Someone grabbed her arm, and Ada whipped her head around. It was Saint.
The world was cacophony and blood. Haversham’s night-shift employees were scattered across the edges of her vision, watching them with numb confusion. Charlie’s playing would only just be wearing off. Any second now they would start to realize what had happened. Saint pulled her across the gravel drive, away from the people. Ada couldn’t focus on anything but Madeline’s weight. She squeezed Madeline’s wrist so hard that she couldn’t tell if the erratic pulse she felt was Madeline’s or her own. The doors to the asylum opened again, and Dr. Knox emerged, flanked by three HPA agents.
Ada realized that even if the gate was still open, they had nowhere to go.
She had the thought, brief but piercing, that they weren’t going to make it. They were going to die in the basement of Haversham, strapped into chairs while Dr. Knox recorded the time in his little notebook.
Saint was still pulling on her arm. He wasn’t leading her toward the car that was parked near the gate but onto the grassy lawn to the left of the drive. There was a blanket spread across the ground—no, it was a giant painted canvas, like a backdrop for a play. Ada recognized it from a recent production at the Mythic Theatre. That was all she had time to register before Saint stepped through the canvas, dragging her with him.
Corinne was last in the chain that Saint pulled through the backdrop. She felt someone’s fingers—she didn’t know if it was Dr. Knox or one of the agents—brush across her coat sleeve just before the painting swallowed her. She fell downward, feetfirst, but almost as soon as the asylum’s lawn and iron gate disappeared, the world shifted and suddenly she was stepping forward. She closed her eyes against the twisting sensation, willing herself not to be sick. Charlie’s hand fell from hers, and for a split second she was utterly alone, with only the solid ground beneath her feet to reassure her that she had made it to the other side.
When she opened her eyes, Corinne was staring across a body of water. The sun was starting to rise, inching over the horizon to her right. Boats bobbed on the choppy waves, their tiny lights twinkling in the hazy distance. Through the early-morning fog she could see the smokestacks and masts of the Navy Yard across the harbor. They were in the North End.
The clanging of the fire bell was gone, replaced by a faint buzzing in her ears.
She looked down to see James on his knees, clutching Madeline. There were angry streaks of red across his cheek and in his blond hair. Ada had pulled off her coat and was pressing it into the wound, but Corinne could already see that there was too much blood.
She knelt down on Madeline’s other side and took her hand. She brushed the dark hair out of her face so that Madeline could see dawn blossoming in the sky overhead. James was sobbing in short, shallow bursts, gripping Madeline’s arm as if he could somehow pull her back. Corinne looked pointedly at Saint, who knelt down beside James and put his arm around his shoulders.
“Guess I’m pretty good at being you,” Madeline said to Corinne, her voice weak and slurred. She started to cough. More blood.
“It’s my fault,” Corinne said. She wasn’t crying. It wasn’t a lamentation or a plea for forgiveness. Just a statement of fact. There were a dozen different ways of sneaking into the asylum. Using Madeline and James as a distraction was the one she had chosen, and now Madeline was going to die.
Madeline shook her head, still coughing. “God, Cor, it’s not all about you,” she said. She made a wheezing sound like a laugh, then winced. “It hurts—really bad.”
Corinne looked at Ada, who nodded and began to hum. After a few seconds, Charlie joined in beside her. The song settled over them slowly, gently.
The pain in Madeline’s expression began to fade. “James,” she said. She had started to cry. “James, you’ll be all right. Say you’ll be all right.” She gripped at the front of his shirt.
“Maddy,” he said, taking her hand. “Maddy, hold on.”
“Thank you for the Mythic,” she said.
“You did that. It was all you, Maddy.”
She smiled through her tears. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told him. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m—I’m—”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Corinne,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Cor, I always wanted to see Paris again. Just one last time.”
Corinne gripped her hand more tightly and swallowed at the lump in her throat. She leaned forward to put her lips near Madeline’s ear. She didn’t have her grandfather’s watch, but it didn’t matter somehow with Madeline’s limp hand pressed so tightly in her own. Her focus had never been so absolute. She whispered:
“Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne . . .”