The golden glow took over Lili’s hands up to the wrists.
I had seen that light a few times already. On her wounded palm, the night we met. In the forest, when the blessing burned the corruption out of the bear. On the cut Rafael took from the skeletons. Every time, the light had been quick and obedient: it touched the wound, and the wound closed.
Not this time.
The light settled over Hanne’s chest, and the white skin seemed to drink it. The gold went in and vanished, like ink on wet paper, without leaving a mark. Lili frowned and pushed harder. The glow grew, filled the room and drove the shadows into the corners. Even so, the leaf-shaped marks on Hanne’s neck were still there, untouched.
“It won’t take,” Lili said.
“Lili.”
“Lili can do it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Her little eyebrows drew together, and the glow pulsed once, twice, three times, each pulse stronger than the last. Sun took a step back and shielded his eyes with his arm.
“She’s p-pushing too hard, isn’t she? Her hue looks weird. Getting paler. Fading, leader.”
I couldn’t see any hue. But I saw the drop of blood that ran out of Lili’s nose and dripped onto the white sheet.
PLIP
“Enough.” Rafael was already moving. “Enough, little one. Stop.”
I grabbed his arm.
It was fast, almost without thinking. The big man turned on me with the look from the restaurant: veins bulging, jaw locked.
“Let go of me, Sehun.”
“Wait.”
“She’s bleeding!”
“I know.” I didn’t let go. “I said she’d stop if it hurt. Let her decide if it hurts.”
We stared at each other. I knew what I was doing and I knew it was cruel. But I also knew that if we pulled Lili out of there now, she would learn she could only be useful as far as the adults allowed. She had already learned that far too well.
Where that certainty came from, I don’t know. Maybe from myself, or from someone else I had once been.
Rafael drew one breath through his nose and didn’t move forward. But he didn’t relax his arm either.
“A little longer,” he said, hoarse. “A little longer and I pull her out of there. Even if you cut me with that spear.”
“Fair.”
Lili was trembling. The blood was running from both nostrils now and staining her upper lip. The light kept going into Hanne and vanishing, nonstop, like sand through a sieve.
She isn’t hurt. There’s nothing to close. The world is erasing her, and the blessing only knows how to heal flesh.
“Pia,” Lili said suddenly, her eyes still closed.
The girl, who was holding her mother’s hand on the other side of the bed, jumped.
“Y-yes?”
“Say the name.” Lili’s voice came in pieces, between short breaths. “In her ear. Real quiet. Like when she’s sleeping.”
Pia hesitated and looked at me, then at Rafael. I nodded. So she leaned over her mother, put her mouth to her ear and began to whisper.
“Pia. Pia. It’s me, Pia. Your Pia.”
Lili’s light changed.
I saw it happen. The gold, which until then had fallen on Hanne’s chest and gotten lost, gathered into a thread and followed the sound. It climbed the woman’s neck, traced the path of Pia’s voice and went in through her ear, together with the name. The leaf-shaped marks trembled. One of them, near her chin, took on a pink edge, of real skin.
“Pia, Mommy.” The girl’s voice was already choked. “Remember. Please.”
Hanne blinked.
Her eyes, which until then had looked at everyone with the same empty kindness, felt their way around the room and stopped on her daughter.
“Pia?”
The girl froze.
“Pia,” Hanne repeated, and this time the word had an owner. Her pale hand rose, trembling, and touched her daughter’s face. “My Pia. What’s that little face for, my love? Who are these people?”
Pia didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She threw herself onto her mother with her arms around her neck and stayed there, face buried in Hanne’s shoulder, squeezing with all the strength of eight and a half years, her thin back shaking under the apron.
Lili’s glow went out all at once.
She tipped backward, and Rafael was there before she fell. I didn’t even see when he pulled his arm free. One second it was caught in my hand; the next, Lili was in his arms, small as a wet cat, her face smeared with blood and her eyes half open.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Lili.” Rafael’s voice cracked. “Lili, look at me.”
“Did it work?” He had to bend down to hear.
Rafael looked at the bed, where mother and daughter clung to each other, and for a moment he couldn’t answer. I saw his Adam’s apple go up and down twice.
“It did. It worked, little one.”
“Mm.” Lili closed her eyes. A tiny smile appeared at the corner of her dirty mouth. “Lili is useful.”
Rafael held the girl against his chest and said nothing more.
I looked away. That was theirs, and I had no right to watch.
[Group member: Lili Ferrer]
[Lume exhaustion: severe]
[Evolving Skill detected]
Evolving? Already?
I went to open her screen, but voices outside interrupted me.
“Is it true? She remembered?”
“Hanne remembered her daughter?”
I went to the door. On the stone street, empty until then, there were people now. Not many: six, seven, maybe ten. Pale faces, some with the same leaf marks on their hands or necks. They stood at a safe distance, as if they were afraid of getting too close to the house.
An old woman in a dark shawl stepped forward.
“The girl from outside. Is it true? She brought the name back?”
Before I could answer, Pia appeared beside me, her face still wet and her nose running, and shouted to the whole street:
“Mommy remembered me! The little lady made her remember!”
The murmur passed from mouth to mouth.
“A saint,” someone said.
Another voice repeated it, and then another.
“She’s a saint.”
“The Tower sent a saint.”
There was no warning and no pain. Just a line that lit up at the back of my head, like a neon sign on a dark street. It was the only line the index had about Lili, the same one I had reread more times than I’d have liked, always with the same knot in my stomach:
Lili Ferrer, the Black Saint of Arcadia. Mass murderer.
I turned back toward the inside of the house. Lili was in Rafael’s arms, eyes closed, face smeared with blood, a small smile on her lips.
Saint. Is this how it starts? With grateful people at the door?
“Leader?” Sun had come up beside me without a sound. “You’ve got a look on your face. Y-you okay?”
“Fine.”
Too fast. I took a breath and tried again, in a lighter tone.
“Close the door, Sun. She needs to rest.”
*
That night, we stayed at Bertil’s house.
The old man didn’t ask anything. He opened two rooms upstairs, gave us hard bread and a thin onion soup and went back to his table in the street, where he kept writing by the light of an oil lamp. Every now and then I heard him say a name out loud before writing it down, in the tone of someone calling his children in for supper.
Lili woke up early in the evening, had two bowls of soup and ate half a loaf. Her appetite, at least, the fever hadn’t taken. Then she wanted to go outside. Rafael went with her. From the window, I watched the two of them going down to the stream, the small girl and the enormous man, and I stayed where I was.
Sun was asleep in the corner, hugging his palette, and someone had to stay. That was the excuse I gave myself. The truth was that if I went down, something that was about to happen down there wouldn’t happen.
I stayed at the window. The village was so quiet I heard everything.
*
The stream was shallow and clear. Erebus’s moon, bigger than Earth’s and yellower, drew a road of light on it. Rafael crouched on the bank and dipped the handkerchief Lili had used on her nose. The water turned pink for an instant and then cleared.
Lili sat on a rock beside him, her knees against her chest.
He scrubbed the handkerchief for minutes, with far too much concentration for a scrap of cloth. She watched his hands.
“Mr. Rafael.”
“Hm?”
“Lili…” She squeezed her knees. “Nothing.”
He kept scrubbing. He didn’t push. I figured he really wasn’t going to push, and maybe that was why, a few minutes later, she tried again.
“When Pia said the name. In her ear.”
“Mm.”
“Lili thought somebody did that before.” Her voice went thin. “To Lili.”
Rafael stopped scrubbing.
“Did what, little one?”
“Said. A name. At night.” She didn’t look at him, only at the water. “When Lili was sleeping. Real quiet. Lili thinks it was Mom.”
The word came out strange in her mouth, all sharp edges.
Rafael went very still. The hand with the handkerchief sank a little into the water and stayed there.
“You remember her?” he asked, without taking his hand out of the water.
Lili shook her head. Stopped. Shook it again, weaker.
“Not her face. Not her smell. Not anything. Just the voice. Lili doesn’t even know what the voice said. Just that it was nice. It was warm.” A long pause. “Then today, when Pia said it, Lili thought: if Mom said a name, then Lili had a name before. Before the screen. Before big brother read it.”
The stream ran on.
“Is it bad?” That was when her voice really broke. “Only remembering the voice? Is it bad not to remember the rest?”
I saw Rafael’s back stiffen.
He took the handkerchief out of the water, wrung it with both hands until not one more drop came out and folded it on his knee. He seemed to be looking for the words somewhere very deep and very dark.
“No.” He stopped. Cleared his throat. Tried again. “Not bad. It’s just that sometimes…”
The deep voice failed him. He looked at the big yellow moon and kept his chin up until his eyes were dry.
“Sometimes the voice is what stays the longest,” he said at last. “I knew somebody too. Little. Almost your size. Some days I close my eyes and her face is blurry, like an old photo. Not the voice.” He ran his thumb over the folded handkerchief. “The voice I still hear. Laughing. Calling me in the middle of the night.”
Lili turned her face to him.
“Who was she?”
Rafael opened his mouth, and for a second I was sure he was going to tell her. But his mouth closed, and he only shook his head.
“I’ll tell you some other day.” And, after a pause: “I promise.”
Lili kept looking at him. Then she climbed down from the rock, sat beside him on the bank and leaned her head against his enormous arm. Rafael froze all over, the way you freeze when a little bird lands close by. Then, very slowly, he put his hand on her small head.
They stayed like that, both of them watching the water.
*
I let go of the curtain and went back into the dark of the room.
I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and opened my palm. There was nothing in it. But if I concentrated, I could feel the souls I had collected since the Turn. Wolves. Snakes. Gibras. The three men on the hill. Baekyung. They were like pebbles at the bottom of a pocket, the kind you carry around without noticing until someone asks what’s in there.
That night, I thought they were heavy.
I’ll tell you some other day. I promise.
It was a promise I couldn’t make. The index had underlined that twice, in my own handwriting.
Outside, at exactly midnight, the bell on the hill rang.
DONG
DONG
DONG
And in the field of white flowers behind the village, something began to move.