No one can say his name to me.
Whenever anyone stumbles into dangerous territory—the Delbos, for instance, or where I went and what I’ve been doing—I can see their eyes skid away from any mention of my foster brother. I can hear his name dropping like a pebble, vanishing into silence before they voice it. They maybe aren’t conscious of the force at work in them, but I keep a close watch for moments like these. The world is dotted with emptiness, wherever Josh is erased from it—even though I’m fairly sure he’s still right here in town. Back with the Delbos, back in school, with some hazy story obliterating the reasons for his absence. Maybe people think he followed me to Buffalo.
We were gone for nine and a half months, it turns out. I had no idea. If I’d had to guess, I might have said two at most.
In general, though, everyone prefers to avoid any subject that might lead to Josh, which in effect means anything connected with my past here. It’s as if I live severed from my own history, and everyone focuses compulsively on what’s next for me. So I have a counter job in a bakery downtown, and a tiny room above it to crash in, and Lexi’s parents pulling every string they can get to find me programs and scholarships and possibilities. And if the cynical part of me says that they’re just trying desperately to make me into someone halfway good enough to be Lexi’s girlfriend, below the cynicism there’s gratitude so fierce that it staggers me. Because who else ever bothered?
They’ve accepted me way more than I ever would have dared to hope, the Holdens. I won’t let them down.
Lexi has called him, I know. Maybe even talked to him in person. I see the strain in her face when she tries to tell me, and the shake of her head when she gives up.
I’m not entirely sure she’d approve of what I’m about to do—but, thanks to the magic throttling us, there’s no way I can ask her. She must guess it will happen sooner or later. And she knows I’m still crying myself to sleep every night, not because I want to tell her anything that could possibly hurt her, but because she insists on knowing the truth of what I’m going through.
I’ve just closed up the bakery in the lingering late-May twilight. Locked the metal gate and tucked two loaves of end-of-the-day bread into my backpack—one for me, one for the Holdens—along with a small box of Marissa’s favorite daisy cookies. And then I start walking. Away from downtown, toward Whistler Drive.
Which seems on the face of it like an uncomplicated thing to do, just an evening stroll. But my body knows better. It’s as if a shivering in the ground rushes up my legs at every step. It’s as if the May evening transmitted a kind of cold that traveled from a place far beyond temperature.
For all I know, it’s deep winter in that not-world where Josh and I were trapped, and a wisp of its breath still follows me.
There’s so much I don’t know—what happened to Kay and all the other imp-creatures, for one thing. Did they just fold themselves back into us when we returned here, and forget all about having independent lives? I don’t know what became of my changeling, but I sometimes dream about her. She’s always trailing behind me, always asking me to find her lost heart. I tell her to go back and look in my grave, and then I realize that grave isn’t there anymore. It’s gone as if it had never been, along with little Olivia Fisher’s. Just like Lexi thought, all the kids are back with their families, though they do have kind of a haunted look when you see them. Do they remember?
Prince, Unselle, their whole uncanny tribe—I don’t know if they were killed by the tide of implings when we escaped. But probably they’re fine, enduring on and on in their sluggish half-life, bored out of their minds and ravenous to feed on human prisoners. On our emotions, the pungency of our despair, the kick of our rebellion. If I’m right about them, then Josh and I were hardly the first, or the last, of their victims.
From what Lexi’s told me, there’s no guarantee they won’t come after us again too. There was something about that mink tasting our blood that means Unselle can track us, wherever we go. We’re free for now, and that has to be enough.
As for what’s going to happen once I’m in front of number 32—I have a rough idea. It doesn’t matter. I still need the snap of empirical proof, or I’m always going to wonder.
So the drowsy streets roll back, and kids scamper through sprinklers, and adults lug groceries. No matter how long I live in this complacent normalcy, I’m always going to carry the buzz of the impossible. Because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it for myself, and that kind of madness gets in your flesh. It’s like one of those viruses that scorches its way into your DNA, stays part of you years after the fever has broken.
Fine.
The Delbos’ house slides up on me. The irony is that I almost miss it and walk right past, because I’ve half forgotten that it’s only a single story high. A bland, butter-yellow split-level ranch. A home where I was always a stranger, except when Josh was smiling at me.
I stand and look at it, searching the windows for any stir that might be him, even though I know that will never happen. No matter if I go right up to the glass, or how I stalk in circles around the house, the magic will always arrange for Josh to wander into some room where I can’t see him. He’s in there, I could almost swear it, but at the same time he’s unreachable.
I had unsettled plans to storm up and ring the bell, but now that feels preposterous. What will happen if I try it? I take the first step onto the Delbos’ front walk and feel weakness bursting in my knees, ready to topple me. A warning shot. Whatever. I’m here and I’ll take the worst it can throw at me.
A window in the living room jerks up. Against all reason, my heart leaps and my hand flies out, as if Josh’s hand will be close enough that I can grasp it.
But of course it’s not him. Emma Delbo is there, looking a bit less decrepit than she did last time I saw her. Still, even now that Josh is back and everything that happened has been wiped from her mind, I can tell her forgotten experiences aren’t really gone. She’s weighed down by something blue-gray and terribly heavy, until it’s visibly distending her skin. Maybe her mind doesn’t remember, but I can see what happened in the sag of her lips.
“Go away. You’re not welcome here,” she calls to me. I notice, of course, that she doesn’t say my name. That’s another thing since we’ve been back—no one calls me Kezzer now, like it’s a facet of everything they can’t say. I don’t think Emma’s a fan of Ksenia.
But maybe that’s not the only reason. Maybe there’s someone who can overhear the faintest edge of Emma’s voice, and so saying my name is impossible for her.
“I never thought I was welcome,” I snap back. But the truth is, a flush like fire races through my skin. It made more sense, her hating me, when she thought I’d murdered Josh. But now? I try to tell myself it’s just the enchantment shoving her emotions around, but that’s not as convincing as I’d like it to be. She probably thinks I duped him into running away with me.
“Why did you even come back to this town? You should have stayed in Buffalo!” She slams the window, but I stay where I am. Did I hear—or maybe I’m only imagining—a few rapid footsteps coming behind her, with a cadence that I know like my own pulse?
No one else comes to the window. No one else will.
The air is so blue, so vibrant, that it cradles me and stops me from falling. Windows wink golden, and I can see everyone else—anyone else, actually, in all the world—going through their everyday motions. And I know I have to stop staring into the void of the one person I can’t see, even if that void pretends to be a magnolia tree and an expanse of vinyl siding. I turn to go.
Half a block later, I halt. Light footsteps are echoing just behind me, each one deliberately timed to coincide with mine. And this time—how?—I already know, I accept in my gut, that those steps aren’t his.
I swing around and meet her grubby gray eyes. Awkward as hell that she’s here, of course—does she think she can take my place? Lexi and I are both horribly certain that the Xand who still lives in town is as fake as tinsel. But at least she’s had the sense to button up that hideous dress, though the crude red rag of her autopsy incision still pokes above the neckline. She gawps at me, maybe embarrassed, with her jagged blond hair twitching and her mouth hanging open.
“Sennie,” she whispers. Ugh. Then, with a shade more confidence: “Did you find it? Give it back to me, and I’ll go away!”
Of course. She’s still after one thing. “Our missing heart?” I say. “Neither of us can get it back. You’re going to have to forget it.”
“Ours?” Her eyes narrow. “It was mine, it was all mine! Prince made it and put it inside me, and then they stole it right out of me! It’s mine.”
“It belonged to both of us,” I tell her. “And no matter how much it hurt sometimes, I know we both would have given almost anything to keep it. But we couldn’t. It’s lost forever.” I nod toward the Delbos’ house. “You know where it is as well as I do.”
Her head twists to look, with a suddenness like a convulsion. When she stares at me again she’s gone bone white, her lips are trembling, and I pity her as much as I can. Which turns out to be a lot, actually.
In a dried-up riverbed, at the bottom of a gorge, I buried a heart full of water.
Now it lives in a yellow house. But that house is deeper than any gorge in the world. There’s no getting to the bottom of it.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “But I have to go home. And so do you. Or—look. You can go to another town, if you want. Invent a new name for yourself. I won’t rat you out. Why don’t you try that? Just be as alive as you can, with everything you have left.”
She stares at me a while longer, both of us suffused in blue. I have a lingering sense—of what? responsibility?—that keeps me from turning my back on her and leaving. For a fake person, a poppet, a mannequin cobbled out of magic and mind scraps and maybe a rotten log, she’s done pretty well, in fact. When she pointed me toward the way out of nowhere, she showed a kind of spirit and independence that has to be worth something.
“You think I can do that,” she says at last. It’s not a question. “With no heart.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I think you stand a decent chance.”
She nods, twitchily, like there’s nothing else that either of us could possibly add to that. No smile—it occurs to me that she might not have learned how to smile yet. She just pivots sharply on one heel and marches off, leaving me with the sick dread that I was spewing lies at her. It would be cruel to feed her false hope.
But maybe she’ll pull it off and forge a life somewhere. She’s what you’d call socially awkward, but so are a lot of people. And anyway, does it have to be with no heart?
With whatever heart you can make for yourself. Make it out of the surging trees. Out of this twilight that doesn’t try to erase you anymore—that lets you burn on, Ksenia Adderley, at the core of its simultaneous peace and wildness. Out of a dark girl working on her term papers, but with a touch of her awareness still tuned to you. She’ll expect you to stop by, even if it’s just for a few minutes, because you always do.