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Estajfan reaches for Heather, misses, and then leaps over the side and is gone.
Petrolio crashes into the other pale centaur—they fall to the ground with a thud that shakes the trees. The dark centaur does not move.
Tasha, breathless, shouts to Aura. “Take me down. Take me down now.”
Petrolio scrambles to his feet again. “I’ll take you,” he rasps. “Aura—get the others away from here.” He bends and Tasha climbs onto his back—they turn to go but Aura shoots out a hand and grabs Petrolio’s arm.
“Wait,” she says. She pulls off her bag and gives it to Tasha. Then they are leaping over the knoll and down the path.
Elyse is on her knees, clutching her chest, her breathing hard and ragged. Annie bends over her, while Moira and Joseph stand terrified, still. The two mountain centaurs’ brown eyes sweep them all.
“Leave now,” the male centaur says as he climbs to his feet. “Leave now, or the rest of you will follow.”
Aura goes to Elyse and kneels. Moira and Annie help the girl onto her back.
“The world is more than the mountain,” Aura says, and she faces the mountain centaurs as she stands. “Green things grew around the graves here, even if the mountain didn’t want the bodies. Change comes to the mountain, too, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.”
She can’t see him, but she knows that he’s there—a small, slight man with dark hair, an easy smile, his fingers long and slender and stained with dirt. She buried him here all these years ago and he sank into the mountain. His bones became the dirt. His hands became the grass and trees, the flowers that grew up and blossomed. The vines that stretch up now and wind around the mountain centaurs’ legs, shimmying up and rooting them to the spot.
The vines thread the mountain centaurs with green, shoot up their shoulders and around their necks, choke them, blind their eyes. Swift and greedy. The female centaur yells once in rage before she is silenced. In the space that was her mouth, a red flower blooms.
The humans stand frozen in horror.
Aura feels the unseen man smile at her, and ready himself. He has become part of the mountain but he, too, does not belong here. He is ready to go home, to follow his daughter back to the world below, now that she’s come up to find him. Aura feels him sink back into the soil once more, and this time he is a river that runs through mountain rock, a starburst of energy that travels all the way down the mountain and back to the city.
He will be there, waiting for them, when they go back down. His unseen hands back in the soil again, coaxing the human gardens to grow. Already she can feel his hands brimming with seeds. The time for starving is over.
“Come,” she says softly. There will be time to mourn her mountain home, but that time is not now. “We must go down.” She makes her way back to the edge of the meadow and over the knoll.
The humans follow.
Heather is flying, falling, a great dizzied tumble. The same sequence that has haunted her dreams all these years.
Not her father’s fall. Her own.
Then she slams into the earth—only it isn’t earth, it’s warm and close around her, Estajfan, his arms frantic to hold her.
The wind keening all around them.
He flails as he tries to right himself, get purchase on the mountainside.
The space around them endless and huge.
They tumble, they fall, they crash against the mountain. She feels him hit the mountainside and strain against the incline. A loud crack beneath them and he screams, and lets go. She hits spongy, leafy ground. Estajfan sails over her head, lands with an impact that shudders deep into the mountain.
The silence that follows is absolute. She can’t hear her heart pounding, she can’t see the sky. Her body is one long bell of pain.
But she’s alive. She tries to breathe—it hurts, but she can do it. Vicious cramps hit her abdomen and she moans.
“Heather?” Estajfan calls. He’s alive too. How can this be? “Heather. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she answers. Another cramp comes, and she whimpers. “Where are you?”
He cries out as he tries to move.
Another cramp, and another. Another. Another. It’s too soon. It’s too soon.
No, she thinks. No, no.
A face in front of her, calm dark eyes, dark hair. “You’re all right,” the face says. “You’re all right.”
Heather blinks. “Tasha?”
The woman shakes her head. “No.” She puts a hand against Heather’s forehead and takes a deep breath. The fresh scent of leaves flows into Heather’s lungs.
“It’s too soon,” Heather says. She can’t move her arm, she can’t move her legs. Are they broken? Beside her, Estajfan moans.
Can he see the woman? She can’t tell.
“It is too soon,” the woman agrees. “But it is going to happen anyway.” She takes Heather’s hand. “You’ll be all right,” she says. “Whatever happens.”
“Who are you?” she gasps out. The woman only smiles.
“Breathe with me,” she says. She touches Heather’s forehead again. “In and out.”
How long do they do this? Heather isn’t sure. Minutes, hours.
Something leaks from her, a warm gush out onto the ground.
“You’re all right,” the woman says again. “You’ll be all right.”
“Who are you?” Heather cries.
“I am the flowers,” the woman says. Her hand firm against Heather’s abdomen, her other hand twining through Heather’s fingers, squeezing hard. “I am the flowers, I am the trees.”
“Heather?” Estajfan calls. “Who are you talking to?”
“I don’t understand,” Heather presses. “Do you live here?”
The woman’s face swims before her eyes. “I didn’t live here,” she says, “but now I do. The mountain is my home; I will never leave it. Your father has already left—he has gone to prepare the way.” She nods to Heather’s belly. “He will come, your boy. We might have to pull him out.”
“I can’t do it,” Heather whispers. “He won’t survive.” I won’t survive, she thinks. The mountain will claim us all.
The woman shakes her head again, and smiles. “No. The mountain claimed me, but I survived. I came out of the ground with the flowers, and so will you.”
“I came out of the ground,” Heather repeats, dizzily. “I didn’t change at all.”
The woman leans in close. “Didn’t you?” Her hand against Heather’s cheek, her expression gentle and knowing. “Heather,” she says.
Heather. Heather. She hears the words as if from far away.
“Heather?” Tasha calls. “Heather?”
“There!” Petrolio cries, and he jumps down the path to a large overhang. Two bodies lie crumpled and bleeding.
“Tasha,” Heather answers, weakly. Tasha slides off the centaur and drops to her knees, then presses her hand against Heather’s abdomen. Heather whimpers.
“How long?” Tasha asks.
“I don’t know.” Heather turns her head—she’s looking around for something. “I don’t know—how long—we’ve been down here.”
Petrolio bends over Estajfan. Voices, another low moan.
Tasha leans in close. “He’s breech, Heather.”
“Yes.” She glances over at the centaurs. “Help Estajfan, please.”
Tasha nods. “His leg is broken,” she says. “I think yours might be too. But we can fix that. Heather, look at me.” Heather nods, meets her eyes. “He’s breech,” Tasha repeats. “I can’t deliver him that way.” She puts a hand against Heather’s cheek. “Do you understand?”
“It’s too early,” Heather says again.
“I know. But we have to try.” Tasha reaches into her medical bag and pulls out antiseptic swabs, then she dips into the bag that Aura gave her and pulls out a needle, small and sharp, a coil of translucent thread. The scalpel, smooth and cool beneath her fingertips. It sparkles in the setting sun, sharp and ready. The sun reflects off its surface and sends pinpoints of light over Heather’s face.
“You’ll take care of him?” Heather says.
“Yes.” The word is like starlight in her mouth—impossible, unmistakable. “But so will you.”
As they descend, Moira can’t stop thinking about the centaurs that stand far above them, covered in green. She can’t stop thinking about the way Estajfan jumped after the woman. Heather.
“Do you see them?” she calls to Aura and the others. They’ve been scrambling down for she doesn’t know how long. No one survives a fall like that.
Beside her, she can see Annie struggling with the same thing. And if they find the bodies—what happens then?
“We’re leaving,” Annie says, as if she hears that last thought. “We get down from here, and we take what food we have left and go. We’ll find other people somewhere. There must be others who’ve survived.”
Others, Moira thinks. Others who met their grief and faced it, or knew what to do with it. She thinks again of Heather. Maybe we’ve always been ready.
“Heather and Estajfan have survived,” Elyse says, with a conviction none of them feel. “We made our way up here. It means something. Nothing else would make sense.”
Moira wants to laugh—What about this makes any kind of sense?—but she can’t.
The sun crawls down the sky.
And then she hears a cry from Aura, and an answering shout—from Petrolio, Moira thinks. Petrolio, and Tasha.
They stumble down and reach the overhang. They are alive, impossibly. Aura kneels and Moira and Annie lift Elyse from her back, then rest her between them. She seems barely there and yet brighter, somehow, than any of them. Dazed and tired and still surprised to find herself there at all. And triumphant, somehow, in the knowing. Annie lowers her gently to the ground and settles beside her.
Moira crouches near Heather, then reaches for her hand and squeezes tight.
“Heather.”
Heather. Darby. Joseph. Brian and Annie, Tasha and Elyse.
Aura. She whispers the names to herself. Aura, Estajfan, Petrolio.
Heather looks at her, eyes wide with fear.
“Heather,” Moira says again. “It’s going to be okay.”
When Tasha cuts into her belly, Heather screams, but they are holding her down, Petrolio and Aura on either side of her, Moira at her head, Elyse and Annie behind her like blonde ghosts. Another shadow behind them—the other woman, brown-haired and gentle. Estajfan, reaching silently for her through the waves of pain and terror. And then there is a great wrench and something dark that blocks her view of the sky—her son, tiny and screaming as Tasha pulls him from her belly and holds him up. Heather sees four dark legs but then the light shifts and he is only a dark-haired baby boy, crying loud enough for the whole world to hear.
Tasha passes the baby to Annie and then begins to sew Heather up. It hurts, but not as much as she expected it would. After Tasha snips off the thread, she spreads the salve from Aura’s bag over the wound and covers it in cloth, then Annie passes her son to her. He is still crying loud enough to fill the sky, and as Heather gathers him into her good arm she sees flashes of his life the way she saw her own fall from the mountain, the way she brought them to Estajfan, the way she saw Tasha and the flames. The long climb down, the even longer climb they will make to find food, to find others. The family they will become. The sudden blossoming of fruit trees and plants down below, a presence deep within the soil that she recognizes.
Her father has left the mountain too. He is waiting for her, down below.
Estajfan, she thinks. Estajfan beside her, around her, everywhere.
I survived, she thinks. I came out of the ground with the flowers.
The baby roots for her nipple like her girls did. Tasha cups his head and guides him to it, and Heather feels him suck at her as though he’s been waiting for this, only this, all these months. It’s an ordinary magic, but it’s stronger than the mountain.
He is so small, but that is all right—he is here now. He is hers.