“Just need one final thing,” Will says, and we make our way out to the back of the house. Outside, a woman with smoke-streaked hair sits next to a man glass blowing new vials in various colors and shapes. Occasionally she bends forward to stir a small vat of steaming clear liquid tinged with amber.
“Hey-o, Viv,” Will says to the woman. “Aila, do you still have the petals I gave you?”
“Yes.” I open my hand. They are slightly wrinkled from my palm, but intact.
“Toss them in there.”
I unfold my hand so that the blooms fall into the vat. With a crackling noise they crystallize into thin disks and float to the surface.
Viv ladles the blossoms out and threads them onto a silver strand. Will slides the first petal from the necklace and pops it into his mouth, then hands it to me to do the same. It’s lighter than a snowflake on my tongue. A soft sweetness spreads out onto my lips.
“Is it some sort of Variant magic?” I ask, and he throws back his head and laughs.
“No, dear,” Viv says. “Not magic. Just maple sap.”
Will reaches into his pocket for another coin, but Viv waves him off.
“I heard your father’s looking for a stars Variant,” she says to Will. “My youngest’s to be married in May. Has her heart set on dusk and lanterns and a tent and all that. Think he could find it by then?”
“For Mel’s wedding?” Will asks. “I’ll ask him to try extra hard.”
Viv winks and tosses him another flower necklace.
Will’s words land like burning embers in my ears. I can hardly hide my surprise as we turn to leave the Market.
“Your father discovered the Variants?”
I’d known vaguely that Dr. Cliffton was some sort of scientist, and I’d never thought to ask more than that. There had been too many other unanswered questions coming first.
“Yes. Most of them,” Will says. The way he reaches up to touch the shaved part at the back of his neck lets me know that this makes him proud.
“Goodbye, Will,” the guard says, clapping Will on the back as he opens the wall door. The door closes, and the ivy falls back into place behind us. And now I understand why there are so many smiles and nods of acknowledgment in Will’s direction. Why the ladies in town with Mrs. Cliffton hadn’t pressed too hard about her Variant infringement.
Because the Clifftons are the ones who have offered Sterling the chance to regain a part of what they’ve lost—?one shattered, glittering piece at a time.
The sun has sunk a hand’s width deeper by the time we pick through the forest and reach the main road. I don’t want to tell Will what I’m thinking. Where will this end? How many more tables of Variants will be added over the years of his life?
Genevieve will be preparing dinner by now, and we should be getting home. But there’s one more thing I want to see.
“Will,” I say, “did my mother live anywhere near here?”
“Um, yes.” We cross a wooden bridge, the water running underneath our steps. “But I think the house might have burned a long time ago.”
“Can you show me anyway—” I hesitate. “I want to see it.”
He weighs this for a moment and then nods. We quicken our pace, turning off the main road and walking for a few minutes more until the burned husk of a house appears. My feet ache, and strands of my hair have come loose to whip in front of my face.
As we draw nearer, I start to wish we hadn’t come. Dried, burnt cornstalks have grown tall around the foundation of the house to form an endless patterned wall that is eerily still. Broken glass bottles and cigarette butts are ground into the dirt. What remains of the house are only the gutted slabs of two walls, gaping holes of blown-out windows, and the rubble of a brick chimney. The foundation fades into the dirt in a mix of debris, ash, and clumps of decaying wet leaves.
I stop, and Will stands next to me, our shoulders almost touching, as I take in a word scrawled in graffiti on the charred remains of the house and etched over and over in the dirt under our feet.
“What does it mean?” I ask softly, toeing it with my mud-speckled boot. “Catalyst?”
Will exhales, as if he wishes he hadn’t brought me.
“The Disappearances are so ordered that something had to happen to set them off, right? Something, or . . . someone,” he says. “No one knows what happened, or why. So we just call whatever triggered it the Catalyst.”
I stiffen.
