Chapter 13 #2
“Because he’s an irresponsible ass!” Mom breaks, finally shouting.
It’s a warning, a line in the sand. I know better than to press.
I won’t get more than this. But I’m so close, I can’t leave it alone.
Sharks smell blood and teenagers smell weakness—there’s blood in the water and I can’t help but hunt it down.
“Am I a weapon?” I demand. “Is that what you designed me to be?”
“I did not design you to be anything. You are my daughter, Persephone. I gave birth to you, I carried you home, I raised you—”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t believe you anymore! If Cain is lying, if I’m not a weapon, if I’m not some ‘Pet Sematary bullshit,’ then what was your lab for?”
Mom’s shoulders seize, rigid. She stomps the brakes, the car behind us howling on the horn as it swerves around. Face deathly pale, hands shaking, she pushes a strand of hair out of her eyes, slowly inching the car forward again as if nothing happened.
“You mean my office in the basement?” she asks, her strained voice almost silent.
“No. I don’t,” I say, flat. “You know the lab I mean.”
We stop at a red light in silence. Mom stares dead ahead, barely breathing, chewing her lip until lipstick stains her teeth, a pinprick of blood welling from the broken skin beneath.
At last, she decides on: “I don’t want there to be secrets between us.”
I force myself to keep breathing, swallowing down the fire rising in my throat, the anger rattling my rib cage. “You are literally the only one of us with secrets.”
“I know,” she admits and God, even that is a hard-won victory.
“And I want you to be able to come to me if… if you need to. If you’re worried.
If anything…” She hesitates, swallowing.
Her eyes dart across the road, barely seeing, swapping words out before she even speaks them.
“If something out of the ordinary should happen,” she decides on.
“Something bigger than you that you find you need help with. If you get in trouble.”
Something about the way she says it itches at me like a double meaning and I can’t see underneath.
Can’t stop hearing the echo of that strange, distant voice in my head, protesting with the surety of a coffin closing: You can’t make me something less than what I am.
But I don’t know how to ask that. Don’t know how to begin to find the words for the suspicious unease swelling in my empty chest.
“Am I in trouble?” I press, instead.
“No! No, you’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But you’re afraid that I could. That something about me makes me dangerous, a weapon—”
“You are not a weapon!” she shouts, too loud.
“Okay, but am I a person?” I blurt, drowning her protests under mine, voice rising. “How am I walking around without a heartbeat?”
Mom bares her teeth, snarling. “Persephone. Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.”
No. I won’t let her make me smaller. I’m not a teenager she can ground. I held a man’s life in my hands today. I gathered ghosts up in my arms—I kissed them on their half-remembered foreheads—and I lived. I am something bigger than Persephone.
I’m Jenny with her green ribbon, alive and dead, balanced on a silk-bound precipice.
I’m…
I’m not human, am I?
“Don’t lie to me,” I hiss. “You said you don’t want secrets—then stop keeping them.
I know it’s impossible for a living person not to have a heartbeat, but I listened to my chest, Mom, and I listened to Bas’s.
There’s a sound in there, but it’s not a heart.
It’s not natural. Bas’s babynapper said something happened seventeen years ago and the only thing that could be is me or, like, the entire actual Ghost War—”
I don’t mean it. It’s just a quip—a gauntlet, an insult, a ridiculous exaggeration—but as soon as the words leave my mouth, I freeze.
All the pieces to this strange puzzle fall into sudden, terrible focus.
Every un-memory of asphodel and dying. The broken sky, two halves reaching for each other across a crumbling field.
The lab. The ghosts in Mr. Snider’s body, reaching for me in pain and desperation.
My hands cupping their dead faces, the funerary drum of my instinctual promise—
(home, home, home)
“Mom.” Horrified, I ask, “What did you do seventeen years ago?”
Stone-faced, determined, she stares out at the cars ahead. “I became a mother.”
“No. No. Whatever you did, you did to Bas too. The ghosts in there—they talked. They were looking for us.”
Mom’s head whips around.
“They spoke?” she blurts, fear live-wire hot. Too quickly, she catches it. Her face falls carefully blank. “No, that’s not possible. Ghosts can’t—”
“No secrets, you said! You wanted to be a safe place, but I come to you, and you call me a liar!”
“I’m not!” She reaches for me, but I slap her hand away, earn a sharp glance that quickly softens.
“I’m not calling you a liar. I’m sure you heard something.
Remnants retain the cadence of speech, and can sound like words at times.
But functional language dissipates as the remnant loses coherency and memory of its original form—”