Hellie sees the windup, the throw. She swings. The crack the bat makes when it connects with Len’s skull is perfect. She pictures his head sailing over the fence. Going. Going. Gone.
She could swing that bat all day. There is no regret, no sadness.
They swing the bat. They swing again. This is the way they say their goodbyes, and only when every last word has been spoken does she notice there’s a rabbit in the middle of the room, sitting on the blood-soaked carpet.
“Babbit Rabbit,” Hellie whispers. She picks him up, seeing the red smears her hands leave on his soft white sides. “I thought you were dead.”
“We’re all dead.”
For a second Hellie is sure the rabbit is speaking to her, but when she looks up, she sees Alex. The old living room at Ground Zero is gone, the blood, the bits of brain, the broken bat. Alex is standing in an orchard full of black trees. Hellie wants to warn her not to eat the fruit that grows on them, but she is already floating, fading away. Not even a shrug now. Going. Going.
27
Alex wasn’t sure what had happened. There was something warm and soft in her arms and she knew it was Babbit Rabbit. Hellie had— She had picked him up. Where was she? It was too dark to see and she couldn’t quite make sense of her thoughts. She went to her knees and heaved once, twice. Nothing came up but a mouthful of bile. A dim memory surfaced of Dawes telling her to fast.
“It’s okay,” she whispered to Babbit Rabbit.
But her arms were empty. He was gone.
He was never there, she told herself. Get your shit together.
But she’d felt him in her arms, warm and alive, his little body whole and safe as he was meant to be, as if she’d done her job and protected him from the start.
The ground felt soft beneath her hands, covered in damp, fallen leaves.
She looked up and realized she was staring through the branches of a tree,
many trees. She was in some kind of forest … no, an orchard, the branches black and glittering and heavily laden with fruit, its skin darkest purple.
Where the peel had split, she saw red seeds that gleamed like jewels. Above, the sky was the plum of a bad bruise. She heard a soft humming and realized the trees were thick with golden bees tending to black hives high in the branches. I was Hellie. Hellie in death. Hellie at the plate. The misery of that night at Ground Zero clung to her like the smell of smoke. She’d never get free of it.
Alex glimpsed something moving through the rows of trees. She stumbled to her feet.
“Turner!” She regretted calling his name immediately. What if whatever was in the orchard only looked like Turner?
But a moment later, he, and then Dawes, and then Tripp emerged from the trees. No one looked quite like they should. Dawes wore parchmentcolored robes, the cuffs stained with ink, and her red hair had been elaborately arranged in thick braids. Turner wore a cloak of gleaming black feathers that shimmered like the back of a beetle. Tripp was in armor, but the kind that looked like it had never seen battle, enamel white, an ermine cape fastened over his left shoulder with an emerald brooch the size of a peach pit.
The scholar, the priest, and the prince. Alex held out her arms. She was wearing armor too, but it was forged steel, made for warfare. The armor of a soldier. It should have felt heavy, but she might as well have been wearing a T-shirt for all she felt the weight of it.
“Are we dead?” Tripp asked, his eyes so wide she could see a perfect white ring around his irises. “We have to be, right?”
He wasn’t quite looking at her; in fact, no one was. None of them were making eye contact. They’d fallen through each other’s lives, seen the crimes they’d committed, big and small.
No one should know another person that way, Alex thought. It’s toomuch.
“Where are we?” Turner asked. “What is this place?”
Dawes’s eyes were red, her mouth swollen from crying. She reached up to touch one of the branches, then thought better of it. “I don’t know. Some people think the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was a pomegranate.”
Turner raised a brow. “That doesn’t look like any pomegranate I ever saw.”
“It looks pretty good,” said Tripp.
“Do not eat anything,” Dawes snapped.
Tripp scowled. “I’m not stupid.” Then his expression changed. He looked caught between wonder and fear. “Holy shit, Alex, you’re…”
Dawes bit deep into her lip and Turner’s grim mouth flattened even more.
“Alex,” whispered Dawes. “You’re … you’re on fire.”
Alex looked down. Blue flame had ignited over her body, a low, shifting blaze, like the forest floor in a controlled burn. She touched her fingers to it, saw it move as if caught up by her touch. She remembered this flame. She’d seen it when she faced Belbalm. All worlds are open to us. If we are bold enough to enter.
She reached beneath her breastplate, felt the cold shell of the Arlington Rubber Boots box tucked against her ribs. All she wanted was to lie down and grieve for Hellie, for Babbit Rabbit. She was crouched over a stranger’s body as the rain fell outside. She was perched at the rail of a ship, the sea rising and falling beneath her. She was standing at the top of the stairs at Il Bastone, feeling the weight of stone in her hands, the terrible power of decision.
Alex gripped the box tighter. She hadn’t come this far to cry for past mistakes or tend to old wounds. She forced herself to meet their gazes—
Turner, Tripp, Dawes.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go find Darlington.”
Again the world shifted and Alex braced to be thrown into someone else’s head, into some other awful memory, like the world’s worst playlist. She hadn’t been a passenger or an observer. She had been Dawes, Tripp, Turner, and Hellie. Her Hellie. Who should have been the one to survive. But this time it was just the world around Alex moving and she could suddenly see a path through the trees.
They emerged from the orchard into what looked like a sprawling outdoor mall that had been abandoned, or maybe never finished. The buildings were massive, some with arched windows, others square. Everything was spotlessly clean and a color somewhere between gray and beige.
Alex looked behind them and the orchard was there, the black trees rustling in a wind she couldn’t feel. Her ears were still full of the bees’
humming.
