Anura sits tightly curled on a brocade sofa, cat-scratched and fraying, with bright cushions mashed around her. A magazine dangles from one hand, poised to slide onto the floor. Her human face hangs over her human knees, but at the sound of the front door she jerks alert and her elbow smacks a nearby stack of books; they thud down in a cascade of pages, pale and hissing. She tumbles after them, kneeling on the carpet and righting the books with shaking hands, her movements so frantic that half the volumes topple down again.
Lore finds her friend there, folded over the books as if she vomited them.
“Anura.” Lore’s voice is very soft. “It’s done.”
“Done.” The word slips and falls like something spilled by accident from hands too full to hold on. “Catherine went with him?”
“As far as I can tell, yes. I’ve just come from Margo’s room and there was no trace of her.” Anura’s forehead hangs just above the carpet. Her back heaves at Lore’s words, and Lore drops down next to her and wraps an arm around her shoulders.
“But there were traces of him.”
“You could say that. Gus’s mangled corpse was there, and Margo’s. Some interesting magic had been performed on Margo’s body; I could feel it at once but I couldn’t tell what it was for. I brought in a specialist, and he said the flesh had been rendered impermeable to ghosts; new magic, nothing he’d ever seen before. I’d imagine Catherine did that, so she could use the body as a hiding place. Clever, especially when you think that she must have had to improvise.”
“Nothing else.”
“Not quite. The … materials were there. A puddle with Angus’s clothes sopped in the middle of it. The smell was something I never need to experience again.”
“But how can you be sure? Catherine could persist somehow—she could just be wandering—”
“You know she’d never do that, Anura.” Lore says it so gently it barely sounds. “If Catherine lingered in any form, she’d stay until she could send word to you. The city did go through a certain amount of disturbance, and for a moment I almost thought—it was only a final flourish, though.” Lore pauses. “There was one more thing. I should submit it as evidence, of course. I nearly left it. But then I thought, where’s the harm if they find it a bit later?” Lore slides a thick black journal from her pocket. “Here.”
Anura rears up, tear-streaked and trembling, and seizes it. “Hers.”
“Yes. I knew she was working on something of the kind—part of our trap for Angus. But I don’t for one moment believe that it was exclusively for him.”
“She only wanted a little of the possibility Gus stole from her, and I couldn’t even let her have that much. It wasn’t fair to her, Lore, demanding what we did.”
“No, it wasn’t. What would it even mean, to speak of fairness for someone who was murdered at nineteen? But it was necessary.”
Anura’s golden head nods once and then can’t seem to stop. She hugs the journal tight and rocks, and after a moment Lore gets up to let her read in privacy. She’s almost at the door back to the hallway when Anura speaks again.
“Catherine must have a grave—I mean, where he killed her in the first place.”
“She must, though I never asked her about it. Are you thinking of going there next? To find her?”
Anura doesn’t answer at first. Her gaze stays fixed to the floor.
“Lore? I’ve decided something. I can’t choose to die, not when Catherine didn’t get to live.”
“I didn’t think you would,” Lore agrees softly. “I’ll be working in the kitchen if you need me.”
When Lore is gone, Anura ripples into her frogskin. Without a salary paid in talens, without bribes, taking on her true form will have to be occasional, precious, an indulgence carefully meted out—and it sickens her to think of truth as a luxury. But even if it means she exhausts her scant funds in a night, she won’t read Catherine’s journal in any other shape. She means to meet those revenant words as herself, and not as a misunderstanding.
Hunched on the carpet, she opens to the first page, smooths it with a soft blue hand. And begins. The words feel serrated, a processional of brokenness, as if Catherine’s murder shattered every thought inside her before it could find expression. He broke you, Anura thinks. He broke you, and it will never be enough to know he’s dead.
But as Anura keeps reading, her quiet attention and understanding work their magic on Catherine’s furious telling. She meets the toothed edges with brokenness of her own, and the jags lock together in sympathy.
She shuts her eyes to feel it, the scroll of broken words becoming whole.