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And yet everything is wrong.

“They’re coming,” she says to me.

She says it the way you’d say the tide is coming in.

I look to the windows.

The sky has changed. The red has deepened past purple, and moving through it are shapes. They aren’t flying or floating but they’re there, red, articulated, stepping through the sky with too many joints bending in too many directions, and the way they move is the way nothing alive moves, and I understand that what I’ve been calling an atmospheric phenomenon, a rare red plasma cloud, is not that at all.

Instead it’s an announcement.

Something saying: we are here.

Something that has been patient for a very long time.

Waiting.

I look back at Renata.

She releases my hand and takes one step back. And then she says, very quietly, very clearly, with the smile still in place:

“It would have been best if you had stayed dead.”

And then I smell it again. The scent of old, greasy skin that the lilac was laid over to cover. I know this smell well and it’s not because of my grandmother’s closet. I know it the way you know something your body recorded in a moment when your mind was occupied with other things, like the temperature of a stone floor against your cheek and the feeling of somebody sneaking up behind you, and the feel of a hand in your hair from behind, and something said very quietly close to your ear just before the world went dark and you went with it.

The same smell.

Her voice.

Her hands.

Her blade.

But Renata is already gone. She’s stepped back into the crowd and the crowd has taken her and I’m standing on the dance floor with the full load of it dropping through me.

Then I’m springing into action, moving across the floor, pushing students out of my way, in a sea of masks and gowns and formal black.

“Saturna!” I yell. A few people turn to look. I see Avelene drinking punch and she’s looking at me now, but there’s no Saturna and the sheer panic going through me is enough to split me open.

“Baz?” I hear her voice.

I turn and find her five feet away and her eyes come to mine through the crowd, mouthing what happened?

I reach her just as the wall opens.

The stone goes dark and wet near the far archway, losing the quality of mineral and becoming something flexible, something with the horrible softness of flesh, and from the opening, dark at the edges, breathing, the first Hollow comes through. It moves with direction, with purpose. Its white pupils find the room and begin to track and it takes one step into the silver candlelight and then another.

Across the room the server turns from the wall, looking confused.

The screaming starts near the door.

The string quartet stops mid-bar, one note hanging unresolved in the air before the silence takes it, and more tears are opening in the walls now, our reality splitting at the seams.

I get my body between Saturna and the nearest Hollow that is stumbling toward us and I look at the room coming apart around us and I think about what Renata said.

She planned this, she has been planning this, and she killed me once already to keep me from finding out.

And now I’m finding out.