The ceiling is a flat, grey expanse of nothing.

  My eyes slam shut but his face is still there. My hands knot in the sheets. The walls press in.

  My chest tightens. The first breath catches, a snag in my throat. My lungs refuse the second. A dry, retching sound tears from my throat as I fight for air.

  Is this it, then? Is this body failing?

  A tremor starts in my legs, a violent shudder that threatens to rattle the bedframe against the wall. My heart seizes, bunching into a fist that batters the inside of my ribs.

  They will hear.

  My jaw locks. A sound from the hall. I press my face into the pillow. The shudder in my legs stops. I am just a body in a bed. An old woman, sleeping. Not this shuddering, suffocating thing.

  I force my jaw to unlock. I make the air come in. Hold it for a count of four. Let it go in a slow, silent stream.

  The fist in my chest slows. Becomes a dull, exhausted thud against the bone.

  The house is still. They did not hear.

  The thud evens out. A slow, steady beat. A mother's heart. A broken one.

  My hands lie on the sheets. Two lumps of cold clay. They should have moved. They should have broken the callipers and burned the ledger. But my body is a ruin. How can a ruin start a war?

  The path is lost. The Echo of Nora frays.

  It remains Vivid, but its flame, once a hungry glow, is now a grasping light.

  ?

  The shape flashes across my vision. Bile rises in my chest.

  Grasping light. Hungry glow.

  These words are a loop. The same thing on repeat.

  The thought is a stone in my throat. I have to spit it out to breathe.

  "This game," I snarl at the darkness. "You let me get my footing, you let me think I'm safe, and then you just take it away. Every single time. Why?"

  A pause.

  A cold spot forms behind my eyes. The hairs on my arms lift.

  A piece cannot question the board on which it is moved.

  "If there is no winning, what is the point of the move?" I throw the sheets back, the motion violent.

  Victory is a form of peace. And peace is an end. The work would stop.

  "The work?" A muscle in my stomach clenches, hard and fast. "You mean the consumption."

  The word makes the room shrink. I am being led. A dog on a long, invisible chain.

  "And my thoughts? My feelings? Are they just pieces in your game?"

  You are not here to think. You are not here to feel. You are here to run the maze I build for you.

  A tremor starts in my hand, a useless, shaking thing. The truth of it is a dull, white noise in my skull, erasing everything, until a stubborn root takes hold. A face.

  "And Eli?" I choke on the name. "Was he a lie? A tool to keep me moving?"

  You ask about the name of the meal you finished five years ago. It is digested. It is irrelevant.

  The tension in my body evaporates. A sudden, shocking lightness. A harsh laugh escapes my throat.

  It just told me. It just... oh, gods. It just told me.

  A hand flies to my mouth, to stifle a sound that is half a laugh, half a sob.

  The sound quiets in my throat. I draw a single, ragged breath that does not shake. "No," I say, my voice gathering. "Eli wasn't just a meal. He was me. He… he made a pact." My hand finds my chest, resting over the heart. "To save Teddy, he became this thing."

  The Voice offers only silence.

  I look at my hands, resting on the rough linen sheets. Old hands. A grandmother's hands. They were meant to soothe fevers, to grind herbs, to offer comfort.

  Now they will dig a grave.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I will find who held the other end of that pact. I will find out who did this to Eli. To me.

  A scrape of wood on wood from the hallway. Then whispers, thin as needles under the door.

  Her voice, a frantic hiss. "She said the name again. Eli."

  His reply is flat and distant. "Always the ghost in my own house."

  The door opens. The light from the hall carves them from the dark. Their faces hold a careful stillness. The kind you practise in a mirror before visiting the sick. There is no anger in James's eyes, only a weariness that goes down to the bone.

  "Nora?" Evangeline's voice is a gentle, terrible kindness. "We heard you talking. Are you alright?"

  "What did you hear?" I demand.

  "Just your illness talking," she replies, her tone a flat, even line. "About Eli." Her eyes flick for a half-second to the medicine on the nightstand, then back to me. "About you thinking you're him."

  "A pact," James says, a bitter chuckle breaking from his throat. A crack in his stillness. "To save Teddy." He takes a heavy step forward, the floorboards groaning. "He didn't save anyone. He just left. He left her. He left Pip."

  "Don't," Evangeline says, her hand moving to his arm.

  James closes his mouth. He takes a slow step back, then another, until the doorframe is at his back.

  She looks at me, and for a heartbeat, her eyes are clear. A question is in them. A desperate, fragile thing.

  Her hand reaches toward me, then pulls back, settling on the bed beside her. She swallows. The small muscle in her jaw flexes once, hard, then goes still. Her eyes go flat.

  She kneels by the bed. "Nora, listen to my voice." Her hand closes over mine, a cage of soft, warm flesh. "You are in your home. You are safe. The bad things are outside. Not in here."

  They think I'm mad. The air in the room turns to poison in my lungs. It is thick with the smoke of a fire only I can see. And they are breathing it in, telling me how peaceful the day is, how the shapes in the clouds are pretty.

  "You think I'm mad," I say, the words barely a sound.

  James sighs from the doorway, a sound of crushing exhaustion. "We think you're hurting, Grandma. And when people hurt, they talk to ghosts. You're not well."

  The conversation ends. A door has been closed. They are still in the room, but I am alone. I have to break the door down.

  I push myself up against the headboard. I look at James. At the love in his eyes that is also a cage.

  "The leader of the Collectors," I say. My voice is steady. "His name is Max."

  I wait for the stillness in his face to crack.

  "He is your father."

  I brace for the shattering. The denial. The rage. Nothing comes.

  James does not move. The shock I expected is not there. In its place, a familiar shadow settles in his eyes. He has heard this ghost's name before.

  "Actually," he says. His voice goes quiet. Level. "He calls himself Maximus Reap now."

  A correction. Not a question.

  The force of my words recoils back into me, a sickening jolt in my bones.

  He walks to the wall and presses his palm to the stone. "I've seen him," he says, his voice for the stone, not for me.

  "Spoke to him." His hand squeezes. Squeezes tighter.

  "For years. I kept going back. Hoping to find the man. The father."

  He pushes off from the wall.

  "You carried this alone?" I ask.

  He does not answer. He leaves. A cold absence settles where he stood.

  Evangeline watches the empty doorway. Her fingernails dig into the wood of a nearby chair, leaving five small wounds in the grain. She turns to me, and her breath is even. Unchanged.

  I look at her, at the deep, quiet strength in her posture. "You knew," I say.

  She nods, her attention drifting back to the empty space James just left. "He tells me everything. Eventually."

  "I'm sorry," I say. "To make him hurt like that."

  "He was already hurting," she says, her voice gentle.

  "I loved him." She turns to me, a faint smile on her lips. "Eli."

  Her eyes drift to the candle on the nightstand. "He was the fire. The kind that warms you from across the room, but burns you if you get too close." Her hand moves to her stomach. "Pip was the spark from that fire. I didn't know until after he was gone."

  "And James." She looks down, her voice going quiet. "He's the earth beneath my feet." She stops, swallows hard, and pushes the words out. "There were days I couldn't get out of bed. He never said a word. Just left a bowl of soup on the nightstand. Sat in a chair by the window until I was ready to talk."

  Her hand reaches out and smooths a wrinkle in the bedsheets. "He's loved Pip like his own since the day he was born. Never once made me feel like I was a burden."

  "So please, Nora." She takes a small step back from the bed. "Let Eli rest. For James. Remember the man who's actually here."

  I rise, my bones a protest. I walk to his door. He sits on the edge of the bed, his back to me, a man holding a house up on his shoulders.

  "I'm sorry," I say. The words are ash in my mouth. Useless.

  He turns. Moonlight catches the wet tracks on his cheeks. "I know, Grandma." His voice is a low, flat thing. "It's not your fault. You can't help it."

  I close the distance. My arms rise, clumsy things that have forgotten their purpose. I try to remember the shape of a grandmother's embrace.

  I put my arms around him.

  For a moment, he is still. Then a sound breaks from him. A sob.

  His head drops, chin touching his chest. And then the rest of him follows. He sags against me, his face buried in my shoulder.

  I feel the tremor in his frame, the wet heat of his tears against my neck. I feel nothing in my own chest. Only a vast, quiet cold.

  His pain. I can fix this.

  "There is a way," I say, my voice calm. "A way to heal them. To make them whole."

  He straightens, and the pity in his eyes is a wall between us. "Grandma, there are no miracle cures."

  His pity is a lock. And I have the key. An ugly, rusted thing Nora has kept buried for years.

  "Do you remember the day you lost your leg?"

  His whole body goes rigid. He pulls back from me, a small, sharp movement, and the cold air of the room rushes into the space between our bodies.

  "I told everyone the Twisted One did it."

  Each word is a physical effort, a piece of rust I have to tear from my throat.

  "I lied, James. It was my fault. My bomb. I did that to you."

  He just stares at me. The pity in his eyes is gone. Burned away. In its place, a raw, wounded stillness.

  "So when I tell you there is a flower in Larkvale called the Sunfire Rose," I say, my voice thick with Nora's tears, "you have to believe me. Because I am the one who owes you a miracle."

  His eyes settle on my body, this rattle of old bones in thinning skin. "You'll never make it."

  He looks toward Pip's room. "I'll go."

  "Your leg."

  "Vera will come," he says, a quiet certainty in his voice. "She's been waiting for a war. I just have to give her one."

  He starts to pace. Three steps to the window. Three steps back to the bed. "I can find others. The ones tired of being afraid."

  "And Evangeline?"

  The warmth in his eyes withdraws. "She wants to save this family. I want to save our son. They are not the same thing."

  He looks up, and the weariness in his frame is gone. "If I don't do this, Pip will come home wearing a monster's face one day." His shoulders straighten, locking into place. "I will burn the world down before that happens."

  He walks to the door. "But first, I burn the man who built it. My father has to die. We can't cure something while the man spreading it still breathes."

  A hot spike of Nora's grief, of her love for her son, lances through my chest.

  Then a different feeling rises to meet it.

  A clean, sharp, and terrible hunger.

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