Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  He might already be dead.

  Emma and her best friend had grabbed onto Chase as a safe subject. Safe, in this case, was still dicey. Emma looked out the window. Allison’s face was pale in reflection.

  “If,” Allison said, proving that all the work to remain expressionless was pointless, “you’re worried about what Chase will say, don’t.”

  • • •

  Petal liked snow. He liked going for walks. Being outdoors while Emma carried her end of the lead had pulled out his internal puppy. Allison’s presence confirmed for the rottweiler that some things were still normal.

  Emma avoided the ravine in the winter, at least while walking her dog; he therefore bounded from tree to tree, practically dragging his tongue behind him. Given the utter absence of cars or pedestrians, she was tempted to let him off the lead. Instead, she gave it its maximum play.

  She looked, as she always did, for her father; he wasn’t here.

  Neither was Nathan.

  Nathan’s death had been—until this past week—the worst thing that had ever happened to Emma. Worse—and she thought it with guilt—than her father’s death half a lifetime ago. She cut one sharp, cold breath. Her eight-year-old self would never have agreed.

  But her seventeen-year-old self had had time and distance. She had had her mother, her friends, school life, and her dog. Life’s friction had dulled the edges of that pain until it no longer cut her anytime she returned to it. She could think of her dad now and remember the good things. The funny parts. The comforting bits. She could even remember the anger she sometimes felt.

  Thinking about Nathan was still too painful.

  For a brief couple of weeks, it hadn’t been—because he’d been beside her. He’d been dead, yes—but death hadn’t been the impersonal, silent wall at which she grieved. He had come back. He’d come back to her.

  He’d come back to her at the command of the Queen of the Dead—and he’d left the same way. If he’d been like Longland—dead, but in possession of a body—he’d still be here. He might hear the Queen screaming orders at him in the distance, but he wouldn’t have to obey.

  “Em?”

  Emma forced herself to smile.

  Allison’s exhale was just this side of a snort. “You know I hate the fake smile.”

  Emma shrugged. “Sometimes I’m better at making it look like a real one.” She shook her head. “Look at the two of us—we’re both having boyfriend trouble.”

  “Only one of us is having boyfriend trouble,” Allison replied. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “That’s harsh,” the non-boyfriend said, as he stepped around the trunk of a not particularly large tree.

  NATHAN DOESN’T SEE THE QUEEN for three days.

  He has his own rooms. They are not small, but they’re not modern; he’s not given a computer or a phone or a television. The rooms seem to have materialized from the pages of a stuffy Victorian novel or a Hollywood set. The bed, in particular. It has curtains.

  Nathan can’t actually tell what color they are, beyond dark. He understands that he is meant to sleep in the bed. His body theoretically requires sleep now. The problem is, Nathan doesn’t. There’s a disconnect. He lies down anyway. He lies down after changing into what might pass for pajamas. He closes his eyes. It makes no difference. He is not asleep, and he will not sleep. He won’t dream.

  He won’t have nightmares. But if he refuses to lie down, if he refuses to try, he weakens. It’s not exhaustion, not exactly—but it’s what exhaustion would be if he were standing to one side of himself and looking in from the outside. His body requires sleep.

  In the silence, though, it’s hardest. When he is still, when he is not in constant motion, he can hear the voices of the dead. He thinks of them as his dead, because they’re part of him; they surround him with their cold, their lack of life. He hears their muted whispers. They are not angry at him. He’s not certain they’re aware of him at all; he’s not certain they’re aware of each other.

  The first night, he tries to speak with them. To speak to them. Mostly, he apologizes. He wants them to understand that he didn’t ask for this, didn’t choose it. That’s guilt talking, and if Nathan’s not Emma or his mother, it still keeps him going for at least an hour.

  No one replies. Or perhaps they do: They cry. They plead. He can’t make out most of the words, but he doesn’t need them. They could be speaking binary and he’d still understand the meaning.

  If he’s moving, he can ignore the voices. They’re so quiet that it’s only in silence that they can be heard at all. But the body itself won’t keep moving; it collapses in inconvenient ways, as if it’s run a race that he somehow missed.

  This is not living.

  Maybe if he’d been dead for long enough, it might seem similar. He kind of doubts it—but sometimes the dead notice him, and they stare at him with a blank, silent envy. As if they can no longer tell that he’s dead.

  The living look at him differently. Or maybe he’s overthinking because the living can see him now. He’s not a mute, invisible spectator. He’s a mute, visible one. The Necromancers of the Queen’s court don’t expect a lot of talk from the dead—even the resurrected. That’s what they call Nathan: resurrected.

  If they die in service to the Queen, they, too, will be able to escape death.

  He doesn’t tell them that there is no escape.

  • • •

  Nathan needs to eat. He needs food the way he needs sleep. He gets hungry, but the sensation is faint, and he doesn’t, for the first day and a half, identify the fuzzy feeling as hunger. Food, however, is delivered to his rooms. The young woman who delivers the food is silent; Nathan thanks her, and she looks straight through him. Given that she can see him, he finds this surprising.

  But she’s dressed in a uniform that would be at home in the same universe the rooms are. And she’s followed by a ghost. This shouldn’t surprise him. It does, but it shouldn’t. The Queen can’t keep tabs on the living the way she can on the dead—and the dead, absent bodies, can’t perform the menial tasks a living Queen requires. Even if they have bodies, they’d probably be terrible cooks.

  So the girl in the uniform is either a Necromancer in training or a regular person who works for the Queen. But a regular person wouldn’t be dragging a ghost behind her. The young girl grimaces as Nathan thanks the servant.

  He frowns.

  The girl sticks her tongue out. “I’m not with her,” she tells him.

  Nathan almost asks the child if the servant can see her. He doesn’t.

  “You’re not very smart,” the child continues. “I’m just keeping an eye on you. For the Queen.”

  Because he isn’t certain that the servant isn’t a Necromancer, he doesn’t say anything. The dead child leaves with the servant.

  • • •

  He eats. He doesn’t taste food. He is aware of the difference between textures, but everything about the experience is bland. He doesn’t feel full when he stops. He has no desire to continue.

  If he needs food, he probably needs water more. He doesn’t feel thirst, but he drinks. He’s never liked the taste of alcohol of any stripe—and he’s clearly been given wine, judging by the shade of gray in the glass—but in this, being dead is helpful. Wine has no taste, either.

  • • •

  He does bleed. He’s apparently gotten used to walking through walls, and that doesn’t work so well with a body. Gravity works far better than it did a few days ago, as well. He would have said that no one gets used to being dead, but he would have been wrong.

  He doesn’t feel attached to his body. He feels it as if it were a straitjacket. He has to learn its rules and its requirements, but they come to him secondhand, through observation and effort. He makes the effort. If the Queen is absent from the throne room, her presence is felt everywhere in the long halls; she casts
a shadow the size of the citadel.

  He doesn’t ask to leave it. He doesn’t ask for anything. Learning how to mimic life takes up most of his time. He does learn. He can read; there are books in his rooms. They’re old, so he assumes they’re musty; his sense of smell is—like everything else—poor. But he can read the words themselves. Reading was never one of his big hobbies. But as he becomes accustomed to the daily routine of life among the living, his fear and uncertainty gives way to boredom.

  It is when he’s reading that the young girl returns, peering through the door without actually fully entering the room itself. She watches him. He ignores her. It takes a bit of effort; there’s something about her that is loud, even in the silence.

  “What’s it like?” she finally says. Her head, from the neck and shoulders, is now fully in the room. The rest of her is on the other side of the door.

  Nathan knows what she’s asking. “Same as being dead but less convenient.”

  The child frowns. “Really?”

  Nathan’s aware that she could be the equivalent of a hundred years old, by now; her appearance gives no indication of how long she’s been dead, given the Queen’s preferred style of dress. The dead wear what she wants.

  The girl sidles her way into the room and sits. She sits in midair. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she tells him, folding her arms.

  “Oh?” Nathan sets the book aside. He’s seen Allison do this a hundred times over the years when dealing with Toby, her perpetual annoyance-in-residence. Except that Toby’s not in residence anymore.

  “You’re supposed to be alive again.”

  “Do I look alive to you?”

  The girl frowns. “ . . . No. But she says you’re alive now.”

  He doesn’t ask who. “I don’t understand how I can look alive to her—she’s the Queen. Of the Dead.”

  The child shrugs. “She’s always seen what she wants to see. It used to make our mother so angry.”

  If Nathan weren’t already caught in the perpetual chill of the dead, he’d freeze. “Your mother?”

  She nods. “It’s funny. She has our mother’s temper, but she hated it in our mother. Why are you staring? She’s alive—she had to be born somehow.”

  “You’re—you’re her sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “Her—her baby sister.”

  “I’m older than you are.”

  “How are we counting, exactly?”

  She snorts. She is the only dead person Nathan’s met who doesn’t seem terrified of the Queen.

  “Why don’t you have a body?” he asks, before he can catch the words and reel them back.

  “Because Eric’s not here.”

  This makes about as much sense as half of what falls out of the mouths of children who look her age. “Eric can’t give you a body.”

  “No. But she’s saving her power. She said. And then she made you one. She’s made bodies for her knights. Just not me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t want to worry about me dying.”

  This makes about as much sense to Nathan as anything else the Queen has done.

  The girl is not impressed. “I’m already dead,” she points out.

  “Duh.”

  “So she doesn’t have to worry that anything worse will happen. If she resurrects me, someone could kill me.”

  “And then you’d be dead again. You wouldn’t be any farther behind.”

  “No.” The child is quiet for a long moment, and then she says, almost conspiratorially, “But I’d be away from her. It would be harder for her to find me.”

  “It would be easy for her to find you.”

  “How?”

  “How does she find any of the rest of us?”

  “She binds you.”

  “But not you.”

  “No. I’m her sister.” Just in case he is stupid, she adds, “I’m important to her. She trusts me.”

  And not any of the rest of the dead. Nathan doesn’t bother to put this into words. He tries to find the little girl charming. “She didn’t kill you.”

  “Are you stupid?”

  “Sometimes.”

  The girl snorts. “No. Other people did—but she found them. You’re probably walking on some of them,” she adds.

  “I can’t hear them, if I am.”

  “No. I can’t hear them either. But she says she does. She hears them everywhere.” The girl shrugs. “She hates them, you know.”

  “And the rest of the dead?”

  “What about them?”

  “Does she hate them, too?”

  “Probably not. It’s because of the dead that she can build. The dead give her life. The dead,” she adds, “give you life.”

  “This isn’t life.” Nathan lifts an arm. Flexes his fingers. Lowers his hand. “It probably only looks like life if you’re living.”

  “So . . . why did she resurrect you?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t tell me either. And I’m not her sister. I couldn’t ask.”

  The girl unfolds her legs; she doesn’t bother to actually stand on the ground. If what she said is true, Nathan doesn’t blame her. “Everyone’s afraid of my sister but me.”

  “You have to admit she’s pretty intimidating.”

  The girl shrugs. She shrugs a lot. She walks around the room as if inspecting it. She even puts her hand through Nathan’s book. If she weren’t dead, she would seem like a normal, bored child. Nathan doesn’t believe it, although he tries.

  “So,” she says. “You have a girl?”

  “I thought you said she didn’t tell you.”

  The girl’s smile is bright and feckless. “I lied.” She reaches out experimentally and puts her hand through his right arm, which happens to be closest. He feels a wave of expanding cold at her touch, but it’s not centralized.

  “I don’t have a girl. I don’t have anything anymore. I have a cemetery plot. My real body is probably ash.”

  “Didn’t the Queen tell you that love is eternal?”

  Nathan is getting tired of the girl. “What about yours?” he counters.

  “My what?”

  “Your love. Did you never love anyone when you were alive?”

  She stills.

  “Is your love eternal? Have you found the people you loved? Do you talk to them, spend time with them, comfort them? They should all be dead, right? They should all be here somewhere.”

  He realizes he should shut up. Her eyes are like glass.

  “They’re not all here,” she says, in a voice that no longer suits her body. For a moment her face ripples. Literally ripples—a reminder, if needed, that the bodies of the dead have an elasticity that the living don’t. He looks, briefly, at his hands, and he shudders. “Some of them escaped, before the end. We’re not like the rest of you. We’re not stupid about death. Even if we have no power or light of our own.

  “Some of us took too long to die.” Her face has hardened. She looks like every demon spawn in every bad Hollywood horror movie Nathan’s ever watched.

  He doesn’t step back. “You took too long to die.”

  “I almost didn’t die. If I hadn’t bled to death, she would have saved me. I would be here in the flesh. If I’d stayed quiet. Stayed hidden. If I’d made no noise. I was younger, then. I was afraid. So they found me.

  “By the time she did find me, it was too late. You can see the door, can’t you?”

  Nathan has whiplash.

  “It’s closed. It was never closed before my sister.”

  The words sink in slowly. He knew the truth. Of course he did. But he’s never heard it stated this way. “The Queen closed the door.”

  The girl nods. “She closed it so the
dead couldn’t leave. And she’s never going to open it, either.” She folds her arms and waits. Nathan’s not sure what she’s waiting for. “You’re not very smart.”

  “No. Not usually.”

  The girl’s eyes widen. She laughs. Her laughter is high and thin and as childlike as she looks. “You won’t like it here,” she says, with a touch of innocent malice. “But I’ll like it. You can tell me about love.”

  Nathan’s ambitions—in life or death—have never included long discussions about the nature of love with someone who died too young to experience it.

  “But not now. I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “To find Eric.”

  ALLISON’S FACE WAS ALREADY RED from the cold. She told herself it couldn’t get any redder.

  Petal headed over to Chase and sniffed around him as if he were a tree. He didn’t, however, mark him as if he were one.

  “What,” he asked, with his friendly, easy smile, “do you think you’re doing?”

  “Taking the dog for a walk,” Allison replied, before Emma could. “Unless you’d like to have him pee in your room.”

  Chase wasn’t biting. “He’s an old, half-deaf dog. You’re thinking he’s much protection?”

  “I’m thinking we don’t need a lot of protection, at the moment. We’re in the middle of literal nowhere, and we don’t intend to stay.”

  Emma had been silent throughout. She remained silent, although she pulled the lead in when Petal wandered away from a person who wasn’t offering to feed him. Chase didn’t add criticism, which was theoretically helpful; he didn’t add anything, which was awkward.

  “I should head back,” Emma predictably said.

  Allison would have grabbed her hand if it had been closer. “You’re not going back to the house by yourself.”

  “I’m going back to the cottage with Petal. If Chase is here, you’ll be fine.”