Chapter 12 What We Owe the Dead
SILENCE FOLLOWED NANCY’S disappearance. Kade turned, with aching stillness, to look at Christopher, who shied away.
“You want to tell me why you decided to do that?” he asked, in a low, dangerous voice.
“They can’t hurt her unless she moves,” said Christopher frantically. “She’s safer than any of the rest of us would be.”
“They’d have taken you all the way apart,” said Sumi.
“No more Kade, no more voice of reason, and then where would the rest of us be? Would we have to find our own ways to be reasonable? Because I don’t think we know how to do that anymore.
You’ve been so good at being reasonable for the rest of us for so long that we don’t know how to be reasonable without you, and we’d all get dead, and then we’d be stuck with stupid ghost Jill all up in our faces all the time, being all wispy and awful.
Or maybe she’d be able to boss us around the way she can all the other ghosts in this place, and then we’d be a part of her ghost army, and that would be awful.
I don’t want Jill to be the boss of me.”
Kade turned to scowl at her, and Sumi looked unflinchingly back. He turned his attention on Talia, who flinched.
“What?” she demanded. “I let the ghosts eat a whole bunch of my moths! I didn’t stop you from getting to the statue-girl! I haven’t done anything wrong here!”
Kade held his scowl for a long moment, then sighed and sagged. “I guess you haven’t,” he said. “But what are we supposed to do now?”
THE DEAD SURROUNDED NANCY, digging their fingers into her hair and locking them around the draped lines of her chitoniskos, and they pulled her down the hall before she could do anything to stop them.
Not that there was anything to have been done: from her position, she would have been devoured in an instant if she had tried to break away and run from them.
They had her, and she knew they had her, and so when they hauled her away, she remained as perfectly immobile as stone, not allowing her eyes to water or her heart to beat.
It was a difficult thing, to be so still that her body forgot what it was to be a body, and began to learn what it was to be a thing.
She couldn’t maintain it for too long. The oldest statues warned about that, whenever someone chose to stay and stand; they told the new statuary that to be too still was to risk losing the self, to become as inanimate as they aspired to be.
To freeze so completely that the body calcified was a terrible way to die, and there was no coming back from it.
Sooner or later, to stay alive, she would have to breathe.
And as soon as she did, the dead would be able to consume her.
So she held her position as they dragged her down the hall, and she hoped against all odds that her friends would be able to find a way to come and take her back before it was too late.
At the end of the hall was a door, one that she had seen frequently during her time in the Halls, but had never passed beyond.
It was a sweeping filigree of gold, burnished bright and glowing like the sun.
It swung open as the dead dragged her toward it, and they pushed her into the darkness beyond.
In an instant, Nancy was stranded in the infinite black of the void at the beginning of eternity, the blackness that existed before the birth of light, when all the worlds were yet to be and could not yet be reached.
There were no doors here, because this was the place past which no light could shine.
This was a space sliced out of the crucible in which stars were born and pushed out into the universe to find their way, the beginning of everything, and there was no light there, there was no warmth or oxygen, only the dark emptiness of infinity.
Her heart clenched in her chest, and she felt it contract, almost moaning with the realization that her concentration had failed: she was finished, she was done, the dead would have her now.
But the dead did not descend, and Nancy did not die.
Instead, she allowed her harried heart to beat, and let her lungs fill with the taste of newborn stars and acrid ashes, and she didn’t know how she could be alive here, and she didn’t know how long it was going to last, but she knew she wasn’t going to waste the time she had.
She wrapped her arms around herself, seeking some comfort in the contact with her own skin, and bit by bit, she shivered and sank into the void, sitting on the nothingness and waiting for the end to come.
Instead, a hand touched her shoulder, and she looked up to behold the faintly glowing shape of Jillian Wolcott, still silvered, but now tinted almost like she’d been when she was alive. She smiled, red, red lips bending upward in a liar’s bow, and asked, “Mind if I sit?”
Nancy tried to scramble backward but could find no purchase on the void, so that her hands and heels only scrabbled. Jill laughed.
“You can’t do anything here unless we allow it, Nancy. You’re our prisoner for the time being, and you get to decide how pleasant or terrible that’s going to be.”
“You said you were going to devour me,” said Nancy.
“Oh, Nancy, Nancy,” Jill chided. “I would love to devour you. I want to taste your heart between my teeth. I think you would be so much sweeter than you realize. But there’s something I want even more than that.”
“What?” asked Nancy blankly.
Jill managed, with a visible effort, not to laugh. “I want what you have, what you’ve been so patently determined to throw away like it doesn’t mean anything at all. I want to live. I was so young, and so innocent, and I didn’t deserve what happened to me.”
Nancy stared at Jill, remembering her with hands gloved in blood and splatters on her pale gown. “You were never innocent,” she said.
“But I was, once,” Jill countered. “It’s not my fault that I fell into bad company, and they made a monster out of me. I had my whole life in front of me. I could have been better than I ever had the chance to be, but they took that chance away from me.”
“You took all Loriel’s chances away from her,” said Nancy.
“And Sumi’s. And Lundy’s. They deserved better than what you did to them.
No one forced you, Jill. No one put the knife in your hand or told you that you should use it.
You did that all on your own. I don’t know how you died, but I know how Sumi came back.
She got a second chance because people loved her enough to come here and ransom her back from death—she was wanted. That’s more than I can say for you.”
Jill’s hand caught her across her cheek and by surprise at the same time. Her head snapped to the side, and as she turned slowly back to face the other girl, she raised her own hand to touch her stinging skin with careful fingertips, staring.
“You hit me,” she accused.
“I’ll hit you again,” said Jill. “I’d do worse, but we need you alive for right now.
A dead hostage is about the most worthless thing there is.
Although maybe they’d just bring you back, too.
What do you think, fancy Nancy? Are you important enough to them that they’d go to all that trouble to have you back with them? ”
Slowly, deliberately, Nancy closed her eyes and turned her face away.
A moment later, she heard fingers being snapped in front of her nose. She didn’t react, forcing herself to remain rigidly still.
“Nancy,” said Jill. “Nancy, do you really think ignoring me makes this go any better for you? Do you think it gets you a happy ending? I have you in the void at the beginning of time. There’s no getting away from me here.
There’s no running. All ignoring me buys you is a little less grace when the time arrives. ”
Nancy didn’t respond. Jill made a frustrated huffing noise and was silent.
In time, Nancy began to believe that the other girl had in fact gone away; she relaxed where she sat, keeping her eyes closed.
They were in the abyss that came before anything else existed.
It wasn’t like there was much for her to see.