Chapter 1
The human body was such an optimistic arrangement, considering how easily it came apart, and how quickly it began to rot.
Three minutes, perhaps, before the brain began to fail without oxygen. Five, if fortune was feeling generous. After that, there was little worth preserving. Thoughts dissolved first, then awareness itself, until whatever essential quality made a person themselves slipped beyond reach.
Within fifteen minutes, pallor mortis settled over the skin. Drained of warmth, the flesh paled as the body began to negotiate its surrender to the earth. Soon after came rigor mortis—the muscles stiffened in orderly progression, beginning with the delicate hinges of eyelids and jaw before working downward through the limbs until the entire form locked itself into its final position. No longer urged forward by a beating heart, blood sank to the lowest points of the body, pooling there in slow blooms of violet and blue.
I had memorized it all, not out of morbid fascination—though I could hardly deny the inclination of my thoughts toward such darkness these days—but because understanding the stages of death felt, lately, like recognizing some essential part of myself.
I glanced down at my gloved hands.
Even through the leather, the cold bit my skin, familiar and deeply unwelcome.
My fingertips were turning purple again.
It began as it always did, with a pins-and-needles tingling that might have been mistaken for simple cold if one did not know better.
But I knew better.
Beneath my nails, a deep bruised discoloration was already emerging, spreading outward in branching veins, staking its claim on my flesh regardless of every evidence that I remained, technically speaking, alive.
I dug my fingers into my palm, squeezing until my nails bit through the fabric.
For a fleeting instant, I wondered what it might feel like to press hard enough to split the skin, to see if anything beneath it still resembled blood.
Do it,the voice urged, my dark little companion rousing from the back of my mind.See for yourself what you're becoming.
I unfurled my fingers, forcing the thought away before it could fester.
That was the first sign the day intended to betray me.
The second was the realization that I was horribly and unforgivably late for the interview I had rehearsed in my mind a hundred times.
Rain fell in thick, relentless sheets, soaking through my cloak and chilling me down to the bone. My boots slipped on the wet cobblestones, forcing me to concentrate on each step so I would not arrive at Dr. Ambrose's door in a graceless heap of sodden fabric and bruised dignity.
It seemed a peculiar kind of cruelty, that the world continued to demand composure from a body that could barely manage upright.
It had not always been like this.
Not until the day I had died.
I retained no memory of it—no final gasping breath, no brilliant white light, no sense of anything waiting beyond. There was only silence, and then, inexplicably, the ceiling of a hospital ward and a physician using the wordfortunateas though it were a gift he was pressing into my hands.
I certainly did not feel fortunate.
I felt like something that had been dragged back from wherever the dead go, only to discover I had returned incomplete. Some essential part of myself had been left behind in that darkness, misplaced or forgotten. What came back was a partial rendering of who I might have once been. Occasionally, I liked to imagine what that woman was like. Perhaps I had been soft and kind and gentle.
All the things I was not now.
Unfortunately, I did not know. Death had stolen my memories along with my soul. The last clear recollection I possessed was from childhood. Everything beyond it existed only in fragments—my young womanhood remained obscured, glimpsed through a fog that never quite cleared,and the months, perhaps years, preceding my collapse were gone entirely.
The physicians had their theories. Oxygen deprivation to the brain during those crucial minutes without breath. Trauma from the incident itself. The sort of cognitive deterioration that sometimes accompanied severe medical events. None, however, seemed to have any explanation for the symptoms that remained.
The weakness deepened instead of improving, the discoloration of my flesh followed. My pulse grew more erratic, and my body temperature dropped steadily, until warmth became something I chased but could never quite reach.
Worse than the physical decline, worse even than the gaping absences in my memory, was the melancholy.
It arrived so gradually I had not noticed the light going until it was already gone. A constant thread of gray wound through everything, staining my mind in a wash of inescapable sadness. I longed for something or someone and the aching absence bordered on physical pain.
