“No,” the cook rushes to say, shaking her head. “No, none of that.”
“But you don’t understand,” I say. “You don’t know me.”
“Lila does. She trusts you, and I trust her.” For the first time since I’ve known her, her eyes darken with fury. “I see her like that, in my nightmares. Blue.”
“She’s safe now.”
“I heard they took her hand.”
I nod. Fern plants hands on her hips, nodding, too. “You sure you two don’t need anything? How are you getting out of the Pith?”
I pause, debating if I should reveal it now. The truth of the matter was that I was never going to meet the executioner in our spot in an hour. I was going to wait until my task here was complete.
“Come on, lovely. Tell me.”
The more people who know of the plan, the more dangerous it becomes.
Do less on your own,Jeremee had said. Perhaps I need to be like Fern and trust the one who Lila trusts. Perhaps community doesn’t need to come just from me. Perhaps I have found anexisting one, one that Lila invited me to join, and now Fern, too. Friends are the only reason why and how I’ve survived lately. They are here for me just as much as I am here for them. All I have to do is accept the help.
“It’s a bizarre request,” I start.
—
Light spills intothe hallway from the Mouth. My breathing slows, ears pricking at the conversation within.
“And when do you think he’ll be stopping tonight?” Fern asks.
A heavy sigh. Carter. “Until he can’t fit any more in his body.”
“Maybe it would do him good to get some sleep. It would do us all some good.”
“His tolerance rises each night he binges.”
“Then give him the stronger stuff,” Fern suggests, then adds: “It’ll be a mercy, I think. To let him sleep through the grief this time. Especially without his usual company to cheer him up.”
“His own doing,” Carter grits out.
“Easy now,” the cook says. “You can never let him see that hatred.”
Holding my breath, I slide farther into the deep darkness of the Pith, down the halls, and to the Salon of Stars. There has been too much debt and death. While I wait, I may as well free those I can.
I return to the trees, place palms on their petrified wood, whisper my genius into their grain.
A linden tree.
Another oak. Then a chestnut again.
And so on and so forth.
For half an hour, I press against the wood and ask:What do you need?
Some choose to be let go; others wish to stay but to have the parasite abated. Some just wish to speak of what they have seen, what they know.
They know much.
And I so little. So I lean against them, and I listen. And withevery freed tree, something frees in me, my genius expanding, crackling like lightning beneath my skin.
When the time draws near, I shake myself loose from the final hold, a door in the second Salon of Stars, the child’s bedroom that belonged to P.V. The doors in this space speak of a blast of energy, one hundred years old.
