2.
The procession up the stairs reminded Claire of the procession down them. Single file, quiet and dark. She didn’t think it was because of any ritual silence, this time. Just because no one had anything to say.
She felt herself filling in again, a long-dry riverbed slowly swelling.
The hollowness she’d cultivated since Elias’s death—hell, since her family’s deaths, she’d been excavating herself for over a decade by now—shrank by the minute, every feeling she’d ever pushed aside slowly regaining ground, here at the inevitable end.
Never gone, just deferred, worked into the fabric of herself so thoroughly they couldn’t be differentiated from the whole.
But now, finally, it was all separating, all coming out in the tide, and she could see herself plain.
She’d missed herself, she realized. Claire had never been anything great, really. Average on pretty much every axis, and she’d never had the kind of relationship with body or brain that made her think she was anything worth missing. But she had missed herself. So she must be.
Strange, how all the things she’d been afraid of feeling paled in comparison to the knowledge that soon, she might not feel anything anymore.
The latent grief didn’t hit as hard as she’d expected it to, wasn’t a bludgeon against her ribs that bent her in half.
But it did hit, complex as it was, and her eyes welled with tears as she marched between Audrey and Dierdre up the wide stairs toward the top of the house, blurring the twisted mermaid statues.
“Please make her be quiet,” Audrey murmured when Claire let out a very soft sob.
The Ashbury matriarch glanced over her shoulder at Ash, walking behind Claire, his arms tied with that same seaweed rope that had lashed her to the altar last night.
There was a slight dampness in Audrey’s eyes, a selfish guilt. “I can’t take hearing that.”
“Nah,” Ash said to his stepmother, looking at Claire. He nodded to see her tears, a fierce angle to his pained mouth. “It’s good that she’s crying.”
To anyone else, it would seem cruel, and the way Audrey’s brow rose said she certainly took it that way. But Claire knew what Ash meant.
“Aren’t you supposed to care about her?” Audrey’s hands worried over and over themselves, pale anemones with her anxiety as the current. “You should comfort her. Make her not feel so scared. If you cared, that’s what you’d do, make it so she doesn’t feel bad anymore, try to—”
“Audrey.” Wellington Ashbury, once again at the front of their procession, didn’t bother turning around to address his wife. “Shut the fuck up.”
Audrey’s teeth clicked together behind tastefully nude lipstick, but her hands kept rubbing and rubbing.
Theo brought up the rear of the group, walking behind Dierdre, Patrick, and Greg.
Claire hadn’t seen him exchange a single word with his husband all morning, and even now, they walked carefully, as if trying to avoid accidentally touching.
The nape of her neck prickled, someone watching. She glanced back.
Theo looked away.
Claire wasn’t sure where all of this was supposed to take place.
She’d thought the underwater cathedral, at first, but that couldn’t be right, since they were headed up instead of down.
When they finally reached the foyer, the wave-patterned columns reaching up into thick shadows, she realized they were going outside.
The glare of the sun felt like knives in her eyes. Claire cringed back, her shoulder running into Ash’s behind her.
Maybe he would have offered some kind of comfort, but someone wrenched him away before he could.
Patrick, the lenses of his glasses shining, a trickle of sweat at his temple already.
Greg helped, the two younger Ashbury brothers hauling Ash into the bright gleam of the day, their edges eclipsed in light.
Dierdre’s hand vised around Claire’s arm. “Don’t try to run again,” she murmured, but she sounded more weary than stern. “They’ll just catch you. There’s nowhere to go.”
It took a minute for Claire’s eyes to adjust, for her to stop squinting long enough to make out her surroundings. Dierdre was right. There was nowhere to go.
They stood on the front lawn of the Ashbury estate, on that curved driveway that twisted like a tentacle loop. But it wasn’t empty, not like it had been the day she arrived.
The gathered throng wasn’t massive. A hundred people, maybe, all dressed in the same blazing white as the Ashburys, reflecting back the sun’s painful brightness.
Mostly older people, around Wellington’s age, though there were some younger people, too.
Married couples, holding the hands of small children, some singles surreptitiously checking their watches like this was a meeting that had gone over its time.
Claire could recognize most of the faces, now that her eyes were cooperating.
The same ones she’d seen on the company website when she was doing her amateur sleuthing, pale and attractive and smoothed by wealth bought in blood and seawater.
They all looked at her, but they didn’t make a sound. Not even the kids.
Which was quite a feat, considering that the skins were right next to them.
Off to the side, nearer to the promontory jutting out over the ocean, the skins were in a fenced-off partition, like farm animals.
They all looked—well, like skin, bulging where they shouldn’t, bloated in the heat, some in shapes that barely passed for human anymore, corrupted enough that it hurt Claire’s stomach to look at them.
Patches of discoloration dotted the bits of the skins visible in their uniforms, bruise-like but redder than a bruise should be, as if something pushed out from the inside and strained the flesh over it.
A few lay spread on the ground, masses of tentacle that shouldn’t be able to live on land.
The skins were as still and quiet as everyone else, but the sight of them sent Claire’s heart kicking up into her throat anyway, made the god-healed place on her side twinge. Her white dress flapped at her legs like a damp fin as her legs instinctively tried to walk her backward, away.
“Forward.” Dierdre’s voice was soft, and even her shove between Claire’s shoulder blades was gentle. She was going along with this, but she didn’t seem happy about it, as if every step was a reminder that in other circumstances, she could be in Claire’s place. That her safety was tenuous.
“Did it ask you?” Claire said, because she had to know. “When your accident happened? Did it ask you to make the promise?”
Dierdre shook her head. “I was never a soft thing, Claire. I’ve never let anyone in.”
Not like her. Someone who was so soft she’d had to make an armor, whose desperation had made her a target.
But maybe it could be strength, too. Maybe learning how to let people in and still stay upright was a kind of power all its own.
Not that she’d ever find out, now.
Claire moved forward, legs jellied. The other Ashburys were already on the cliff next to the driveway, arranged as if this were another wedding, one more typical than the ceremony they’d given her and Ash in the underwater church.
Arches had been fixed to the sides of the cliff, creating a ceiling of blowsy, expensive white roses and peonies.
Tall glass vases of what smelled like salt water lined the cliff’s edges, glinting in the sunlight.
The Ashburys had arranged themselves in an arrow shape, the brothers on one side and the spouses on the other.
Ash stood near the root of the cliff, close to the fenced-in skins, held in place by two stone-faced guards in pristine white suits.
More faces she recognized from the website, executives turned security.
Ash still wore the suit he’d slept in, bloodstained at the leg and side, his bruises florid on his face.
At the apex of the Ashbury arrow was a carpet, white embroidered with wave patterns in blue and gold thread. That must be where she was supposed to go.
As Dierdre steered Claire past the skins, they all perked up, slowly moving toward the edge of their enclosure, faces raised like they could smell her. One or two of them had blood on their uniforms, crusted around their misshapen mouths. Claire’s blood.
The woman who’d eaten her intestine—Lucille, who’d refilled the wine, Audrey’s younger sister—leaned halfway out of the fence, breathing deep, stretching back her jaw so her needle-like teeth could get as close to Claire as possible.
One of the Marinography employees reached out with a small, black device, pressing it to her shoulder.
A Taser. Lucille shook, making loose skin bubble and sway, then slunk back into the fence.
She raised her bloodstained shirt to her mouth and started gnawing on it.
Claire wanted to say something when she passed Ash, but she couldn’t think of anything. Goodbye seemed morbid. Thank you seemed even worse, somehow. So she just made eye contact, hoping he could read something on her face and make it into whatever they needed.
He looked at her and swallowed.
Theo stood at the end of the line on the spouses’ side, a conspicuous place left between him and Audrey for Dierdre.
Claire looked at him as she passed, too, keeping her eyes fixed on his unnaturally blue ones, unsure why she felt the need to make him acknowledge her, but following the instinct. He didn’t look away this time.
That felt important.
Dierdre brought Claire up to the white rug, centered between two more tall glass vases of seawater. Green strands of algae twisted in them, as if in some eco-friendly lava lamp. Dierdre gently pushed Claire to her knees, then stepped back into her place in line, silent all the while.