She nods. “They go dormant without it.”
“And because silphium could never be cultivated, they could never survive at the surface for long. But you figured out how to cultivate it so you could keep them alive.”
“We disrupted the cycle nature put into place to keep them in check. Now there are too many, and they’re too close to the surface. And then there was the breach. Now it’s down there leaking. Slivers of evil slipping into this world.”
“Charles,” I say. “We need to find Charles.”
“Charlie tried to stop them, but there was a mistake.” She stares straight ahead. “They tried to use him, but everything went sideways. That’s how the breach happened. And now only you can stop it.”
“Why only me?”
“Because you’re the code.”
“I’m the code? How is that possible?”
“Not you, your retina.”
A wave of relief sweeps over me as I finally see. “A retinal scan? That’s the code?”
She nods. “Yours and Charlie’s. But I’m afraid Charlie’s won’t work anymore.”
I know what she’s going to tell me, but I don’t want to hear it. Not yet. I’ve been trying far too hard and for far too long not to hear it. I’m not letting her tell me like this. Around us the woods are suddenly so quiet it feels like I’m being smothered.
“I want to come back now,” she says into the silence.
“Not yet,” I say.
She laughs, a bitter laugh. She isn’t me, and I’m not her, not fully. Like these creatures we try to contain, we slip between worlds, and the end of her is just the beginning of me. Or is it the other way around?
She gives me a cruel slip of a smile. She’s somehow more delicate than I am, more feminine, but there is an acid to her, venom lurking just below the surface. “You don’t want me back because you don’t want to know the truth.”
“I need to find Charles,” I say, and yet I don’t move. I stare into the darkness beyond the fence. There are more out there now, moving, crawling on all fours between the trees.
“Charlie’s dead,” she says flatly. “You killed him.”
“No,” I say, but my negation falls equally flat.
“It’s time to remember,” she says.
Tears spring forth as I fall back to that night, as I stand there with Isabelle, watching it all play out before me like some horrible dream.
We were out near the pillar. The sun hung low and red in the sky like a throbbing pustule, and yet it was just beginning to snow, coming down in flat, heavy flakes just as in my dreams of New York.
And then the sirens. The breach. The look of abject horror on Charles’s face as he understood. Someone had opened the gate, and they didn’t know how to close it again.
I tried to run. I had to get to the control room. But he grabbed my arm.
It happened so fast, my world came undone in an instant. Me trying to pull away again, yanking my arm, but he wouldn’t let go. Me pushing. Pushing too hard. Me reaching for him to undo what I’d done. The fall. His head colliding with the marble sundial—no, the marble pillar. A skull splitting; there’s always so much blood from a head wound, isn’t there? Me holding him while he bled out, whispering words of love as his blood soaked deep into the soil, nourishing the plants from which we’d derived our greatest potential, “feeding the crops.” And all the while, the snow falling silent and bright.
“You let him die out there in the snow,” Isabelle says. We’re back at the fence now, back in the dark.
“It was an accident,” I say through my tears.
“You let him die and then you let Symon take you. You wanted to forget as much as he wanted you to.”
With everything laid bare before me, I can finally see the truth.They’re not going to let me seal the breach. As much as Finn and the others might want me to, there are powerful shadows standing behind them, just outside of the frame, that are going to make sure I don’t.
I think back to the bitter water Symon had given me in the car. It had been drugged, hadn’t it? That’s why I’d slept so long, that’s why I’d been so sick when I woke up. Had he been planning on killing me? Had he changed his mind when he realized I still thought I was Robin?
