40

ABRA STUMBLED AHEAD, trying to run, but it felt like she had been on the move for hours, and her legs refused to keep a fast pace. The tunnel went ahead, always in a straight line, and after the first ten or fifteen minutes, there were no more intersections with other tunnels. It was a lonely line. At some point the walls went from smooth cement to cement block to rock, and eventually they were nothing more than packed dirt. The floor went through the same transformation. The smell changed as she went—at first it smelled like the city, but the farther she traveled, the more it smelled like rich earth.

Her flashlight flickered off. She turned on the second one. An hour later that one flickered, then turned off. She banged it against the wall and twisted the top and it came back on, barely shining. She tried to walk faster, tried not to think about the possibility of being stuck in a tunnel without any light. Behind her she heard a loud rumbling as if the earth had split in two. The silence that followed felt like a missing tooth.

It is usually when we are going to give up that the difficulty changes, and such was the case with Abra. The tunnel felt never-ending, and she had nearly convinced herself to turn around and take her chances leaving the city above ground when things changed: she stumbled into a wide section of the tunnel. Dim light illuminated a stairway, and she went up into the red light.

She didn’t realize where she was, and she crept through an empty room to a set of windows. The red light streamed through, and broken glass crunched under her feet. She ran outside.

It was the house outside the city, the house she and Leo had stopped and looked into. She was shocked at how far she had traveled in such a short time. The tunnel had led her all the way out of the city. The sky was red, fading to night, and the air was full of smoke. She looked in the direction of the city and saw flames, smoke, and the black outline of buildings as they fell.

She turned and jogged away from it toward the darkness, toward the doorway that would finally take her out of the grave of Marie Laveau. She hoped she’d find Leo and Ruby before she had to seal the Passageway closed. Now that she knew them, now that she had been with them, she didn’t know how she could leave them behind. When she thought about Leo something warmed inside of her, some small flame that was not one of destruction but one of friendship.

Abra kept going, kept pushing, and the longer she went, the darker it became. The city glowed behind her, giving off a sense that night would never come, not until the fire died. Something about the woods pressed tighter against her, as if the entire Passageway was shrinking. It made her feel claustrophobic. Her breathing was tight and heavy.

Soon it was dark. The souls would be making their way through the Passageway at any moment, screaming with speed. Abra saw a hunched form on the path ahead. She slowed, peered into the distance, but kept moving forward. When she saw who it was, she ran.

“Ruby!” Abra said, gasping for breath.

Leo was on the ground beside her, stretched out, his eyes closed. His breath came slow, with large spaces in between. His shirt was torn and covered in blood.

“Ruby?” Abra asked, and there were many questions in that one word, but she already knew the answers, or at least the only answers that mattered.

“It was Beatrice,” Ruby said through her tears. Her hands were covered in blood too, from where she had tried to stop up Leo’s injuries.

Abra fell to her knees beside Leo and touched his face. “Leo,” she whispered. “Are you still here?”

His eyelids parted, tiny slits of shining light, and he nodded. “You have to get out,” he said, and each word was a deep root pulled from the earth. “You have to leave me.”

Abra shook her head, but she knew he was right—they did have to keep moving. It wouldn’t be long before people tried to flee the city.

“We can’t leave you, Leo!” Ruby insisted. “You’ll be okay! You have to come with us.”

Abra reached over and held Ruby’s hand.

“I remember now,” Ruby whispered. “I remember the third-floor bedroom and the light streaming in. I remember the sound of the birds under the eaves. I remember how you took me out back, even when I wasn’t feeling well, and pulled me around in the little red wagon, showing me the flowers. I remember how you’d point up at the tallest tree and we’d dream of climbing it, seeing the entire city.”

She paused for a moment, tears dripping from her nose.

“I remember it all, Leo. I remember how much I loved you. Please don’t go.”

Everything grew dim. Even the fire that was the city died down, like an old-fashioned oil lamp when the wick is drawn down into the oil. The same thing happened to Leo—he withdrew into himself, and the light inside him went out.

The Wailers started streaming past Abra and Ruby where they knelt beside Leo. Their sound was loud, but it didn’t seem as harsh as it had before—it felt more like the whistling the wind makes when it races along a rocky shore. The two girls sat there and let the bodies of light stream around them. Ruby’s forehead was close to Leo’s chest when Abra saw it begin to happen.

“Ruby,” she whispered, and Ruby sat up straight.

It looked as though someone had spread white talcum powder all over the top of Leo—his face, his chest, his legs—so that even the red of the blood was covered over by this almost glowing white. It reminded Abra of the veins of silver she had seen in the cliff on her way to the rocky plain. That dust, that very dust, began to float around him the way dust sometimes floats through beams of light as it falls between tree branches or down through barns full of fresh hay. The white dust hovered there for a moment, and the only thing that stirred it was the passing of the souls as they whistled by.

“It’s him, Ruby,” Abra said. “It’s the real Leo.”

And she was right. More right than she had ever been. Because that was Leo—the very essence of him. It wasn’t only that he was leaving his body behind, because there was even an element of his body there in that white dust, and it was his perfect body, a body full of cells that could never mutate or be affected by diseases, cells that could never break down. His mind was there too in its perfect form, swirling full of thoughts and memories and feelings. But all of these things were so intermingled that you never could have separated them, never could have labeled them, never could have dissected them. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could take apart and later, piece by piece, put back together. No, it was a beautiful intermingling of everything that was essentially Leo.

Then he was gone. That white cloud of Leo shot off like a comet, racing along with the other souls, whistling with joy. If Abra and Ruby could have kept up with him, they would have raced through the smoke and the fire of the city. They would have seen him shoot out over the water like a star, rising, crossing an uncrossable distance, to the white cliffs and the soft green hills that waited on the other side.

Abra and Ruby walked in complete and utter darkness for hours. Have you ever had a conversation with someone in the dark when it is only the words and nothing else? The words become sounds that take on their own being—they float around looking for anything to latch on to. The voices are everything. You notice every fluctuation, every point of emphasis, every sigh. Every swallow.

“Did you know they were building a telescope to see over the water? To see beyond death?” Ruby asked, and Abra knew that she was combing her mind for something to talk about that would help her forget about the death of Leo, her only brother, the one she had barely known.

“Yes,” Abra whispered.

They pulled themselves through the darkness. Abra’s arm was around Ruby’s shoulders, and she held her close. Ruby pressed in close to her and trembled like a baby bird.

“I looked into the telescope,” Abra said, regret heavy in her voice. They were words she had to say, because it was not something she could carry on her own.

“You did?” Ruby asked, and by the way her shoulders turned, Abra could tell she was looking up at her in the darkness, searching for her face.

“Before I killed the Tree. Before I came back down. It was only a second, only a glance,” Abra said, and it sounded like she was trying to convince herself that it was okay, that she had not looked into the eyepiece long enough to be changed.

“What did you see?” Ruby whispered.

Abra waited. In the darkness, she could remember it perfectly.

“There was a cliff that rose up out of the water. White waves crashed against it. The cliff was high, very high, and at the top of the cliff was the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, stretching on in rolling hills. Beyond that, there was a city, and all the buildings were shining white.”

Abra’s voice caught as a sob tried to escape.

“What else?” Ruby whispered in a small voice.

“Far off beyond everything was a terrible darkness, but it was a darkness that had no power. It was an emptiness I could not bear to look at. But that was far, far beyond the city, and it seemed almost invisible compared to the beauty of the cliff and the green and the white.”

“What was the white city like?” Ruby asked. “Could you see anyone there?”

Abra shook her head. “I can’t . . . I can’t talk about it.”

“Are you glad you looked?” Ruby asked.

Abra shook her head again. “No.”

“Why not?”

Abra looked down at her and gave a sad smile. “Because I’m sure that for the rest of my life it’s the only place I will ever want to be.”

For a moment, Abra imagined the years stretching out ahead of her, the distance of a life she would have to live before she could go to that city. She remembered the vision she had seen in the clear water of the old woman sitting quietly in her bed, passing away. She wondered again if that had really been her in her old age, and if that was a vision that would come to pass or one that would change. She pulled Ruby close in the darkness, and Ruby reached up and kissed her on the cheek.

“Thank you,” Abra said, and they kept walking.