X strode toward them, Ripper at his side. He was so close to his bounty that the Trembling had all but taken over his body and begun breathing for him. He never felt more inhuman, more monstrous, than in these moments. He was ashamed that Zoe would see him like this a second time. She’d see him shake and scream and spit vile oaths, all the tenderness she’d awoken in him suffocated by rage.
Could she really choose him? Over her own father?
X looked to her for a sign that she was still committed to their plan, but she was turned away. He couldn’t make himself believe that he deserved her. The sensation of being loved was still too alien and new. He wanted to trust it, wanted to wrap himself in it, wanted to give himself up to it entirely. But this anger coursing through him made him feel polluted. Unworthy. Undeserving of even the name she’d given him. Love felt like a blanket someone was bound to yank away. The warmer he got now, the colder he would be later.
He needed to see Zoe’s face. He needed to be sure she hadn’t changed her mind.
X turned to her father, and found that he was gaping at him in shock. He held a strange, twisted piece of metal in his hands. Dark water was pooling at his feet.
He seemed to recognize X from their moment on the beach the day before. X could see him replaying the conversation in his head:
“Is this your first time in Canada?”
“Is this Canada?”
X motioned for Ripper to stay behind. She made a small, pouty sound, and stopped walking, the hem of her dress waving above her boots. X went ahead alone.
Yet again he looked to Zoe—and finally she turned.
Her face was aflame with anger. X had never seen her features so distorted. She looked ready to kill her father herself.
She rushed toward X.
She embraced him, but for the first time she felt cold and stiff. Utterly unlike herself. She gripped his arm so hard he could feel her nails even through his coat.
She gestured toward her father.
“He’s the reason Stan killed Bert and Betty,” she said.
“Yes,” said X grimly. “He is.”
“Take him,” said Zoe.
X was startled by her fury. Had he done this to her? While she had been teaching him about kindness, had he been teaching her about rage? He tried to banish this new fear—tried to unthink the thought—but it had taken hold. Its roots were spreading.
Nonetheless, he nodded.
“Go to Ripper,” he said. “Walk to the woods. Do not look back.”
Ripper stepped forward. X did not know how she would greet Zoe—he prayed she would not be sarcastic or manic or dance in some outlandish way—nor how Zoe would respond in her present state.
They were tentative at first, but seemed to recognize something in each other. X could not stop studying them. It occurred to him that they were the only two people who had ever held him, had ever praised him, had ever loved him. He could see his entire life—everything that was decent and humane—in their faces. When X was young, he hadn’t understood that Ripper cared for him as if he were one of her own lost children. He understood it now. He watched as Zoe’s rage began to melt in her presence. He watched as Ripper put an arm around her shoulder, like a great, warm wing.
“I feel as if we are already well acquainted, dear girl,” she said. “Perhaps it is because X made me read your letter aloud twenty-five times.”
Zoe smiled weakly.
X watched as they crossed the lake, their arms linked, their heads touching gently. He heard Ripper tell Zoe that the lords were on their way.
“But they’ll leave us alone once X takes my dad?” said Zoe. “Right?”
“Perhaps they will,” said Ripper.
“What if he decides he can’t take him?” said Zoe.
“I suspect they will make X watch as they murder you in some colorful way,” said Ripper in an incongruously sweet voice. “But perhaps that is too obvious? The lords are a mystery, I confess. One never knows when they will feel the need to be creative.”
X turned at last toward his bounty, who was cowering against the shed and gripping the weird piece of metal as if it might protect him. X tried to tell himself that the man meant nothing to him, that his fate was of his own making, that his only name was 16th Soul.
But when he gazed at him, all he saw was Zoe’s father.
All he saw were Jonah’s eyes.
X pulled the metal out of the man’s hands. He flung it across the ice. It skidded to the far edge of the lake before coming to rest in a clump of dead reeds.
“Have you any other toys we should dispose of?” said X.
The father was too frightened to speak. He looked pleadingly at X—and then he ran.
Why did they always run? Every one of them had run! What made them imagine they could get away?
X watched as Zoe’s father raced for the shore, stumbling and slipping as he went. It was a pathetic spectacle. He remembered telling Zoe that her father was not evil, just weak. Had she not believed him? Could she really hate such a pitiful person, or was she just reeling from the shock and rage? Would she blame X tomorrow—and forever after—for what she’d told him to do today?
With a flick of his hand, X yanked the man back—it was as if he were on an invisible tether—and dashed him against the wooden shed. He left him suspended there, his feet dangling above the ground. With a few more gestures, he sent ice crawling like murderous ivy toward the man’s hands and feet. Zoe’s father watched helplessly as it bound him to the shed.
“What do you want from me?” he said miserably. “You can take anything I have. You can take anything you want.”
“Yes,” said X darkly. “I know.”
“So what do you want?” said Zoe’s father.
X unbuttoned his coat and let it fall to the ice in a heap.
“Just your soul,” he said, “which you have made poor use of.”
X cast his eyes around the lake.
“Which of these holes do you choose for your grave?”
Zoe’s father flailed wildly, but the ice held him fast.
X ignored his exertions—he had seen such desperation many times—and pulled his shirt over his head. The man’s sins were so eager to show themselves that X’s back was burning.
He had to turn off his mind, had to shut out the man’s questions, had to stop looking at his eyes.
X’s body knew what to do. He just had to let his body do it.
He dropped his shirt. It mushroomed briefly as it fell.
He turned away from Zoe’s father, and stretched out his arms. The muscles in his back and shoulders were aching. The cold air stung his skin.
He summoned up the man’s sins. He could feel the terrible images starting to crawl across his back.
Zoe’s father let out a sob.
“I know what I did!” he shouted through his tears. “You don’t have to show me. I know everything I did!”
X was in such turmoil that the words cut through him. He felt more keenly than ever that—whether or not he was only doing what the lords had commanded, whether or not the punishment was just—he was piercing another human being’s heart. Ripper said they were dustmen, but that was a kindly lie. She knew better, and so did he. He was a killer. And worse: he was a torturer.
He lowered his arms before the movie was over.
His back went white.
Behind him, Zoe’s father gave a grateful sob. He tried to stop crying but couldn’t.
When X turned, the man’s chest was heaving and his face was a storm of tears. He looked raw and terrified. A helpless bird.
“Wait, stop, please,” he said. “Talk to me for a second. Just for a second, okay? You love my daughter, right? I can see that. I saw the way you hugged her. I saw the way you looked at her. It’s the way—it’s the way I used to look at her mother.”
X refused to listen. This man was nothing to him. He was just the 16th soul.
“Stop your mouth,” he told Zoe’s father, just as he had once told Stan. “Or I will plug it with my fist.”
Zoe’s father ignored the threat. He knew this was his last chance to speak.
“But if you love Zoe—why do this?” he said. “Why murder her own father?”
X knew he shouldn’t answer, but the words rushed out of him.
“I do it because she asks me to!” he shouted. “I do it because you have hurt her who is dearest to me! I do it because either you or I must be banished to the Lowlands, and I have endured that darkness long enough!” It was as if X were defending the monstrous act not just to Zoe’s father, but to himself. He could not stop. “If I do not take your soul, I will never see Zoe again—never feel her touch, never hear her voice, never curl her hair around my fingers. My heart was born in winter, sir, and I will not go back to the cold.”
Zoe’s father said nothing.
He had run out of words, as they always did.
But just as X was about to take the 16th soul down from the shed and plunge him into the lake, the 16th soul started screaming Zoe’s name.
His voice was startling. It tore the air open.
“Zoe!” he screamed. “Zoe! Please!”
X turned frantically, and saw that Zoe and Ripper were still ascending the hill to the woods. They stopped now. Ripper held Zoe tightly, urging her not to turn.
“Zoe!” her father shouted. “Listen to me! Zoe!”
X leaped at him, and struck him hard across the face.
“I showed you a kindness, damn you!” he said. “I could have forced you to behold all your sins, but I did not! And yet you beg your daughter for sympathy? She will not save you. She is not your daughter anymore!”
“I don’t want her to save me,” said Zoe’s father, and again he began screaming: “Zoe! Zoe! You don’t have to look at me, just—just listen. Zoe, I’m sorry! Please, please, please know that I’m sorry. I was a disgrace as a father. As a man. As everything. I disgust myself. I don’t deserve to live. And life without you and Jonah and your mom—it’s not really living, anyway. I love you, okay? I absolutely freakin’ love you. If you don’t believe anything else I ever said, please, please, please believe that.”
He was breathing so hard now that he had to collect himself before he could say more.
“If me dying helps you somehow, then I’ll do it,” he shouted with what energy he had left. “I mean, I already died once. It’s gotta be easier the second time, right? I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I think you’re awesome, Zoe—and you’ll always be my girl.”
Zoe’s father turned to X now.
“If you want my soul, just take it,” he said. “Take it.”
X was closing in on him, when, up on the hill, Zoe finally turned toward them. She walked back down to the lake, her steps heavy and trancelike. Ripper could not stop her. Together, they descended and stepped on the dead reeds, which crackled under their feet.
Zoe was not looking at her father, but at X.
Nearby, a cluster of wild turkeys, black and red against the snow, raised their heads to X now, too. Even they seemed to be waiting.
X took the man’s slender neck in his hand. Zoe’s father gasped, but he did not resist, did not speak, did not look away.
He just stared at X—stared at him with Jonah’s eyes.
X began closing his fist around his windpipe.
And then he stopped, not knowing why.
He felt a kind of stirring in his brain—a wind almost, as if someone had cracked a window or pushed open a door.
It was Zoe. She was searching his thoughts.
She’d told him that he was never to search hers. “There will be no mind-melding—or whatever that is!” she’d said. Yet here she was trying to figure out what he was thinking, why he was hesitating.
She was walking toward him across the lake, with Ripper following close behind. She was stepping around the holes. She seemed to know where they lay even without looking. And all the while, she was delving deeper and deeper into X. She was unfolding him—gently, like he was a piece of paper that might come apart in her hands. Surely, she knew what she would find? She’d taught him the word herself.
Mercy.
As suddenly as it had begun, the movement in his mind ceased. The wind retreated. The window closed. The door shut.
X looked to Zoe. She’d stopped 20 feet away. She was weeping. Her hair was white with snow.
She nodded to X. She seemed to want to reassure him, to soothe him, to make him feel loved.
Her eyes said, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Let him go.
X ripped Zoe’s father from the shed by his neck—the ice shattered, the plywood groaned and splintered—then threw him to the ground.
Zoe drew closer.
She knelt beside her father.
X saw hope kindle in the man’s eyes, as if he expected his daughter to throw herself into his arms.
X knew that she wouldn’t.
“We’re letting you go,” Zoe told her father calmly, “because we don’t want to turn into you.”
Her father began to speak, but she shook her head.
“You don’t get to talk,” she said. “Remember?” She paused. “I was going to have X drown you in this lake, but I love him too much to make him do that. So I’m going to let you keep running and hiding and ice fishing or whatever, although—honestly?—it seems like you’re really bad at it.” Zoe looked at the auger, the fishing rods, the holes. Her father had caught nothing at all. “I never want to see you again, Dad,” she said. “I mean it. And that’s the last time I’m ever gonna call you ‘Dad.’ I’m going to try to forgive you—not because you deserve it, but because I don’t want you to mess up my heart the way Stan messed up yours. I’m going to try to remember the good stuff. There was some good stuff.” Zoe stopped, and stood. “Okay, that’s enough. I’m done talking to you. I’m gonna go and … I’m gonna go and have a life. I’m going to have a life with X and Mom and Jonah. X and I won’t give up until we figure out how. It’s going to be a good life—and you won’t get to watch.”
Zoe went to X. He put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her to his chest, and spoke to her quietly.
Ripper approached Zoe’s father.
“I would advise you to run, little rabbit,” she said. “X may not be hungry for your soul, but my own stomach is rumbling.”
Zoe’s father got to his feet. He was sobbing, but he must have known Zoe wouldn’t listen to another word.
He scrambled into the woods without looking back. The trees quaked and shed some snow, then settled once more.
X had felt no joy when Zoe said she would make a life with him, for he knew how unlikely it was. He had let her father go free, so the lords would almost certainly haul him back to the Lowlands. He suspected Dervish was lurking in the forest even now. He could picture him gouging the bark of a tree with his nails, barely able to contain his glee.
X listened. He waited. He looked to Zoe and Ripper, and saw that they were waiting, too. But everything was silent. There was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the tiny puffs of smoke it made, like steam from a train.
He stooped to collect his clothes, and began pulling them on.
No one spoke, for fear it would unleash something. Their eyes scanned the blackening woods.
Nothing.
Maybe the lords wouldn’t come? Maybe Regent had convinced them that X had been punished enough? With each moment that passed, X became more and more convinced that it was possible. He was still in the grip of the Trembling. He was still feverish, still dizzy. His body was not his own. But Zoe had nursed him before, and he felt sure that if he could just lay his head against her—if he could just feel her cool breath settling over him—they could defeat the Trembling forever. Her father would be free. So would X. The lords would not own him any longer.
But then the buzzing began. They all heard it. It was faint but insistent. It sounded like a blackfly circling closer and closer.
X whirled toward it.
It was coming from Zoe.
She searched her pockets. It was her phone.
It was only her phone!
Zoe and Ripper stared down to read what was written there. Their faces looked eerie in the screen’s yellow light.
X was about to look away when Zoe gasped.
The noise hit him like a punch.
She seemed unable to speak, so Ripper spoke for her.
“The lords are striking,” she said.
X had known Ripper virtually his whole life. He had seen her fight and curse and flirt and sing. He had seen her tear out her fingernails and beg to be beaten. He had literally seen her in hell—but he’d never seen her afraid.
She was afraid now.
X wheeled around. The sky, the woods, the lake—they all spun before his eyes. But he found nothing to fear. The world was empty. He was certain of it.
“I see no threat,” he said.
Zoe held out her phone, as if he could read it.
Her palm was shaking.
“I d-don’t think they’re coming after us,” she said haltingly. “I th-think they’re going after Jonah.”