“Yes. She says she doesn’t know. I believe her.”
Van drops the cigarette to the ground and looks at it. “Yes, I do too. Which means the only way to find out is to get Pilot to tell us.”
“A potion?” I ask.
“Yes, but it’s not that simple. A truth potion would be best but they take time to make and need to be adapted to the person, and they work so much better if the person is weak-willed and healthy. Here we have a skinny, dying patient with a strong will. Much trickier.”
“So?”
“The other option is a potion to access her memory of the place, go where she went, see what she saw.”
“A vision of it?”
“Yes. I can make a potion with something from Pilot and something that belonged to Mercury.” She looks not very hopefully at Gabriel. “I don’t suppose you have anything?”
“I have a hairpin, which I got off Rose. Mercury made them and gave them to her.”
Gabriel shows it to Van, who shakes her head. “It’s magical. If I use that it will interfere with the potion’s magic.”
“There’s no other option. We have to try the truth potion,” I say.
“There isn’t enough time,” Van insists. “She’ll sleep for a couple of hours with the drug I’ve given her. I’ll talk to her when she wakes. Maybe her situation will help change her mind. But for now we’re all tired. We’ll rest until then.”
“We staying here?” Nesbitt says, looking around at the vast nothingness.
“Yes,” Van replies. “This will be Pilot’s final resting place.”
The Map
It’s getting dark and I wander off into a field and lie on the bare earth and close my eyes. My brain is mush.
I think of Annalise as I fall asleep. I’m walking with her by a river, through a meadow, blue sky overhead. We lie on the ground together and the birds call to each other. The breeze ruffles my shirt, the sun warm on my face. I roll onto my side. Annalise is looking up at the sky; her skin is glowing, flushed with the sun, and she’s talking, moving her lips, but I’m not paying attention, I’m just thinking how I like looking at her. I blow in her ear, expecting her to smile, but she doesn’t; she keeps on talking. So I lean over her and kiss her but she doesn’t kiss me back and so I move to be over her, to look into her eyes. Her eyes are the same blue as ever but they’re not focused on me: they’re focused on nothing and the silver glints are still. Frozen. And I seem to fly up and be unable to touch her. She’s lying on the ground, her lips moving, but she’s not talking at all; she’s gasping for air, taking her last breaths. I fly further from her and see she’s on the ground by the cottage and Mercury is standing over her and the gale is holding me back and I’m shouting at Mercury. And I wake and sit up.
Gabriel is with me. “What happened? You were shouting.”
“I’m OK. I’m OK. I have something of Mercury’s.”
*
Van is grinning. “It’s perfect.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.” She’s holding the piece of paper that Mercury gave me. The piece of paper she drew a map on so I could find the house that Clay was using as a base.
The folded piece of paper has been in my pocket for months: flattened, soaked and worn, so that it’s rounded at the edges and there’s a hole in the middle. But it is from Mercury—it used to belong to her. Even better, it has Mercury’s handwriting on it, which is still visible, and, most importantly according to Van, Mercury gave it to me—it’s not a thing stolen but a gift.
It’s the perfect item for the potion.
“Of course this means that you must receive the vision from Pilot.”
“OK.”
“That means you make the potion and you drink the potion. The potion is like a river cutting through the land of the mind, carrying memories from Pilot to you.”
“OK,” I say, a little more cautiously now.
“You must make the cut that it flows down and be what it flows into.”
“I cut her?”
“We need her blood for the potion. Lots. You must bleed her to death.”
“What?”
“She’s dying anyway, Nathan.”
*