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I don’t know how long I’m in this place, feeling the deepest parts of myself brutally rearranged, but I wake to darkness, andit is the darkness of the road. And in the darkness is a sound—
The sound of waves.
“Don’t move,” Becca whispers. Her questing fingers find my arm. Her breath catches in time to Anthony’s, and I know that they’ve found one another as well.
“What happened?” I ask.
“The light went out,” Anthony says. “Just now. Didn’t you—but I think we’re there.”
Light shines all around us. Not the light of the candle, but a green-cast light, sliced narrowly into shafts that stretch from some vast height to the ground at our feet. I tilt my head up, still half-lost and uncomprehending, my mind lurching from one thing to the next without being able to conceive of the connections between them.
Becca makes a sound—ta—behind her teeth, startled and wondering, as the light grows stronger.
We stand on a cobbled street. Around us, buildings rise to domes and spires and minarets, a glorious confusion of architectural styles, their sides overgrown with fringes and folds and rivulets of varicolored coral. The light above filters down as if through a great expanse of water, and I can see the wrinkling surface of waves, but we are no more drowned than when I walked with Lucy through that unformed space. What we passed through there was like a dream; this has the substance of skin, of stone. A solid thing, more real than not.
The severed hand lies at my feet. The candle is burned down to nothing, a puddle of wax and a smudge of soot that used to be the wick. Spent.
“What is this?” Anthony asks. He and Becca are barely touching, the last two fingers of his hand softly bent around hers. Her fingers dig into my arm, gripping tight.
“Ys,” I say, with a certainty that girds my ribs like iron. “This is Ys.”
“There they are,” says a voice, and I turn. For a moment the girl is a stranger, the smile on her face inexplicable. And then I know her—Mel. Relief and affection rush in, but they never quite reach me, as if restrained behind a pane of glass. Kyle is with her, running toward us down the cobbled street. Mel reaches me and catches my hands. I should feel something more, I’m certain, but I am focused instead on the cool, dry texture of her palms. “You made it. Where’s Lucy?” she asks.
“Something happened to her,” Anthony says. “She’s dead.”
Mel swallows, but just nods. Lucy was a stranger, and we’re all out of grief. “But we made it,” she says. “This is Ys, isn’t it?”
Somewhere beyond us, through the maze of buildings, comes a deep, reverberating sound.
I move toward it, pulling free of Mel’s hands. Her fingers slide from my arm without resistance, and a moment later I hear the others’ footsteps behind me.
Anything wooden has rotted through, but stone still stands. The buildings are empty. We don’t check inside to be certain, but they have a loneliness to them, a hollow way of watching us, that makes it clear. And it’s clearer still when we turn a corner and find them.
The crowd stands before the gates of Ys. The women wear long skirts in colors to match the coral, and jeweled pins adorn thehair piled in lush arrangements on their heads. The men wear tunics belted over leggings. Some people carry lanterns. Most stand empty-handed. They no more belong to one era or country than the buildings; they’re the sum of a hundred imaginations, not quite real, not quite in agreement.
The gates are massive. Taller than ten men, and not wrought iron but solid stone, carved with a pattern of waves. Every face in the crowd is turned toward them. Every face—including a blonde girl, her features sharp, her form muscular and lean.
“Trina?” I say, but the moment I step toward her, the crowd seems to shift without moving at all, and she’s gone. I halt, pain lodged in my breastbone.
A boom sounds through the air, and the gates shudder with the force of a blow. The crowd tenses, a thousand intakes of breath making a seething, wave-dragged sound. The tension bleeds out slowly.
“That... that’s the gate?” Anthony asks. We’re still a ways back from the crowd. They don’t seem to have noticed us—or if they have, they don’t care that we’ve come. “That’s the gate we’re supposed to open?”
“I donotthink we should open that gate,” Becca says.
“But that’s the way home, isn’t it?” I ask. I drift a step forward. “Through the last gate.” I want to open it. I need to open it. Someone is waiting behind it, I’m sure—waiting for me to set them free.
“No,” Becca says, catching my wrist in a tight grip. “That isn’t the way home. Can’t you feel it? Whatever’s past there, it’s...”
“Hungry,” Mel finishes, shuddering.
“Ys drowned for him,” Becca says. Her eyes are unfocused, and her body sways slightly. “Ys the drowned, Ys the drowning, Ys long since lost. We walk among its bones. We speak to its memories. Ys is the end of the road. And the end of the road is Ys.”
“Becca?” Anthony says, but she seems not to hear him, to see any of us. She sways forward.
“I can hear it. Now that it’s quiet, I can hear all of them. The drowned,” she says. “They stand guard, to keep it shut. The gate. To keep him out. Dahut’s lover—Dahut’s master. She draws us here, and we feed the road. We feed it by traveling it. We feed it by dying. We keep it alive so that she stays alive, and someday she’ll escape it. Someday she’ll wake him up, and open the gate, and we will have to drown the world to stop him.”
The others shift uneasily. I reach for Becca’s hand, hush her. “Stop. Don’t listen,” I tell her, surprised by my own urgency. “Everything we know says we need to go through the last gate. That’s how we get home.” She turns half-blind eyes on me. The boom comes again. Something knocking on the door. Something knocking to be let in.
