Gradually he got used to the idea of what he was now, an exile, a lost talent. He was what his father had been before him. If he did not heal, he was no different than Alice, or his mama, and he had loved and admired them both. Nevertheless it amazed him that he wasn’t more devastated by the change. Each morning he awoke, and felt the dark London air on his skin, and laced his boots, and felt the heat of his blood in his fingers, and thought of Marlowe alone in the land of the dead. His own misfortunes diminished at such times. Instead he’d remember a destitute boy, sentenced to death in Natchez, confused by his talent and frightened of it and thinking himself alone in all the world. That boy felt almost like a different person, someone he wished he could find, and talk to, tell him: It’s not okay, but it’ll get better.
Because it had. He saw that now. Even after everything. After meeting Mar and Ko and Ribs and Oskar, after learning about his father, after entering the orsine and walking through a dead world. His first life seemed like a dream. What he’d seen since was the more real. He’d witnessed the spirit dead rise up out of the orsine, had felt the icy swarm of them scrabbling for the glyphic’s heart. He’d seen a drughr drained of its power, and he’d watched his best friend descend down into that other world, sealing it up behind him. There was a new quiet sadness inside him now. Not just his own loss. Charlie’s only refuge in all the world had burned down around him. His friends were lost, likely dead. Whatever he was now, whoever he was becoming, it was nothing like the boy he once had been.
For several weeks they stayed at Mrs. Harrogate’s old lodgings, eerie though it was for Charlie, haunted by the crooked shadow of what had happened there, the litch scrabbling across the walls, its claws at his throat. He remembered too the strange not-London of the other world, the foyer of that watery building, and had to suppress a shudder every time he went out. But they went out only for food and necessaries. They’d had to break the lock to get in, and though Charlie did his best to repair the gate, it still would not close properly, and they were both of them wary. Miss Davenshaw was quiet, brooding, obsessed with the burned journal she had carried out of Cairndale. Charlie would read passages to her for long hours at a time, the gas lamps turned high, a candle sometimes lit in the sconce beside the sofa.
As for him, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Marlowe was not gone, was not dead, that he was somewhere inside the orsine, on the far side, still alive. He had no reason to think it and every reason to think its opposite, except for his friend’s parting words, and the feeling he had. One night he told Miss Davenshaw what he felt, about how maybe Mar wasn’t dead. Miss Davenshaw only pulled him close, and held him.
* * *
The journal he read from each night had belonged to Dr. Berghast. It was charred and there were pages missing and the entire back cover had been ripped off and the papers smelled of smoke and oil and dead things, and when he rubbed his fingers together they smelled of it too. Sometimes he would have to put the journal aside. It felt like a relic from that terrible night. Little in its pages made sense to him. There were columns of numbers, or dates, and half-legible scrawls observing colors and times of day, all of them records of some kind of experiment. All this he dutifully read aloud. There was an entry recording three names, with described locations, which Miss Davenshaw asked him to reread several times while she sat with her face turned aside and her brow furrowed.
“They are from the glyphic,” she breathed at last. “Mr. Thorpe’s last findings. Children. Talents. They’re still out there, somewhere.”
Charlie remembered his own rescue by Miss Quick and Mr. Coulton, from that jail cell in Natchez. It felt like a lifetime ago. “How’s anyone going to find them now?”
But Miss Davenshaw only urged him to mark the spot and go on reading. Many of the later pages were missing but he could sometimes still read parts of entries and it was one such that he read that made Miss Davenshaw scowl and sit up straighter, as if she’d been waiting for that very passage. It seemed like a kind of diary entry. It made mention of a woman named Addie, of a community built of bones. Addie believes it possible to guard the passage and keep its monsters at bay, Berghast had written. It is not possible. If there is a door, it will be opened. Sooner or later. For that is its purpose and all things of this earth both animate and not must fulfill their purpose in time. One cannot shut one’s eyes and trust the horror will flee. The only way to slay a monster is to confront it in its lair.
Slowly Charlie understood. He lifted his eyes. Berghast was writing about an orsine.
A second one.
* * *
Then one day a hand was forcing the big front door, and there came the sound of footsteps in the foyer downstairs, and then Alice Quicke was standing in front of Charlie, staring amazed and speechless, her clothes filthy and her eyes lined and her wide shoulders tired. She looked ten years older. Before he could say anything, pouring around her on all sides, came Komako and Oskar and Ribs, though Ribs’s left arm was in a sling and her angular face looked paler than usual. They were all of them laughing, talking over each other, and even Miss Davenshaw was smiling gravely.
“And where’s Lymenion?” she said, when they’d quieted down.
Oskar drew his pale eyebrows low in a frown. “He helped us stop Jacob, Miss Davenshaw. But I can make him again. I just need the right … material.”
“He means he needs some dead uns,” said Ribs helpfully. “Aw, Lymenion ain’t gone for good. You can’t kill a flesh giant now, can you?”
“No,” replied Oskar sturdily.
“Thank you, Eleanor, that will do,” said Miss Davenshaw. There was a faint smile at her lips. It seemed some part of herself was coming back to her, and she had drawn herself up in dignified pleasure. “First things first. I expect none of you have eaten. And when was the last time you washed? What are you wearing?”
As Miss Davenshaw’s fingers began to investigate her wards’ condition, Charlie saw Komako looking at him intently, searching his face, a deep sympathy in her, and he felt a heat rise to his cheeks. What did she see? Her eyes lingered on the swollen new scar on his palm. He folded his hand away, uncomfortable, shy. He liked the look of her, even rumpled and unwashed and tired. She had her long braid wrapped around her head.
“What happened to your hand?” she said quietly, so that only he could hear. “Charlie—?”
He started to answer her, to tell her about his talent, and then he couldn’t. He shook his head, looked away.
“We thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought you were dead. We all saw the island blow up.”
“Yeah. I … I got away.”
“Obviously.” She arched a thin eyebrow and for just a moment Charlie saw the old Komako, the sarcastic girl, the one who’d given him such a hard time. But just as quickly it was gone again, and that new worry descended over her face like a veil. It made him sad to see it though he didn’t understand why. It was only later that he realized she hadn’t asked about Marlowe, none of them had. It was as if they knew. There was a distance in her now, some unspoken thing, and he knew then that they were all of them changed, changed utterly, and there was no going back to how it had been.
* * *