Adeline. The name came to Fernanda like a gift.
“Hello there.” Fernanda crouched down, right into the blood. What did she care if she ruined her jeans? “Adeline, can you hear me?”
The girl kept wailing. Fernanda patted her hair. Adeline pulled away.
“She’s dead,” the child said. “She’s dead, and Ikilledher.”
Fernanda looked at the stacked corpses. She doubted she would ever fully understand the consequences of the ceremony in which they had all become ensnared, but after watching the mirror upstairs, she had seen so many things. She had seen the way time could be bent. She understood, on some instinctive level, what she was seeing in this room.
“You did not kill her, child,” Fernanda said. “She died every night, right at the end, after you kept her safe for as long as you could. That is all you wanted to do, yes? To keep Penelope safe?”
Adeline blinked, her breath hitching. “I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I’m not dead. I don’t know why she is, and I’m not, and why is shehere?”
Fernanda said, “I do not know much either, child. But I believe this house has served a purpose. It is the in-between space. It collects things. It shows things. And now that its purpose has been fulfilled, it is beginning to collapse.”
As if to prove her point, Fernanda glanced over her shoulder. The door through which she had entered was gone. In its place yawned that black void of nothing.
They could not stay here.
Adeline, too, saw the nothing. She started to wail again. “It’s over. I couldn’t save her, andit’s over!”
But it wasn’t. Because when Fernanda looked past Adeline, she saw that something was trying to help them.
The silver mirror from upstairs had moved. It leaned, now, against an empty patch of wall between two stacks of corpses.
Fernanda took a slow, steady breath. She knew what she needed to do.
She smoothed Adeline’s hair, brushed her cheek.
Then she said, “Have you heard the story about the little girl who met a fallen star?”
ETHAN
Ethan heard screaming.
As he sprinted around a soft bend in these endless silver streets—as another moan ripped through the air, sending fresh cracks spidering through the pale stone walls—he caught the sound of a man crying out in pain. In horror.
The screams were coming from a window at the base of a tall building up ahead. Peering inside, Ethan realized he was looking through one of the bathroom mirrors in the Brake Inn Motel. The door was open, giving him a clear view of the back hallway.
Stanley Holiday was there, in the hallway, trying to wrestle off one of the Guardians of the Mountain. The thing had a talon sunk deep into Stanley’s eye. As Stanley screamed, he lost his grip on the creature’s other arm and fell backward to the floor. A moment later, the Guardian buried another talon in his throat.
Stanley didn’t scream for much longer after that.
“If there’s any justice in this world, that one used to be his mother.”
Ethan spun, heart hammering.
Ryan Phan emerged from another window across the road. Not that Ethan recognized him at first. This Ryan appeared to have aged by a decade, maybe more, in the few minutes since Ethan had last seen him, and he’d picked up the scars to prove it. The Ryan Phan standing here was missing an eye, an ear, a finger. His hair had faded to a dull gray. And his clothes—some kind of tunic and long pants in a material Ethan had never seen before—was somehow familiar.
“What happened to you?” Ethan said.
Ryan only nodded over Ethan’s shoulder. “Have you figured it out yet?”
Through the window behind him, the Guardian ripped something flabby and pale from the floor. Stanley’s arm.
Ethan said, “What did you mean, you hope it’s his mother?”
“The ceremony doesn’t just hold back time. It transforms the people it’s trapped here. It creates its own Guardians.”
