Not me, he answered himself glumly. “We’re not children anymore and we have lips,” she’d said when she came to his room to seduce him. “Isn’t that reason enough?” It wasn’t him she cared for. He just happened to have lips, not to mention the significant anatomical feature that set him apart in this small tribe of girls. She’d been using him, and he’d been fine with it, but now he wasn’t, and not only because he had to scrounge up new bedding.
He came to the end of the passage, where the seraph’s left arm joined its shoulder and a broad hall abutted the gallery that ran the length of the chest. Halfway across he had to stumble to a stop, because a steady stream of ghosts was passing by. They were coming from the opposite direction. He never liked to look at them straight on—he disliked seeing the hate in their eyes, and the misery that was there, too—but he still could pick out this one from that one, and he recognized the guards from the dexter arm. They were all marching into the gallery.
He got a bad feeling, and then Minya appeared, and his feeling got worse. “What’s going on?” he asked her.
“Come see,” she replied in her icing-sugar voice. “I promise it won’t be boring.”
…
Out in the garden, Ruby and Sparrow saw the ghosts and shared a stark look. They had the same bad feeling as Feral, and went warily to the arches.
Feral abandoned his mattresses and followed the procession of ghosts.
Minya paced to the table and climbed into her chair. She arranged herself, crossing her ankles, and took some care with the folds of her torn and grubby shift. What a sight she was: an urchin with the bearing of a queen.
No, not a queen. A goddess. The wrathful kind.
She lined up her troops in formation. There were too many of them to fit in the room, so she overlapped them. It fought the eye to look at them: seeming solid but for the way they disappeared into one another like partially shuffled cards. Last, she parted them down the center and made an aisle from the door straight to her, so that when Sarai and Lazlo came round the corner, that’s what they saw: Minya sitting in state at the end of a gauntlet of slave souls.
“There you are,” she said. “Are you ready?”
They just looked at her, bleak, and knew that no words existed that could shift her from her course.
She cocked her head when they failed to answer. “Wraith got your tongues?” she asked. She wrinkled her nose at Lazlo. “Or maybe Sarai got yours.”
He was a sight, his lip swollen, blood dried down to his chin. The others’ eyes widened. “That little maniac,” uttered Ruby.
Lazlo answered calmly, “My tongue is intact. I should thank you. I suppose it could have been worse.”
“That’s a good rule to live by. It can always be worse. But cheer up. If you’re good and do what I tell you”—she spoke in singsong, dangling her words like a bribe—“I’ll let you two alone later, to do as you like behind your closed door.”
If they were “good”? Let them alone…? As though they would return from slaughter eager for pleasure? Sarai felt ill. Did Minya really understand so little? Had her hate devoured everything else? She let out a hard breath. “That’s your bargain? Help you kill, and you’ll let us kiss?”
“Oh no,” said Minya. “That’s just me being nice. There is no bargain, silly. Have I not made that quite clear?”
But of course she had. Do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go. It wasn’t a bargain, but a threat.
“Come here,” she said. “Why are you lurking in the doorway?” She stood up on her chair and stepped onto the table to stroll its length, hands clasped behind her back, her gaze never leaving them.
Sarai and Lazlo advanced between the phalanxes of ghosts. Ruby and Sparrow came through the arches, and Feral from the door, and all three went to stand with them, so that Minya again felt splintered from the “us” that was rightly hers. Here they were, at last, on the verge of avenging the deaths of their kindred. They should have been lining up behind her, taking up knives of their own accord. Instead they stood there like that: pallid and weak, soft, pitiful things incapable of avenging anyone. She wanted to slap them awake.
No more preamble. No more waiting. She fixed on Lazlo and said, “It’s time. You know what’s at stake.” Her gaze shifted to Sarai and back. “No need to yammer on.”
And so they came to the moment, like a dark hole between them, from which there was no escape. A jolt of horror shot through Lazlo. “Wait.” He was shaking. His blood and spirit were racing, and his thoughts went around in a loop, like the white bird circling, only faster. In tales, when heroes battled monsters, they always won by slaying, but that wasn’t an option for him. He couldn’t kill anyone, and even if he could—if he were that kind of hero—it wouldn’t help. If he slew this monster, he’d lose Sarai, too. Killing could not solve this problem. “Can’t we talk—”
“No.” The word punched through the air like a fist. “Take. Me. To Weep. Right. NOW!” Minya finished on a roar, her face going red.
Sarai clenched Lazlo’s hand. She could feel him trembling, and squeezed, wanting to give him strength, and take it, too. In that moment, she didn’t know what scared her more: that he would keep his promise or break it. Oh gods. She didn’t have it in her to hope for her own evanescence.
Nobody noticed when Sparrow nudged Ruby, and shot a sharp glance toward the door. Or when Ruby, with a half step, then a full step, then a duck, slipped between the ranks of ghosts and sidled out of the room.
Lazlo just stood there, reeling, flooded with the bitter choice between Sarai and Weep. But…he had already made it, when she had made him promise. No matter what. Helplessness vied with rebellion. His two vows clashed like swords. He was supposed to save her anyway.
How could he save her anyway?
“I can’t,” he choked out.
A wild disbelief flared in the little girl. Her eyes flashed back and forth between Lazlo and Sarai. How was it possible they still dared to defy her? She had thought it a certainty that they wouldn’t put at risk all that tenderness and aching. What mad notion of honor was this?
Pieces on a game board, she told herself, grim, and it wasn’t she who spoke next, but Sarai.
“Lazlo,” she whispered, soft, at his side. “I’ve changed my mind. Don’t let me go.”
He turned to her sharply, expecting her eyes, like all the other ghosts’ eyes, to give lie to her words. But they didn’t. They weren’t wide, showing whites, and rolling with helplessness. They were soft and hesitant, ashamed and sweet and full of fear, as though it pained her to be weak and plead for her own soul. “Sarai?” he queried, uncertain.
“No!” she screamed, but only in her head, where it was so loud to her own senses that it seemed impossible he couldn’t hear it. Those weren’t her words. That wasn’t her plea. But her face—her eyes— betrayed none of the panic they sparked in her. Ghosts’ eyes always told the truth, didn’t they? That was what they’d always believed, that Minya’s power had that limit, at least, but Sarai could tell by the intensity with which Lazlo was searching hers, and by his confusion, that they didn’t. “I’m afraid,” she whispered, and clutched his hand tighter, and none of it was her. “It’s so cold out there, Lazlo. I’m so afraid.”
He warred with himself right before her. She saw every nuance cross his face. He was caught between what he knew to be true and the flawless, insidious lie Minya was putting on like a show. “Just do what she wants,” Sarai pleaded. “For me.”
And he knew. And he felt sick. No matter what, Sarai had said. He remembered how brave she’d been, and he turned to Minya, shaking. “Stop it,” he said, his bloody, swollen lip curling with fury. “She would never ask that.” He knew it was true. Sarai would never choose her uncertain ghost future over untold human lives.
A cry of anguish escaped from Sarai. Her pleading became more insistent—and all the more unconvincing for it, as though it was only to torment him now that he hadn’t taken the bait. “Don’t you love me?” she asked. “Won’t you save me?”