THEY SAY THE Narrow drowns all it takes, but they are wrong. I know because I watched a girl fall in. I watched the water fold over her as she vanished instantly into the dark.
And six years later, I kissed her warm lips. I felt her heartbeat under my palm and her breath on my skin. A miracle like that, you don’t waste. You don’t let it get dragged back under.
So I jump. And I take Maeve down with me.
We hit the water. What little light there is on the surface is obliterated instantly as we plunge below the surface. Bits of wood and leaves and dirt strike my skin, but it’s hardly noticeable next to the pummeling of the water itself. My lungs burn, my flesh is ice. Maeve tears herself free of my body, desperate to reach Del, but I wrap my limbs around her, tangle my hand in her long dark hair. She cannot escape me. I am too close to death, and she has become too real.
My arm scrapes against a rock, pain jolting through my body. Maeve thrashes and strikes at me. I hold on.
The water slams my back against some unseen obstacle. What little air is in my lungs goes out of me at once. My grip fails. Maeve twists free of me as my vision goes dark, as my sense of my own body fades.
And then I’m not in the river. I’m standing in the dark, in silence except for the dripping of water from my hair and my clothes. Beyond me is only an infinite black. I’m not cold. I’m not hurting.
I’m not anything.
There comes a slow, cruel laugh behind me. I turn, and there it is. The bright room. The ratty couch, the pills spilled over the coffee table. Luke, glassy-eyed. Dylan, his elbows on his knees, looking straight at me.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks. “There’s nowhere to go from here.”
I look behind me at the emptiness that I mistook for darkness. It’s not night but a vast nothing. That’s why I can never get away—this room, this light, is all that exists.
I’m back in the room. Dylan pats the cushion beside him. “Come on. Get comfortable. Have something to relax.”
Where was I a moment before?
The Narrow.
“You were right here. You never left,” Luke says, his empty eyes fixed on me.
“Sit down,” Dylan says.
Water drips from my fingertips.
Maeve.
“There’s no one here but us,” Dylan says, and he’s right. Even Luke is gone. So are the walls. There’s just Dylan and the couch and a tiny wedge of light. I step leadenly toward the couch. The carpet is soaked, squishing beneath my feet. “Come on, Princess,” he says, except it’s Maeve who speaks. Maeve sitting on the couch, blood billowing lazily in the air around her from the wound on the back of her head.
“What is this?” I ask.
“The last frantic synapses firing in your brain,” Maeve suggests, one shoulder shrugging. “Or the hell you’ll get to live in when you’re dead. The Narrow keeps most of the drowned, but some have prior claims.”
“I’m dying.”
“You jumped in the Narrow, Princess. Of course you’re dying,” Maeve says. “Idiot.”
“I had to stop you. I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing. Not like with Dylan. Not again.”
“Idiot,” Maeve says again. “You didn’t do nothing. You did the only thing that mattered. You survived. Whatever it took. It’s everything you did after that was surrender. You kept quiet. You played nice. You destroyed yourself for everyone else’s comfort, and you’ve done it again.”
“That’s not what I did,” I say angrily. I pace in front of her. Water oozes from the carpet with every step.
“Martyring yourself is a hell of a lot easier than standing up for yourself,” Maeve says. “You killed yourself to save a girl who was already dead. How does that make sense?”
“Del isn’t dead.”
“Del isn’t Del. She’s three people, and two of them are going to die tonight, whatever happens. You chose to let Del live, which means Grace and Delphine don’t exist anymore, not really. At least if you’d let me take Grace, everyone would be back to where they were supposed to be. The living and the dead.”
The circle of light is getting smaller. The water is rising at our feet. Lapping against my ankles now.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Maeve says, leaning back with one arm flung casually over the back of the couch. “You did it. Surrendered to your suffering.”
“Sacrifice isn’t the same as surrender,” I tell her, a scrape behind the words. I stand in front of her, my hands fists at my sides.
“A real sacrifice has to be something of value. You don’t think you have any,” Maeve says with a vicious twist of her lips.
“That isn’t true.” Is it?
“You didn’t even try to fight the current,” Maeve says, eyes locked with mine. “You let it take you under without a fuss. Just like you always turn back to this place. Because you think this is what you deserve. And maybe you do.”
“No. I don’t,” I say fiercely. “I don’t deserve any of this.”
“Then why are you still here?” Maeve asks.
I wave a hand at the darkness around us. “There’s nowhere else to go. Every time I leave, there’s nothing but the dark, and this place is right behind me,” I tell her. She should know that. She was in my head long enough to remember my nightmares.
“Oh. I guess you should just give up and die, then,” she says.
I glare at her. There’s water dripping from the ceiling now, cold rivulets streaming down my back. Maeve’s face is sunken, her skull gleaming beneath her skin.
She’s wrong. I don’t think I deserve to die.
But maybe that’s not the same thing as thinking I’m worth fighting for.
I did what Dylan told me to. Survival, not surrender. But then I’m sitting safely at the kitchen table, my mother’s appalled face across from me. You aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?
Moving my flight to give my bruises time to heal.
Hiding my arm from my friends.
Agreeing to Oster’s deal so I didn’t have to confront my parents.
Avoiding Veronica and the others.
Inviting Maeve to crawl inside my skin, even knowing it would change me—end the me that exists now.
There were countless small moments of surrender.
Jumping into the water, though, hadn’t been surrender. She was wrong about that. That was a chance to save Del—and to save Grace from an eternity in the Narrow’s grip, and Maeve’s.
But what about now?
Waiting for the lights to go out. For the river to rise. Waiting for time to catch up with me and my death to find me. This is surrender.
The Narrow drowns all it takes. I don’t for a moment believe that I am an exception. But I’m done surrendering. If the Narrow wants me, I will die fighting.
Fighting for myself.
I turn away from Maeve. Away from the ratty couch, the white pills that have turned to knuckle bones on the coffee table. With water sloshing around my calves, I stride toward the darkness.
Every time I’ve had this dream, I walk and walk and never get any farther away from the light, the room. As soon as I turn back, it’s there.
So this time I don’t turn back. I walk blindly ahead into the empty dark. The water rises. I wade through knee-deep water, then thrash my way along as it swells to my thighs.
You will die anyway, I think, and keep moving. You already took that lungful of water into your body. You are dying or you are dead. You are circling around in the last seconds of your life, and it is too late to do anything about it.
I keep walking. A sob rises in my chest and I let it out—and then I scream, raw rage and fear and hurt.
I want to live, I try to shout, but my voice has failed and the dark is all around me. Why did I waste so much time? Why did I let myself sink so deep and never let anyone see that I was drowning?
I fall to one knee. I shut my eyes, which changes nothing, since there’s nothing to see. All of this is a dream, anyway.
Why fight now, when it won’t matter? It won’t change anything. No one will know.
Because now it’s the only thing that matters. The last thing. Not if I die but how I die. It matters to me.
I open my eyes and I stand. I keep moving. I don’t turn back.
And then, all at once, the empty dark isn’t empty. I stagger to a halt, staring at the girl in front of me. She has light brown hair that falls to her shoulders, brown eyes a touch too big for her face.
“Grace,” I say, staring.
“Eden.” She smiles—a bright, genuine smile that crinkles the corners of her eyes. “There you are.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask, confusion and apprehension stealing the last warmth from my blood.
“Looking for you, of course.” She stretches out a hand. The water has gone still around us. My hand trembling, I take hers, and she pulls me lightly but firmly toward her, until we’re inches apart. She runs the fingers of her other hand down my cheek in a tender gesture. “Eden, I’m so sorry. I had two lives to find you, and I still only managed to steal a few days for us to spend together.”
“How are you here?” I ask her, my voice shaking. If she’s here, that means—
“Hush,” she says, and kisses me. It isn’t like kissing Del—not quite. And yet it is the kiss of a girl who knows me, and I know her—know the taste of her lips and the touch of her hands. There is love in that kiss, and grief. Hers and mine, because her being here can only mean one thing.
“Grace,” I breathe.
She touches her fingertips to my lips. “Don’t. It’s too late. I made my choice.” She takes hold of my arm, fingers wrapping tight around my wrist. “Don’t let go.”
The ground beneath my feet vanishes, and we plunge beneath the water.
The dark does not relent, but suddenly my lungs are empty, burning. My body is alight with pain.
But Grace’s hand is still around my wrist. She floats in the water before me, limned in strange light. For a moment we hang there—and then she begins to swim toward the surface in utter contradiction of the punishing current. I rise with her. I don’t have the strength to kick my legs, but it doesn’t seem to matter. A shred of light appears above. The moon.
Something snags my ankle. I jerk to a stop, kicking frantically against the thing that holds me—a hand, a pale arm. A thin white face, dark hair billowing in the water around it. Maeve. Her other hand wraps around my leg. For an instant, we stare at each other—the dying and the dead.
And then there are other hands. Clutching at her arms, her throat, wrapping rotten fingers around her mouth. The drowned drag her down. Begin to drag us down, too—
She lets go. Her grip relents, and the current and the drowned rip her away.
I’m rising through the water again, but my oxygen-starved brain has reached its limit. Bright spots appear in my vision, pulsing like alien jellyfish, and the flat circle of the moon vanishes. My grip on Grace’s arm weakens.
The last of my vision flickers—
Goes dark—
The hand around my wrist hauls me upward. I break the surface. I gasp, gulping in a desperate lungful of air, catching water with it. I choke as voices shout.
“I’ve got her! I’ve got her!” It’s Veronica’s voice, Veronica’s hand on my wrist, and Grace is gone. I cling to Veronica as the greedy water drags at me. Ruth throws herself down beside the bank, reaching out so far that Zoya has to grab her waist to steady her. I manage to get my other hand around Veronica’s arm, and then Ruth gets hold of my shirt and pulls.
We topple onto the slick rocks of the bank as I gag and cough, expelling the Narrow from my body.
“Eden, talk to me,” Veronica says on her knees beside me.
I only cough again, tremors convulsing my body.
“Jesus, don’t make her talk, let her focus on breathing,” Ruth says, pissed off the way she gets when she’s scared, and I want to weep because I thought I would never hear her voice again.
“She’s okay. She’s okay,” Zoya is repeating, and her fingernails tease back the wet hair from my face as she makes soothing noises. Well back from the water, Delphine stands with her arms wrapped around her body, her expression lost. She looks at me as if I’m a stranger.
For just a moment, I think I see another girl standing on the shore. Then she’s gone, and she might have never been there at all.
Veronica grabs my hand and holds on tight.
With all my strength, I squeeze back.