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"There's nowhere else to stand." Mercy's eyes come up to mine. "You'll need something on this side holding the other end of you. Something living. It has to hold, and it has to want to."

Sid comes up onto the star and sits down beside my boot, and the cold coming out of the seam moves his fur and he doesn't flinch from it.

I have waited three hundred years for you. The vast old voice, quieter than it was. And I am only eight pounds, and I cannot hold you.

I put two fingers on the top of his head. He allows it.

Behind me, Gage has gone very still.

"Anchor to what?"

"Not what," she says. "Who."

And then she tells me what makes it a choice instead of a rescue.

"Pick the one who'd let go of you if you asked him to. That's the only kind that holds."

48

GAGE

STILL MIDNIGHT

Mercy tells Maren to pick the one who'd let go of her if she asked, and every living thing left in the room turns and looks at me.

I understand two things in the same second.

The first is that she means me.

The second is that I've never once in thirty-eight years let another person hold any part of me, and I don't know the first thing about how it's done.

Seraphine is getting up out of the piano.

The ballroom has emptied out around us and gone strange with it. Three hundred people were pressed to these walls four minutes ago and now there's nothing between me and the far end of the room but broken wax, a dropped shoe, and cold coming up out of the floor.

There are forty dead people standing here. Maren told me that and I can't see one of them, but I can feel their presence, the way you can feel someone behind you in a doorway.

"Evelyn." I don't look away from Maren. "Sometime tonight."

There's a long pause behind me. Then a woman in a plain black dress walks past my shoulder with her sleeves pushed back, and something goes tight across the middle of the ballroom like a wire coming up out of the floor.

"I'll hold her," Evelyn says. "Not for you."

"I know."

"Two minutes. Possibly less."

Lila is on her knees in the cold wax with blood coming down past her ear, not moving, watching Maren the way you watch something you set on fire. Cass is still down on the bottom stair with her hand under her ribs. Nobody in this building can help with the next part.

Maren turns around and looks up at me.

The seam in the floor has opened another quarter inch while I've been standing here doing math.

"You heard her," Maren says.

"I heard her."

"Then I'm asking."