There’d be no further argument, no explanation, and no closure for anyone.
Anger struck Memory Jesstin first. What the fuck is wrong with you, get up! Annoyance followed. You have ten seconds, Gennady... And then when ten, twenty more passed, the pleas arrived. Gen. Gen, come on. Get up. Gennady. Gennady, get up.
Jesstin turned his head toward Bellessa. “Why is it you, here, with me? Why not him?”
“Because I don’t think he can be.” She nodded at Gennady’s crumpled body. “He never arrived in the Infinitum. They say it happens when your unfinished business is strong enough to anchor you. I think he would have wanted you to have the truth.”
“He’s haunted me for two years, Bellessa. Two years when he’s said nothing about any of this. Even when I ask, he’s refused.”
“The dead cannot tell the living the secrets of the living world. Maybe he hoped you’d remember him as he was before that night, or find the truth on your own. This is, after all, mostly a memory.”
“No. No.” Jesstin’s head sliced back and forth. “No, why should I believe anything shown to me here? The Conductor is a businesswoman. The especular is a trick. They benefit from my pain and confusion.”
Bellessa’s expression clouded when she leaned close. “Jesstin, if you have made a barter with the Conductor, they already have what they wanted. Pass or fail, they’ve already won.”
Jesstin crouched, squinting and reaching into his thoughts for something resembling coherence. The whistle between his ears whined on. Sweat streamed from his hair, down his face. He’d forgotten what his last meal had been, but he’d be reminded soon.
The words he needed were there. He’d found them in the turbulent spaces, reforming into a memory that finally made sense. Speaking them aloud was the acceptance of a truth replacing the greatest untruth of his life, but if he didn’t say them, he wouldn’t just be living a lie; he’d know it. “Why did you take your life that night if Gennady had found a place for you to go?”
“I tried to do it sooner,” Bellessa said. She sidled next to her body on the floor and slid along the blood until she had her head on her own shoulder. “Gertrude wasn’t having any of it. She’d taught us everything... was the one who thought we needed to learn our letters at all, and she was forced to do it by moonlight to keep the masters from finding out. It suited them best when we were ignorant. The men, they... The ones who came, they preferred us that way too.” She nestled further against herself with a faint smile. “The one time I felt bigger than all that was the three days my daughter lived. She was light and she was magic, and I knew I could do anything because of her. They could do whatever they pleased to me. I had her, and she made it all worth it. And then one night, we... It was Gayle who found her. She wasn’t in her cradle. She was lying on the floor beside it, all twisted... but the fall was so short, not even two feet. A fall like that didn’t explain the way she looked. No one said, but we all knew, same as we knew who was snapping the necks of the bunnies each spring. My little Faith wasn’t the first child taken from us, but she was mine, and there was nowhere I could go, in that world, where I wouldn’t miss her. I came here for her. To be with her.” She smiled dreamily. “And I am.”
The scene shifted instantly. He stood under the weeping boughs of a celestine oak in the back of a field, the property of the businessman who’d owned the Azure Haunt before Jesstin.
At his feet, the disturbed soil looked like the grave that it was. There was no disguising it, only a prayer grass would grow before anyone looked too closely. He’d wanted to take her to hallowed ground, with a proper headstone, where those who had loved her could visit. But those who had loved her were long gone or living their own hell. So he’d taken his dagger and carved a bell into the bark, just above the first row of branches.
Bellessa held a wriggling, mewling bundle in her arms, soothing her with soft, whispery words. “You could have left me in the apartment that night. No one would have suspected you or looked for you. They don’t look for the killers of girls like me.”
Jesstin stared at the mess of earth. He’d only been able to dig down three feet due to the groundwater, so her grave was shallow enough he never forgot to check on it after a good rain. “I don’t know why I chose this field, or why the old bandit sold it to me a few months later. Didn’t believe in fate then. Now?”
“Now you’re a living man in a dead world.”
Jesstin sifted the wet dirt through his fingers and closed a handful tight in his fist. “That cursed mirror wants me to face the truth? That I’m the fucking murderer, not Gen?” Agony rose with his words. “I killed someone who was trying to save you and all those others because I was angry, and I believed everyone, everyone was out to get me. When I thought Gen was working with Sestinn and Castien, I was almost relieved! I figured he’d betray me too one day, so at least I had confirmation.” He slammed his fist into the soft earth. “There it fucking was.”
The ground rattled. Dirt skittered from the gravesite, bouncing left and right. Two human-sized holes formed on either side of Bellessa’s resting place.
But Bellessa herself was gone, her daughter too. Standing upon the gnarled roots at the base of the tree was the Conductor.
She tapped her red-and-white cane twice, creating a hypnotic band of endless movement. “The especular presents your final trial.” She pointed the cane at the grave to Jesstin’s left, then to the one on his right. “Your forgiveness of Mathias Skylark has lightened all the pieces of your soul. Your courage against Sestinn Edevane has strengthened them.”
Jesstin’s flame pulsed. Most of the time, he forgot it was there, but he suddenly wanted to hide it from the witch. “I breezed right through your ‘trials.’”
“Breezed? No.” The Conductor chortled. “Can you guess what your final one will be?”
“Reliving that night was my final trial.” Jesstin climbed to his feet. He was covered in dirt, his trousers, his hands. “You wanted me to know Gennady didn’t kill those girls, to know myself for a murderer. Well, I do.”
“I?” The Conductor tsk-tsked with her tongue. “It is not I who wants anything. I’m a procurer of that which the especular desires, and you have now before you your final choice. You will crawl into one of the two graves I have made for you. There is no turning back, no running, nothing but this final selection, which you must make, or I will flip a coin and decide your fate for you.”
“You want me to climb into a grave?” Resistance climbed up the back of his throat. “A grave?”
“Symbolic perhaps.” She tilted her head back and forth. “Or literal.”
“My final trial is to choose where you’ll bury me, you mad bitch?”
“But I have not said what awaits you.”
“Then how am I supposed to choose?”
Her broad, garish red mouth turned into points at the corners. “Both will sound tempting. They each have their advantages, their disadvantages. You will not immediately know which is inherently right. This will be very unlike your first two trials, where you could see the challenge before you. Now, you will be forced to listen not to your mind nor to your heart, but to your soul. Have you one worth listening to, Jesstin Skylark?”
