“How do you survive?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he tells her. “It just happens.”
They are silent for a time as the wind whistles lonely through the trees. “I saw a fox,” she tells him, and he stiffens. “Foxes. A vixen and two babies. They came to me when we were under the hospital. They followed me for months as I walked through the forest.”
His hand stills against her hair. “What did they do?”
“Nothing.” She closes her eyes to remember. “One time I unwrapped the girls and put them on the ground. I was so tired.” A long pause as she remembers. “I saw… a hole in the air, behind the foxes. It crept toward the girls and I knew it would take them away. I wanted it to take them away. But I snapped out of it. I got them back just in time.” She opens her eyes and looks at him. “My father told me other stories. Mothers leaving their children. Things like that.”
Estajfan swallows. “The mountain tells lots of stories.”
“But the girls are gone now,” she whispers. “I did that. I wanted it, just for that moment. And now it’s happened. That was no story.”
“Heather, I’m sorry—”
“Stop saying that!” She lurches unsteadily to her feet. “What are you sorry for? What can you do? Nothing. You could barely do anything for us when we were starving.” She gulps a breath, tries to calm down. “You couldn’t—or wouldn’t—bring the girls up here. You said that. Fine. You were right—I should have left when the meteors came. And I didn’t. It’s my fault. You have nothing to do with it, with them.”
He stands, and in the gathering dark he seems twice his size—magical and lonely, dangerous and beautiful. “I kept all of you alive,” he says, hurt.
She laughs at this and spins around in a circle. “For what? For what, Estajfan? So that the trees could claim everyone anyway? So that I could stand alone on a mountain with a monster from the stories my father used to tell and know that the ordinary world is gone and magic is the only thing that’s left? I don’t want magic. I want my girls back!”
She screams those last words into the sky and they hang in the air like mist, clouding everything she sees. Greta, ducking behind one weeping willow. Jilly toddling after her, her small hands eager and outstretched.
Even B is hiding in the mist. His soft laugh, his smile. The way he’d turned hard, so defeated, in the end.
Her fault. All of it.
“Go,” she whispers.
“What?”
“Go,” she says, again. Even now, the fact that he’s so near her feels like a gift. All these years and it’s that same first night all over again, beautiful and wild. He is the only thing she’s ever wanted. “Estajfan, please leave me alone. Just for now.”
“But—”
“I can’t bear it,” she says. Greta. Jilly. B. She squeezes her hands into fists. She sees the worry in his face and shakes her head. “I’ll be okay. I just—I need to be alone.”
His face shutters, and he nods. Monster. She’s hurt him. “All right,” he says. “I won’t—I won’t be far.”
When she opens her eyes again, a long time later, she is alone beneath the sky.
The stars hang heavy and bright overhead, brighter than they’ve been in a year. Three billion, one hundred and twenty-six million, four hundred and twenty-five thousand and one.
Who could possibly count the stars? Her father had been wrong to count them with her—wrong to take her up the mountain, wrong to fill her head with stories. But he had done it, and now here she is. The ground presses, rough, against her knees.
I want to be something else, she thinks.
No more sloping shoulders, no more awkward gait. No more dead girls or dead husband or dead parents. A new life here on the mountain. Four legs instead of two, family that will mirror her when she looks at them. She drops to her knees and digs her fingers into the soil, and it gives way beneath her hands, inviting her in.
“I want to be something else.” This time she says it out loud. She pushes her hands deeper into the earth and now she can feel it—the electric something that Estajfan called ground magic, thrumming and joyous, ancient, alive.
She digs and breathes and digs and breathes. The deeper she goes, the more the longing overtakes her, until it’s a constant hum in her throat, in her chest, in her heart. Estajfan, Estajfan. She won’t live in two worlds anymore. She won’t do it.
She can’t.
When the hole she has dug is deep enough, she scrambles into it and thinks of the horse that did the same all those years ago—what he wanted, what the mountain eventually made him be. Does she need a whole night? She looks up at the stars and pulls the dirt in close. She buries her feet and her legs—her human legs, the last time she’ll see them—then the rest of the dirt falls in on top of her. She can’t move. She can’t move.
The ground whispers in her ear, incantatory and triumphant. She will become other, she will become more.
She cries out as the earth tumbles over her face and blocks the sky. When she screams, she gags on dirt.
14
Tasha doesn’t know how long she’s been locked inside. It feels like hours.
The mother’s wild wave of grief, her plunge into laughter, the twisting of her hands, her boy’s neck snapped. Annie’s crazed voice.
What does it mean? What has happened?
“Tasha,” Annie moans. She doesn’t sound mad now, only heartbroken—but then she bangs on the door again and Tasha jumps. “Come out. I know you’re in there. You can’t hide from me forever.”
Tasha gets up off the floor, silently, and feels along the shelves and through the boxes—gauze, bandages. Sanitary napkins, toothbrushes. On the highest shelf she finds what she’s looking for, but loses her grip on the box, which topples to the floor.
“Tasha,” Annie moans again. “You come out now.” She starts banging on the door again.
Tasha scrabbles on the floor through clamps, scissors. She picks up a pair of scissors and unwraps them with shaking hands, then feels along the shelves again until she finds a small, heavy box.
Then she goes to the door and turns the lock slowly, hoping Annie doesn’t notice.
One, two. Three.
She shoves the door open, pushing Annie back, brings the box up and smashes it against Annie’s head. Her wife drops the scalpel she’d been clutching and as her hands go up to her head, Tasha kicks Annie in the stomach, then brings her elbow down hard against her neck. Annie falls and Tasha lunges for the scalpel, her fingers closing around it just in time. She climbs over her wife and straddles Annie’s torso, holds the scalpel flat against Annie’s throat while the other hand points the scissors at the soft knob of Annie’s trachea. “Don’t move,” she hisses.
“Tasha,” Annie whispers. “Tasha, I can’t do it. Not anymore.”
“They’re only thoughts,” Tasha says, her voice hard. “They’ll go away.” Her mad thoughts went away in the greenhouse. Despair faded, and became smaller. She has to believe the same will happen for Annie.
“They’ll go away,” she says again. Over and over. “They’ll go away.”
This time, the terror comes for both of them. She sees it sprout from Annie’s ribcage first—an ivory creature with blood-red teeth, its wings all knuckled bone and raw, sinewy flesh. It moans at her, flapping its wings so that darkness brushes her face.
Look at what you did to me, it says.