My hair stood on end at the husky voice and the name it spoke. Backing against the parapet, I pulled my hood about my face. She stood in a small bay flanked by twin Angels of pocked stone, a wiry girl peering at me amused.
“Don’t worry,” she said airily. “He’s forgotten all about me. After Dr. Silverthorn died, I guess. Nobody cares, nobody remembers about Anna. Nobody misses Andrew but me.”
She stepped into the corridor. It was the girl I had seen in the Gloria Tower a few days before, the blond girl who had winked at me. Now I could see that her smile was the only fair thing that remained of her face. She was gruesomely scarred.
“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound bold.
“Who am I?” she retorted mockingly. “Who are you?”
“I am Raphael Miramar.” When she made no move to come any nearer I let my hood droop back and peered at her. “But you think I am Wendy Wanders.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Dr. Silverthorn told me about you. He turned out to be a nice Doctor after all, didn’t he? He tried to save Gligor—”
Suddenly she doubled over, racked by a fit of coughing. When she raised her face again tears streaked it, and when she brushed them away blood smeared her cheeks. The rain of roses had left suppurating wounds across her face and arms and legs, any place that had not been protected by her short tunic. “You were smart to leave when you did,” she said hoarsely. “They killed all the rest of us.”
“What is your name?” I asked. I tried to imagine what she had looked like before the rain of roses, this Ascendant girl, but it was impossible to tell. Her skin had cracked and blackened like scorched bark; flesh hung in tiny curls from her arms. Only her eyes still shone with sharp intelligence within her ravaged face.
“Anna,” she said. A flash of white as she smiled again. “I had a brother too, you know. An independent personality. Andrew. They fed him to the NET . I’m alone now, Wendy.”
I nodded. She seemed harmless, and I was lonely. “Yes. I’m alone too, Anna.”
She coughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, then gazed surprised at the film of blood upon her fingers. When she looked up her eyes were unfocused, her words slurred.
“I was looking for you, Wendy. To warn you: he means to capture you. They will kill you just like Andrew and Gligor, just like me …”
She took a step, weaving as though drunk. Then she stopped. With a smile she stuck her hand into a pocket. I drew my breath sharply: I had misjudged, she had a weapon hidden there. I glanced around to see how I might escape, but when I looked back she held her hands out to me one at a time, chanting in a hoarse childish voice:
“Now: this is for me, and this is for you.”
There was no weapon. One raw palm held a slender cobalt capsule, its casing dull as though she had carried it for a long time. In the other was some bit of gaudery, cloth or feathers mashed flat and pickled with dirt. As I stared uncomprehending she pushed her hand closer to me, the one holding the filthy cloth.
“Take it,” she urged.
Gingerly I picked it up, held it at arm’s length. A narrow headband made of feathers, matted together with grime and all but colorless.
“Andrew and I made it for you after you left,” she said softly. “After they killed him I finished it. That was why I followed Dr. Silverthorn and Gligor. I was afraid they’d forget to give it to you.”
I stared at it numbly, this pathetic bit of frippery.
“Don’t you like it?” she asked with a twinge of anxiety.
I nodded. “You came all the way here just to give this to her?”
She shrugged. “They would have killed me anyway,” she said. “Silverthorn was mad at first, but then he didn’t have much time to stay mad, did he? And I remembered how much you liked the other one.”
She smiled then, a smile of ineffable sweetness. “It’s funny, after Andrew died I felt so horrible, but it was different than before, when we tapped them. I wanted to ask you about that, and about that Boy you showed me—”
A spasm shook her. She waved her empty hand across her face, then looked down at the capsule in her other hand as though she had forgotten it. “But I guess I won’t have time now.”
Before I could stop her she tossed the capsule into her mouth, making a wry face. She waited a moment, then shook her head apologetically.
“I was the one who betrayed you to the Aviator, Wendy. I was still mad at you. One of the blond children told me about the masque at Winterlong. I was the one who told the Madman. I’m sorry now. I felt bad afterward, that’s why I wanted to warn you, to give you a chance to escape.”
She hiccuped, then grimaced. “Dr. Silverthorn told me it would taste awful, and he was right: it does. Augh. Well, I was afraid I’d never see you again, Wendy. I’m glad I was able to give you your bandeau—”
Turning, she took a few steps, then stumbled and fell, suddenly hidden in the shadows of the bay.
“Wait, Anna!” I cried. I shoved the headband into a pocket and rushed after her. I knelt at her side, turning her body so that she faced me. Moonlight fell from a window in the granite wall above us, a thread of fine white light across her face.
But it was not the face I had seen an instant before. As I held her the broken skin rippled and then grew smooth and pale, her eyes blinked open and stared up at me with an expression of faint derision.
“Franca!” I cried.
She pulled herself up and shook her head, the hair whipping across her face no longer tawny but silver-fair. The eyes staring at me from behind that gossamer cloud were green as unripe apples.
I staggered back. Without thinking I crossed my hands in front of me, but He only laughed.
“Raphael Miramar!” He scolded. He reached for the rope about my neck and tweaked it teasingly, pulling me near Him. “You saw how little protection that afforded the Saint-Alaban in the cloister.”
I dropped my hands. “But you were not in the cloister,” I stammered.
“Oh, but I was,” He replied. He looked at the bit of rope, let go of it and settled back upon His heels. He seemed heedless of the freezing stone floor, for all that He was naked as an egg. “I am with you always, Raphael. With all of them: Franca and Anna and Dr. Silverthorn, Margalis and Oleander and yes, your little friend Fancy—”
“Fancy? She is alive, you know where she is?”
I tried to grab Him, torn between rage and hope, between wanting to rend Him or embrace Him if what He said was true. But as my hand closed about His a burning pain shot through it. I snatched it back.
“Not yet, Raphael,” the Boy murmured, a note of menace in his voice. “You should wait until you are invited. Soon enough, darling boy, soon enough.”
His tone had deepened to the Aviator’s soft drawl. I looked up, then stumbled to my feet. Because the Aviator stood there, staring down at me with pale mad eyes.
“Did you kill her?” he asked. He stooped, took Anna’s corpse by the hair and yanked it so that her head lolled backward, gazing at him blindly. I stared in disbelief, then glanced around the tiny bay. Her scars were unhealed, and she was certainly dead. And the alcove was empty, the Boy gone. The chink in the wall showed a fingerlength of pale gray, bright enough that I knew it must be morning.
He let go of the girl. Her body fell back to the floor with a thud. He stood, continuing to stare at me with that knowing smile, his eye bulging.
“Your little friend,” he said. “Fancy.”
I felt as though he had driven a knife through my stomach. “Yes,” I said at last.
The Consolation of the Dead extended his hand, took the end of the cord about my neck and tugged it.
“Come,” he said, as though promising wonderful things. “She is in the cloister, waiting to see you again.”
Without a word I rose and followed him.
It was not until we reached the cloister that I saw a tendril of living vine had clasped itself like a green finger around the hempen rope that bound me to him.