Neve came back with a small fruit knife from the snack tray on her desk and hurried to her grandmother’s side.
She lifted the jade pendant over her head and held it out, together with the knife.
“Nana, all it needs is a drop of blood on the jade.
You do it.
You should be the one to have it.
I’m afraid I won’t be able to protect it.”
Margaret looked down at the pendant in her granddaughter’s palm.
It was about the size of a thumb, shaped a little like an old-fashioned padlock charm but flat on both sides, with no keyhole and no opening anywhere.
A thin band of gold wrapped its edges and joined to the chain.
The stone itself was a soft, cloudy green.
It looked completely ordinary.
If Margaret hadn’t just heard everything she’d heard this morning, she would never have given it a second glance.
She closed Neve’s fingers back around it.
“Silly girl.
The space should be yours.
Keep it yourself.” She held Neve’s gaze.
“But you are never to tell anyone about it again.
Human nature is dangerous.
When you hold a treasure, you become a target.
Remember those words for the rest of your life.
Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
Margaret nodded, but the worry in her chest didn’t ease.
She had been listening carefully all morning, and she had noticed something Neve hadn’t said.
In all of it, the rain, the house, the fevers, and the long years with the Ashfords, Margaret herself had never once appeared.
Silas had brought the guards.
Lana and Shane had been there.
Walter’s whole family had died protecting Neve.
But Nana hadn’t been anywhere.
That could only mean one thing.
She hadn’t lived to see it.
Margaret kept her face calm, but her hand tightened on the edge of the mattress.
If she died again this time, would this foolish, soft-hearted girl be able to escape the Ashfords on her own?
Neve hesitated a moment longer, then gave in.
Fine.
She would keep it.
Besides, she wasn’t as helpless as she used to be.
In her past life, she had survived almost four years after the apocalypse began.
She had trusted the wrong people and made terrible mistakes, but she had learned a great deal about the end of the world along the way.
She knew how zombies moved and what drew them.
She knew which abilities mattered and which supplies ran out first.
She raised the knife to her fingertip.
“Wait.” Margaret caught her wrist.
“Don’t.
That knife hasn’t been sterilized.”
It was a fruit knife.
It had probably been used to slice apples a dozen times since it was last washed properly.
Margaret wasn’t about to let her granddaughter cut herself with it.
“Okay, okay.
I’ll go get some antiseptic from the bathroom.”
Neve turned, knife in one hand and pendant in the other, and started across the room.
She didn’t see the rag doll lying half under the bed, a floppy yarn-haired thing she’d kicked off the covers sometime in the night.
Her foot caught on it.
Her whole body pitched forward.
She threw her hands out to catch herself, but they were both full.
The knife twisted in her grip as she hit the floor, and the blade drove straight into her chest.
“Neve!”
Margaret’s cry filled the room.
She was on her knees beside her granddaughter in an instant, hauling her up by the shoulders.
Blood was already spreading across the front of Neve’s pajamas, dark and fast.
Neve gasped and pressed her hand over the wound.
The pendant was still clutched in that hand, pinned between her palm and her chest.
Then something strange happened.
The blood seeping between her fingers stopped spreading across the fabric.
It flowed toward the jade instead and vanished into it, as if the stone were drinking it.
The cloudy green deepened and brightened, and for a single heartbeat it seemed to glow from within.
Margaret stared, unable to breathe.
She was shocked and terrified at once.
But above everything else, she wanted to save her granddaughter’s life.
She lunged for her phone on the nightstand to call Dr.
Morrow, the family physician.
Neve grabbed her arm.
“Nana, wait.
It’s okay.
It’s stopped bleeding.”
Carefully, she lifted her hand away.
The front of her pajamas was stained, but no fresh blood was welling up.
She guided her grandmother to sit on the edge of the bed.
Her own hands were shaking.
She had scared herself badly.
She hadn’t seen that coming at all.
But the bleeding really had stopped, and little by little she calmed down.
Thank goodness the knife was so small.
If it had been any bigger, stabbing herself in the chest like that could have killed her on the spot.
It would have been the stupidest second death imaginable.
Margaret didn’t calm down at all.
She looked at her granddaughter, pale and blood-streaked and already trying to smile, and a cold weight settled in her stomach.
This child.
She was always so careless and impulsive, rushing into things without looking.
If the apocalypse truly came, could a girl like this really hold the family together and keep herself alive?
At the same time, her heart ached.
Neve hadn’t been this careful and serious about anything before.
She wondered how much her granddaughter must have suffered in that other life to come back like this.
She picked up the phone again anyway.
Neve had just been stabbed in the chest and lost a frightening amount of blood.
Margaret wouldn’t rest until a doctor had examined her.
She had just found the number when Neve vanished.
There was no flash and no sound.
One moment her granddaughter was sitting on the bed, and the next the space beside her was empty.
The mattress was still dented where she had been.
The phone slipped from Margaret’s fingers.
She knew, of course.
Neve had just finished telling her about the space.
But knowing something and watching a living person disappear in front of you were not the same thing.
Her heart was pounding.
“Neve?”
She looked around the room.
The rag doll lay on the rug.
The egg chair swung gently by the window.
The breakfast tray sat on the desk.
Everything was exactly as it had been, except her granddaughter.
“Neve!”
Margaret had taken two unsteady steps toward the door when the air beside the bed shimmered and Neve reappeared, cross-legged on the mattress, her eyes enormous.
“Nana, it’s huge!”
Margaret pressed a hand to her chest and sat down hard.
“And it’s different from last time!” Neve rushed on, too excited to notice her grandmother’s face.
“In my past life I could only put things in and take them out.
I could never go inside myself.
But just now I was thinking how wonderful it would be if I could see it, and then suddenly I was there.
I don’t know why, but I can go in now!”
Before Margaret could say a word, Neve seized her hand.
“Come on, Nana.
I’ll take you in and show you!”
If Neve could enter, surely Nana could too.
It still amazed her.
She had only been wishing she could go inside, and then, somehow, she had.
In her past life, she had never been able to enter the space.
If she had, if she’d been able to hide inside it when Sylvie’s people came for her, she might never have died on that roof.