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Undu set her hand to Lucia’s cheek: an almost tender gesture. Bek’s flesh crawled at the thought of laying her own palm against that cooling, discoloured skin.

“But until she has crossed the river—whose name we do not speak within the hearing of the dead—she remains within reach for those who have the touch for it.”

Undu laid her other hand on the corpse’s forehead. Lucia’s eyes remained fixed on some distant point on the ceiling, glaring, her anger palpable, as if at any moment she might lunge upwards, seeking a mouthful of some enemy’s flesh.

“She wasn’t sleeping. She was ready to act. Ready to fight. The noose around her neck surprised her…” Undu closed her eyes as if looking for more answers in the darkness. “Yes, surprised. Anger came next. She raged. If she had been able to make a sound it would have been threats, and then curses. The fear came only at the very end. There was a brief moment in which she would have pleaded. And at the last, in the heartbeats between knowing and unknowing, there was…sadness…a complicated sadness of many parts. Too many for her to…and then she was standing beside the river, gone from her flesh.”

Undu opened her eyes and withdrew her hands. “I have amplified her last feelings to the point where some of you, those few with aptitude, might get a hint of them. Who would like to try?” She moved away, gesturing to the body on the table.

Nobody advanced. Most stepped back. Four or five girls, forgetting they were on a table, tumbled to the floor with screeches of surprise that in turn provoked ripples of nervous laughter. Some, like Bek, who didn’t shuffle away were left like rocks revealed by a retreating tide.

“You, girl.” Kindness Undu beckoned in Bek’s direction.

Bek looked behind her in the hope that someone else was advancing at her shoulder. The closest, a small, black-haired girl she’d heard called Brooth, was too far back for it to be her.

“You, the mousy girl with the nose.” The Kindness gestured impatiently.

Bek stepped forward with a sigh, making a mental note to keep to the rear of proceedings in future. She stopped shy of Lucia’s glare, out of reach of her dead arms.

“Well, touch her, girl. We haven’t got all day.” Undu’s childish trill carried an uncomfortable weight of command.

Bek set a tentative hand to Lucia’s forehead.

“Touch her! This isn’t a first date!” Undu shook her head in disgust. “You’re rooting out the secrets of the dead here. If she had wounds I’d have your fingers under her skin. Touch her!”

Steeling herself, Bek moved her hands to Lucia’s neck, finding the livid flesh unpleasantly cool and waxy.

“Listen. Try to hear the river. It’s flowing all around us. Through us and her alike. Really listen.”

“I can’t—”

“Listen!” Undu barked.

Something happened then, an explosion of violence, slow in the frozen heartbeat that trapped Bek, that kept her prisoner in an awful moment. Without a “between” she found herself hitting the opposite table, the wood biting into the small of her back. She ended up on the floor, gasping for breath, clutching at her neck, desperate to breathe, suffocating despite the air pumping frantic from her lungs—in—out—in.

Two other acolytes hauled Bek to her feet at the Kindness’s urging.

“Bring her here, quick as you like,” Undu shrilled.

The girls started frog-marching Bek down the aisle but as her strength returned she shook them off. Since Undu’s “quick” had not sounded as though it was optional, Bek scooted under the table, scraping her head as she stepped over the divider.

“Here,” she announced self-consciously as she popped up on Kindness Undu’s side.

Undu studied her with eyes so deep-set and glinting that Bek couldn’t even guess their colour.

“Did you kill her?”

“What? No!”

Bek’s shock seemed to convince the Kindness. “Such a connection is highly unusual even between murderer and victim.” She held out her hands.

“I don’t…” Bek patted her shirt as if expecting to find what Undu wanted.

“Hands!”

Bek reached out and let the woman take hold of her. It required a greater effort of will than touching the dead body had, and she failed to suppress her shudder, though Undu didn’t seem to notice.

Undu was short, though still taller than most of the acolytes. Her strength came as a surprise when those soft, clammy hands began to squeeze. Bek struggled not to cry out. She felt her bones grind together and a strange fire began to flow through her veins. When it reached her lungs the fire pooled there, filling both with that maddening scratchy itch that the dropsy had started to torment her with at night, only worse. She coughed, coughed again, wheezing as she drew in breath for another cough.