sent back. It came slow and careful. On the beach. She’d changed her face more times than anyone could count, and she said the green was never anyone else’s. It was there before the masks, and still there after.

Laura looked at Riley. Reddish-brown hair. Arabella’s had been deep auburn. And the green, which had always been hers. “She might,” Laura said. It came out of all three of her at once, and wobbled, and held. “Riley. She might.”

Riley didn’t answer. She pressed her cheek against Myra’s hair and nodded, twice, and her eyes didn’t leave Laura’s, and Myra laughed out loud through her tears at whatever color had just come off all three of her.

And then she remembered the beach.

The last dream. The one Andy’s own heart had made for them, the night before the wedding. Laura had sat on the sand above the tide line with her knees up, both of her, and watched the little girl they called Bee build a tower in the wet sand. Bee had worked on that one tower all morning. She had told it to stay up. She had called Andy over to admire it with her arms flung wide. She had run down to the foam over and over and shouted No touch! at the sea, and run back to see if her tower had lived, and it always had. And Laura had sat there with Andy and watched.

Then the big wave had come in. Andy had braced for it. Laura had seen him brace. And at the last second the wave had curled and broken short, barely touching the sand, and the tower stood.

It because it mine, Bee had said, hands on her hips. It doesn’t fall.

Laura understood. She felt Andy’s wonder arrive through the bond in the same moment as her own, so exactly at the same moment that she couldn’t have said which of them it started in. The baby in the nursery. The little girl on the beach with sand to her elbows. They had been the child under her hands. This child, years from now, with Arabella’s soul in her. A baby who would not stay in anyone’s arms when she wanted the floor. A little girl shouting at the sea to leave her tower alone.

She had been theirs all along. And Arabella had been in her all along. And Laura knew now why the big wave had broken short.

She laughed. She didn’t mean to. It came out of all three of her at once, a small laugh, the same one from three mouths, with the tears still running down every one of her faces and her mother’s hand on hers and Andy’s beside it, and she couldn’t have stopped it if she’d tried.

Through the bond Andy was laughing too, somewhere under everything else. She could feel it shaking loose in him, and his hand over hers was shaking with it.

She looked down at their hands. His, and her mother’s, and her own three sets, all on the one child.

In the dream house she hadn’t let him name her.

She remembered the kitchen, the morning light coming in sideways across the table, the baby in the highchair with cereal in her hair. Andy had come back from the pantry with a blue box of the cheap O-shaped cereal his mother used to buy, a cartoon bee grinning on the label, and the baby had put both hands straight into the bowl as if that were what bowls were for. Andy had leaned in over the tray and said it softly, as if it had been sitting in him a while. We could call her Sarah. We could honor her that way. And Laura had said no. Not Sarah. It was bad luck, naming her after her mother. And then, wiping the tray in one long sweep so she wouldn’t have to look at him: A name sticks. Whether or not you get to keep the person, the name is always there.

Her mother’s hand was on hers now. Her mother, who had been sitting in a chair in the Hollow Garden that morning, unable to so much as look at her own daughter. Laura didn’t tell her. Some other day.

We’ll know when we see her, Andy had said. For real.

She hadn’t named the baby. But the little girl—she had named the little girl.

She had been calling her Bee ever since the last dream. Mostly in her head, before she had any right to. She had used it out loud to Andy the night before the wedding, when she wasn’t sure she would see the end of the next day: if she didn’t make it, he was to tell Bee that she had loved her, and that she had tried to stay. And at the end of everything, chained on her knees on this stone with Nergal’s pain going through all three of her at once, she had chosen to believe in a kitchen, and a Tuesday, and Bee.

She hadn’t picked the name. It had been waiting for them in the dream.

Dawn had said it first, before Laura had even seen the little girl. Dawn with her calendar and her Sharpie, crossing out a whole morning with a flourish: Bee’s gonna need shoes if you take her outside. Then the little girl had come tearing through the kitchen between Andy’s legs with her arms out like wings, buzzing, and planted one finger on his hip and shouted DADA STING! and gone on to sting Claire twice over. Bee’s been at this since she woke up, Chloe had called from the stove. And Andy had looked down at the little girl and then at Laura, and said, Bee? And Laura had shrugged, both of her at once. I guess it fits.

She had thought it was for the game—the buzzing, the stinging, the arms out. A little girl who had decided she was a bee, and a whole house that had gone along with it. She had thought that was all it was.

Something turned over in her, slowly. It wasn’t a thought yet, only the shape of one. At that exact moment Andy sent it to her.

There was a drawing on the wall. It came down the bond quick and unsteady, as if it had only just come to him too. In the dream. All the kids’ drawings, with their names on them. Hers didn’t have a name. Just a bee. A breath, and she felt him take it. Laura. It was never only for the game.

It landed in her and finished the shape. She heard it, then—the name she had been saying all night, heard for the first time. Arabella. Bella. Bee.

She didn’t send it. This was a thing to say out loud, where everybody could hear it, where it would be real. “Bee,” Laura said. It came out of all three of her at once, one voice from three mouths, and it shook. She didn’t try to steady it. “It’s short. Bee’s—” She had to stop. Her breath caught on it, and she let it catch, and went on through. “Bee’s short for Arabella.”

Around the Ring, people went quiet.

“That’s her name.” The tears were running into the corners of her mouth. She didn’t care. It was the only name Arabella had ever chosen for herself. “That’s our daughter’s name. Arabella.”

Andy’s hand tightened over hers. She felt the whole of him go through the bond at once, too much of everything to send as words, and then his voice, out loud, wrecked.

“Arabella,” he said. As if he were testing whether it would hold. It held. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Beside her, her mother let out a long breath that shook all the way down. Her hand didn’t move from Laura’s; if anything, it pressed closer. “It’s a good name,” Sarah whispered. It was only for her. “It’s a good name.”

The nearest of Laura turned her face into her mother’s hair, just for a moment, and breathed in. Her mother still smelled of the cottage, of that small shut room, and under it of the night air and the ash. Laura didn’t care about any of it. She stayed there a breath longer than she meant to, and her mother let her.

Across the ash Anna had heard it. She stood in the circle of Dumuzid’s arms with Emi held against her side, and her hand had come up over her mouth, and her eyes on Laura were enormous. Emi had turned her head on Anna’s shoulder to look at Laura too, and Laura watched the name reach her, and saw Emi understand that she had just promised to teach a child named Arabella about Arabella, and saw her start to laugh.

Behind them, Herman had put his free hand over his eyes. When he took it away he was laughing, or very nearly, with the tears still on his face. “Still telling everybody where to stand,” he said, to nobody Laura could see.

Riley had her face pressed into Myra’s hair. Claire had both arms wrapped around her shut notebook. At the edge of the stone Sumiku was still bowed down, and her lips were moving, and Laura thought it was the same prayer as before, and then thought maybe it wasn’t.

Over the ash the Verant’s light stood where it had stood all along, bowed a little, and did not seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere.

Laura closed her eyes.

She had been a little over a month old. She didn’t remember it, and she never would; it was a story, a thing Andy’s mother told at the kitchen table to make everybody laugh. Two babies who cried and cried in two different rooms of the Cooper house until somebody gave up and put them together. Laura had heard it a hundred times. She had laughed at it every time.

Tonight she had heard the rest of it.

Andy had shared it with her before they both stood in front of Arabella on this stone: Carol laying two babies side by side on a yellow blanket in the front room, the evening Laura’s mother brought her over and was called home and didn’t come back for her. The two of them turning their heads, and seeing each other, and reaching. Their hands finding each other. And across the street, under the maple, in the dark, somebody standing still, watching the lit window. She hadn’t come any closer. She had stayed there all night, until the last light on the street went out.

You stayed, her mother had said across the ash.

I stayed, Arabella had said.

Her mother had asked her to. Before Laura was born, frightened, with nobody else to ask, Sarah had asked Arabella to watch over her baby, and written in the baby book that she had asked, and that she believed Arabella would. And Arabella had—from that night on the blanket, from across the street, for thirty years, in ways Laura had never known about, like another mother. And when Laura died in the river, Arabella was the one who brought her back.

And Arabella had never been a baby herself. She had never been small. She had been made out of the First Gate, in one making with her brothers and sisters, and set to work, and the rules of a game had been written into her before she ever drew a breath. She had never had anyone stand under a tree all night for her. She had never had a mother to ask somebody to.

She would now.

She would have a room with a crib in it, and a stuffed rabbit with a torn ear to chew on, and two parents who didn’t know what they were doing and would do it anyway. She would have a house so full of aunts and siblings that there would always be someone to catch her, and none of them would ever think that was unusual. She would have brothers and sisters to play with. She would build towers on the beach and shout at the sea. She would sting people. She would be loud, and sandy, and impatient, and loved, and nothing would be written on her but what she wrote herself.

They would tell her. Laura knew it like she knew her own hands. It would be years yet. But one day, when she was old enough to ask the right questions, they would sit her down and tell her about a woman with green eyes who had stood under a tree all night across the street from a lit window. Andy would tell it, because Andy kept everything. Emi would tell it. Anna would, if she could bear to. And Bee could decide for herself what to do with it, all at once and without asking anybody’s permission.

Laura opened her eyes.

Andy was looking at her. His face was wet, and there was ash on his cheek where he’d wiped it, and he was smiling at her in a way she had only seen once or twice in her life.

She closed her hands over Bee, all three of them, gently, with Andy’s hand over the nearest one and her mother’s beside it.

Arabella had stood across the street in the dark and watched over her, all that night and every year after it, for thirteen years.

This time, Laura would be the one who stayed.

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Author's Note

VOTING IS OPEN FOR THE SIXTH CHALLENGE! https://forms.gle/UnPp1EGAx9fyh2jT9

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

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

Thank you!

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