Chapter Sixteen
She didn’t move from the door for a long time.
She couldn’t—the creature on the other side held all her attention.
Because it was a creature. There was no sign of Harker there anymore. His deep brown eyes were blank and black, almost sightless seeming.
Like all he needed was instinct, and instinct said his prey was close by. Just on the other side of a thin membrane, barely
visible. The only thing he had to do was find a place to slip into.
But god, the way he went about it.
He didn’t search. He scrabbled, feverishly. He went over and over the edges of her door with clawed, hungry fingers, looking
for holes. Looking for some crack that might let him in. Horrible to see—but something else that she didn’t expect, too.
Sad. It was desperately sad. Even though she hated him, even though he was awful, her heart swelled to see someone so robbed
of all their senses. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, just to make the idea go away.
Yet still, remnants of it remained.
They followed her as she finally stood, and closed the door on him.
They made her do it slow, too slow, as if hoping he might switch back at any moment.
And even after he was sealed on the other side, she couldn’t quite tear herself away.
She stood with her forehead pressed to what was now stone surrounded by nothingness, for a long time.
You are starting to think he means his help, her mind whispered.
To see it as something a begrudgingly made friend might do, instead of a forced enemy.
Even though that was ridiculous.
In fact, all her focus right now was. Calabaraia lay spread out behind her, and all she could do was think about him. Like nothing had
changed from her first moments at Harrowhall, to where she was now. Truth be told, she had gotten worse. Then, she had gladly pushed him from her mind.
Now it took time.
It felt like pulling a tooth out, from the root.
She was sure she bled, as she finally put her back to the door. And this time, somehow, what she saw couldn’t quite wash that
feeling away. It lingered, as she let her gaze wander over a landscape that the historian Hornbeck had once called featureless and dull, and the explorer Alvin Broadbeam had declared singularly barren without a bit of civilization about it.
But it was, in truth, a wonder beyond all imagining.
Because it wasn’t really the gray desert they had described at all. It was a shimmering series of dunes, dotted with silver.
Each one of those rises so soft seeming, so subtle, it was like seeing something that wasn’t all there. It appeared nebulous
almost, like you could sink into the ground with one step.
And that thought finally made her understand: It was not the ground at all
It was the sky. It was the upside-down sky. She was standing amid stars, amid the velvet darkness of the night, amid the furrows made by something like clouds. And somehow, it all took her weight.
She could walk on these things, with her human feet.
She did right then and there.
She took a step, heart in her throat, and it all held her as softly as sand.
And they hadn’t appreciated a single thing about it. They had looked at it and found it lacking, simply because it wasn’t
covered in roads and buildings and things that didn’t even matter here. Nobody lived in a house. They didn’t even need to
choose between the ground and the sky.
There was none of that to them.
It was all just everything, all at once.
She looked up, and there were staircases suspended in nothingness. Twisting things like trees, weaving sideways through the
spaces in between. Somewhere in the distance she could hear music, sweet music—like nothing on earth and yet so familiar at
the same time. It made her think of that Sunday school song:
I danced with the devil when the sky turned black.
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
She even found herself humming it, as she stepped toward the sound. And she felt absolutely no fear when she did. Because
of the favor she had been granted, she thought. Because of the safe passage that was now hers.
But the farther she walked, the more she wondered if that was the truth.
Or if ringing the bell was more about something else.
Not about claiming safety, but about showing that you were safe.
That you would not hurt anything here. That you didn’t have terrible intentions and would not do anything deeply unfair.
Like their way of granting permission to come, she thought, in places where humans had decided for them what permission they gave.
We say that we grant it to them, and they grant it to us, Hargreaves had said the other day. But that is not entirely the case. The beings of the Underneath do not, in truth, seem to understand such a concept. They
only know what we enforce and impress upon them. They only know to abide by our wishes.
And that had seemed like a strange thing for her to say, at the time.
This very feeling she was getting seemed strange, truth be told.
But it looked less so after she saw what she did, in the distance. A rope of deep blue gauze, it looked like, flickering in
and out. But as she got closer, she realized what it really was, with a sharp intake of breath. It was a being. It was something that lived here. Fen possibly, if the soft loveliness of that shape and color was anything to go by.
But it could have been something else.
A shrey, a wilderun. Like violent dogs they are, Hornbeck had said of the latter. But what did he know? He was dead. And he’d never understood anyway, if this was anything to go by. It seemed to approach, then darted away again. Seemed to
become more solid, then not once more. Sometimes she thought she could see its face and sometimes not. In fact, it was only
when she stood completely still and calm that she saw it had anything like a face at all.
It looked formed out of water and moonlight.
Mostly eyes, of some description, all a deep blue, with no center to them. But full of recognizable feelings. They confirmed what she had first thought, when she had seen its hesitation in coming to her.
It was timid.
Almost afraid of her.
And it only stopped when she smiled in welcome.
Then suddenly she could see something resembling a body, some sort of clothes. Like the long coat Harker had worn, only not
quite. We don’t have words for what they do and wear and how they present themselves, she thought and ached to write that down. To scribble over everything she had read in a million silly books with just how
marvelous that idea was.
And that was before it spoke.
“Lilibet, it is you. Have you come to dance with us once more?” it said, so clearly and with such obvious joy in its voice
that she couldn’t deny the words or what it meant. Despite the fact that this joy and this voice didn’t sound like anything
she could ever have imagined. It was one long hum, that resonated at a frequency she could just somehow understand. Impossibly
pleasant and completely magical, even with the mildly terrifying implications.
And it was the terrified part it seemed to sense.
It drew back. That strange face creased down the middle.
“Ah, no, no,” it said. “You are not her. I have mistaken your inside face.”
Then it retreated even farther. It shrank down, seemed to flicker in and out again. Ashamed of the assumption and disappointed
that it wasn’t the case, she realized, and wanted to reach out a hand immediately, to reassure. But somehow, she knew just
feeling the emotion would be heard.
And sure enough, the being seemed to brighten.
“You are kind, like she was. Perhaps this is what I touched? So few of the large ones of your sect are, only the small sort. I cannot find their word for it to you. Might you tell me of it? Lilibet does not come, and I forget,” it said, and now the meaning behind everything came thick and fast.
She thought of what it searched for immediately.
“The small ones are called children.”
“Yes, yes. There, children. That is so. The ones who come to us only when lost. The ones she gave thanks to us for, for our
kindnesses to them. She thought it very well, indeed, very well, even as we tried to do the explaining. It is only as things
must be, we showed her. Yet we could not have shown her rightly, for it only made the sadness from her eyes greater. There
is a river that came of it, not far from here. I could take you, if you will it,” the being said. Then it waited patiently
for her answer.
She didn’t know how to say that she couldn’t. That he had almost made her sad from her eyes, too. That his words made her
think of Lilibet, breaking into pieces over all the ideas of what this place was. And to what extent it was the opposite.
“I should probably stay here,” she tried. “But thank you.”
Then watched the being bow. “It is not so strange that you do not wish to. She did not do a visiting to its banks often. And
when her Bram came alone, he did not seem to like it so well.”
Hers, she thought. Bram, she thought.
And automatically after it:
The boy in the long grass. The boy on the edge of the building. The boy in the deck chair, with the nervous hands. “So she
had someone, then. Someone who would come here with her. Someone good and loving.”
“He was her one above others. As gentle as she.”
“Do you know what happened to him? Did he die, too?” she asked, too desperate to actually uncover something about that ghostly girl, to even think about her tone or what her question meant.
Though she regretted it immediately.
The being recoiled.
“Oh, she has done the terrible ending.”
“I’m sorry. I think so. I don’t know for sure.”
“Yes, you do not all feel each other. I recall.”
“But you can feel this good man. This one above others.”
“Not anymore. So perhaps you are right. Perhaps he has gone on without us, too. Perhaps a dreadful thing befell them both—oh,
oh, it cannot be held in me. I must fade; you must let me,” the being said, its form starting to dissolve before it even finished
asking. She had to race to ask one final thing, before he was gone for good.
“What dreadful thing could have befallen them? Could someone have hurt them? A rival maybe, someone bitter about them, something
untethered that stalked them, searching for people to latch on to,” she said, barely sure of what she was even thinking but
needing to know. It would explain it, after all.
Why she saw them, like a warning. The sense that something was haunting them, in every flash to that past. Then the fact that
Harker looked just a little like him, that Bram had said he felt like something took him over . . .
No, she thought. No, no, no, no. That is mad; that is impossible. Harker is not some weird thing walking around in someone else’s body. He
showed his flesh and blood to you, underneath. There’s no way it could ever be the case.
But just as she did, the being spoke a final time. “They had a shadow on them, always on them. We tried to tell them that it could not be shaken, but they did not listen. Be careful, one who is not Lilibet,” it said.
Then it was gone, and she was alone, in the Underneath.
Exhausted, suddenly. Desperately sad. And completely unsure what to do.
Sleep, her brain said. Things will make more sense in the morning.
Then before she could wonder how she might go about a thing like that, something seemed to spring up around her. Branches,
bursting with flowers and moss, coiling and curling to make a kind of bower. A bed for her, it seemed—as if this place had
heard what she most needed.
Because she did need it.
She drifted off before another second went by.