Val landed flat on her back. The cool ground beneath her was riddled with rocks.
She blinked, feeling frozen between here and elsewhere. Above her rambled a familiar treescape. Then her breathing returned in an abrupt, choking gasp.
She rolled over, pressed her hands into the mud, and looked up to search the woods. They weren’t as dark as they had been when she’d left them; the sky beyond the stern black branches had lightened to a newborn gray.
“Marion?” Her voice came out in shambles. When she tried to stand, she fell back to the ground.
She suspected that final tesser had been a difficult one for Marion to accomplish—what with the monster latching around her body and all, and the fact that the place she’d been going had been . . . Except Val didn’t know or understand or want to understand the place Marion had been going.
But somehow, Marion had managed it—Marion, Marion—and now Val was home.
Zoey sat hunched beside Val on her hands and knees in the dirt. She coughed, wiped her mouth across the back of one shaking hand.
The other hand still tightly held Grayson Tighe’s baseball bat. The sight of it tore Val in half and sent her spinning away atop the sea winds.
She must have made a sound; Zoey turned, her face crumpling with grief and pity.
“Val, come here.” She reached for her, half crawling.
Val slapped her hand away. She didn’t deserve comfort. She could repent for the rest of her life and it would hardly make a dent. “Don’t touch me!” she sobbed.
She decided, staggering away from Zoey, that she didn’t have the capacity to fathom what had happened—to her, to Marion, to all of them. The men who had hunted them, the corpse of her mother, the wide, flat space of the hidden realm where the Collector had revealed his true form. An infestation of monsters, old and inimitable, that prowled the world hunting girls.
Words circled her brain: miracle, phenomenon, abomination, plague.
Faintly, she heard Zoey speaking to her: Val, you’re shaking. Val, you’re gonna pass out.
But Val’s mind wouldn’t stop racing.
Maybe the Hand of Light wasn’t once made of men who wouldn’t listen to reason, who would lead girls to slaughter if it meant their rituals were validated and their truth absolute.
Maybe, Val thought, somewhere in the world was a Hand of Light chapter composed of women, or kindhearted men. Maybe there were other ways to slay these beasts—many other ways—and none of them would require the world to give up its bravest girls in sacrifice.
But none of that mattered at the moment. Nothing mattered but the loss of too many lives at Val’s hands, and the loss of one in particular.
“Val,” Zoey whispered, “please say something.”
Val collected herself as her mother had taught her. She raised her chin, squared her jaw, and proceeded west through the woods.
“Where are you going?” Zoey called after her. Val heard her footsteps, slight and hurried. “Val!”
“I’m going to wait for her.”
“Wait for who?”
“For Marion.”
Zoey was beside her now, tearful. “Val, stop.”
But if Val stopped, she’d collapse. If she stopped, she might never start again.
“Val,” Zoey whispered. “Marion’s gone.”
Val did not reply. She walked. She walked across Sawkill, from the eastern Kingshead Woods to the western Spinney. Zoey, beside her, said not another word. They stayed clear of the roads and kept instead to whatever trees they could find, because in the trees’ whispers sat half-formed words that reminded them of Marion, of the Rock, of the obscura. They passed by the Von Neumanns’ farm, and the Hawthornes’. At every fence stood a horse with pricked ears and curious bright eyes, watching them pass.
Val was grateful. The sight of the still, silent horses reminded her, oddly, of the frigid glacial plain of the obscura, the icy trees swollen with blight and monsters. She allowed herself to imagine that she would soon pass a shrub, turn a fence corner, look past the flanks of a curious yearling, and see Marion walking toward her through the misting jade fields.
It was the sort of cruelly intoxicating vision that Val should not have allowed herself, the sort of imagining she did not deserve.
And yet she couldn’t resist, didn’t want to resist.
Don’t ever hope, Valerie, her grandmother had told her once. Don’t hope for things to get better. Don’t hope for a different world.
Hope, Sylvia Mortimer had said, is a lie that only weak-minded people believe.
Val settled on a flat jutting rock beneath the lighthouse and turned her face to the sea. A moment later, Zoey sat down beside her—not near enough to touch, but near enough that Val felt comforted.
She decided her grandmother had been wrong.
Hope, she thought, breathing with the tide, was a choice that only those with resolute hearts dared to make.