Tasha shakes her head. “It wasn’t that, ever. I—recognized her, somehow. She recognized me. That’s what it felt like. Even though I know she didn’t trust me. That’s what I was trying to figure out.”
They watch the pot for a few more minutes in silence.
“What happens now?” Annie asks.
“We’re leaving. Same as before.”
“Even if Heather’s up there on the mountain?”
“Yes,” Tasha says. She pours a bucket of dirty water over the fire and straightens. “We have the truck now—that’s as good a sign as any we’re meant to go.”
As they carry the pot to the clinic, they both hear it—footfalls. Horses, galloping closer.
Annie’s hands tremble; Tasha takes the pot from her.
Inside the clinic, everyone else is already crowded at the front window. Tasha sets the pot on a towel on the counter and checks on Brian, then follows everyone outside. They stand together and listen. Silence. Not even the birds.
Then, the sound of weeping. They shouldn’t be able to hear it, but the rest of the world is so silent it isn’t hard to make out. Hard sobs, thick and anguished. A voice she remembers, a voice she knows. She closes her eyes and feels the sudden rush of falling.
“Let’s go,” Tasha says, and she leads them all to Heather’s house.
Heather slides from Aura’s back onto the ground. There is no walkway to the front door anymore. She takes a few steps through the foliage and then drops to her knees. The vines and soft green things on the ground slide around her legs, but she pays no attention.
She doesn’t want to go in. This is far enough. She bends down and places her forehead against the grass. Her sobs come hard and angry.
Greta and Jilly, snuggled against her in their sling.
Greta and Jilly, crawling on the grass.
B’s hesitant smile.
All gone.
The centaurs stand guard around her and say nothing.
Then there’s another cry—a human voice. The centaurs stiffen around her. She stands up, slowly, and turns.
She sees pale hair first, and the relief is so strong she’s surprised.
“Elyse,” she breathes. Beside Elyse, Tasha. And Annie. And Joseph.
And then she hears the unmistakable click of a gun. On the other side of Joseph stands a stranger, her gun pointed at Estajfan’s face.
25
Heather is still pregnant, but even so she is thinner than Tasha remembers. She tries hard not to look at the centaurs, but this proves impossible. They are so large, so strange and beautiful—the brown-skinned one closest to Heather huge and tall, the other two pale and blond. Each centaur wears a golden cuff. Against the world’s vivid green they’re exquisite—a dream come to life that will fade if she blinks.
The darker one, she sees, has a bandage wrapped around its flank.
This is the one that Moira is staring at, her eyes glinting with fury, the pistol in her hands raised and pointing at its head.
“Moira,” Tasha says. She wants to fall on her knees and weep, touch her forehead to the ground, pray. Something. She keeps her voice low, a hand outstretched. “Moira, put the gun away.”
“I told you not to move!” Moira shouts at the centaur. “I fucking told you not to move!”
“Moira!” Tasha shouts, trying to snap her out of it.
“Brian is back there with a broken leg because of them!”
“Brian will be all right,” Tasha says. She forces a steadiness into her voice that she doesn’t feel, and takes a step closer to Heather. “No one else needs to get hurt today.” She nods to Heather. “The baby?”
“Fine.” Heather gets up, and looks from Moira and the gun to Estajfan and back. She moves to stand in front of him. “I think.”
“Where did you go?” Tasha asks. “When the scream came.”
“I was at the greenhouse. Estajfan took me up the mountain. I was going to come back—I only went there to warn him, to tell him to hide…” She looks up at the house and then back to Tasha. “Did you go inside? Did you see?”
Tasha nods. “I’m so sorry.”
Heather wipes her eyes with her palm. “Were they—did they—”
“The plants came for them,” Annie says, her voice gentle. “The plants came for everyone, in the end.”
Moira is still holding the gun on Estajfan but Tasha can see something more than anger in her face now. Her arms slacken. The barrel dips.
“What are we supposed to do, Tasha?” Heather asks. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“I can answer that,” Joseph says. “We’re going up that fucking mountain!”
“Joseph,” Tasha says, “we can’t go up. It’s too dangerous—”
“I don’t fucking care! You heard Elyse—there’s food up there. We’ve been starving for over a year!”
At last, one of the centaurs speaks. “The mountain isn’t safe for you,” the dark one says. “I do not—” and his eyes shift to Moira, and the gun—“we do not wish you harm.”
“We just want to be left in peace.” This from the blonde female, a bag slung over her shoulder and between her breasts. “That’s all.”
“But Heather went up,” Tasha says.
The female nods and says, “She’s not going up anymore. None of you are.”
“You don’t fucking get to tell us what to do!”
Tasha sees Joseph grab Moira’s gun as if in slow motion. The surprise in Moira’s face, the sudden splash of terror on Heather’s. Elyse screams as Joseph shoots, Moira tackles him to the ground, something glinting in her hand.
“Let it go,” Moira says, and as Tasha comes closer, she can see that it’s the scalpel Moira showed her the day before. Moira’s voice is surprisingly calm now. “Let it go, Joseph.”
He stares up at her, anguished. “Why them? Why do they get to survive?”
To this, no one has an answer. When Moira finally leans back, Joseph pulls himself up to a sit, small and defeated.
“Moira,” Tasha says. “That scalpel. You said you found it by the water?”
“No. In the forest. After we were—ambushed.”
The female centaur steps over to them. “That’s mine,” she says, urgently. She holds out a hand. “That knife. Heather dropped it in the forest. Give it to me.”
“It’s mine now,” Moira snaps. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Where did you get it?” Tasha looks at the centaur. She can feel Annie watching her, confused.
“My father gave it to me. It was a gift,” the centaur says. “It’s important to me. Please.”
And Tasha drops to her knees after all. “There was a woman in my family,” she says. “Long ago. My mother told me stories. She was a travelling physician.” The centaur knows, Tasha realizes. Maybe she’s always known. She takes a breath and says, “One summer, she delivered triplets in a village.”
THE DOCTOR AND THE VILLAGE GHOSTS
The second time she comes to the mountain, the doctor discovers that the centaur has cleared the path she’d hacked on her first climb. It’s now free of brush, and in places the climb is so gradual it hardly feels like a climb at all. It ends exactly where they met. She finds him waiting for her there. She doesn’t know how he knew she was coming, and doesn’t ask. He is grateful for the textbooks. He doesn’t take her to the children.
The next year is much the same—and the year after that, and the year after that. Every time she asks him if she can meet the children his response is the same: not yet, they aren’t ready. He is grateful and polite but also closed to her. She continues to visit anyway.