Birds are adaptable. They fly south and find a way to survive.
Or, they don’t.
I’ve made it as far south as Norwalk.
I stand on the platform and try to ignore the dull ache in my hand. My injury is wrapped in bandages, like that terrible film Phineas and I saw in the cinema a few years ago. The Mummy’s Hand.
Me and the mummies. We just keep rising up out of the grave.
I inhale air still dark with morning and try to stop glancing over my shoulder. Wonder if anyone from the underground will come after me for what I did to Larkin. I suppose it doesn’t even matter now. I rock on my heels. My hand throbs. And then the breeze changes and my nostrils start to sting.
I take in gulping breaths suddenly tinged with salt.
It fills my nose, my hair, my skin. Dizzying with scents. Soil. Sweat. The breeze itself smells like colors now. Braiding and twining together.
Fruit. The cloying sweetness of perfume. Other things I’ve never smelled before, and never will again.
Juliet’s daughter has actually done it.
She unknotted Phineas’s legacy.
I close my eyes.
I picture Matilda. Wonder if it will be enough.
My lungs fill with air that has been set free of the Curse.
Freedom, at last.
I take a step forward.
I imagine sprouting wings.
In the distance, the train horn calls.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The air.
The air around me is coming unmistakably alive again.
It sings with scents, each as different and as layered as harmonies. After months of blankness, it’s almost overwhelming—?the mix of compost and wet earth and flowers and musk and sweat. Will fills his lungs with it, and he turns to me, his shovel frozen in the air.
“Aila?” I see his mouth move. But I still can’t hear him.
We each instinctively look up to the sky, its blank, cloudless expanse still unbroken by stars.
Then Beas takes a deep breath and opens her mouth to sing, but it comes out in a monotone whisper.
She closes her mouth again, confused. “Why isn’t it working?” she demands.
“Wait.” George picks up his shovel. “Hurry, help me shovel. Scents went first. They must be coming back in the order they were taken.”
We rush to fill in the rest of the pit, frantically dumping shovelfuls of earth. We smooth it over, leveling the surface to conceal what we’ve done.
Then George kneels for a pouch of Variants and dusts them over his head. They fall to coat his eyelashes and the bridges of his cheekbones. He opens his eyes and blinks. “Nothing.” He turns his hand to let the wind catch the Variants and carry them into the air. “The Variants aren’t working anymore.”
“Look!” Beas cries. She points to the sky.
