Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  “The snow will stop soon,” she tells the girl. She takes a chair—an empty chair. “I brought food—it’s cold, I’m sorry.”

  “The snow will never stop.”

  “The snow stopped long enough for me to make my way here,” Reyna points out.

  “Did—did my father send you?”

  “Your father wasn’t in any shape to travel,” she replies, completely truthfully. If the girl’s father left the house during this storm, he didn’t survive it. Reyna’s certain he couldn’t see three feet in front of his face. He might have gone out, turned back, and been unable to find his way home. “I came instead.”

  Lying to the dead is tricky. Reyna thinks of it as telling them a story. It’s a story they need to hear. It has to be believable, because if they believe it, they can step outside of the fear. Fear is a story, like any other story. Change the story a bit, and the ending shifts with it. The ending the girl faced was death—either by freezing or starvation. Reyna can’t tell which, and it doesn’t matter. She needs to shift the ending enough that the girl can leave the house. If she leaves the house, she should be able to see where she has to go.

  That’s the way it always works. It’s no wonder her mother’s not as good at it—comfort has never been one of her mother’s strengths.

  “If you’re not hungry, I’ll take the food with us. You’ll need a coat,” she adds.

  The girl stares at the food; it’s dried meat, hard cheese. There’s nothing fresher than that. Her hesitation wars with her hunger—she doesn’t get many visitors, and she’s wary of strangers, here. But she’s desperate. Sometimes that helps Reyna break people free of the spaces they create for themselves—and sometimes it makes things almost impossible.

  The girl shakes her head; Reyna puts the food away. She does so deliberately, carefully; she takes no short-cuts. To be here at all, she’s lost the evening with Eric, and if she’s lost that, she might as well do something right. As she carefully slides meat and cheese back into the pack she’s carrying, she concentrates on the weather. The howl of wind recedes; again, it’s slow. She sits it out, waiting. She almost offers to build a fire, but she thinks that would be too much.

  It’s enough to still the storm. It’s enough to stop the snow.

  The minute her mother arrives, she knows; her mother remains invisible, watching. Reyna feels her fists clench; she feels her throat dry. It is always this way. She tries to focus on the poor, trapped girl, instead. When it’s been quiet for long enough, she rises and walks to the door; the girl follows.

  The wind begins to howl again, and Reyna says, “It’s quieter, but we’re not clear yet.” She goes back to the table, knowing that this will happen again. No matter how quiet the cabin is, approaching the door brings the storm. Opening the door is death.

  She doesn’t tell the girl that leaving it shut was death, anyway. She works, and she waits. She offers the girl food each time they retreat from the door. The third time, the girl’s shoulders slump, and she nods. She handles the plates; she tries to be host to a guest. When she begins to eat, Reyna thinks it is almost over.

  She’s wrong.

  • • •

  Five hours later—five actual hours—Reyna has fought the wind to a standstill. The girl has eaten. She has eaten everything. The fabric of her hunger is woven from memory, but when she has finished, she lets it go. She knows she is no longer hungry, because when she was alive, she wouldn’t have been. It’s enough of a change that she can—barely—believe that the storm that consumed her family will end.

  She lets Reyna open the door. She has dressed, now, for a long trek in the bitter cold; she is prepared to step outside of her home. This should be enough.

  It isn’t. They can barely get the door open. It’s almost as if the house itself has been buried. Reyna doesn’t understand snow very well; she half suspects that the monstrous amount of it is also part of the girl’s fear. She could make the snow vanish; she suspects she’s skilled enough to do that. But the snow is just another wall, and if the wall isn’t carefully deconstructed, the girl might never see beyond it; she’ll build it again and again and again.

  And so Reyna spends hours digging a path through the snow. It makes her arms and shoulders ache; she is so tired by the end of it she wants to crawl back into the imaginary house, into the imaginary bed—there’s room enough for three—and sleep. There’s a danger in that. Reyna almost made that mistake once.

  She has never repeated it.

  The girl, on the other hand, doesn’t tire. She digs, and the memory of desperation lends her a strength the living don’t possess. This could be another trap—a different one—if Reyna weren’t by her side; the girl might spend eternity digging and never look up to see sky. It was evening when Reyna arrived; it is not evening now. She knows it is not night in the world beyond her circle. She can hear bird song and argument in the distance; she can hear crickets and the buzzing of dragonflies and other insects. She can hear the sounds of Helmi.

  Helmi knows better than to interrupt Reyna or the magar when they stand, or sit in their circles.

  Mother, she thinks, where are you? There is no answer, of course. This is a test. Another test. And Reyna knows what she must do to pass it. She must dig, as the girl is digging. She must become part of the girl’s cage, the girl’s fantasy. She must become enough a part of it that she can find the door and open it.

  Find it too soon, open it too soon, and the girl will slip free of Reyna, not the cage; she will retreat, restructuring memory, and cloak herself once again in her uninterruptible fear. There must be another way. But if Reyna tries to make one today, she will fail.

  So she talks while she digs. She talks about Eric.

  The girl actually smiles. It’s a shy smile, as if she’s not quite used to talking to other people—and given the situation, she might not be. But she asks about Eric, about his father, about the village, as if she’s hungry for news. And as Reyna is just digging, and she’s tired, and she wants to stop and rest, she answers. Talking about Eric gives her energy. Talking about love makes the cold seem warmer, as if it could melt the snow just by existing.

  Hearing the girl’s tentative questions makes her seem like a real girl to Reyna. A living girl. Someone who has known loneliness and the fear of rejection, someone who can appreciate the gift that love is. Answering them—answering makes her seem almost like a friend. Reyna doesn’t have a lot of friends. Living the life she lives, and moving from year to year, makes friendship impossible. She can’t talk about what she does. She can’t share it. She knew, before she could talk, that she was, and would remain, an outsider.

  But the truth is, she doesn’t want that. She’s never wanted that.

  What she wants is Eric. She wants to be loved, not feared. She wants to be understood. She wants to stand up and shout the truth to the world: She is here to help people. She is here to help the people that most people can’t even see. She almost says as much to the girl, who is one of those people.

  But the girl is talking about her father, now. He hunts and traps. She is talking about her mother, who died when she was very young, in a winter like this one. She is talking about her own dreams—of love and freedom and, most of all, summer. Summer, when the snow melts and the world is warm, and standing outside of four walls won’t kill.

  Her dreams are smaller than Reyna’s, but she glows with them, and as she speaks, the tunnel through the snow expands; the digging quickens. She works—as all the dead do—without being aware of the work itself; by speaking of the things that she anticipates, the girl is pulling herself out of the hard shell of her fear. As she does, the tunnel lengthens.

  The color of the sky shifts. The snow doesn’t so much melt as vanish. The girl stops, midsentence, her mouth hanging open as if she’s forgotten she was speaking. And she has. She is staring ahead of her, her eyes wide and unblinking. There is a look on her f
ace that is almost painful; Reyna can’t describe it. She struggles to find words for it, but the ones she comes up with don’t work: love, desire, peace.

  Reyna’s mother says the dead don’t cry.

  She’s wrong.

  “What do you see?” Reyna asks. Her mother will be angry about it later—and her mother’s anger never goes away—but she feels the sudden, visceral need to know.

  The girl doesn’t hear her. Reyna is holding her, and Reyna’s hands tighten—just as they once did around her mother’s skirts. “What do you see?” she asks again.

  The girl whispers a word in a language Reyna doesn’t understand. She’s never had that happen to her before. She has always understood the dead, no matter where she finds them. They speak the same language. “I don’t understand.”

  The girl then looks away from whatever it is she sees. “You can’t see it?” she asks.

  Reyna shakes her head.

  The girl’s tears fall again; she looks—with pity—at Reyna. As if it is Reyna who is trapped, or Reyna who is blind. “It is everything I ever needed.”

  “What is?”

  The girl lifts her arm. Points. Frowns. “You helped me to come here. My father is waiting. And my mother. My mother.” She looks down at her hand; Reyna is holding it. Reyna has been holding onto the girl for the entire, long night. “Close your eyes,” the dead girl whispers.

  Reyna does.

  Eyes closed, for one long minute, she can see what waits for the dead. It is . . . like light. But not visual light; it’s the essence of what light offers: illumination, vision, beauty. It is home. It is warmth. It is a place—at last, after so much struggle and fear and resentment—to belong. She cannot describe it because it isn’t something that can be seen, even if she sees something; it is something that is felt. Here, all anger, all rage, all fear, all ambition, can and must at last be set aside.

  She understands, then, why it is forbidden to look. If it did not remind her so much of what she feels for Eric, she is certain she would walk by the girl’s side until there was no turning back.

  And that she wouldn’t regret it.

  • • •

  “There’s no rain coming,” her mother says, as Reyna works.

  Reyna knows. The stream is so low in the bed beside the ring tree. This is not the first year the rains have been sparse. There is water, of course, for their own gardens. There will always be water for their gardens. But her mother doesn’t like to use their gifts that way, even if it keeps them fed.

  The villagers will notice.

  The villagers, who know that there’s been so little rain. Rumors will start. And eventually, someone will say, “They’re stealing the rain!” It’s not true, of course. It’s never been true. If Reyna’s mother weren’t so afraid of people, she could make it rain for the whole village, and then, they’d be welcome. They’d be heroes.

  But she doesn’t. The only time Reyna was foolish enough to ask why, her mother slapped her. Her mother, bent and wiry, has a temper, but she almost never hits her children, not with her hands; she uses words for that.

  “The power does not come out of nowhere!”

  No, of course not. It comes from the dead. “If we’re finding them anyway,” Reyna countered, “they don’t need that power. The only reason they have it at all is to help us search for them and free them. Once they’re free of this world and their pain, why shouldn’t we use that power to help the living?”

  “Because that is where it would start,” her mother replied grimly. “And it would not end there. It never does.”

  “And how would it end?” Reyna demands. “If we only want to help people—living or dead—why is that bad?”

  “Why do you want to help the living?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to help them?”

  “Because then we won’t be hated. Then we can stay!”

  And her mother shook her head and said, again, No.

  SNOW CLUNG RANDOMLY to highway signs along the 401, obscuring letters or numbers designed to mark the way. White borders absorbed white clumps; no one unfamiliar with the signs could be expected to read them.

  No one tried, anyway. Amy was driving, and Amy knew where they were going. It was a comfort, to leave the driving to Amy—the only comfort in this small space.

  Michael was on the right-hand side of the SUV’s bench, head pressed against the window, chin tucked toward his chest. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping; his hand was running rhythmically across Petal’s head. Petal, in theory seated in the middle of the bench, was actually sprawled across both it and the two passengers on either side of him.

  Allison had his back end, which meant the stub of his tail as well as his damp paws. She didn’t lean against the window; her head was tilted back, her neck almost rounding as she rested the weight of her head against the top of the seat. Her eyes were closed. It was dark in the car. Dark enough that her pallor shouldn’t have been visible—but her expression suggested the absence of color; her lips were almost as pale as the rest of her skin. Her glasses, flecked first with snow and then with the water snow became, rested at a slight tilt across the bridge of her nose.

  Emma was certain she was thinking about Toby, her baby brother. Toby, who was in the hospital, in the ICU, hooked up to god only knows how many machines, courtesy of a gun; it had been hours. Toby had been fine at dinner. He’d been his usual, annoying younger brother self until people broke into the house, looking for Allison.

  Allison had escaped. Chase had made her leave.

  Emma didn’t know what to say to her. Allison hadn’t shot her brother. But it was Ally the attackers had been after. Had there been no Necromancers—and no necromantic best friend—there would have been no break-in and no guns. Had Allison refused to get caught up in the lives of the dead, she’d be doing her homework or reading her latest amazing book.

  Instead, she was on the run, trapped in a car with Amy Snitman, who had always made her feel uncomfortable, driving away from a brother who might die at any minute, instead of running in a frenzy of worry and fear toward him.

  Ally couldn’t phone. She couldn’t ask how her brother was doing. She couldn’t go home; if she did, it was only a matter of time before Necromancers once again descended on her home and family.

  The only person who could feed Emma and her friends information about Toby was Emma’s father, who happened to be dead. He’d promised to keep an eye out, to report any changes in Toby’s condition. Emma didn’t know if his absence—so far—was a good sign.

  She wanted to believe it was, but she couldn’t force those words out of her mouth. She wanted to comfort her best friend, but she didn’t have anything to offer. If it weren’t for Emma, if it weren’t for that friendship, there would have been no home invasion. Toby would never have been shot.

  Emma wondered if this awkwardness, this desire to help mixed with the certainty that nothing would be helpful, was natural; she felt like a failure of a friend. Was this how Ally had felt in the months after Nathan’s death? Wanting to help, but awkward with uncertainty about how?

  And the truth was, nothing had been certain to help Emma, then. Minute to minute, what Emma wanted or needed from her friends had changed. What she’d wanted was to have Nathan back. She couldn’t have that. Some days, she’d wanted to go to the places she and Nathan had gone together, and some—she wanted to avoid them because all she could see there was loss and absence.

  What had kept her sane? What had kept her here, as far as grief’s gravity allowed that? The answer was contained in this car. Michael. Allison. Petal. Even, in her fashion, Amy. Amy could understand the theory of grief and loss, but Amy had never been big on sympathy—she considered it too close to pity, and no one who liked having a social life, however stunted, pitied Amy Snitman.

  Had she cried on their shoulders?

/>   No. Because she was a Hall, and Halls don’t cry. Even at funerals.

  What, then? She glanced out the window at snow that was almost horizontal, turning the question over and over in the terrible silence of the car. She almost asked Amy about her current rival in school, just to have that silence filled. But she realized that Amy, tight-lipped and active, wasn’t in that much better a place than any of the rest of them, which was unsettling.

  What had these friends given her, when she thought there was nothing of value that the universe could, anymore? She thought, although it was uncomfortable. Emma had always been taught, in subtle ways, that every request for help—or time, or attention—put pressure on another person. Asking was forcing someone else to say No, and given how much Emma hated saying No herself, asking for things became, as she grew up, a social crime.

  She glanced at Amy’s grim profile.

  Amy asked—if by “ask” one meant demanded—for things all the time, but Emma didn’t hate it, or her, most days. On the other hand, hating Amy would almost be like hating rain or snow. Amy didn’t need anything to be Amy. Or rather, she didn’t need anything from anyone else.

  And that was beside the point. Emma looked at the rest of her friends in the mirror and understood what they had given her, in lieu of obvious, superhuman comfort. They had needed her. Even when she was at her worst, when she’d felt so empty she thought she’d crumble into dust and ash just trying to take a step forward, they’d needed her. They reminded her that she was necessary, even without Nathan. There was still an Emma-shaped space in the universe that had to be filled.

  She would have said they’d asked for nothing. And, in words, they hadn’t. Words weren’t necessary to walk Michael to school. Words weren’t necessary to walk and feed her dog. Words were definitely superfluous when listening to Allison talk about the most amazing book she had just read.