“Fire,” I suggested. “It will consume virtually anything, if heated sufficiently.” My mother was not the only casualty of the events which placed me in command of our small County. She was, however, the only one so severely damaged that her body could not be retained in the company basement, which has served as a makeshift morgue for the past several years. Faerie flesh—even changeling flesh—does not decay as human flesh does. It should. Fae digest mortal food, walk in the mortal world; mortal bacteria clings to their skins. They should rot like anything else. They don’t. I don’t know why.
When most among the fae die, the night-haunts come to consume the shells they leave behind. Since a corpse is sometimes useful, they leave manikins of artificial flesh and bone behind, to decay in the mortal way. But when the people in my basement died, the vitality—the soul—was drained from their bodies by a machine of my mother’s making and Gordan’s refinement. There was nothing for the night-haunts to desire. They did not come for the bodies.
There are no graveyards in Faerie, not with the night-haunts to make such things extraneous and the purebloods doing their best to deny that death is a part of being alive. My mother’s body had been so damaged that there was no keeping it safely. The others . . .
They were still in the basement, all of them, from the first victim to the last. They were a good reminder of what I had done to find myself in a position of power. I am not Daoine Sidhe, for all that I resemble one, but I have been as underhanded and cruel as any of that line, and the trail of bodies marking my ascension is more than sufficient proof of my deceptions.
Li Qin pursed her lips, a moue of displeasure which said more than any words. “We are not setting our people on fire, April. We’re more civilized than that.”
“Acid?” It was difficult to see how dissolving people could be considered more civilized than burning them, but given the enduring nature of fae flesh, I was unsure what other options we had remaining.
Li Qin laughed before she could catch herself. The sound was sharp and bright and beautiful, and I smiled without considering my expression.
There was a time when Li Qin’s laughter was a common sound in these halls, ringing like a bell above the sound of January’s satisfied voice, which was almost never quiet. They were so well matched, my mothers; each of them could have searched the world over and never found herself a better partner. My smile faded. They had been perfect together, and perfect for me, but I had never been perfect for them. If not for me, January would have been here, alchemist and inventor and loving wife, and they would have had centuries yet to share. If I hadn’t come along and ruined everything, Li Qin’s laughter would never have grown rare.
She shook her head, unaware of the dark turn my thoughts had taken, and said, “We’re not going to destroy the bodies. April . . . I want you to repair January’s prototype. I think I’m ready to call October. I’m ready to ask for her help.”
I cocked my head. “Help? For what do we require October’s assistance?” Sir October Daye is a knight errant of the realm. She is an irregular command in the code, a roving antivirus entering compromised systems and repairing what she can before moving on to the next crisis. She has been a friend to me, and I think well of her, but that did not mean I wanted her in my County. Where October goes, trouble reliably follows.
“April . . .”
“Wait.” The first part of Li Qin’s request finally registered. “Why do you want me to repair Mother’s prototype? I do not want to touch it. It should have been destroyed.” Would have been destroyed, had Li Qin and Elliot not insisted I keep it intact. Tamed Lightning was mine, but the habit of obedience to my elders remained strong. When they commanded me not to break what my mother’s hands had made, I listened.
“Because, dearest,” she said, in all seriousness, “we’re going to raise the dead.”
I stared at her, speechless. Static crackled in my ears, blurring the sound of the world around me as my hologram heart pounded in my chest, mimicking the behavior of a more traditional body. I could have excised it, had I so desired, left that space open and empty of either organs or the symbolism they represented, but I had always thought it reasonable that I should carry something in my chest that I could blame for the weight of my sorrow.
In that moment, I resented my past choices. All a heart could do was harm me.
Li Qin clearly picked up on my distress. She frowned, beginning to reach for me again. “April, what’s wrong?”
There were no words large enough or complicated enough to encompass my answer. If I tried to reach for them, I would find myself answering her in binary, or worse, in the rushing language of wind over leaves, which I no longer understand, and hope never to speak again, not even in my dreams. So I took the easy route, the coward’s route, away from my problems, away from my mother, who loved me, yet did not understand how direly she had wounded me.
I disappeared.
Not back into the code, where I might have found timeless comfort, the space to lay down my virtual roots and restore my sense of peace, but into the rush of space that was not space surrounding every networked article in the building—and there were so many, there were so very, very many. Smartphones and laptops and fitness trackers, handheld gaming systems and new-model cars and even the system which monitored the air-conditioning, keeping it comfortable within the body of the building and blasting in the reception area, where the arctic cold threw visitors off-balance and allowed us to move them into the Summerlands without damaging them.
I had not been farther into the mortal world than the parking lot since my own near-death and resurrection, my alchemical transformation from wood to living lightning. I pushed myself to the very edge of my range and materialized in a spray of sparks and the stinging scent of ozone. The transition was fast enough to generate friction. It slapped me on my synthesized skin, and I dropped to my knees, digging my fingers into the grass that grew along the edge of the parking lot, wishing I were still a slow vegetable girl, wishing I could still feel my connection to the green.
How could she?
THREE
This is what happened:
A woman—a wonderful, kind, brilliant woman, with an alchemist’s eye and a blood-worker’s power—crafted herself a daughter from wood and glass and a dying Dryad’s heart, and all she ever asked of the girl was that she learn to navigate this strange new world in which she found herself marooned. That woman was Prometheus and Prospero rolled into a single golden-eyed form, and I loved her more than I had ever loved anything. More than I had loved the sun, or my sisters, or the Mother of the Trees. All those things had come to me by chance, but she? She had chosen me, and all I had ever wanted was to be worthy of her love.