There’s a lot of trust tied up in the way we learn about the world. The things we know, and the things we think we know, and the people who tell them to us. The facts we learn for ourselves, and the facts we assume about everyone else. Trust is how we function as a society. Take away the trust, and you take away the function.
I joined Ostler’s team because I had nothing else left, and no other clear alternatives. My plan had always been to grow up, get a degree in mortuary science, and work as a mortician. I’d never really wanted anything else. That seems like a weird dream in hindsight, to be so set on following in the footsteps of parents I hated. But the hatred, when I thought about it, was recent, a new development brought on by divorce and abandonment and adolescence. For most of my life they’d been fine: angry sometimes, loving at others. My father beat me up a few times, and he beat my mom a lot of times, but I didn’t have the emotional capacity to separate that from the good stuff: the jokes at dinner, and the movies on the couch, and the stories at bedtime. Sometimes he slept on my floor because I was too scared to sleep alone. I don’t know if that made him a good dad, but it made him more than just a bad one.
By the time things soured and we all fell apart, my heart was already set on the family business, and no amount of uncomfortable association could change it. Embalming a body—cleaning it, caring for it, giving it that final solemn celebration of the life it used to have—was my greatest source of peace. It’s where I went when things got too messed up to deal with, and when my family got messed up. The embalming was all I had.
And then the Withered came, and my mother died, and I ruined Brooke’s life, and Ostler had the only key to the only door that looked like an escape route. I’d done a lot of very shady things killing those Withered, and in my final desperation to kill Nobody, I’d done things I couldn’t hide. If I worked for Ostler I could help Brooke, forget my mom, and make all my crimes go away. I could leave my life behind.
That’s never as easy as it sounds. And now I was doing it again: I was leaving, maybe forever. I’d slipped free of Potash again, and I was ready to disappear for good.
Almost ready.
I was back in the park, holding a new box of wood as I stood before the grill. It hadn’t snowed since the last time, and the half-charred logs of my previous fire lay in a wet, cold heap on the ground. I kicked them out of the way; they’d burn, but only when the fire was already big. That wouldn’t be a problem today. I was going to make a very big fire.