She lifts her hand to my face, her arm trembling with the effort as she brushes away my tears.
“You will escape this place.” There’s a desperate plea in her eyes as her voice becomes fainter and harder to hear. “Go to Central Park. You remember it… Remember the places I told you about… Go to the statue of the toadstool…”
She gasps and shivers in my young arms.
“I’ve hidden something there. It’s important. Promise me, Daughter…” She closes her eyes, her breathing shaky. “Promise me you’ll find it and always remember… We were loved.”
Outside of the image, where I kneel, I close my eyes, not wanting to see again the moment when the only mother I knew died, but the image keeps playing in front of my closed eyelids, defying my wish to look away.
“Mother?” my younger self whispers as I wait… and wait… and wait…
“Mother?”
Her vacant eyes stare upward and her chest has fallen still.
“Mother!”
I remember how heavy she was in my arms in that moment and how badly my heart was breaking and how much I wanted to scream.
A wail breaks out of my mouth and I can’t tell if it comes from me or my younger self. In the image, I’m doubled over, holding on tightly to a body that no longer houses the only person who had ever loved me.
There’s a sudden rush of air, seeming to chill my skin even now, as the angel Zadkiel bursts through the cell door.
He rushes into the darkness, drops to his knees opposite the younger me, and he’s cursing over and over, words that shouldn’t pass an angel’s lips.
He snatches Sosia out of my hold, lifting her so abruptly that her arms and legs dangle and her head lolls.
Younger me lurches forward, claws out, screaming at him to leave her alone.
He nearly drops Sosia’s body to extend his right hand, a slap of light magic burning across my younger self’s shoulder, sending my thin form flying across the floor. It gives him enough space to rush out of the cage and close the door behind himself.
My younger self leaps after him, screaming and beating my fists and claws against the closed door, my wails shrieking from the pages of the book.
The sound echoes around me, fading as the image leaves my younger self behind, focusing on Zadkiel as he rushes along the wide corridor between the cages—these ones made out of bars, including the one where the panthers were being kept.
He makes it to the door at the end of the dark corridor and pauses there, Sosia held tightly to his chest, with his ear turned toward the door and his head tilted for a long moment before he opens it.
When I escaped from my cell, I couldn’t look at what lay beyond that door because the environment was too bright for my eyes. I was aware of steps—the panthers helped me navigate them upward—and when I reached the top of them, I somehow fell into the keeper’s realm.
Now, even though it’s still bright within the image, I can see what I missed before.
A spiral staircase hangs in the air, a seemingly impossible structure with no visible supports around it. It doesn’t have railings, but as Zadkiel rapidly ascends it, doors appear on both sides of each step. And then disappear again as he takes the next step up.
The uppermost step doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, but he heads toward it instead of going through any of the doors.
When he reaches the top, he glances around, and then?—
I’m shocked when he opens his arms and dumps Sosia’s body into the empty space in front of him.
Her frail form plummets for a brief second before the bright air swallows her and her body simply disappears.
My hands flex against the floor where they’re bound, as if I could catch her from outside the book.
Then the image leaves Zadkiel and rushes down after her.
Down into a sudden darkness that couldn’t be seen from the staircase.
Her body becomes visible again as she plummets through that darkness, her descent slowing until she floats to a stop, and her body settles onto the same gleaming, black surface on which I landed.
