Whispers in the Lantern Light

Seven of the Fourteen came down through the lantern-light together. Dinah had given them their names on this same grass, not twenty minutes ago. There had been fourteen of them in the Dance Hall. Only half had followed the household down into the Garden. Laura didn’t know where the other seven had gone, or who was standing in front of them now.

These seven didn’t come by the path. They came over the tops of the far lanterns, out of the dark above the pasture, low and fast and all together, the way starlings turn: women with their hair and their rags streaming back in a wind that moved nothing else in the glade. Their faces were fixed in rage and in pain at once, like two things poured into one mold a very long time ago and left to set. Their hands were hooked into claws. The lantern-light went through them and came out the other side paler than it went in.

The howl came with them. And under the howl came the whispers.

Laura had listened to Sam and Norah and Erin and Sumiku try to describe the whispers from the Hall, earlier, standing on this grass. All four of them had done it badly. Now she understood why.

“Laura,” the voices whispered. They were at her ear, low and patient, the kind of voices that read aloud to a sick child in the next room. They said her name as though they had been saying it for years.

“The river,” they breathed. “Again. Slower, this time. Cold, ever so cold. Alone.”

Brown water, closing over her head. Cold that took her breath before the water did. The underside of the footbridge far above her and getting farther, with nobody standing on it.

“Or a kitchen. A Tuesday. His back to you at the stove, and he doesn’t turn around until—”

A pan hissing. Floor tiles coming up at her face, very clean.

“—twelve minutes from now—”

“—in your sleep, all three of you, and not one of you wakes—”

They came faster than she could finish hearing them. Each one cut off the last in the middle. The next was inside her head before the picture from the one before had finished happening. And under all of them was the fear, which was not of the river, or the kitchen, or the twelve minutes, but of nothing at all. It sat under everything. It didn’t care in the least what she was looking at.

All along the line she watched it land. Norah’s mouth went thin and flat. Riley closed her eyes for exactly as long as a blink takes and opened them again harder. Myra flinched with the whole of her body, hit by all of theirs arriving in her at once, and her tails went rigid behind her. Sam’s jaw set like a door being shut.

“Here we go,” Sam said. The armor glittered on her while she said it. Deep cobalt blue plate, along the legs, over her shoulders and down both arms, and on the breastplate, raised and polished and absolutely unmistakable, a grinning corgi. Some part of Laura, far at the back of her, saw the corgi and started to laugh. It didn’t get anywhere.

Sumiku went up to meet the first of them.

Her wings took her off the grass in a single beat. She met it above the arc with both upper arms behind the naginata and the lower two spread wide for balance, and Hinode-no-Saku went into the thing and took hold of something that should not have been there to hold. The blade bit. The howl from that one went up into a shriek that Laura felt in her chest.

On the left, one came in low at Norah, and Norah was already moving to meet it. The crystal sticks went across and back. The second stroke caught it across the forearm, and the light inside the stick went white where it struck.

“It hit!” Norah was still moving; she threw it over her shoulder into the noise. “Laura, it hit—I felt it! It’s actually there!”

Riley’s hair had gone out at the same moment, a dozen dark locks at once. Two of them closed. “It’s holding. It’s holding—” The locks jerked. “Gone. A second, maybe less. It went out between them like water out of a fist. But for a second it was in my grasp.”

Along the arc Erin had walked, the ground was already open. Coils rose out of the split turf, green going on black, ridged like old vine and thick as Laura’s arm, and they moved with no wind to move them: lifting, turning, closing on anything that came in low. One of the seven dropped toward the arc and three coils went around it at once, and it jerked to a stop in the air like a kite caught in a hedge.

Erin had gone back down on one knee at the far end of the arc. Both her hands were flat in the turf. Her eyes were shut. “They’re mine,” Erin said, without opening them. “They’re holding. Don’t ask me for how long.”

“Nobody’s asking,” Sam said. “Keep them.”

Laura had her own work. One came at her from the right, low. She went to meet it with the nearest of her, and the claws went through its ragged side and caught. It was like dragging blades through wet canvas that screamed. The shriek came straight up the gauntlets into her wrists, all six of them. The thing tore free and fell back, and she had hurt it. She knew she had hurt it. Shar had been right about the claws.

She was still turning back when one came over Sam’s shoulder.

All three of her saw it, from three angles at once. All six of her hands came up, but the Howling One went between the claws of the middle one of her before she could put up her guard, and put its hand into her shoulder.

In. Through. Out the back. All three of her went down on one knee. The same sound came out of all three of her mouths. It wasn’t a word. The hand had been cold going in. On the way out it took something with it—warmth, or something under the warmth—drawn out through the place it had passed. It went from all three of her together, the same from each.

She couldn’t breathe. Then she could.

“That was one hand,” the voices murmured at her ear. “Think about seven.”

All three of her got up. The grass had soaked through three dresses at the knee. There was a single ache in three left shoulders. She understood exactly what had just happened to her, and she understood, too, that nobody on this line could possibly know it except her.

“Listen to me.” It came out of all three of Laura’s mouths in one voice, cracked down the middle. “Whatever touches one of me touches all three. All at once. If two of me get hit at the same time, I get both, all of me, twice.” She made herself keep going. “And if one of them gets a hand on me and holds on, it’s holding all of me. I can’t pull the other two away from the one it’s got. I’ve got twenty feet, and that’s it.” She swallowed. “Three of me isn’t three fighters. It’s one of me, with three places to get hurt.”

For the length of a breath nobody answered her. Above the arc, Sumiku’s blade was still buried in something that howled.

“Then nothing gets a hand on you.” Sam didn’t turn around. “That’s the job now.”

“No.” Laura heard herself say it before she had finished deciding. “Then there’s only one of me to get a hand on.”

Sam did turn around then, half a turn, the plate grinding. “Laura. You can’t hold that.”

“I can hold it an hour.” She had said so herself, once, and she had meant it as the worst it could be. “If this goes longer than an hour, we’ve lost anyway.”

She didn’t apologize. There wasn’t time, and it would have been a lie besides. She had wanted to be three tonight, and she had been wrong about what three would buy.

“Sam, out front,” Laura called. “Sumiku, you’ve got the left and the air. Norah, you’re on the right now. Rye, Myra, on me, one each side, and don’t let anything through while I do this. Erin, keep them out in front of us.”

“This one has the left,” Sumiku said, and went. She wrenched the naginata free of whatever it had been in. The thing fell back shrieking, and didn’t come apart.

Riley came to one side of her and Myra to the other. The white cane came up across Myra’s body. Sam took two long strides forward, and the plate rang when she set her feet.

Laura brought herself in. The two farther of her came walking in toward the nearest, then the moment came where three had to be one. It hurt. It had never been like putting a coat away, and with the cold of the hand still in her it was worse than it had ever been. A suitcase a size too small, and a fist on the lid. Her jaw locked. Her breath stopped halfway and stayed there. One of the seven saw her fold and came straight down at her. Riley’s hair met it a yard from her face and held it. Myra’s cane took it across the middle.

There was one of her, then, standing on the grass, in one wedding dress, with one pair of claws. She let her breath out. It didn’t help. Holding it was like holding a door shut against a wind that wasn’t going to get tired. She had started a clock on herself, and she didn’t know how much of the hour the way in had cost.

Norah crossed behind them to the right without being told twice, heels digging in. Laura risked one look back over her shoulder, at the big tree and at the nine women under it that nobody had armed.

She could see every one of them. Chloe, with her arms locked across the oatmeal sweater and her chin up, daring the whispers to get through the wool. Liesa beside her, lips moving, answering something nobody else could hear. Marissa, one arm around Liesa’s waist, with no sign she knew it was there. Claire with a hand pressed flat to her breastbone and her eyes squeezed shut. Emily in the middle of them, very still, her hair falling to her thighs. Katherine at the back with Dawn’s hand in one of hers and Emi’s in the other; Dawn’s lips moving fast. Emi’s face, calm, as if she were listening to rain on a roof. And a few yards out on her own, where she had stood to watch Dinah run, Eden, very straight, her hair down past her ankles into the grass.

They were terrified. Laura could see it from thirty yards off. But they were holding together tighter than she would have believed possible, drawn in close around Emily as if Emily were a fire and the night had turned cold.

She turned back to the fight.

Above the arc, two Howling Ones dropped. They went down to the edge of the glade, where the lantern posts threw long shadows across the grass. They sank into the shadows and were gone. Laura had just time to wonder where.

They came up behind the line, to the right, out of its own shadows, the ones the lanterns laid out across the grass behind every woman standing in it.

“Two behind me!” Norah’s voice cracked high. She had her sticks up and her head turning, front and back and front. “Right side, behind—I’ve got two behind me and three in front and I can’t face both ways, I can’t—”

Myra’s cane came around. Nobody had pointed her anywhere. Nobody had called it. She let go of Laura’s shoulder and swung the white cane backhanded into the empty air behind Norah, both hands on it like a bat. It met something. The sound was a wet sheet cracking in a wind. One of the two reeled back from Norah’s spine with its howl gone ragged. Riley’s hair was on the other one before it could turn, three locks, holding, slipping, gone.

Myra came back to Laura’s shoulder breathing hard.

“I can feel them.” Myra’s voice had dropped almost to nothing, and Laura heard it anyway, because it was right beside her ear. “Every one. They’re the brightest thing on this field.” She swallowed. “It’s pain, mostly. Pain, and something under the pain that’s worse, and rage over the top of all of it. Nobody out here feels like that. Nobody alive does. It hurts to be near.” Her breath shook. “But it means they can’t hide. They can go down into the shadows all they like. I’ll still feel them there.”

Her face turned toward the big tree. “And I can feel all of you,” Myra said. “Every time one of them comes near one of you, your fear jumps, like a flame when a door opens. Except by the tree. Not near Emily. It goes up there, and it comes straight back down again. Like it can’t find anywhere to stand.”

“Then call them,” Riley said. “Out loud. Every one. I’ll put my hair wherever you say.”

Myra called them. “Left, low. Behind Sam. Laura, your right—above you. Sumiku, above you—”

Sumiku was already there. She came down on one of them out of the dark over the lanterns, wings folded tight, both upper arms behind the blade. Hinode-no-Saku went into the thing at the crown and out at the hip. For a moment it held its shape around the blade, howling. Then it came apart. It didn’t fall or tear. It came apart into nothing at all, as breath comes apart in cold air. Sumiku had already turned to the next one before the last of it was gone.

Six of them left.

Laura let herself believe it for the length of a single breath. After that, the fight stopped having a shape she could hold. It went on for a long time.

Myra’s voice went on beside her ear, low and steady, never stopping—“Left. Left again. Behind Riley. Sam, high”—and Riley’s hair went where Myra sent it, dark ropes thrown and caught and slipping, while Riley reported every hold in the same flat voice: “Got it. Got it. Gone.” On the right Norah’s sticks flared white and white again. Her breath came in short furious grunts, and the heels she had worn to a wedding cut trenches in the turf. The coils rose and closed and were torn loose and rose. Out front Sam hardly moved at all. She turned Thrustworthy in both hands so that anything coming down the middle met the whole length of the blade. Whatever met it went back screaming and didn’t try the same way twice.

Laura cut. Hurting them didn’t make them stop. But Riley covered one side of her and Myra the other. Her back she stopped trying to watch. It was theirs. And under all of it she was holding herself shut. Every stroke had to come out through the effort of staying one.

And the voices never stopped either.

“On the beach,” the voices murmured while she was cutting, almost conversational. “In the sun. Choking on nothing, with Emi’s hand flat on your back, and Emi not understanding yet—”

Sand on a wet cheek. Six hands, all reaching, none of them fast enough.

“—old. In a white bed with the rails up, and the nurse has to read your name off the chart, because nobody is left who—”

A window with no view in it. A plastic cup of water nobody had touched.

She kept cutting. There was nothing else to do with the voices but keep cutting through them.

Once, one of them came through the coils on the left, low and fast, straight past Myra. It went close enough that its hair trailed across Myra’s face. Myra flinched and swung and missed, and it didn’t so much as turn its head toward her. It came on at Laura. Riley’s hair took it from the side and held it for a count of two, long enough for the nearest of Laura to put all claws through its middle. It tore loose and went back up into the dark over the lanterns, shrieking. It didn’t come apart.

Laura watched it go and thought: it didn’t even look at her. At Myra. It went past her like she was a post.

She filed that away somewhere she didn’t have to look at it yet.

Then something happened that had nothing to do with any of it. A crack split the air, flat and short—wrong for every sound the night had been making: not a howl, not claws tearing through canvas.

A gunshot. A young woman was standing at the edge of the lantern-light, where the grass gave out into the dark over the pasture. She hadn't come down out of the sky and she hadn't walked in from anywhere; she was simply there.

Couldn't have been more than five-foot-four, compact and athletic, built out of proportion in the chest in a way the armor plating didn't bother to hide, hair an electric, impossible blue whipping in a wind that touched nothing else in the glade. Straps crossed her hips and chest, hung with more guns than Laura had a quick way to count, some of them wrong in a way she didn't have words for—no hammer, no visible barrel, all sharp angles. A revolver was still climbing back down out of its recoil in her hand. The nearest of them turned toward her, in no hurry at all.

The around went through it and buried itself somewhere in the dark, and did exactly nothing. The woman looked surprised. She let the revolver disappear in her hands and had a weird crossbow up and loosed in the same breath, at a second one hanging low over the coils. The bolt went through rag and rib and whatever was under both, and came out the far side, and kept going into the night. That one didn't so much as flinch. Her mouth moved. Laura couldn't hear the word over the howling. She didn't need to.

The woman pulled off a black, mean submachine gun from her hip and just held the trigger down. The sound of it ate the howling whole. Two lanterns burst apart in showers of glass and sparks. The muzzle-flash lit the whole field in short white-blue stutters, faster than a heart could keep up with, chewing through rag and turf and nothing that mattered at all.

“Down!” Riley's hair had already dragged at Laura's shoulder before the word was fully out. It lasted four seconds. Five.

Then the woman turned with what sounded like a curse and ran back over the dark tree line, and the noise went with her, and did not come back.

Nobody had gotten a clean look at her face. Whatever had been straining against Erin's coils had flinched at the light and the noise same as everything else in the glade, and for one unguarded second all its strength went out of it at once. Erin drove it down into the turf, and it stayed there, pinned and still. Erin hadn't opened her eyes.

“What the fuck was that!?” Nobody answered her.

After that, Laura lost track of time. She didn’t know when; she knew only that at some point she noticed she had lost it. The ache in her shoulder had gone from a sharp thing to a deep one. The merge had gone the same way, from a held breath to a weight, and the weight was growing. Twice more one of them came close enough that she felt the cold of it on her skin. Twice she twisted out of the way, and each time the others closed up around her. Under the tree, the nine were still where she had left them, Chloe and Liesa and Emily and all the rest, drawn in together like one animal keeping warm. She could see it every time she risked a look back. The fear went through the household like wind through a field, and near Emily it lay down.

Then suddenly, Sam called out for her. “Count them.” Sam used the kind of voice that asks whether the stove is off. Laura counted. So did the others; she could feel them do it.

“Seven,” Sam said. “There’s seven again.” She lifted Thrustworthy’s point an inch toward the far edge of the glade. “By the post on the left, where the grass ends. It’s walking back in.”

It was. At the edge of the lantern-light, on the grass, one of them was walking. Not flying. It was walking, slowly, rags and hair lifting in the wind that wasn’t there, as if it had only just remembered how to move and wasn’t in any hurry to be good at it. It was whole. As it crossed the first line of lanterns it lifted off the grass again and came on.

“That’s the one Sumiku took apart.” Sam didn’t take her eyes off it. “I watched the place it went. I’ve been watching it the whole time.”

High on the left, Sumiku’s wings checked in mid-beat. She hung there a moment with the naginata level, looking at the thing she had killed coming back across the grass toward her, and her face didn’t change at all. Then she beat once and was moving again.

“So it doesn’t matter,” Erin said. She hadn’t opened her eyes. Her voice was flat and even and tired. “We cut them, and they come back. It doesn’t matter how many we—”

She stopped. Something went through Erin where she knelt. Laura saw it. Erin jerked, not as if she had been hit, but as if something had been pulled out of her from the inside. She cried out, as if her own heart were being torn out of her chest. Both her hands came up off the turf at once. Her back bowed. Her mouth opened on nothing. Along a whole stretch of the arc, from her knees halfway to the middle, the coils went slack. They sank a foot, all together, like a held breath let go. One of the seven dove for the gap it made.

Erin slammed both palms back into the grass. The coils came up under the diving one and closed on it, and it hung there, fighting. For a moment Erin couldn’t say anything. Her face was wet, and it hadn’t been a second ago.

“Something died.” It came out of Erin rough and broken in the middle. “Just now. A lot of something. All of it at once.” She pressed down harder into the turf. “Not here. A long way from here. It was alive, all of it, more alive than I have words for, and it’s gone, and it went through me like—like a hand going through me. Like one of these.” Her breath hitched. “I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it was.”

“None of them touched you,” Riley said. “The nearest one was twenty feet off you and caught in your own vines. I’m sure. Whatever that was, it wasn’t them.”

Erin didn’t answer her. She knelt with her palms flat and her shoulders shaking, holding the arc up by main force, and the coils along the slack stretch climbed slowly back to where they had been.

Laura tried to think what could be that large. Alive, all at once, a long way off, and gone in a moment—more of it than Erin had words for, and Erin had words for most things that grew. The pastures, maybe. Something out past Dinah and the long grass. Something above them, on the island, under a sky none of them could see from down here. She didn’t know. She couldn’t even tell whether she wanted to.

“Laura.” Erin said it fast, without getting up and without opening her eyes. “Is it him? Is that Andy?”

The whole line heard her ask it. Laura felt the others hear it, as a room goes still around a dropped plate.

He was alive. He was afraid, the fear sitting at the top of the reading and not moving. And he was right here, closer than her own hands, and at the same time so far away that there was no word for the distance. Both at once. Nothing in between.

It hadn’t changed. Not by a hair.

“No.” Laura’s voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “It’s the same, Erin. It’s exactly what it’s been since the bell. Nothing moved. That’s all I’ve got.”

She heard how little it was. Erin heard it too. Erin’s head bowed an inch lower over her hands, and she didn’t ask again, and her mouth moved once on something that might have been his name.

“Nobody finishes one.” Laura’s voice came back flat and loud. “You hear me? Nobody chases one down. Nobody spends anything putting one on the ground. You hit whatever’s in front of you, you make it back off, and you let it go.”

“Then they get to come back as often as they like,” Riley said. “And we don’t.”

Nobody answered her. But the line moved in, all of it, like a hand closing. Sumiku came down lower over the left. Myra’s calls got shorter. Sam stopped taking the half-steps forward she had been taking to meet them, and held where she was. Nobody was trying to kill anything any more. The line wasn’t a line now, but a knot, drawn tight around Laura in the middle, and its ends went thin. Laura felt it happen and couldn’t see how to stop it happening.

Two of them came at her together.

They came from opposite sides, over Riley and under Myra’s cane, in the same half second. One mind might have thrown them both. Laura got her claws into one. The other she didn’t see in time. Its hand went in under her ribs and out through her back.

She felt it once. The cold went in at one place and came out of one body, and the warmth went with it. For a moment the lantern-light went white at the edges. The grass tilted. She was on her knees without having decided to kneel. But nothing stacked. Some cold, clear part of her noted that, and was glad of it, and went on being terrified.

The merge was worse. It slipped. For one sick instant she felt the edges of herself give, three of her straining to come apart. She knew exactly what it would mean to come apart now, on her knees, with two of them over her. She clenched everything she had, and held.

Riley’s hair hauled one of them off her. Myra’s cane caught the other across the back. Laura got her breath back in a long ugly whoop, the kind of sound that a swimmer makes coming up from too deep. She got up, because the alternative was not getting up.

She was colder now. She could feel how much colder, all the way through, as if she had been standing in the river a while. The merge sat on top of the cold like a weight on a lid, and neither of them was getting any lighter.

“L.” Riley again, at her shoulder, low.

“They’ve gone past me twice now,” Riley said. “Right past. Close enough to touch, and they didn’t even turn their heads. They’ve gone past Myra three times.” She let a lock of hair go out and come back. “Every one of them keeps coming back around to you. Every single one. I’ve been watching all seven. Whatever they go at, they come back around to you.”

Sam heard it. Laura watched her hear it: the plate’s shoulders lifting, barely, and settling. “Then they come through me first,” Sam said.

She gave up the ground out front that she had held since the first howl and came back the length of two strides. She planted herself directly between Laura and the dark beyond the lanterns where they kept coming from, close enough that Laura could have reached out and laid a hand on the corgi. Thrustworthy came up across the plate. Sam didn’t look round.

Laura knew that stance. Riley and Myra had had a plan once, with Sam and Norah in it: stand in front of her and stall, whatever it cost, whatever Andy said. Laura had told them no. Sam hadn’t asked her again, and she wasn’t asking now.

“After Sam,” the voices whispered. “Right after Sam. With her still standing in front of you.”

The breastplate, face down in the grass. The little raised dog with dirt in it.

Laura shut her teeth on whatever she had been about to say. When she risked a look back she could still see Chloe and Liesa and the rest of them drawn in around Emily, as if nothing out here could reach that far.

On the right, one of them came in low at Norah.

Laura was half turned toward the right, and saw all of it. It came under the coils and along the grass like something skating. Norah did the correct thing with the sticks. She crossed them low, turned her hip into it, and came up through the turn to take it across the face. It was good. It was exactly right. And as she turned, her heel came down on the hem of her own dress and caught.

Norah staggered. It was all the thing needed. It went through her from the shoulder to the hip.

Norah went down in the grass. Her face went gray. Her eyes rolled back white. The sticks fell out of her hands, and the light in them went out.

“Norah!” Dawn cried out from the tree, but Laura could see that she was beyond help. Not dead, but nearly so. She gritted her teeth, and reached for one more thing she had been keeping back since the wedding.

She had never used it. She didn’t think Andy ever had, either. Dangerous, so dangerous. She hadn’t named it on this grass, when she named the claws and the rest. It was a little of what Andy had, weaker and narrower, like all of hers were, but still powerful. One mistake undone for each of the women: Sam, Sumiku, Erin, Riley, Norah, all the others. One per round. Nobody else would ever know it had happened.

She took hold of Norah’s, and pulled.

Everything went back. Not far. There was a feeling like missing the last stair in the dark, and the merge shuddered in her and held. Norah was upright again and turning. The sticks were going low. The thing was skating in along the grass. This time the heel came down clear of the hem.

The turn came around clean. It still wasn’t enough.

The thing went through the point of Norah’s shoulder instead of through the whole of her. Norah went down anyway, hard, on one hip in the grass. But her eyes stayed open. Her hand stayed closed on one of the sticks. She made a sound, a real one, angry, and tried to push herself up, and couldn’t.

The one that had done it hung over her for a moment. It looked at her, lying there, as if it were making sure of something. Then it turned away and didn’t come back.

“Norah’s down.” Riley was the nearest; she had seen all of it, the second time. “It went through her shoulder. She’s breathing. She’s got her eyes open, she’s trying to get up—” Her voice caught and went on flat. “And it turned around. It looked right at her, lying there, and it turned around and went away.”

“Right side!” Sam didn’t move from in front of Laura. She shouted it instead. “The right’s open—close it! Somebody close the right!”

“This one cannot,” Sumiku called down from the air over the left. She was holding two of them off at once with the blade and her tail and a set of claws. “If this one leaves the left, the left is gone.”

“My vines are out in front of you!” Erin’s eyes had come open. “That’s behind the arc. I can’t pull them back there, I can’t reach it, Sam, it’s behind me—”

Laura measured it.

It was fifteen yards to where Norah had been. She could cover that in two breaths. She took two strides toward the gap, and all seven of them turned with her. She felt them do it. They swung around her like iron filings around a magnet, and the whole fight came with her toward the right, toward the gap, toward the tree and the nine behind it. Riley said, “No—” and Myra’s fingers locked on her arm, and Laura stopped. Wherever she went, they came. If she went to the gap, she would bring every one of them through it.

Riley was on one side of her and Myra on the other, and neither of them could leave her without leaving her open. Sam was standing in front of her with a sword, and Sam wasn’t going anywhere.

Nobody could reach it.

For a moment the whole glade seemed to stop and look at the empty grass on the right, where Norah had stood. The coils curled uselessly out in front of it. The lanterns burned on either side. It was perhaps ten feet wide. It wasn’t much of a gap at all.

So the gap stayed open for the length of one breath, and one of the seven, ragged and wounded, went through it. It went past the line, past Norah in the grass without looking down at her. Low and fast across thirty yards of lantern-light toward the big tree, and in among the nine women nobody had armed.

It went for the nearest thing in the glade that wasn’t moving away from it, and the nearest thing that wasn’t moving away from it was Eden.

She was still where she had been since Dinah left, a few yards out from the tree, on her own. Laura saw her try to run. She had turned the moment it went through, and she would have given anything not to see it. Eden’s whole body gathered itself to bolt. What came out of it was a slow turn of the hips, a sway, one heel set down in front of the other as if she were crossing a stage. It was the only way her body could move, whatever she wanted from it. The heels she could never take off sank into the soft turf. She had no arms to throw up in front of her face. She kept trying. Every time she tried, she swayed. And it came on across the grass at her, low, not in any hurry, hair and rags streaming.

Emily had gotten to her. Emily must have run the moment it came through. She was there beside her with both hands on Eden, one on her waist and one at the small of her back, pulling. Eden didn’t come. Eden’s body turned in Emily’s hands like a dancer’s, heels sunk deeply in the soil, stuck, and stayed exactly where it was.

Under the tree, the others broke apart a little, and then drew back together, tighter. Chloe came out from under the branches in the oatmeal sweater, both arms flung out. She put her whole chest into it, and it carried across thirty yards of howling.

“Sam! Sam, behind you!” Chloe screamed. “It’s on Eden! It’s going for Eden!”

Sam’s whole body jerked toward the sound. The plate turned half round, and stopped.

“I can’t!” Sam didn’t take a step. She stood in front of Laura with the sword up, and her voice cracked across the grass. “I can’t leave her! Emily, get her down—get her behind the tree!”

Emily was trying. But Katherine got there first.

Laura never saw her let go of Dawn and Emi. One moment Katherine was at the back of the group under the tree, holding two hands. The next she was across the grass at a dead run, bare feet flashing, with nothing on her and nothing in her hands. She went past Emily. She went around Eden. She put herself in the space between her sister and the thing coming at her, square, feet planted in the turf as she had planted them when she refused Dinah. Her hands came up, because her hands were all she had.

And they closed on it. They closed on something that had gone through steel and through Norah, and through Laura twice tonight, as if none of them were there. Katherine’s fingers closed on its wrist and its ragged shoulder and they didn’t go through. They held.

The thing stopped dead. Its howl broke in the middle.

Katherine’s face changed in the same instant the howl did. Laura, watching from thirty yards off, saw it happen to both of them at once. The thing felt the hands. Katherine felt what she was holding. Neither of them had known.

There was no way on Earth for Katherine to tell anybody what had just happened. She did it again instead.

She let go with her right hand and struck at its face, open-palmed and full-armed. It landed. The thing’s head snapped around and its whole shape shuddered like a sheet in a gust. She took hold again, one hand clamped on its wrist and the other at its throat. She bore down. She drove it backward a full step across the grass, away from Eden, and held it there.

All six of the others turned toward her at once. In the air over the arc and out along the line, every head came around in the same half second toward the naked woman by the tree with her hands on one of them. Nothing passed between them. They simply all felt it.

Sumiku took the opening. Hinode-no-Saku went through one of them from behind while it was still turned. It shrieked and flung itself up and away over the lanterns, and Sumiku let it go, as Laura had told her to.

It was a breath. It was only a breath. Then the six came back around to Laura, all together, and it went on.

“Katherine’s got it!” Chloe’s voice was going hoarse at the edges now. “Her hands work! She’s got it in her hands—she’s holding it!”

“She is,” Riley said. She had seen it from Laura’s shoulder. “It’s trying to go through her the way that one went through Norah, and it can’t. It keeps hitting her like she’s a wall.” She stopped, and made herself go on. “It’s clawing at her arms. She isn’t letting go.”

It wasn’t letting go of her, either. It thrashed in her hands like something pulled up out of deep water, rags whipping, hair flying around both of them. Every time it heaved, Katherine went back half a step. Every time, she set her feet and took the half step back. Her mouth was open. No sound came out of it. Behind her Eden had stopped trying to run. She had come up against Katherine’s back instead, the whole length of her pressed there, her cheek against her sister’s shoulder blade, swaying because swaying was all her body would do, and not an inch farther away than that. Emily’s hands were still on Eden’s waist. Emily wasn’t pulling any more. She was just holding on.

Laura didn’t move.

She couldn’t. The six were back on her, and Sam was in front of her, and Riley and Myra were at her shoulders because she was the thing all seven had come for. If she went to Katherine she would bring every one of them with her, straight into the nine. So she stood in the middle of the grass, half turned toward the tree, and cut at whatever came. Between strokes she watched a naked woman hold a ghost by the throat.

“Standing still,” the voices whispered at her ear. “Right here. Exactly where they told you to stand.”

Her own claws, hanging at her sides. Grass, very close to her face. Two hands that had never moved.

She kept her hands up. One of the six came at her from behind, and she turned and took it across the ragged middle with the claws and felt it tear. It went back. Another came in behind it, and she took that one too. Her arms had stopped feeling like arms. The cold from the two passes had settled deep into her, into the bone. Holding herself as one had stopped being something she was doing and become something she was enduring, and every stroke she made had to be pushed out through both.

Why Katherine? Laura couldn’t make it make sense. Not Norah’s strength, not Sam’s, not the blades on Laura’s own hands. Katherine, with nothing. Katherine, who had spent years in a painting and had only just come all the way out of it. Something about her was built differently from the rest of them, and Laura didn’t know what, and there was nobody on this grass to ask who would know either.

Claire was already moving.

She didn’t go toward the fight, but away from it, a step back and then two. Laura noticed that first, because every other body under the tree was leaning toward Katherine and Eden. Her hand came away from her breastbone and went into the air beside her hip and came back out holding a roll of paper, tied with a ribbon and closed with a dark wax seal.

She turned to Liesa.

She didn’t write anything. She put the scroll into Liesa’s hands and folded Liesa’s fingers around it with both of her own, firmly. She tapped the dark seal with one fingertip. Then she touched her own throat, just under the jaw, and held her fingers there.

Liesa looked down at the scroll as if it might bite her.

“Me?” Liesa’s voice went high. “Claire, no. Is English. Is old English, some kind—look at it, the writing—” Her hips were moving under the dress, a slow roll from side to side that had nothing to do with anything she wanted, and she didn’t seem to notice it at all. “I read it wrong, it does nothing. Or it does the wrong thing, and then—”

Claire tapped the seal again.

That was all. One fingertip, on the wax, and then her eyes on Liesa’s, and her ears straight up, and her tail gone still behind her.

Liesa broke the seal.

Her thumb went through the wax on the second try. She looked once at Claire, and once past her at Katherine by the tree with a ghost by the throat. Then she unrolled the paper with hands that weren’t steady, held it up close to her face in the lantern-light, and read it out loud.

“Sib sy mid eow,” Liesa read. It sounded almost like English, and Laura couldn’t follow a word of it: thick consonants, old swallowed endings. But Liesa’s accent, which fought every English sentence she had, settled into it as if it had come home. “Sib sy mid eow, þe—þe yrre sindon.”

Peace. Peace upon you who—who rage.

Nothing happened.

Claire had a hand flat between Liesa’s shoulder blades. Marissa’s arm was still around her waist, and Marissa didn’t seem to know it was there any more than she had all night. Chloe stood in front of the three of them with her fists balled in the sleeves of the sweater. Liesa looked at none of them. She kept her eyes on the paper.

She kept going. Her voice climbed, trying to find the level Chloe’s had found, and didn’t find it. She read anyway, loud and a little wrong, her hips still rolling slowly under the dress as if she were dancing to something very far off.

“Pesað—” Liesa stopped dead. Be erased—

Laura saw her mouth stay open and her eyes go back along the line of writing. Liesa’s lips moved without sound. Then she found it.

“Wesað,” Liesa cried, much louder. “Wesað geliþode. Wesað geliþode, and beoð slawe, and beoð stille. Lecgað þæt yrre adune þær ge standað, forþon hit is hefig—” Her breath caught. “Forþon hit is hefig, and ge hit to lange bæron.”

Eased. Be eased. Be eased, and be slow, and be still. Lay the anger down where you stand, for it is heavy— For it is heavy, and you have carried it too long.

The howl went out of the glade.

It didn’t stop, not all at once. It dropped. Underneath it was a silence Laura hadn’t heard since the bell. In the air over the arc the six of them slowed. They slowed as if they were moving through something thicker than air, their hair and their rags drifting now instead of streaming. And on their faces, which had been fixed in rage and in pain since the dome came down over the Dance Hall, it was not the pain that went out, but the rage.

The pain stayed. Without the rage over it, the pain was much worse to look at. They hung there in the lantern-light like women who had been walking for a very long time and had forgotten where to. At her ear, the voices slowed too.

“On a staircase, with the—” the voices murmured, and dragged. “With the rail—the rail—” And they ran down in the middle of the word like a record with the power cut, and were quiet.

Laura stood in the silence they left and found she was shaking.

By the tree, the one Katherine held had gone slack between her hands. Katherine didn’t let go of it. She stood with her arms locked and her chest heaving, and watched its face, and held on.

“That won’t hold,” Erin said. Erin’s eyes were open, and she was looking at the six in the air the way she looked at weather. “Look at them. It’s already slipping. It’s not going to hold.”

Under the tree Liesa had lowered the scroll to her chest and was holding it there with both hands, her lips still moving on the last line.

Erin was right. Laura could see it starting in the nearest of them: a twitch at the corner of the fixed mouth, a lock of hair beginning to lift again in the wind that wasn’t there.

Emi walked out.

Laura didn’t see her leave the tree. She saw her already on the grass, past Liesa and past Claire, walking straight across the open ground toward the line. There was no weapon in any of her six hands and nothing in her face but attention. She walked past Norah lying on the right. She walked out past the right-hand end of the arc, toward one of the six that hung low there over the grass.

“Emi!” Dawn had gone three steps out after her before anybody could stop her, out from under the branches onto the open grass. “Emi, no. Come back. Emi, come back!”

Emi didn’t turn round. She kept walking, not fast, and spoke to the thing in front of her as if it were the only thing in the glade.

“Hey,” Emi murmured to it. “Hey. Come down here. You don’t have to be up there any more.”

It stopped. Its head turned. Its eyes, which Laura had never once seen look at anything but her, looked down at Emi. The pain in them, the anguish, the horror, was so much Laura couldn’t understand how Emi could stand to look at them.

Emi stopped too. Her eyes were wet. “Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You don’t deserve any of this.” She put out one hand, palm down, not touching it. She held it there.

Behind her, Dawn had stopped where she was, three steps out onto the open grass, alone. She didn’t go back to the tree and she didn’t go forward. Her hands were up at her chest, knotted together. Her lips were moving again, fast. Her ears had gone flat to her skull. The others were all behind her under the branches. Emily was a dozen feet off to the side with her arms still around Eden, and whatever it was that Emily did to a frightened room, it wasn’t reaching that far. Laura could see the difference from where she stood. Everything near Emily had gone still. Dawn, out on the grass, was shaking like a wire.

Laura had known Emi since they were children. She knew what was in Emi’s blood, as much as any of them knew it; she had felt it once herself, in a dream that had turned out not to be a dream, with Emi walking through the inside of her head as calmly as she was walking through this grass. But she had never seen Emi look the way she looked now. There was nothing in Emi’s face that had needed to find courage. Everyone else in the glade was afraid, and Emi, alone of all of them, wasn’t, and Laura couldn’t tell whether that should comfort her or frighten her more.

The waiting was what frightened her. Emi stood still in the open in her wedding dress with one hand held out. The thing came down out of the air toward her by degrees—a foot, and a pause, and another foot—until its face was level with hers. The two of them held there, a yard apart, in the open grass in front of everybody. And the scroll’s quiet was going.

Laura could hear the howl beginning to come back up underneath it, thin and far, from all around the glade. The others were moving faster already. Any one of them that understood what it was looking at could have crossed that grass in a heartbeat and put a hand through Emi, and Emi would not have seen it come.

Sam saw it before she saw the point of it. “Emi’s standing still out there!” She had half turned, the plate grinding. “She’s wide open. She’s just standing there! Sumiku!” The name cracked out across the glade. “Off the left! Go—get over her. Cover her!”

Sumiku went. She came off the left in one long stoop, wings half folded, and dropped to the grass beside Emi. The naginata came low across all four of her arms. Her tail lashed. She faced out, between Emi and everything else on the field. Myra let go of Laura’s shoulder without a word and went to the left end of the line to hold what Sumiku had left, the white cane up in both hands.

The six were speeding up. Laura could feel them turning back toward her, one after another, the scroll wearing thin on them like a coat worn through at the elbows.

Five of them loose, with Katherine holding one and Emi another, and Laura had Riley on one shoulder and nothing on the other.

One of them came at the open shoulder almost at once, slowly still, but not slowly enough. Sam met it. She turned from the waist with Thrustworthy flat, and the broad blade took it across the middle. It went back tumbling through the air with the howl coming up in it again, thin and furious. Riley’s hair lashed out past Laura’s ear after it and caught nothing. Laura set her feet and held her claws up and waited for the next. Her own hour was running. She could feel it running, like sand in a glass she couldn’t see.

In front of Emi, whose face shield nothing but empathy and sorrow, the ghostly woman was crying. The pain was still in it, but softened now, blurred, as though it were being seen through water. The hair had stopped moving. The rags hung down still. And as Laura watched, the woman sank out of the air the last little distance and settled into the grass at Emi’s feet. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up a little and her eyes shut, with the kind of small, boneless settling that a child does when she has been carried in asleep from the car.

Emi looked down at her.

“She’s asleep,” Emi said. She said it to Sumiku, but it carried. “That’s all I did. She isn’t gone, and I didn’t hurt her. She’s asleep.” She drew her hand back and folded it with the other five in front of her. “And she won’t stay asleep. She’ll wake up, and I can’t keep her under when she does. I don’t know how long.”

Sumiku looked at the sleeping woman in the grass for a long moment. Her tail went still. The naginata’s point had sunk until it almost touched the grass beside the woman’s shoulder.

“Does she feel anything,” Sumiku asked, “sleeping like this?”

“No,” Emi said. “Nothing. Not now.” She looked at Sumiku’s weapon sadly. “Give her grace. Give her rest.”

Sumiku looked at the woman, and something complex flashed on her face. Sympathy, pity. Two of Sumiku’s hands came off the naginata and folded together in front of her, briefly. Then they went back to the shaft.

She put Hinode-no-Saku through the sleeping woman where she lay.

The woman didn’t come apart. She didn’t shriek, or tear, or scatter into nothing like the one on the line had done. She went out: there, and fading at the edges, and gone. When Sumiku drew the blade back, the grass where the woman had been lying wasn’t even flattened.

Emi stood looking at the place. Her six hands were folded in front of her, two by two by two, and her face was quiet. Sumiku stood beside her with the naginata point-down in the turf and didn’t move either. For the space of a breath the two of them stood over the empty grass together, like two people at a graveside after everyone else has gone back to the cars.

“She went out,” Riley said, slowly. Her hair had drawn back in around her shoulders, a dozen locks gone quiet at once. “She didn’t come apart. The other one came apart, on the line, the one Sumiku took apart first. That one just vanished.” Riley swallowed hard. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if it’s for good.”

The last of the scroll’s quiet went after that. The howl came back up from every side of the glade, and the five that were loose came with it, fast again, their faces set hard in the old rage again. They came at Laura. They came from every side at once. Sam met one on the sword. Riley’s hair took another. Myra’s cane swung blind into a third. The last two went over the top, and Laura put her claws into both, left hand and right, and felt them tear free.

The voices came back with the howl. They had found their place again.

“Here,” the voices breathed. “On this grass. Before morning.”

Turf against her cheek. A lantern, very high up, swaying on its hook.

“—in a room full of people, and not one of them looking at you—”

A long table. Candles. Every chair turned the other way.

One of them got a hand on her.

Not through her. On her. It came in under Sam’s sword, low, and its fingers closed around her right wrist and held.

She raked at it with her left hand. A second one came down out of the dark and took that wrist too.

Both arms. She couldn’t lift either. The claws hung useless at the ends of them, and then she felt the pull begin. It wasn’t hard, not yet: a steady drawing, like a tide, toward the dark beyond the lanterns. Her heels slid an inch in the wet grass. She threw her weight back against it, and the merge buckled under the strain. She felt the three of her pulling at the seams of the one. If she came apart now, it would have all three of her by the wrist.

She held. She held the merge and she held the ground, both at once, and it was the hardest thing she had ever done with a body.

“Riley—” It came out of her as a croak.

Riley’s hair hit the first one from four sides at once. Myra came back off the left at a run and swung the cane two-handed into the space beside Laura’s other wrist. Something shrieked. Both sets of fingers opened. Laura came loose so suddenly she staggered. Myra was already running back to the left.

Laura stood and breathed. There was a ring of cold around each wrist.

Out on the open grass, Dawn had started to shake harder. Laura could see her whenever she turned her head. Dawn hadn’t moved. Her hands were knotted together so tightly the knuckles showed. Her lips had been moving on and off all night, and Laura understood now, watching them, that they had not been praying.

“Dawn?” Emily had turned her head from where she stood with Eden. “Dawn. Dawn, look at me.”

Dawn didn’t look at her. “He needs help,” Dawn whispered to the grass in front of her, to the lanterns, to the air.

“He’s needed help since the floor went. It hasn’t stopped. It hasn’t stopped once, not for one second, the whole time. It keeps going, it keeps telling me, he needs help, he needs help, he needs—” Dawn’s voice climbed and cracked and kept climbing. “And it never tells me where! It never once tells me where! That’s what it’s for! That’s the one thing I’m for when it goes off—I go. I find him, and I go to him, and I help. That’s all it’s ever—”

She was shouting now. Laura had never heard Dawn shout like that.

“And I can’t!” Dawn’s whole body jerked with it. “I’m standing in a field. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t find him. I can’t do the one thing, I can’t do the only thing, and it won’t stop telling me, it won’t stop, it won’t—”

Her voice went up past anger into something that wasn’t anger at all, a sound with no bottom to it.

And then Dawn Moreno went up. The light erupted out of her all at once, from everywhere. Gold. It came through her skin and her hair and the wedding dress, bright enough that Laura’s shadow sprang out long behind her across the grass. Nobody had time to run, or even so much as duck. Every woman in that glade held where she stood.

The light washed out across the grass. It went through Laura, and it was warm, and the cold in her eased. She felt it let go of her shoulder first, then of the place under her ribs, then of the rings around both her wrists: every place the seven had put their hands, and all the cold they had left sunk into the bone. Her next breath went in deep and easy. The light went over the line and the arc and the coils, warm and glorious and holy, over Sam in her plate, over Riley and Myra and Erin on her knees, over Norah lying in the grass. And it took the six that were left of the seven.

The two still over the line came apart in the air.

The one Katherine was holding went out of her hands. One moment Katherine’s fingers were clamped on a wrist and a throat, and the next they closed on nothing, and she stumbled forward a step into the space where it had been.

The other three went down. They dropped out of the air into the grass and didn’t get up, and when Laura looked again there was nothing where they had fallen but grass.

The light went back into Dawn, or went out. Laura couldn’t tell which. The glade was quiet.

Laura stood in it with her claws still up, and waited for something to come at her out of the dark, and nothing came. Sam didn’t lower the sword. Riley’s hair hung in the air around her, waiting. Out at the left end Myra had turned her face toward the tree, still, as she would turn it toward music.

Dawn was standing exactly where she had been, looking at nothing. Her arms had fallen to her sides. What was on her face wasn’t triumph, but exhaustion, gray and wet and complete. Her knees buckled, and she swayed, about to fall. Chloe got to her first. She came out from under the tree at a run in the oatmeal sweater and reached for Dawn, grabbing her before she could collapse.

“I’ve got you,” Chloe said. “Dawn. Can I—okay. Okay. I’ve got you.” She put both arms around her. “Sit down. Sit down with me, right here. You don’t have to do anything else.”

Dawn’s knees went, as if a string holding her up had been cut. Chloe went down with her, and the two of them sat in the grass with Chloe’s arms around Dawn and Dawn’s face in the wool.

Emily was already moving the other way. She left Eden with Katherine and went fast across the grass to where Norah had been lying since the line broke. She knelt and put both hands on her. She must have knelt like this beside a hundred frightened people down here, back when the Garden was where she lived and worked.

“She’s breathing,” Emily called. “She’s awake. She’s—” Her voice wobbled. “She was so cold, Laura. Like, cold all the way in. It’s going out of her. I can feel it going, she’s getting warm again. She’s here. She’s not going anywhere.”

Norah’s hand came up off the grass, still closed around one of the crystal sticks, and fell back.

Under the tree, Liesa had sat down where she stood with the scroll unrolled across her knees, as if she didn’t trust herself to let go of it yet. Claire was kneeling beside her, reading it over her shoulder, and Marissa had an arm around both of them now and still didn’t seem to know it.

By the tree, Katherine had turned round.

Eden was standing where Katherine had left her, swaying a little. Katherine went to her and stood in front of her, and for a moment neither of them did anything. Then Katherine touched the toe of one bare foot to the toe of Eden’s shoe, and Eden touched back. Katherine leaned in, and their foreheads met and pressed, and held. Eden turned her shoulder into the crook of Katherine’s elbow, and Katherine closed her arm around it.

Sam lowered Thrustworthy until the point touched the grass. “Clear,” she said. The plate’s shoulders came down an inch. “We’re clear.”

“We’re not,” Riley said. She said it at once, flatly. “The one Sumiku cut came back,” Riley said. “Whole. Walking. It felt like about a quarter of an hour.” She looked out at the empty grass beyond the lanterns, where the pasture began. “I wasn’t counting then.”

Riley shut her eyes. “I’m counting now.”

Nobody argued with her. Out beyond the arc the coils were settling slowly back into the turf, and Erin was still on her knees with her palms flat, and Sumiku stood over a patch of grass with nothing in it, with Emi beside her, all six hands folded, looking across the glade at Dawn. Laura stood in the middle of all of it, one woman, with the cold gone out of her and only the weight of holding on left, and let go.

The one of her opened into three. All three of her stood swaying in the wet grass, and the relief of it was so enormous that for a moment she couldn’t see. She hadn’t wanted to let go. She had to. She didn’t know how long she had held it, twenty minutes or thirty, and she didn’t know how fast an hour came back once it was spent. If they came again, she would need whatever was left of it.

The rest of her counting was shorter. Norah’s was gone until the around turned over. Every other woman’s was still there, one each. She hadn’t needed Katherine’s, or Emi’s, or Claire’s, or Dawn’s, sitting in the grass with Chloe’s arms around her. None of them had put a foot wrong all night.

She reached down the bond. He was alive, and afraid, and both at once.

It hadn’t changed.