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“Hush, dear. It will be all right.” Eli pulled a blanket over me. I was back in bed. To someone else he said, “Perhaps we should let her mother in to see her.”
“Not like this,” Iris replied. “Give Rachel something to help her sleep. Keep her away.”
“Am I going to die?” I asked, but time had skipped again. I was alone. The ring around my wrist was scabbed over, but fresh blood wept from the edges. I struggled up from the bed. My body felt wrong. When I moved, something in my torso ground like an arthritic joint, hard and rasping where no bone should be.
My legs gave out. I collapsed two feet from the bed.
“Help,” I rasped out, trying to shout. “Please, I need help.” I twisted, trying to brace myself against the floor so I could work my way toward the door.
My grandfather lay before me. Crumpled, as I was. Hand reaching out, his face broken by the cracked-glass haze, mouth open in a scream choked into silence by the bloom of foxgloves.
But he wasn’t reaching. He was pointing to the window.
A hand snagged my hair and yanked backward. Jessamine. She hauled me back with all her childish strength. Scrabbling on her knees and one hand, the other tangled in my hair, she dragged me toward the window, wailing out a rasping cry. I reached thewall and clawed my way upward, Jessamine collapsing against me, collapsing further still, rabbit bones clattering against the floorboards as she vanished.
I leaned my brow against the cold windowpane. My breath made no fog against it, and I realized I wasn’t breathing at all. I squinted, and the world outside came into reluctant focus. The dark sky, the trees. The light among the trees, pale white. Not Bryony’s warm lantern light.
Roman was outside again.
I turned. Leopold was gone. The fox’s skull sat grinning in his place, and in its teeth, fringed with foxglove, was Bryony’s healing charm. I staggered to it and crushed the pouch into my palm, and for the first time since I’d started paying attention, I took a deep breath. My limbs seemed to stabilize—not much. Enough to move.
I stumbled to the door and turned the knob, but it was locked. Of course. Eli always locked me in. But when I dreamed, I got out. “Show me. Please,” I said.
Muddy footprints seeped up from the floor. They led from the bed to the wall beside the door. I pressed my hands to the spot.Let me out, I thought, and imagined it giving way before me. It parted in filaments. I angled my body through them, keeping my eyes squeezed shut. The wall gave, stringy and dry, and then there was air on my face again and I was in the hall.
I couldn’t stick around and wonder at what had just happened. I was dying. And I did not want to die. It seemed so obvious, but I’d never felt it before, this terror, this absolute rage at the idea—I didn’tdeservethis. I didn’t ask to be here, and I shouldn’t be, andI wouldn’t let it beat me. I wouldn’t surrender to this place, to these people, to this fate.
I stumbled down the hall, leaning heavily against the wall. Where my palm dragged against the wallpaper, moisture bubbled, leaving blisters that burst, oozing clear liquid that smelled like algae bloom. That spot in my belly kept up its bone-click feel with each step.
One step after another, I told myself,and don’t let that desperate fear tear you apart because your body has gone soft beneath its brutal teeth.
What was this place doing to me? My breath stopped and started again, my shoulders wrenched as if straining to rearrange themselves, and even my teeth swam in my mouth, uncertainly rooted to my warping jaw.
I reached the stairs. I half hung myself over the banister and let gravity carry me. By the time I reached the bottom, I was mostly myself again, except for the strange sucking hollowness in my chest I didn’t want to think about. Roman was up to something, and whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. I had to stop him. It was the only thought that mattered.
The hall—the door—the cold open air. I blinked, not entirely sure how I’d crossed the distance, not entirely remembering why I’d done it. I stood under the stars and tried to think. I was coming undone, some unnatural force rearranging me.
Or maybe it was an entirely natural force. Reality is randomness. To be organized and static is an unnatural state—it’s the change and decay that is natural, entropy the only inevitability.Every pattern is constantly tumbling toward its own undoing and—
“Helen.” A name. My name. The name for the set of rules I was, the name for this collection of limbs, digits, organs, features, neurons in this particular order. I was still me.
“Helen,” the voice said again, and only then did I realize itwasa voice. Bryony’s voice, and there was Bryony, walking toward me with an expression of deep concern. “It’s after dark. You shouldn’t be—”
I opened my mouth. I meant to ask for help, I think, but what came out was a sound no human throat could make. It was a flurry of moth wings in the dark and a rasp of stone and the startled shriek of a rabbit caught in a snare. I came apart again—bones shifting beneath my skin, throat crumpling, lungs blooming with unseen cilia. My vision went blank for half a second and then returned, the colors wrong, glimpsed from too many eyes that blinked along my cheekbones before receding into my skin again.
I expected Bryony to run. She lunged forward instead, catching me around my waist before I realized I’d started to fall, and she pulled me against her. “What’s happening to you?” she asked, startled but not afraid. Not afraid ofme, at least.
I tried to speak again, but my trachea had folded itself into a corrugated mass—but that was all right since I was pretty sure I was breathing through my skin. I would have laughed, if I could, as if that notion could be comforting. My arm, slung over her shoulder, sprouted tiny growths like the fringed antennae of silk moths.
Bryony seized me by the shoulders. Her thumbs pressed against my clavicles, and she stared into my eyes—just two of them now. “You need to calm down,” she said.
Calm? I was calm. No, I was panicking. The sensation was hard to pick apart from the wrenching violence of the changes in my body, but there it was, corrosive, toxic.
“Listen to me, Helen. Listen to my voice and calm down. You’re Helen. Be Helen,” she said. She was saying whatever came to her mind, I knew, but that arch, confident tone that had so fooled me when we met, convincing me that she knew every secret in this place and how to use it, swept over me just as effectively now. And that was something I could surrender to. I gave myself to it, believed it, embraced it.
Helen. Be Helen. Collector of bones. Rachel’s daughter. Loner. Awkward. The girl who loved chocolate ice cream and couldn’t sit still. The girl whose heart beat harder because Bryony Locke was holding her. But for that to be true, she needed a heart, not a tangle of thorns.
I built myself from the inside out, anchoring each piece of me. It wasn’t perfect—bits of me still felt wrong—but from Bryony’s relieved expression, I must at least have looked more human when I was done.
