She spoke. She raised her voice. Lowered it. She tried a different harmony; she tried to join her voice to theirs. Nothing.
And then, for one brief moment, she felt something smooth in a way that stone wasn’t; smooth, cold—not ice, but . . . glass. Glass.
“Nathan,” she whispered.
“I’m here. I won’t leave you.” He didn’t say I can’t, but they both knew it was true.
“When you look at the—the exit, you can see what’s beyond?”
“Yes.”
“But you can’t reach it?”
“No. None of us can.”
“I see—I saw—a door. I opened it. Until I did, I saw nothing of what waits. You saw it as a . . . window. A closed window.”
“Yes. It’s like there’s a layer of unbreakable—”
“Glass.”
“Yes.”
Emma lifted her right hand and turned to Helmi. “You said your sister was coming?”
Helmi nodded. “You can’t see her.”
“No.”
“She has to run the long way. She’s not running yet. But she’s moving. If you leave—”
“I can’t.” Emma turned then. To Michael, to Allison, to Amy. “But you can. I think you’ve got time.”
Allison shook her head but said nothing.
“Michael, you have to go with them. You’ve got to take them back to the safe rooms.”
“And you?”
“The Queen of the Dead is coming. I think she’s coming to wherever it is she thinks I am. And she probably knows now. I’m not sure she knows about you yet—she probably will if I don’t—” Emma exhaled.
“I’m going to do something that will grab all of her attention. I’m sure it’ll hold all of her attention as well—and I think you guys can make it out of here. I’m worried about Petal,” she added, which was actually true.
“If she finds you,” Allison began.
It was Chase who cut her off. “Emma doesn’t have what it takes to have you remain here. Before, when she didn’t know what she was going to do—or how—she wanted advice. Support. She knows now.”
“Care to share, Emma?” Amy asked. And it was a question, not the usual demand.
Emma shook her head. “I’m not sure it’s a plan that stands up to scrutiny. You remember what I did after we got Andrew Copis out of the burned out building?”
Amy nodded.
“That, but—maybe bigger.” She hesitated.
“And you want us gone because you don’t want to have to worry about us.”
“Pretty much,” Chase said.
“Wasn’t asking you,” Amy replied. She pursed her lips, folded her arms, and met Emma’s gaze head on. Emma had no idea what her face looked like; she had no idea whether desperation, fear, or exhaustion currently occupied her expression.
But whatever it was, Amy nodded. “You’d better make it out of here,” she said—and that was the usual demand. “The rest of us probably won’t survive if you don’t.”
“I think she knows that,” Allison said. “Em—you’re sure?”
“She’s sure,” Chase said. Allison wasn’t Amy; she didn’t demand the words come from Emma’s mouth. She trusted Chase. She had never trusted his opinion of Emma before, but clearly, something had changed. She caught Michael by the arm.
Michael looked as if he would argue, but he didn’t.
“It’ll be over soon,” Emma told him, trying—and failing—to be confident.
Michael nodded, and if the nod went on a bit too long, it didn’t matter.
Emma hesitated. “Chase,” she finally said. “Go with them.”
It was Allison who said, “No.”
And it was Margaret who said, “Ernest will go with the children.” Amy didn’t even bridle. To Emma’s lasting surprise, Ernest nodded, grim-faced.
“You need me,” Chase said. “I’m the only other person who can see what you can see.”
“Yes, but you do it in a heap on the floor, Chase, and I’m not thinking that’ll be useful. And if the Queen is on her way here, so is Eric.”
“Unless she’s imprisoned him. What does Helmi say?”
“Helmi says so is Eric,” Helmi said. “She may well imprison him—or worse—when this is over, but she hasn’t taken the time to do it yet. You guys need to move.”
Emma repeated Helmi’s last instruction. “I’ll give you five minutes,” she told them, staring at the floor.
The door opened and closed; the Emery crew were on the move, and they didn’t take the time to move silently. Emma didn’t watch them go; she turned to the wall that Michael had seen as a door. It hadn’t changed. Neither had the floor. Chase moved briefly around the room, emptying his pockets as he did; he was silent, but it was the silence of intent. He armed himself only when he returned to Emma’s side, and he watched the closed door.
Everything in this room was under glass. Metaphorical glass.
Emma turned to Chase. “Ready?”
He nodded. He didn’t ask her what she was going to do. Neither did Nathan or any of the rest of the dead gathered here. Margaret, the magar, Anne, Rose, the remainder of Scoros. And his mother. They hadn’t turned—as Chase had—toward the door; they were watching Emma.
Emma reached for the lantern. It came instantly to her hand.
• • •
Blue light radiated from its center. Not for the first time, she noted the words that were stacked in an even column. She had assumed they were Chinese letters because of the shape of the lantern. She’d been wrong.
“Helmi, do you recognize these words?”
Helmi failed to answer. The light grew brighter, and brighter still—but it wasn’t harsh enough to cause Emma—or anyone present—to close their eyes.
“Helmi?”
“. . . No.” She was lying. She wasn’t lying well, but only a small fraction of her attention was devoted to the attempt. The rest was drawn to, and held by, the lantern.
Emma said, “It’s important.”
It wasn’t Helmi who answered. It was the magar. “She can’t tell you, Emma Hall.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. But it wouldn’t help.”
Emma frowned.
“It is the language of the dead. Anyone dead, from any culture, at any time, would recognize the words—even if they had not been taught to read or write or recognize writing. She could repeat them. I could. Margaret could. You would not hear them unless you yourself were dead.”
“But I can—”
“You can visit, yes. You can occupy the memories of the dead who linger. You can act in the world they create. But you are not dead, and these words are not for the living.”
“Even if they would help the dead?”
“Even so. I have made many mistakes in my life. Many. Making you the keeper of the lantern and its light might prove to be the biggest. But I will not do this. It would be murder.” And the magar had enough on her conscience.
“What exactly are you trying to do?” Chase asked. Of course he did.
“You can’t see it?”
“See what?”
She nodded, as if he’d answered, because he had. She guessed that the light growing steadily brighter as it dangled from her hands would be visible to Necromancers, but she didn’t ask Margaret because it no longer mattered. Helmi had said the Queen was coming anyway.
And even that faded to insignificance as she studied the harsh, brilliant light. It cast no shadows. She turned toward Chase, the only other person who remained in the room who was also alive. The light revealed him in all his uncomfortable glory: shorn red hair, faded freckles, white scars, and yellowed bruises.
“Have I got something on my face?”
“Nose, mouth, eyes—the usual bits.”
“Gallows
humor is my job, thank you very much. Is it just me or is the floor vibrating?”
“It’s been vibrating all along—”
“Not like this.”
Emma frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“If you were standing, barefoot, on the throat of a man, and he was speaking, this is what it would feel like.”
To Emma it was a rumble like thunder, or the earthquakes of imagination, given she’d never experienced one in person. She didn’t argue with Chase, though. If she couldn’t feel the vibrations the way Chase did, she accepted that they were becoming constant.
“What are you trying to do?”
“Truthfully?”
“Let me get back to you.”
She laughed, as he’d no doubt intended. It was a thin sound, but it was genuine. And it was miles better than whimpering or crying.
“But seriously, if you mean to dissolve the chamber, give me a bit of warning?”
“I’ll try.” She looked at the circle engraved in the stone of solid floor. To her eyes, the runes were now glowing, as if light had, like liquid, been upended into their grooves. “Oh.”
“Oh?”
“I think I understand what you were saying, now.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Good,” she said, although she wasn’t certain. She could hear the words without apparent effort or concentration on her part. She could hear raised voices. It was hard to focus on one or two, because the entire chamber was beginning to fill with syllables.
What words could stone speak? What words could be uttered without throat or mouth?
These ones, she thought. She had touched a floor in this floating city, and she had listened. It had been a struggle to hear anything, and it had required the whole of her concentration. Now, she thought, the struggle would be the reverse.
In Toronto, the dead had come to her while she held the lamp aloft, drawn by its light. She had asked for permission to use the power they didn’t even understand they had. She had asked their names. She had promised them that she would open the door. They had given everything that she’d asked them for. Maybe they’d given more.
The dead here were not free to move. They didn’t roam city streets, trapped in memories of lives that steadily receded as people aged and died and the future became the present. They were trapped, instead, in one woman’s dream.
Reyna had dreamed of safety. Of a place in which she would finally be free to love Eric. In which Eric would be free to love her. Emma knew this. She’d heard it, time and again, in Scoros’ memories.
And she was aware that the dream of a girl in love had become a nightmare for countless others—some living, most dead. She didn’t even wonder at it.
She had loved Nathan. Nathan had died. The dreams she had hoarded and guarded so carefully had been irrevocably shattered. She had tried to hold their shards when Nathan—dead—returned to her. She had been so happy to see him. So happy to finally be able to tell him all the things she’d wished she’d said before her words could never reach him again.
She could keep him here.
She knew she could do what the Queen had done. She could house his spirit in something that could pass for flesh. She could hold him, be held by him, be comforted by him. At heart, her dream had been the same as the Queen’s. She had wanted forever, although she’d mostly kept that desire to herself because it was sentimental and sort of embarrassing.
She had wanted a love that never died and never changed.
As if he could hear the words, Nathan came to stand by her side. Guilt sat poorly on his face, but it occupied it nonetheless.
But she shook her head and smiled. She’d done her crying. She’d said her good-byes. If she could talk herself into being what the Queen was, she knew that Nathan would never forgive her. He loved her, yes. She saw that clearly; his eyes were almost shining with it. But he would stop loving her if she became like the Queen of the Dead.
Because he saw her clearly. He’d always seen her clearly. He’d seen her fears and her insecurities and her desire and her fear of that desire. He’d seen her anger, been exposed to her temper, and endured it all by her side, smiling or grave or angry himself. To do what had been done here she would have to be everything she wasn’t, except wildly in love.
What he loved about her would die, just as surely as he had.
She would have taken his hand, but she couldn’t. Even that, he understood.
The voices rose to a crescendo of sound, and Emma raised her voice above them, shouting to be heard. She couldn’t hear her own voice over the din, but it must have been piercing, as all-encompassing to the masses of the dead as their combined voices felt to her. She reached out, one hand free, and touched the stone of floor, into which words had been carved of the dead.
Something shattered.
And just like that, the voices stopped, and there was an echoing silence.
IN THE SILENCE, two words rose from the stone, leaving no grooves or marks in their wake. They left a gap in the circle’s circumference as they came to hover in front of Emma. No, she thought, in front of the lantern. They fluttered there, like moths in a form too cumbersome for actual wings; she could almost feel them battering ineffectually against the lantern’s body.
They spoke.
Emma listened.
The Queen’s name reverberated in the air for a long, long minute, and then it died into silence and stillness. She reached out with a hand instead of the lantern, and the letter forms came to rest on her upturned palm. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. The forms of lines and curves melted around that palm, changing as light spread toward the floor, until she held the hands of two young women; they overlapped in her outstretched palm.
They were her age, maybe slightly younger—or slightly older. She was not surprised to find that they were beautiful, or at least that they had been beautiful in life, with wide, round eyes, long hair, regular, perfect features.
She was also not surprised to see tears.
“Isabella,” one girl said, although Emma hadn’t asked for her name. The other girl didn’t speak. Or perhaps she did and Emma couldn’t hear her; her hand rested over Isabella’s.
“I’m Emma,” Emma told them both.
They nodded. She meant to ask them if they could return to the circle, if they could speak—or sing—her name instead of the Queen’s. She didn’t; she knew, although she wasn’t certain how, that they couldn’t. But there was no name on this circle. Not yet. Not until she could remake what had been unmade.
“This,” the magar said, “is why you found the two.”
But Emma shook her head again, mute now. She turned to the girls, Anne and Rose, both silent. Their attention was focused on the Lantern, not Emma, and something in their expressions made her want to weep. Scoros had kept them safe. He had murdered them. He had been responsible for their horrible, agonizing deaths.
And then he had found what remained.
Even if they were willing to do what the two freed girls had done, she wasn’t certain how to take advantage of that. She wasn’t certain how to force them to be what the girls had been: words. Names that weren’t their own.
“I’m sorry,” she told the magar—and she meant it. “I can’t draw a circle of my own. Not yet. Not in time. But this one can’t be used safely by Reyna, either.”
She lifted the lantern, her arm aching, her heart louder now than her own voice.
And Nathan said, “Let me.”
• • •
She turned to him. “I can’t—” and fell silent.
“Let me, Em. They were her name, right?”
It was the magar who nodded, because Emma was suddenly paralyzed.
“Just her name?”
“It is more complicated than that, but yes. Her name.”
“And the others?
The other words?”
Even as he asked, symbols began to rise, just as the two girls had done. His fists tightened as these words also drifted toward the lantern, pulled, called by Emma Hall. Isabella and the silent, nameless girl withdrew their hands, turning to watch the same transformation they had undergone: words becoming people.
All of these were also Emma’s age—the age she imagined Reyna had been when Eric had died. They were also beautiful. She wondered if Reyna had made that choice consciously or unconsciously; she wondered, as well, if the girls had all been dead when she had chosen them, or if she had simply ended their lives to preserve their deathly appearance.
It didn’t matter.
“What are you doing?” someone asked, sharp-voiced and outraged. Scoros’ mother.
“I’m not doing anything,” Emma replied. “They are.” She watched as the words that described who Reyna thought she was lifted themselves from the stone circle and vanished, one by one.
Only the elemental words remained. They were simple engraving. They did not appear to be written in the ghostly bodies of trapped, dead girls.
“They do not change,” the magar told her. “They would never change. But the other words might, with time and experience. The words that might alter, in time, are the words that are rendered in the dead.”
“It’s not much of a circle, now.”
“No, Emma Hall. And that was foolish of you. You have power, but you lack knowledge; this would have been one of your most effective shields.” But she looked unruffled. Scoros’ mother made up for it. She looked apoplectic.
And Emma didn’t care. Because Nathan’s sentence had finally cleared the fog of her thoughts and fears. Let me, Em.
She was horrified. The words became the loudest thing in the room. And he knew. Of course he knew. He’d known her better than anyone except maybe Allison.
“Those words—they’re a description of who you are, right? And the first two—your name?” Nathan continued to speak.
She couldn’t even answer. She had taken Nathan’s chain—if that was even the right word, but she hadn’t taken it to use him. To consume him. She hadn’t—
“Em—give me the choice, okay? Don’t make it for me. You know I always had problems with that.”
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