The pheasant’s wings suddenly flapped, stirring dust. Its head moved stiffly, the beak opened, and a wheezing sound emerged while the wings continued to flap, faster now. It was like some doll brought to life, testing alien limbs.
He had never known he had this kind of power inside him. Gerik and Uncle brought bodies to him and he revived them; it had always been that way, but he had never tested himself like this.
The pheasant thrashed, and he could feel its panic the way he had felt Amsel’s hunger. Very soon, I will let you go, he thought, hoping maybe the animal would sense him, too. But I need your help.
The pheasant’s wings settled into a restless flutter. He tugged it free from the base. Wires ripped from its feet, but the bird didn’t seem bothered. It half-flew, half-crashed to the ground, where it limped a few steps, head turning from side to side. It seemed to be blind and silent. All the better. He could revive every animal in this room before Arabella returned.
Now he knew to free the birds from their bases first and revive them afterward—two ducks with rounded black crests, a white egret with long plumes, a fierce owl, all brought to life, making attempts to fly, crashing into walls. He watched them for a moment, the initial rush of bringing them to life fading as, again and again, a brief ruckus of wings ended in a thump against the wall.
He scooped up one of the ducks. Tucked under his arm, it stopped struggling. Just one more…
He turned to the gazelle. It was only about two feet tall, but the horns were fierce enough to skewer someone.
He pushed magic from his fingers, imagining it coursing down the gazelle’s legs like running water. The head creaked sideways. It moved even more stiffly than the birds did, its limbs making squeaks and groans, but when he tried to urge it toward the door, it wheezed and attempted to run, smacking pell-mell into the side of the fireplace.
“It’s all right,” he said, stroking the animal’s back. The fur was thin in places. “I won’t keep you long.” The gazelle calmed.
He remembered feeling Amsel’s fear when the cat went without serum. Seeing the way the animals responded to his touch, he wondered if the transfer of thought could go the opposite way. Maybe he could keep them calm, influence their movements.
He shouted, “Mrs. von Kaspar! Get back in here!”
She pushed through the door, her mouth opening to speak and then hanging silent as she took in the birds flapping madly around the room. Her face drained of color. Keep moving! He tried to push his thoughts toward them. This way! The egret knocked against her hip, and the key in her hand clattered to the floor. He had meant to simply run, but this was even better. He snatched up the key.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Arabella kicked him in the head, scraping his cheek. He shoved his elbow into her, trying to knock her down, but she held her ground.
“Don’t move.” She pointed the pistol at him. “Drop the key.”
He went still, but he kept the key.
“What have you done?” she growled. “What kind of grotesque magic is this?”
“I’m done with doing magic at someone else’s orders. I’ll let the dead go—after I’ve freed them.”
“You’re only making it worse, Freddy. You’re a monster just like the men who’ve kept you.”
“You call me a monster? You’re giving up on your own daughter!”
Arabella’s gaze darkened even further. “Of course I don’t want to give up on Sigi. You don’t know how badly I want to tell her I’m sorry. But I have no other choice. I—” She broke off as the gazelle struck her with its horns. It moved too awkwardly to do more than throw her off balance, but this was his chance. He flew to the door, slamming it shut behind him, thrusting the key into the lock.
“Stop!” she shouted. A bullet punched a hole in the door. He moved sideways.
He turned the key, tried the handle to see that it was secure, and bolted down the stairs and toward the front door.
Arabella was screaming to be let out, and he heard servants behind him saying, “What’s going on?” and “It’s that boy! Stop him!” But the maid at the door looked somewhere between surprised and bewildered as he rushed past her and flung the door open.
He didn’t stop. He didn’t let himself think about the stitch rapidly developing in his side. He veered down a side street.
When he hit the busier street ahead, with congested traffic and shops, he finally slowed, his breath coming sharp and desperate. He ducked into a stationery shop, knowing he must look half mad.
“May I help you, sir?” asked the man at the desk, but Freddy was too breathless to speak. “Is someone chasing you? Perhaps you should move along if you have no need of stationery.”
“I’m fine,” Freddy gasped. “Just…give me a second.”
He turned his mind back to the animals. He had promised them he would let them go, but he had never released his magic from a distance. This was his test, feeling the threads of magic, even from afar.
He closed his eyes a moment, looking inward. There—
The magic shimmered like memories of dreams upon waking. He felt the sparks of their lives—the birds, the gazelle.
Thank you, he thought before letting them go.
Was Nan dead or dreaming?
A new memory floated into her mind easily, painful though it was.
Sigi was dead.
Arabella told her amid the lively clamor of the club, clutching her drink and her cigarette holder, her eyes dry but seeing nothing around her.
“She’s dead,” she repeated. “And they took her.”
*
The whole account didn’t tumble out until Arabella had Nan back in the privacy of her home. She clutched the edge of her desk as she spoke, as if the news had left her dizzy and she needed something solid to hold on to. Photographs Sigi had taken were scattered in piles everywhere, all those faces and their untold stories.
Sigi’s roommate had found her dead in the apartment, with pills and a suicide note. The girl called the authorities, and no one told Arabella for days.
“They took her to frighten me,” Arabella said, speaking slowly as if she had to let herself absorb her own words. “They know I’m working against them.” She stretched her fingers toward Nan but then drew back, apparently remembering that Nan did not like to be touched. Arabella gripped the desk again.
“I should have checked on her,” she said. “I was—relieved—she had moved out.”
“What did the suicide note say?” Nan asked, still trying to grasp that Sigi could be dead.
“‘Don’t blame yourselves.’ But of course I do. I should. Sigi was usually a happy child, but when she got into a mood, it was a very low mood. I never knew how to talk to her, even when she was younger. She looked just like her father, dark and stocky. My fault for marrying an ugly man with money, I suppose. But Sigi never even seemed to care if she was pretty or if anything around her was pretty. I always liked pretty things, myself. That desire to capture beauty was what made me into an artist when I was young.”
“Her photographs aren’t beautiful, maybe,” Nan said, reaching for one of a workman with large ears and gnarled hands. “But they are…” She smiled wryly. “There’s something about them.”
“I—I also got all her diaries, her papers,” Arabella said. “She wouldn’t want me to read them, I know. She tears me apart in them. But I understand her, for the first time, when I read them. All her compassion and her pain…I wanted her to be like me. I’ve failed her.”
“And you think they’ve sent her underground?”
“I know they have.”
Nan realized then that a pile of papers next to her chair was Sigi’s, too, the top sheet a turbulently scribbled poem. Why did Nan feel so strange, looking at Sigi’s photographs and papers? She had barely known her. Sigi seemed to be everything Nan was not. Full of feelings, so many they had ove
rwhelmed her. They had spilled into art, and now her art was all that was left of her.
Only, no. She was underground, where she certainly wouldn’t have a camera, probably wouldn’t even have paper.
“What can we do?” she asked Arabella. “If there’s no way to get to the underground…”
“There is one way, of course,” Arabella said, toying with one of her earrings.
“To die,” Nan said. “But you think I’m an immortal guardian of fate.”
“I never said—”
“I found your book,” Nan said. “You’d scribbled a note in the margin.”
Arabella’s expression shifted slightly, almost to irritation, as if Nan had broken the rules of the game. “Well,” she said, “you fit the description.”
Nan felt something unfold within her. It should have been fear, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t like other people. She had always felt like there was something she must fight. Something she must do.
And now she was here.
“I could do it,” she said. “I could die.”
“No one ever comes out of the underground,” Arabella said, with a note of caution. But Nan could see that she was hopeful. Nan didn’t care; she wasn’t doing this for Arabella. Maybe a little bit for Sigi. But mostly it was for herself. Maybe this was how other people felt when they fell in love, a sense that fate was working as it should.
“I will,” Nan said. “If there’s any way, I’ll find it.”
Arabella nodded slowly. “Yes…yes…When they bring you back, Nan, you will see the one who is causing all this. You have to try to stop him. Do whatever you have to do.”
“But if I kill the person who is doing this, won’t Sigi die with him?”
“Sigi has died,” Arabella said, sweeping up the photographs. “She chose death. That moment when you are brought back might be our only chance to save her, at least, from a worse fate.”
“I see,” Nan said. “I don’t think they would let me have a weapon on me when they bring me back.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But you must see if you can find a way.” The eagerness in her tone suddenly dropped away. “You really are prepared to do this, my dear? Death is—”
“I know what death is,” Nan said, feeling her first small tremor of fear. She forced it down.
*
Nan couldn’t do it at home. She had to go somewhere where her body would just be another poor anonymous soul, perhaps with radical ideas, because those were the people who disappeared.
She went to the club, to see Thea one last time. If her resolve faltered, it was renewed when Thea apologized for not seeing much of Nan anymore. Her mother’s bound-sickness kept getting worse. Nan was doing this for her, too—to set her mother free.
In the wee hours of the morning, she walked to Frederstrasse with nothing in her pockets but a copy of the Worker’s Paper and the small glass vial of amber poison Arabella had given her.
She ducked into an alley next to one of the coffee shops and fished out the bottle.
Thea’s worried face sprang to mind. She would be hurt that Nan had left without an explanation, but she would never understand. Thea would never let Nan do it.
Nan drank.
Her heart began beating faster. Her stomach felt very warm. She tried to cough. It was harder to breathe. She collapsed, thrashing and writhing on the packed dirt of the alley. Her eyes fluttered.
She could hear the familiar thrum of music in her mind, growing louder and louder.
Nan saw nothing anymore. She clawed at the ground with her last bit of strength. Pain roiled through her stomach. Her body betrayed her. It had always been strong, and now it was helpless and suffering, and she wanted to cry out but could only gurgle and gasp.
This was death—
The familiar, comforting music swelled through her, and suddenly she was free. She was one with that sound that was more than sound, the music of life itself, and it was more beautiful than it had ever been.
*
She became aware of her body all at once, a physical world of ceiling lights blaring in her eyes, clinical smells, and a cold surface beneath her.
Nan woke as if from a dream and looked into the face of an unfamiliar boy.
“Where am I?” she asked, blinking. All her senses seemed heightened.
Something was wrong, and she ought to know what, but she couldn’t. “Who are you?” she asked.
And then she remembered. Arabella. Sigi. The underground.
But it was already too late.
Nan woke with a cry.
What had happened? Her feet were bound, but not her hands.
Right. Freddy. Freddy had been here. And then she had dreamed of the first time she died. This time, the second, was far worse. She let out a breath. It didn’t hurt quite as much now, and the pain that remained was not unwelcome. The air dragging through her lungs, the piercing ache in her chest, the bruises—and the trees out her window. They looked different. A different kind of gray, almost like…green.
The green of a kiss.
No, that didn’t make sense. The trees were gray to her, now and always, because they were of this world, and she was not.
The door opened with a creak. “You are one stubborn little cuss, aren’t you?” She shut her eyes, still too exhausted to speak, but she heard Valkenrath’s footsteps approach.
His cold hand touched her cheek. Her eyes flew open once more.
He drew his hand back. “Warm. How did you get your hands free?”
“I don’t know,” Nan said, not wanting to mention Freddy, but she was having trouble thinking quickly. She let out a weary sound, not quite a sob, and then coiled her emotions back up. She couldn’t let Valkenrath see her weakness.
“How much do you remember?” he asked.
“Everything. I remember everything.” Arabella and Thea; Sigi who kissed her, and Sigi the monster in the dark, and Sigi the girl with a camera and a suitcase.
“Good,” he said. His face was impassive, craggy with exhaustion. “You’ve died twice now. And yet here you are as if nothing ever happened. How did you do it?”
“I’m not human,” she said. “I’m a guardian of fate. I came here to stop you. You have to listen to me.”
“I think you’re delirious.”
“No. I’m not. You know I came back from the dead. Isn’t that enough that you should believe what I say?”
“I don’t have proof of how you came back from the dead.”
A part of Nan wanted to say, All I know right now is that my chest hurts and I’m tired and I don’t have a clue what to do next. But she did actually know one thing. This man was the core of everything. The magic was Freddy’s, but the plan was his, and if she wanted to fulfill her purpose, she must do something with him.
“I know why you are unable to explain,” he said. “You’re in cahoots with Arabella von Kaspar. She gave you something. Some kind of spell to feign death, or—or you have your own source of serum.” He grabbed her arm, jarring her poor broken body so that she almost wished to return to that dreamy world between life and death. “Tell me everything she said to you, and I won’t hurt you.”
“Arabella didn’t tell me much. She found accounts of people like me, and I believe them, because I know what happened. I killed myself to get to the underground, and although you took my memories from me, I quickly realized I didn’t need your serum.”
She wasn’t sure what was angering him: her calm, or the answers that he clearly didn’t want to believe or understand. She knew it had always bothered him that she didn’t fear him as the other workers did, and now his eyes suddenly flared with fury. He hauled her out of bed arm-first, and she sucked in air, squeezing her eyes shut, trying not to give him the satisfaction of her crying out.
“You aren’t invincible,” he said. “You are hurt.”
“I’m healing,” she said. But right now she felt torn up inside.
“Here is how I see it, Miss Davies. There are a few possibilities. One is that Arabella von Kaspar has given you something to keep you alive and made you swear not to tell. If that is the case, then it is my job to make you tell. The other possibility is that you’re telling the truth. You are here to stop me. You are, as you say, a guardian of fate. But there are so many questions. How are you expected to guard anything if you have no power? Unless you’re keeping it from me.” He shook her shoulders so rapidly she wanted to retch, but her stomach was empty.
Tears trailed down her cheeks. She remembered telling Sigi she never cried, and it was true, but they were coming now, and thinking of Sigi made it worse. Nan had promised Sigi the sunshine, promised that she would not die in the tunnels, and now Nan had nothing. She had no strength, no answers—just this man looming over her who didn’t care about anything.
When she looked at him, she could only seem to imagine him withering like the workers he controlled. Did he love, did he feel, did he see beauty, any more than she did? She didn’t think so, and of course, he didn’t have her inner music, her inner purpose. He might as well have been that man in the tunnels—shambling along, ugly and hungry.
“I pity you,” she said softly.
His eyes narrowed. “I pity no one.”
“I know. You’re dead inside.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I do. For so long I’ve felt that something was wrong, and now I know what it is. You’re the imbalance. You created all of this, not Freddy. He’s just a boy. And you’re just a man. But I am—immortal.” With the word, she summoned all the strength left within her and kicked him. She grabbed his hands. She didn’t quite know what she was doing, but all along she had been able to see the emptiness in his heart. Maybe she could fill it with something. Maybe she could make him see. Or hear.
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