by Anya Allyn
I stepped toward her.
Again she held up a hand. “Please, I know you, Cassie. I know your heart. You’ll try to stop me, because you won’t want to let me go. And I can’t let you do that. This is what I want.”
A tear tracked down my face. “You would be the one to disappear. Molly. I need you. We’ll find a way to keep you here, to keep you from being pulled back to the castle. And find a way of making you better.”
She shook her head sadly. “There is no better for me. I feel it. Day by day. I’m fading.” She turned to her double. “But she might have a chance, where I have none. And if every double of us in all the universes is like a part of ourselves, then she is part of me and I am already part of her. Even if she has only the smallest possibility of waking, this is my gift to her... and to you.”
Sophronia rubbed her forehead. “Cassie is right. You should not do this. You might die along with your double. If the machines have been off for over an hour, then they are barely clinging to life.”
Aisha’s eyes were stony. “I’m already dead. If I switch over and die along with her, then there is no difference.” She looked down at the otherworld Aisha.
Cold cement poured into my limbs. “Aish,” I cried, “not you too? You can’t do this....”
With a heavy sigh, she pulled the hood from her face. Her hair hung wild and stringy around her cheeks, as though she hadn’t bothered brushing it in days. “Why? All I’ve done is hurt you. I can no longer live with myself. All the things I’ve done—to everyone. All the people and things I left behind are haunting me now. I can’t live like this anymore.”
“So join with us,” I pleaded. “Be on our side.”
Sophronia nodded. “Yes. Both of you. Stay here with us. Help us. Leave these girls and come upstairs—there’s nothing more anyone can do for them now.”
“Please....” My voice weakened to a whisper.
Aisha’s expression clouded. “I have nothing to give. Every day, every night, I’ve battled with myself. All I think of is killing myself. And Emerson—he’s changed. He was never a loving husband, but this autumn he showed who he truly is. Cold and cruel. A true Batiste.” She spat the last word out as though it pained her to say it. Her hands tightened around each other. “Molly found me with a rope and noose in the orchards this morning. She stopped me. We talked about everything and she told me what she was coming here to do today. Together, we made a decision.”
“Emerson’s not a Batiste,” I said quickly. “None of them are. Balthazar never had children. I found this out... in my time with Balthazar. Everyone chooses their own path, and people can change, if they want to.”
A tear streaked down Aisha’s pale face. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, anymore.”
I stared at them both, stricken. “You can’t do this. Please. You can’t take your own lives like this.”
Molly’s eyes were calm. “I see it as the chance to give life, however small. I have no chances left. Cassie, I treasure the time I had to know you outside of the dollhouse.” She turned to Aisha. “And in the brief time that I’ve come to know you better, I wish I’d been able to know you sooner. Maybe I will, on the other side.”
Molly’s hand reached toward that of the otherworld Molly.
Tears streamed down my face unchecked. “Molly... Aisha... I need to tell you both something....”
They paused, their fingers almost touching those of their doubles.
“I need to tell you about the tower at the castle,” I breathed, afraid that at any moment, it would be too late to tell them the things that were burning inside me. “I know who it is that they keep in there. It’s Prudence.”
Their lips parted in shock, stunned looks widening their eyes.
“They keep her there in service to the serpent,” I told them. “She watched us, every day at the castle, unable to contact us.” I turned to Molly. “Molly, she said that it wasn’t what you told her when she first came to the dollhouse that made her try to kill herself. I know you always hated yourself for telling her that Jessamine was a spirit, but it wasn’t because of anything you said. It was because she could see too much—in the dollhouse she could see Balthazar and the castle and the evil drove her to lose her mind.”
I paused, then smiled tightly at Aisha. “Aish, Prudence told me she saw the battle within you and knew that it was fear that paralyzed you.” I wiped the wetness from my face with both hands. “I know what fear is like and how it binds you. I too, have been paralyzed with fear my whole life. I found the source of that fear in the tower. My mother lost a baby when I was very small. From then on, I spent my life terrified of loss, of darkness. In the tower, I found the baby that my mother lost—grown up into my sister.” I inhaled deeply. “Prudence.”
Molly and Aisha stared at me.
“That explains so much,” said Molly softly. “Thank you.”
Aisha just nodded, her eyes brimming, giving me a small smile.
I felt the tightness in my body relax. They’d understood.
They each turned back to their doubles. As if in slow motion, their hands reached across the beds.
Cold realization closed over me. Nothing was going to change the path they’d chosen. Not my words. Not anything.
I watched as empty spaces formed where Molly and Aisha had been.
As though they’d never been there.
In the stillness, seconds ticked away.
Nabaasa stepped over to each of the girls in the beds, bending to place a hand on each cheek and say her goodbyes. She turned back to us. “I will leave you to grieve your loss.” Quietly, she left the room.
Sophronia stepped over to hold hands with Ethan and Frances and me. In a circle, we stood in the dim room together. In the numb stillness of my mind, thoughts like poison arrows hurtled toward me.
I’d thought I’d known Molly so well. But in the end, she was unknowable, and she ended a life that was to me a bright thing shining in this universe—in any universe. Molly’s star had burned so brightly, she’d scared me sometimes.
I had even thought I knew Aisha—at least, I’d thought I knew the person she’d become. I’d seen moments where she’d battled herself, but in the end, she’d seemed to choose Emerson and the castle. But I was wrong. She’d never completely stepped over to that side.
I prayed for some way of answering the dragging weight inside me, the knowledge that I couldn’t stop Molly and Aisha from sacrificing themselves.
No answer came.
15. Daybreak
CASSIE
A soft gasp of air sounded behind us.
I whirled around. Molly’s eyelashes stirred.
I didn’t really see that.
But as I watched, a frown etched itself into her forehead. Her eyes opened to the ceiling.
Sorrow and hope charged through me.
We rushed to her bedside. Her eyes met ours, growing large with unspeakable fear and confusion. She tried to talk, but was unable to form words.
I looked to Sophronia, expecting her to say something, but she shook her head. Then I remembered—Molly had never heard Sophronia utter a word. In Molly’s mind, she’d woken straight from the bed chamber of the dollhouse—straight from the world where she was Missouri and we were in our last days.
I grasped her hand. We needed her to know this wasn’t a dream or an imagining. “Missouri, we’re all safe.” I bent my head down to hers. “We got out of the dollhouse. We’re free.”
We weren’t safe, or free, but in this moment, we were together—and that was enough.
Her eyes moistened, and she stared at each of us in turn.
I didn’t want to scare her by staring back like she was a miracle. But that’s what she was—an insane, amazing miracle.
Clattering footfall echoed down the stairwell to the basement.
Ethan turned his head sharply. “I’ll go head them off. And I’ll get Nabaasa back down here—she’ll know what to do.”
Molly’s eyes closed again—s
eemingly exhausted by her brief wakening. She slipped into a deep sleep.
Frances gazed at the sleeping Molly, her little face quietly frantic.
“Don’t worry,” Sophronia told her, “she’ll wake again.”
I released the lungful of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
Beside us, in the next bed, came a breathy, no.
Aisha opened eyes filled with unspeakable fear. I knew what was in her mind. She’d gone to sleep with an overdose of sleeping potion, thinking she’d never wake—and being waking now was her worst nightmare.
“Go....” I whispered to Ethan.
The Aisha of almost two years ago had been Ethan’s girlfriend. It seemed right that his face should be the first that she saw.
~.~
Heavy boots clattered on the stair landing outside the basement. Ethan turned back to Sophronia and me. Like Molly, Aisha had fallen back into sleep.
We headed out of the basement rooms—Mr. Calhoun and a few of the guards were making their way down the stairs. Sister Bettina stood piously at the top railing.
“Sister,” called Ethan, “call off your troops.”
She gazed down at him with hard eyes. “We allowed you a certain amount of time with the... bodies. But we must make preparations for a proper burial now.”
“Unless you wish to bury live persons, there will be no burials,” Sophronia told her.
She tilted her head slightly, as though she hadn’t heard correctly, or didn’t want to hear Sophronia’s words. “Excuse me?”
“She said they’re alive.” Ethan’s voice was sharp and accusing. “They both woke—just then when we were in the room.”
“No. Damned. Way.” Mr. Calhoun crossed his beefy arms.
“Yes,” Sister Bettina, “there’s little point in trying to make us feel neglectful in relation to turning the machines off. For those girls to survive would be a miracle.”
Pain raged through me. I had escaped Balthazar and the castle’s grip, only to be faced with the prim coldness of Sister Bettina. “You, more than anyone, should believe in miracles.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness that I felt inside from escaping into my voice.
My limbs shook, my body both chilled and hot.
Her eyes bored into me as my mind started to fuzz and gray out.
Ethan caught me under the arms as I stumbled. “She’s not well. She’s been kept in an underground prison for months, she’s just escaped through an ocean and come out into freezing temperatures. At least let her change into some dry clothes.”
She laced her long fingers together, a strange look visiting her eyes. “You may both go and change. Perhaps I was indeed too hasty on deciding your future here. We will revisit our discussion on your future here in a few days.”
She sounded as though she’d had a complete change of heart, but there was no softening of her eyes.
“I will go sit with the girls,” said Sophronia. I knew she didn’t trust the Order or Mr. Calhoun any more than I did.
~.~
Molly and Aisha sat gazing out of one of the few upper-level windows that hadn’t been smashed and boarded over—in what used to be one of the museum eateries—eyeing the wintery view over the frozen lake in alarm and awe. Sophronia and Ethan and I sat with them, trying to give them some space and allow them room to adjust.
It had taken three hours for the girls to wake again, and another two hours for Nabaasa to hydrate them and for us to orient them to the museum and fill them in on all that had happened during their long, long sleep in the basement. We’d told them everything—from my escape, to Ethan bringing the comatose girls to the museum, to Tobias’s old house here in Miami, to the people of the castle and the books of the Speculum Nemus. And Prudence—I’d told them about Prudence, each word catching in my throat.
We’d tried to tell them everything gently, but there wasn’t time to give them days or weeks to recover before telling them the truth about the past two years. We were in a deadly race.
The weight of our words was evident in the way they both sat silently in their chairs, hands grasping the table tops as though to assure themselves they were really here—their eyes still shaded with confusion—still unable to process any of the past two years. I understood the strangeness they felt at knowing they had absorbed otherworld doubles of themselves—I didn’t know that I had completely accepted having absorbed the life of another.
Looking back, it was almost as if Molly and Aisha and I and everyone else were all part of some kaleidoscope—with all the pieces changing positions and colors, but all bound together, all depending on each other for the ability to move. All part of some pattern. But I was inside the kaleidoscope, and I couldn’t see the whole pattern, couldn’t figure out how the pieces all fit together.
Molly’s full lips formed a smile that was half irony and half sorrow. “Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Except to keep going. As we did in the dollhouse—you more than anyone.”
Her eyes grew round. “Calliope... I mean, Cassie... do you still know me?”
“Of course I know you.”
“What was she like—the other Molly?”
My eyes grew wet, but I felt a smile tug at the edges of my mouth. “She was just like you.”
“Really just like me?”
“In every way. I’ll tell you, one day soon, about all she did, and about how she never gave up.”
The loss of the Molly I’d known for the past year undercut everything with a sharp blade. Loss and gain, gain and loss—no one stayed forever, no one remained the same or even in the same place.
Breathe, breathe. You can change nothing. You can’t bring anyone back who is gone. Even if you find the identical person, in the identical world, you still can’t bring them back, or be with them again in the same way. Because you are already changed by their loss.
Molly bent her head, staring fixedly at her fingers. The freckles on her face contrasted with her pale skin. Detective Kalassi had arranged for those freckles to be lasered off the skin of the otherworld Molly—to help conceal her identity when she came to live with Mom and me in Miami. I remembered the first time I’d seen those freckles clearly, when she’d run up to Ethan and me in the dollhouse and begged us to attend Jessamine’s tea party. She’d seemed like some strange, underground creature—but she wasn’t. She was just a girl, like me, forced to remain in the worst of places.
Aisha’s green-blue eyes were troubled. “So tell me, tell me who the Aisha of the other earth was. I don’t seem to have been much... in the story.”
I inhaled deeply. When we told Aisha and Molly what had happened, we’d left out much of what Aisha had done. The Aisha sitting before us might have chosen a very different path.
Ethan pressed his lips together in a smile. “Aish, are you okay to walk? Maybe we can take a walk together and we can talk about everything.”
Aisha nodded but her expression was hesitant and questioning. “I’m okay to walk.” She rose from the table.
Ethan slung an arm around her and helped her step from the eatery into the corridor. I saw uncertainty in the rigid posture of Aisha’s back—she had to know that Ethan had some difficult things to say to her. I felt sorry for both of them and the discussion they were about to have. But I knew Ethan, and I knew he would say it in the best way possible. And I knew now that when we were all at school, in the normal world, that Aisha had never really wanted him—because back then, she’d only seen herself and her own ambition.
A small girl tore through the eatery, honey-brown hair flying and eyes popping from her head. She stopped just before reaching Molly, eyeing her shyly. Molly held her arms out wide. Frances ran to her and climbed up into her lap, hugging her like she’d never let go. Frances had been kept with the other children of the museum while Molly and Aisha recovered and were told of the events of the past two years.
Nabaasa stepped behind, smiling at Frances. “She waited a long time for you to wake,
Molly.”
Above Frances’ head, Molly gazed up at Nabaasa. “I heard your voice, when I was sleeping, but I thought I was dreaming.”
Nabaasa shook her head thoughtfully. “It’s incredible to see you awake and talking to us.” Her dark eyes clouded. “Frances, would you mind getting a glass of water for Missy? She needs lots of water to help her get better.”
Reluctantly leaving Molly’s lap, Frances ran out to the eatery kitchen.
Breathing in sharply, Nabaasa looked at us each in turn. “Others are saying that the recoveries were not natural, and they are of course correct. Patients do not recover from comas in the way that Molly and Aisha did. We must be extremely careful.” She rubbed her forehead. “I suspect the Order believes that some power of the castle was invoked in that basement room. I’m not sure that it is safe for any of you to stay.”
“They cannot force us to leave,’ said Sophronia. “They need us. And Ethan has done more for them than anyone else here. Certainly more than that tiresome Mr. Calhoun. They know that.”
“That is true,” Nabaasa agreed. “But the Order are fanatical—they see only their own narrow beliefs. We cannot operate on logic where they are concerned. I’ll have the guards that I trust watching over you.”
“I’m the one they want gone from here,” I told Nabaasa. “And the Order will get their wish. I don’t want to leave any of you, but I have to go—I have something I need to do.”
“Child,” said Nabaasa, “You won’t be going anywhere for days. That leg of yours is infected—you need rest and antibiotics. We have none left right now. We need yet another raid on the medical stocks of the rangers.”
A figure strode up behind Nabaasa. “I’m on my way.”
Nabaasa turned, concern in her face as she eyed Ethan. “Not you. You need rest yourself—you’re looking the worse for wear.”
“No, Ethan, don’t you go anywhere,” I agreed. “Anyway, I’ll be fine.”
“Where’s Angeline, I mean, Aisha?” Molly asked Ethan.
Ethan gave a drawn-out, regretful sigh. “She said she needed some time on her own. She’s hurting right now. Wish there was something I could say to make it easier on her, but there isn’t.”