CHAPTER 32
The locked door withstood all her efforts to open it. Emma had returned, more than once. Each time, with a new idea. Each time, disappointed. The opening charms she bought at the night market had no effect. Trying to pry off the hinges only stung her claw-tipped fingers numb.
As the moon waned and fattened once more, Emma felt numbing despair creep in.
For the first time, she truly considered that she might fail.
That she might never escape the Night City.
Even as the spring bloomed lovely around her, Emma felt only the cold of the rainy nights.
Her sisters could not tempt her to their jaunts in the Night City.
Not the fairy horse auction at the night market; not the brandy raid in the Master’s Sitting Room at Granville College; not even the ballet of the bats in the starry groves of the University Arboretum.
Hunting was the only thing that settled her.
At least she was earning something toward her escape.
Even if it was a droplet against the sea of her thousand-year debt. And so Emma stalked her prey.
One evening, Emma perched in an alder tree by the river, waiting. The University track team ran the path below, and they would be rich pickings. But the runners were late. Emma peered down, looking for them.
Something else caught her eye instead. In the thicket that stretched beneath the alder to the river, she saw thatching.
Emma slid down the tree and waded forward.
There was a hut hidden in the bracken, low to the ground and roofed with dripping reeds.
It would be invisible from the path and the water.
The air was quiet there. Almost too quiet.
There was no birdsong, no friendly rustle of squirrels.
The opening of the hut gaped at her like a dark mouth.
A voice hissed from its depths. “What do you wish?”
Emma backed away.
“Do not leave, little one. Enter.”
“No, thank you,” Emma said, as politely as she could. “I must go.”
“And leave behind the thing you want most?” the voice caressed.
“How would you know what that is?” Emma crossed her arms, skeptical to the core.
“No corner of the heart is secret to the water hag.”
“The water hag?” With a jolt in her pulse, Emma remembered the fox maidens’ tale. “You take memories.”
“I show memories,” the hag said. “We all have things we wish for. Things lost in the past. A lover, left in the mortal realms? A babe, perhaps, or a long-gone home? Do you not have something you wish for?”
Her mother’s hands, warm on her shoulders. The rosemary smell of her. Something yawned inside Emma: a hole that screamed like a tiny lost child. If she could just feel her mother holding her one more time.
Emma hushed the voice warning of danger. She was a fox maiden now, armed with claws and teeth. The hag should be wary of her. She ducked into the hut’s entrance.
“And if I do have something? A memory?”
“Then I can help. I need only an item—and coin.”
Emma crawled in. The inside of the hut smelled as damp as the outside. A fire glowed at the center of the gloom. Beyond, a dark figure waited.
The water hag. She did not wear a wig of weeds, as Nancy had predicted.
Her hair was a pale cascade, knotted with talismans of bird bone.
Within the tangled mass, her face was unlined.
But her eyes were ancient pits, and the fingers that reached for Emma were glassy, as though the fingerprints had worn smooth from use.
“Come.” The water hag’s voice was sand over river stones, the grit in it ground fine over centuries. “Closer.”
Her young-ancient face stilled, as though she listened to a sound Emma could not hear. “There is a strangeness to you. You carry memories that are not your own. I hear them, whispering. I see a shape of cruel lines, fixed upon you.”
“There’s something on me?” Emma twisted to look at her back. Her skin crawled, as if with wriggling insects.
“Not on, but inside. It glows from your soul, this rune. A key that locks within the memories of many others…”
“A rune fixed to me. To my soul,” Emma said, with a sick realization.
The Judge’s ruby eyes loomed before her.
Marked by the bargain with the Turnbulls, he had called her.
Branded as a sacrifice by a thing affixed to your soul.
But then Saskia had told her that whatever marked her, it wasn’t visible.
So Emma had stopped wondering whether the thing on her was a literal mark, like the rune the Turnbulls wore on their backs.
Or whether there might be someone who could see it for her.
If she knew what this sacrifice mark was, and what it held, could she find a way to destroy it? To free herself?
The water hag regarded her curiously. “I could read the memories that cling to this rune, should you wish.”
What memories would be trapped within such a mark?
Those of the Turnbull who had placed it, perhaps?
Or someone else? Emma’s nails bit into her palms. The Judge had said that the bargain was of long standing and paid before now at the appointed time.
So she could not have been the first sacrifice.
Others had worn this mark before her. She imagined it clawing into them, drinking away their souls, those unlucky ones who had not been protected as Emma was by her fox’s skin.
She thought of small pieces of those souls catching on the mark, staying trapped like food stuck between teeth.
Emma scrabbled backward. She had to get away.
She could not witness those kinds of memories.
But she did not even make it to the door.
Those memories might hold the Turnbulls’ secrets.
She needed those secrets to trade with the Night City for her reward.
So she could go home, destroy the Turnbulls, and not even need the locked room to do it.
“And you can show me these memories, even if they aren’t mine?”
“Oh yes. I read memories held in objects, not just people. Will you hear my terms?”
Emma would taste the memories within the mark, the hag said.
But once tasted, payment would be due. The memories would become the property of the water hag and be wiped from Emma’s mind.
The memories of nightdwellers did not have the blazing vitality of the mortal kind, but they still held some value.
Added up, they paid the water hag’s dues to the Night City. Emma would understand.
Emma edged back. It would be no use discovering the Turnbulls’ secrets if she could not remember afterward. There had to be another way.
“What if I offered a trade?” she faltered. “A memory for a memory, yes. But you take other memories from me instead, and I keep these.”
The water hag’s gaze bored into her. “The memories here are strong. I can feel them. Their intensity gives them value. What could you give as equal?”
Emma thought fast. It was a gamble, and she would need Nat’s performance skills to pull it off. “Take the thing I valued most in my mortal life.” She paused for dramatic effect. It was what Nat would have done. “Take my law studies.”
The water hag leaned in.
“My learning at the University meant everything to me. Everything.” Emma tried to look wistful and noble. “Take those memories.” She hoped she had been convincing.
Firelight glittered on dark eyes. “Very well.”
The water hag stoked the fire and bade Emma close her eyes. There were rattlings and chants. Smoke puffed up Emma’s nose, acrid and scented with herbs. It made her cough until her throat tore. She wiped bleary eyes.
And found herself within the first memory.
She was in the Turnbull Clubhouse. It was her own memory, exactly as she recalled it.
Jasper held a jar aloft, poured four red drops into the Turnbull bowl.
Emma felt the press of the next memories, calling her away.
But she lingered another moment. Because here, Julia was beside her.
Memory-Julia turned to Emma with light in her eyes.
Emma wanted to lean into her warmth, but the memory-body would not move.
And so she watched Julia fade and the next memory take hold.
She was in the same room; a table stood at the center with the same ritual objects.
But the boy above the bowl was not Jasper.
And the memory-body was not hers. This girl—Lucy, her name was, Emma heard it in her mind—had almost sweated through the shirt the agency had made her wear, and she was worried.
Her arms ached after hours of carrying trays.
The money for the gig was good, she was reminding herself.
And though her friend had said they’d be the worst kind of posh boys, they’d been fine so far.
Even asked her to stay after dinner for drinks.
Which made it hard to go home, not without being rude.
But things were getting strange. They did some weird shit, rich people.
Emma lost track of the girl’s thoughts then.
Because she had looked at the crowd of Turnbulls behind the table.
And she had seen Jasper and Richard. For them to have been at the University in this memory, this girl had to have been sacrificed the year before Emma.
But they could not have sacrificed two girls in as many years.
Once a generation, she’d imagined. To claim a soul every decade or two was monstrous; unthinkable, even.
But one a year? She lost her grip on the girl, and the current of memories took her.
The next sacrifice was sobbing. Clutching the wall of Wessex College, falling. Something was happening to her. Her thoughts were draining away and her name and herself—
Gray flooded the world. Faces loomed close, asking What’s wrong? and Can you hear me? and none of it mattered. It was too much trouble to move. There was nothing left inside. No feelings, no memories. Just numbness.