by Daryl Banner
Then, he says, “It’s the stone.”
I frown. “What do you mean it’s the stone?”
“Ever since I’ve been near it, the sky’s changed. Greyer and greyer.” John kicks at the ground, sending a tuft of soil into the fire. No one seems to notice, the others so involved in their own chatter. John and I have this horrible exchange alone. “I didn’t think anything of it at first until I realized the sky had gone. Now it’s just …” He looks away, unable to finish.
“But … I thought the stone’s protecting us,” I say stupidly, staring at it across the circle. “I thought …”
“It is,” he says, still looking away. “Like another Mayor who’s scared of Living things. It’s protecting us from …” He shakes his head. “From what, I don’t know.”
From our own demise, I answer. From turning to dust. In its presence, we’re safe. With its existence, we will live as long as we please. Everything has a price, yes, but I guess some prices are just harder to pay than others.
For the rest of the evening, or what we perceive to be the rest of the evening, we spend our hours chatting with one another and leaning back in our chairs, enjoying the endlessness of the night, enjoying the eternity, enjoying the worry-free zone of absolute self-denial we’d built for ourselves.
This is what it means to be almost alive. This is what it means to be dead, and yet not dead. This is the end without an ending. This is a part of the circle and you don’t know where the circle starts and where it finishes.
When he returns, the chatter and the noise quiets to a pitch, deadly silence. Jimmy collapses on his knees by the fire, his face dried of all tears and reddened, mad. All that’s likely left in his tear ducts is salt, and the flames dance in his eyes as we wait for him to say something.
He says nothing. He doesn’t need to.
Jasmine fetches him something to eat, though he doesn’t ask for it. Wordless, he lies by the fire and shuts his eyes, embracing his pickaxe like a teddy bear. Every set of eyes seems to meet one another’s in the circle, and I know the look of guilt when I see it.
This is not the peace any of us wanted. Not when one of our friends is lost to the caverns forever and a Human is suffering and losing his sanity because of it.
It is Jimmy who indicates that morning has come. By now, the fire’s eaten away the wood and all that’s left are glowing embers and smoky skyward snakes. After Jimmy is fed, Jasmine turns to us, her eyes heavy and sad. “I will walk him back to the caves,” she tells us, “and we will search for her together.”
I watch Jasmine leave from the gate and observe the spread of dead or dying trees, all of them having coiled and turned black just from my passing through with that potent, sickly stone. I’ve burned a path of decay through the vivid green that once was here. No wonder the whole journey to Shee’s lair was through dead and deader terrain; she clawed a scar of doom from the Whispers to the woods to the underground with her treasure.
“You were out there for a whole year,” I tell my mom that night when we are seated at the table in my house. John listens from the stiff couch we acquired, his arms folded and his eyes dark. “Looking for Shee. What were you doing all that time?”
“Oh. I found her quite quickly,” my mom confesses, staring at the Anima Stone, which pulses greedily. “But once I’d found her, I became … curious. I studied her. I studied the spiders. I was fascinated, really, and I knew that if I didn’t wait until the right moment, I might be captured. So I stayed around … I watched.”
“But … a whole year?”
She winces, gives a little shrug. “I suppose I lost track of time.”
I think on that. “Somehow, that I can believe.”
“Oh, your ring,” she murmurs suddenly.
I’m playing with John’s ring on my finger. Then, realizing the irony, I say, “Yeah. Your favorite ring, huh?”
“That hurt,” she admits with half a laugh. “Steel is a horrible thing to a Deathless. Even though the years might have … taken away my vulnerability to it, I don’t trust touching such metals so easily.” She looks away. I do too, my gaze lingering on John at the couch. He’s looking at my hand now, studying the dull ring he once gave me long ago that saved me.
Turning back to my mother, I suddenly say, “I died too young.” Her eyes snap to mine, surprised. “I wish I could’ve … experienced the world and learned more. I wish I could’ve gone to college and had some annoying, horrible roommate. Maybe I’d take classes and excel in some of them and bomb in others. I could stand in front of a classroom and give a presentation on zombies.” I laugh, amusing myself. John on the couch, however, might still be trying to figure out what a word like “college” means.
My mother pushes a strand of my hair out of my eyes, draping it behind my ear. “Count yourself lucky, sweetie, for not having to witness the torment of your twenties, watching all your friends’ arrogance become their downfall.” She sighs, staring into her hands. “And then the tragedy of the thirties, all your friends losing their youth, hair receding, bellies pushing out. Then the forties cripple them into insecure material-grabbing monsters who feign maturity while … while grabbing at all signs of youth they can muster, before plunging mercilessly by time’s firm grip into their fifties, then their sixties, then their seventies … as their hair turns white as winter and falls out and their sanity slowly scatters like bugs … Oh, there is nothing less pretty than the passage of time, my dear, and you were spared every ugly hour of it.”
She closes her fingers, looks up at me with a lightness in her eyes. Then, almost casually, she scoots her chair over, putting it right by mine, and she pulls me in for another of her bone-crushing hugs. I figure, in these past few days, she must be making up for an undeniably large amount of lost time.
“I would give anything to have died at nineteen,” she murmurs into my ear. “Oh, Claire, my dear, dear, dear sweet Claire. Life was so stupid. All the tiny little things I worried about every day … broken nails, bad attitude from a friend, the look my own mother would give me when I said something cross, the opportunity to kiss that one boy that I missed, the stupid thing I said where I might have gained a friend for life but instead made an enemy … Oh, Claire, all these stupid, stupid, stupid things I chose to do and say and not say and worry about … instead of just being happy. All these stupid minutes I wasted crying and wanting and hating, instead of feeling the sunlight on my face—ooh, the sunlight—All the foul words I chose to utter instead of, say, telling you that you look so pretty in your prom dress.”
Her arms squeeze me horribly. My neck could break and I’d let it. I don’t hug back because she hugs enough for both of us. John still watches stonily from the couch.
“The Living are so, so, so stupid,” she says.
Claire had to die so that Winter could live. I wonder if death is just life in a different form. The Chief, is he still within the planet, searching, curious? Is Helena with me somehow, her energy settling in the wood of the chair I’m sitting in, in the wind that makes my hair dance, in the flames we all watched last night?
When my mother pulls away, I’m left to stare at the ugly yellow rock on the table again. It is a deeper color, a richer color, like honey … It is getting hungrier.
“We’re feeding it,” I suddenly realize.
My mother puts a hand on my shoulder. “What was that, dear?”
“The Anima Stone. Every plant that shrivels in its presence. Every Dead that turns to dust … Maybe even John’s ability to see the sky and the sun … This ugly thing has absorbed all of that Anima.” I’m not even sure I’m right, but I know hunger, and maybe some psychotic, lost-my-mind part of me can recognize it, even within this stupid, fell rock.
“It won’t quit,” my mom says, following my logic. “It will do more than just protect us.”
“It’s the key to an Undead revolution.” I laugh dryly, turning to my mom. “I think about the choices I made … What if I had chosen long ago to join you in that Black Towe
r, mom? What if I had decided to become Deathless with you and rule at your side?”
My mother considers it, her gaze turning darker as she studies the cloying golden pulse of the stone on the table. “We would’ve won,” she finally says. “The Undead would have taken the world. Humans would die off and join us, Risen in their Second Life to feed on the planet’s blood until there’s none left. We’d never know how a racing heart feels, ever again. We’d never know pain or tears or taste. No growing old. Trapped, ageless forever. The concept of time would be obsolete. We would be living in a world of the Numb … a world of ceaseless Whispers.”
“But I didn’t choose death. I defied you, I defeated you and I made the Living a home out of Trenton.” I peer over my shoulder, studying the brooding shape of my love as he sits darkly with arms folded. “I chose life.”
I rise abruptly from the chair, unable to sit suddenly. My mother watches as I fetch the sheathed sword off the floor and brandish the Judge’s blade. It sings from the scrape of metal, its song ringing through our tiny home.
“People will come for the stone,” warns my mother. “That stone ensures our survival.”
Staring bleakly at the floor, I say, “Then we’d better protect it so it is never, ever destroyed.”
“Yes,” agrees my mother. “We’d better.”
I take one long, unyielding look at John, my love, my everything. Then I swing the sword up high and strike it with all my might into the heart of the Anima Stone.
T H E F I N A L C H A P T E R
F O R E V E R T H E B E A U T I F U L D E A D
The booming crack of thunder that is the sound of a thousand tiny shards of Warlock eyes and undeathly wishes and stolen life shattering is so loud, it can rip the world asunder.
But it doesn’t.
After the deed is done, I find the Judge’s sword has broken into pieces along with the stone. Only the hilt remaining in my palm, I lay it gently on the table, then join John on the couch. We stare in silence at the remains of our salvation, now in pieces, like we all soon will be.
My mother nods. “That’s one way to do it.”
When the morning light finds us, imaginary or not, I think a new sort of peace finds us with it. It’s the peace of true freedom. The peace of the infinity that is to become of all of us Living and Dead. The peace of absolution.
Or whatever.
I’m with the girls on Jasmine’s porch, excluding Jasmine herself, of course, as she’s with Jimmy in the caves. We’re sharing stories when the unsettled dust down the road brings with it an unexpected visitor. I’m on my feet in an instant and rushing to the person whose armor can’t hide her. I hug her so hard, she grunts from the effort.
“You’re alive,” she remarks, her lips caught in my hair.
“Not exactly,” I joke back, overcome with emotion. “I don’t know why I thought I’d never see you again.”
We pull apart and I stare at the woman in front of me. It strikes me as so strange, considering she was once a child whose tears wetted my shirt when she clung to me.
“Jasmine caught me up,” says Megan, sounding rather matter-of-fact. “She and Jimmy made a stop by the city before … Well, she told me about Ann as well.” Megan tugs her gloves off, lays them over the porch railing. “Not a day’s passed that I haven’t worried on you and the others. I woke screaming in the night, picturing all of you turned to dust, and …” Her gaze detaches. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, Winter.”
“Well, you’re running this big ol’ city,” I say casually. “Y’know, giant scary thing full of metal buildings that we used to call the Necropolis. Not sure if you’re aware, but you’re its Mayor.”
Megan feigns surprise, the ten-year-old I know coming out in her eye—the Human one. “Is that what I’m doing?” Her laughing face finds Ash’s and Marigold’s. When her eye lands on my mother, her face changes. “J-Julianne.”
“Dear child,” says my mother. “We are going to need you, now more than ever. Megan, sweetie, you’re going to serve the greatest purpose of all.”
Megan looks to me, to Ash, to Marigold, confused. “What do you mean?”
Sad fact is, my mother and I haven’t told the others. Neither has John, stony-faced as he is anyway, nor my mom. None of the others know that the stone is no more.
“Tell me,” Megan insists, her eye fierce and steely.
I brace myself for a truth I was hoping never to utter. “We are the Dead, and we are eternal.” I direct my next words to the others, Marigold and Ash. “But the Living are … more eternal.”
“What do you mean?” asks Ash, her face blank, her eyes blanker. Even Marigold’s expression is frozen, her hands gripping the porch banisher anxiously.
There is no easy way to tell them, so I just do. In a matter of words, I tell the Dead what we might be looking forward to: an indeterminate amount more of our Second Life before falling to dust. We may have years of time left. We may have just days. The Anima in us will return to the planet when it’s ready whether it has our permission or not.
The others are silent for a while. Then, unexpectedly, Ash smiles and, thoughtful, she says, “Y’know, in this strange way, it’s almost like being alive again. You never really know how much time you have.”
“I might be ready to become a flower,” Marigold decides, I guess comforting herself with the sweet belief that she’ll somehow come back as flora.
Megan takes the news gently, sitting on the bottom porch step and drawing shapes in the dirt with her toe as she talks. “I have to count us lucky. A part of me thought, when I sent you off on your mission, that I’d never see you or anyone again. So, I guess I got another chance.” Her Human eye meets mine, soft and kind.
“You have to tell our story, Megan.” The wind keeps pulling my hair in front of my face, so I draw it to the side so I can keep my gaze on my lifelong friend. “You have to keep our legacy alive. The world doesn’t deliver second chances, not like this, and if the future learns any lesson from our existence, I hope it’s that you—”
“You have to embrace what you have,” my mother interjects, “before reaching for more.”
I turn to my mother, studying her cool demeanor, and know with a heavy heart what her greed has cost her in both her Lives.
“You must love while you can,” utters Ash.
Yes, the lesson from the Chief, I want to say aloud. Well, from Brock, really, but perhaps everyone knows precisely for whom Ash speaks.
“You must do all you can, and be the fool,” Marigold puts in cheerily. “No one will remember you, if you give them nothing to remember.”
Smiling now, I voice my own: “The world will give you what you give it. Reciprocity.” I think of Claire as if she were sitting next to me, her head on my shoulder. “And it’s never too late to change.”
Megan takes my hands and we fall into another embrace. The tender silence of the porch holds all our promises for the future, Megan’s mission made clear. When she leaves to return to the Necropolis, she carries with her our legacies.
I hope that this burden makes her, in fact, lighter.
The last time I ever see my little grown-up Tulip, she smiles and waves at me from the North Trenton Gate. Her smile makes me see the little girl who screamed in the cages, who screamed with joy when I found her at her camp, who followed me into the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Garden. When she disappears into the woods, I move to the gate and watch, half-hidden behind the wall. I watch as she crosses the terrain from the dead woods to the thriving woods, a gradient of black to green as she crosses back into the world of the Living, there to stay forever. May her mind always wonder. May her belly always be full. May her heart always beat.
Time is a gentle monster sometimes. I’m with Ash in the Refinery during her last moment. Marigold is fixing Brains with a new set of legs and an arm, imported from the hospital of the Necropolis, when Ash turns to the window, startled by something. Her eyes grow big, then soft, her mouth parted in awe.
Ash turns to me right then as if she wants to say something, but her face falls apart too quickly, followed by the rest of her body in a mellow rainfall of dust. Marigold and I turn, our alarmed eyes meeting, and neither of us say another word.
Brains only enjoys her legs for a week and a half before deciding how to finish the sentence she’s stuck on. “I am happy,” she tells me. With an innocent, childlike glow in her eyes, she leans her head on my shoulder one night when we’re all circled around the fire, and it’s there in that chair with her head on my shoulder that she, almost carefully, crumples into a pile of bony pieces.
“The reason I do it,” Jasmine explains to us one day when we’re relaxing in the old lounge of the Town Hall, the front windows lending a view of the whole Square, “is because a person oughtn’t be alone when they go. We were robbed of that opportunity with Ann, but I know she wouldn’t want Jimmy to suffer alone.” Jasmine turns to face the Square, searching for the words. “Sometimes, he’ll sing to her in the caves, hoping she hears it.” Then, she chuckles. “I guess in some respects, we’re all alone. How ironic. We’re alone … together. And I suspect that’s exactly how I’ll go: alone together with Jimmy and Ann.”
When we’re heading back to the cul-de-sac, Jasmine tells John what a strong man he’s become, both inside and out. She swears to us it’s her birthday, making us promise to throw her another epic party, as long as Marigold bakes the perfect cake. We’re still trying to decide what that perfect cake is when Jasmine bids us farewell and leaves the city again with Jimmy. We never see her return.
I hope her Final Sight was the sunrise, at long last.
The rain comes a few days later and we all stay in Jasmine’s house, listening to the torrential downpour as it pummels against every inch of the roof. Marigold, John and I share stories about Jasmine’s party back when there were so many more Undead in the world. “It was where Ann met Jimmy,” Marigold states proudly, and I try to argue, insisting that the two of them already knew each other before the party, but Marigold changes the subject to talk of the frightfully awful music that was played.