All the while, I felt Dante’s presence behind us, getting closer, closer, his vacancy prickling up my skin like frost. I heard a Monitor near the back shout that more Undead were upon them, but beyond that I couldn’t make out his words; I could only sense Dante, his hollowness tickling the back of my neck.
I caught glimpses of him. An arm reaching toward me through the fog. A flash of brown hair, wet with snow, as he ducked beneath a Spade. His hands, grasping the tattered shirts of the Undead boys and pulling them away just before they attacked the Monitors. A pair of lips, frosted red, parting to call out my name. I pushed through the bodies between us, trying to make my way to him, but the sway of the fight kept pushing us apart.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of Undead boys run toward me. I swung my shovel toward them, but before they reached me, an Undead with blond hair thrust them in the opposite direction. Beside him stood a tall Undead with broad shoulders and a frame that bespoke someone my age. Together, they scooped up another Undead that ran toward me, and then another, tossing them aside until the snow around me was clear.
Their vacancies felt familiar. I thought back to the pair of Undead who had directed others away from me at the Mädchen Inn in Germany. These boys must have been the same ones that had protected me that night. But why?
The taller one must have noticed me staring because he touched the blond boy’s arm and pointed at me. I held out my shovel, ready to attack, when I felt someone come up behind me. I spun around, slicing my shovel through the air. Clementine ducked out of the way, the metal tip barely grazing her hair. When she stood, she patted her head, making sure her barrette was still in place. She let out a sigh of relief. “You’re lucky,” she said. “If you had cut off any more of my hair, I would have had to send you into the crevasse with them.”
I felt my chest deflate. “You’re lucky I didn’t aim a little bit lower,” I said, and together we turned to face the two Undead through the fog.
“You take the blonde,” Clementine murmured. “I’ll take the tall one.”
I nodded. But they didn’t come any closer. Instead, they backed away, disappearing into the mist.
I blinked. “What was that?”
Clementine didn’t respond. Before I heard the footsteps behind us, she whipped around and struck an Undead in the jaw. Blood splattered across the snow. She wiped the blade of her shovel on her pants, unfazed, and turned to the fog where the two Undead had stood, her face just as perplexed as mine was. “I have no idea.”
But I didn’t have time to linger. I had to find Dante. His presence reached out to me in icy tendrils of air, leading me through the Monitors and the Undead boys, over the bodies strewn across the ground, contorted by death. Now that Dante was closer, I could feel the life coming back to me. The colors grew vivid, the filth of the fight brightening until it almost looked surreal. Warmth returned to my hands as I gripped my shovel.
The Brothers of the Liberum loomed over the fight, their hooded silhouettes casting dark shadows over the snow. They scanned the snow, as if searching for something. An Undead boy beside them whispered to one of the Brothers, then pointed in my direction. The Brother turned; his empty visage rested on me. One by one the Liberum broke free and followed him.
“Are they coming toward us?” I asked, a wave of dread passing through me. “They saw Dante rescue me at Gottfried Academy. They know I know him. They must think I have the chest.”
“I call the two in the middle,” Clementine whispered. “Which ones do you want?”
I steadied my arm. “I—I guess the two on either side.”
Clementine’s eyes met mine, a mischievous smile spreading across her face. “What do you think is under those cloaks? All I can picture is more cloaks.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Aren’t you ever scared?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “The trick is to never show it. So what do you think is under there?”
I thought back to that awful day at Gottfried, just after Noah had died, when one of the Brothers had swept through the snow toward me. All I had been able to make out of him was a crinkled sliver of white beneath his hood. I tried to extend that hint of white to the rest of his face, but it withered into mist. “A cavity of wrinkled skin and bones.”
Clementine shook her head. “See, that’s what you’re doing wrong. You have to think of them as what they actually are: kids, just like us. The only difference is that they’ve gone on living long past their expiration date. Which is why there’s nothing to be afraid of. Watch them,” she said. “Their senses are dulled. The Monitors know it; you can tell by the way they’re attacking.”
The nine Brothers pressed their way toward us. The Monitors crept around them, striking with stealthy, sudden movements, before receding back. With each blow, the Brothers lashed out, but always a few seconds too late.
“They act like they can see and hear us, but they can’t, at least not that well,” Clementine said. “It’s a weakness that we can manipulate to our gain.”
I hadn’t even realized that my fingers were trembling until Clementine reached out and put her hand on mine to make them go still. When she removed her hand from mine, a roll of gauze was wedged between my fingers.
“If I don’t get a chance to see you before the end,” she said, “then good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
My eyes stung in the cold. “Thanks,” I whispered. “Maybe in another life, we’ll run into each other again.”
“I hope so.”
Together we crouched low to the ground and crept forward, our feet barely making a sound, as if we were carried by the wind. The Liberum were just yards away, their hooded heads leaning forward as if they were trying to see where we were. I stole to the left, Clementine to the right. We raised our shovels. The Liberum tilted their heads, as if they had seen a flash of something move, but before they had time to turn their heads, we struck. A glimmer of metal. A clean swish through the air. A low wheeze as our metal hit their sides. Once, twice. A blow on either side, stunning two of the Brothers
,
followed by a quick turn of the wrist. I looped a roll of gauze around one of their arms, catching a glimpse of the sallow skin beneath. Clementine did the same. Then we both ducked out of the way, their heavy robes grazing my forehead as I crouched low to the ground and went still.
I tried to silence my breath as the Brothers searched for us, their long hoods swooping to the left, the right. Clementine and I mirrored each other like we were two hands on the same body; she doled out the strikes while I wrapped the gauze around their ankles, their hands, weakening them bit by bit.
One of the Brothers must have heard me breathing. He lunged at me, his withered wrist reaching out from beneath his robes. I fell back just as his icy fingers grazed my skin. Grabbing my shovel from the snow, I scrambled to my feet and backed toward the crevasse as two Brothers swept toward me. Over their shoulders I could see Clementine fighting off two more, her slender body weaving through them like a shadow.
I swung at them, once, twice, trying to knock them into the crack in the earth, but they were too quick. I stumbled, feeling the cold wisps of their breath lick at my throat as one of their hooded faces came dangerously close to mine. The crevasse was inches away, the ice beneath my hand crumbling into the abyss. I would only have one chance. I gripped my shovel by my side, hiding it behind the folds of my coat, and waited for the Brothers to lower their faces to mine. One of them leaned in, his hollowness wrapping itself around me, compelling my body to his. I let him lean closer, until I could feel the breath within me curl into a thin stream of air and force its way up to my lips. My body grew weak, the colors around me dulling, darkening. Just before the Brother’s hand closed around my throat, I summoned the last bit of energy I had left and thrust my shovel into his chest.
I heard a dull crunch as it broke through his ribs. The Brother keeled over, letting out a raspy breath of air. I pushed the shovel deeper until his flesh compressed in on itself, making him shrink back. I was about to swing him into the crevasse, when his arm went rigid. His hood slid back. I could see the reflection of the sky in one of his dull gray eyes. The handle slipped from my hands. He pulled the shovel from his ribs and threw it into the snow, pausing while his flesh repaired itself.
“Find me,” I said, hoping the wind would carry my voice to Dante. In the distance, I heard a shout. Footsteps running toward me. A white silhouette materialized through the fog.
Dante collided with the Brother, tumbling with him onto the snow. I backed away as they grappled close to the edge of the crevasse, their bodies a snarl of black cloth and pale skin. My heart raced as I watched Dante throw the Brother into the hole, then tackle the Brother that had cornered Clementine.
My shovel lay in the snow just a few feet away. The temperature dropped as a Brother grew closer. Just before he reached me, a torch hurtled through the air. I rolled to the side as the second Brother collapsed beside me. Fire engulfed his cloak.
My grandfather burst through the fog. He swung his Spade over the Brother’s chest and threw his smoldering remains into the abyss. His movements were swift, controlled, concise: the result of a trained hand. With his right arm he sparred, with his left he unwound a roll of gauze, looping it around the Brothers as if he were knotting a necktie.
A handful of Undead boys strayed from the fight and ran toward him. I grabbed my shovel from the snow and intercepted them, thrusting them, one by one, into the crevasse. I wiped the edge of my shovel in the snow and started to search for Dante, when I heard a shout.
My grandfather’s scarf had come loose from his lapel, its crimson tails unraveling in the snow beside him like a trickle of blood. I heard a loud rip as one of the Liberum circling my grandfather caught hold of his sleeve, tearing the seams from his overcoat.
His arm trembled. He didn’t make a move toward the Liberum
;
he waited, his chest rising and falling. They closed in like a long black shadow. One lunged at his Spade. My grandfather barely ducked away in time. He was tired. His reflexes had slowed.
They were closing in on him when the fog parted. Dante charged through the circle, knocking two of the Liberum to the ground. My grandfather stumbled back, stunned, as Dante wrestled with the Brothers, the muscles in his arms flexing while he pressed them into the snow.
His intervention gave my grandfather a second wind. He fought beside Dante, using the last bit of his strength to knock another Liberum aside. But it wasn’t enough. Another slice through the air and he stumbled back. I saw his Spade fall. He tried to pick it up, but the hooded figures closed in around him.
“No!” I shouted, fighting toward him. He removed a roll of gauze from his pocket and held it in front of him, his final attempt to ward them off.
My grandfather didn’t run when one of the Brothers came up behind him and took hold of his arms, nor did he stop fighting when the other approached him from the front.
“Stop!” I cried.
His legs buckled. He dropped to his knees.
For a moment, it no longer mattered what he’d done or why he’d done it. I pushed through the Undead boys before me, tangling their arms in the gauze to clear a path. But when I looked up, my grandfather’s eyes met mine.
“Stay where you are, Renée,” he said. He never looked the Brother of the Liberum in the face as his robes swept over the snow toward him; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on me. There was no sign of fear, just regret, as if to say,
This my fate, not yours.
I saw my mother’s face in his. Though she had once been his daughter, they were so different that I always felt they belonged to separate incarnations of my life. My mother, to the bright California sun rising up over the trees; and my grandfather, to the gray wintry skies rolling in over New England. But now his eyes were a watery blue, like the swells of the ocean on a rainy summer day. He missed her too, I realized as he took me in one last time. Just like he would miss me.
I saw Dante lean back into the snow as the last of the Liberum around him tumbled into the crevasse. He turned, ready to fight off the others, but my grandfather stopped him. “Leave me!” he shouted to Dante, his voice wavering. “Take her away. Keep her safe.”
The shadows of the Liberum eclipsed his body until all I could see of my grandfather was his hand lying in the snow, his fingers still closed around the roll of gauze. They quivered as the life left him, their grip loosening until the cloth unraveled between his fingers and flapped in the wind like a flag of surrender.
An icy hand wrapped around my waist. A tingling sensation crept up my skin. I spun around to see a pair of thin lips; an ashen cheek, cut at a harsh angle, like ice; a pair of melted brown eyes, now clouded behind a thin film of gray. Dante.
I saw another hand wrap around Theo’s mouth. One more over Anya’s. Before I could call out to them, Dante lifted me in his arms and carried me away from the fight, the snow billowing around us until my grandfather, the Monitors, and my friends all faded into white.
T
HE COLORS OF THE LANDSCAPE
grew brilliant and saturated as Dante carried me through the snow. The mountains that layered the horizon brightened into vivid shades of blue and purple, and the snow glittered in the sunlight. It felt like a lifetime had passed since I had last seen color, since I had last felt the comfort of his arms as he held me to his chest, the thin fabric of his shirt soft against my cheek. Gray clouds rolled in from the east, the shade of my grandfather’s coat, as though they were mourning for the Monitors, too.
“You’re okay,” Dante said. “I have you now.”
I waited for his voice to envelop me in its richness, to bring back all of the memories I had lost, but all I heard were words, the sounds flat and dull. I listened to him breathing, to the unnatural rhythm of his heart beating against my side, waiting for the sounds to stir something within me, but they inspired nothing. I had the vague recollection of smelling the woods on his skin, but no matter how deeply I breathed him in, I sensed nothing.
So instead, I used the senses I had left. I studied the porcelain white of his skin; the frosted red of his lips, just a shade away from turning blue; the rich brown of his hair, its ends caked in snow. I slid my hand down his arm, remembering the smooth feeling of his muscles beneath my touch; the familiar shift of his shoulders as he trudged through the snow; the way his brown eyes seemed to melt, the gray haze clearing, when he looked down at me.
Dante pushed the hair away from my face. “I found you,” he said, as if he was referring not only to this life, but to all iterations of our lives in the past, and all that lay ahead of us in the future.
“What about the others?” I said. “Theo and Anya?”
“Don’t worry about them,” said Dante. “They’re fine.”
We zigzagged around the crevasses, scaling the final slope of the mountain. Slowly, the landscape began to look familiar, though I couldn’t place why until I felt the chest thudding against Dante’s back. When we were far enough away from the Undead that their chill began to recede, Dante slowed.
He let my feet slide to the ground, then took the chest from his bag and opened it. A sweep of lines and shapes, etched into the lid, stood between the third and fourth point. Dante held it up to the landscape before us. As he did, the map came to life before our eyes. Its thin stack of triangles mimicked the crooked staircase of mountains in front of us; its swirl of circles mimicked the low-hanging clouds that the ridge disappeared into, the fog engulfing everything but the peaks of the mountains as if they were suspended in the sky. The fourth point was nestled somewhere within the mist.
As we walked toward it, the snow lost its brightness, the blinding white losing its shimmer until it looked faded and old. I looked back at Dante, wondering if he noticed the difference, but his hair distracted me. Its rich brown seemed to be fading, as though the color was washing out with the wind.
The next verse of Descartes’s riddle echoed in my mind.
The eyes follow, the jaws of the mountains a colorless gray...
A weathered red temple rose through the clouds. It had a hollowness to it, as though its windows and doors had sucked up the air around us, making everything go calm. A wooden terrace wrapped around it. At its center stood a heavy wooden door. Dozens of crooked steps led up to the entrance, each brushed clean of snow. A broom rested on the wall as if someone had just finished sweeping. Dante turned to me, the dye in his clothes draining with every step.
“It must be inside,” he said.
He paused, as though I, too, looked different. He took my hand in his, turning it in his palm. My skin looked paler than ever. I curled my fingers around his, the feeling of his hand in mine giving me comfort.
We found ourselves in a vast room, warm and dark. Tea candles lined the walls. Their flames danced in the draft from the door, their trails branching off into dozens of tiny paths, revealing a labyrinth of passageways leading deep inside the monastery.
The floor was tiled with pieces of glass, glimmering in the flickering light. At its center lay a mosaic of a canary, its golden wings spread in flight. The Keepers.
As I walked around the image, venturing deeper into the room, the color drained from the tiles. The golden luster seeped out of the bird’s wings, and the red and blue glass around it faded until it looked like a gray film had been laid over the floor. I peered down the hallway. Despite the candles lining the walls, it looked impossibly dark, as though the rooms beyond were absorbing all of the color.
“This way,” I whispered to Dante.
I led him toward the end of the hallway, where the darkness looked most drab. Dante’s body changed shapes beside me as the shadows from the candles shifted over him. The smooth contour of his arm beneath the cuff of his shirt grew dull as he held me back while he inched forward to make sure it was safe. The loose strand of hair falling across his cheek as he leaned around a corner, glancing left, then right, seemed to lighten, losing its rich color. The glimmer of his eyes as he looked back at me grew dimmer until they looked lifeless.
“Wait,” I said, touching his wrist. “Let me look at you.”
It was the last time I would be able to see his beauty, to appreciate the tilt of his nose, the melting brown of his eyes, the muscular contours of his shoulders shifting beneath his shirt.
“I’ll still be here on the other side,” he said, reading my thoughts. “You’ll still be able to see me.”
“I know,” I murmured. “But not in the same way.”
At the end stood an open-air courtyard lined with columns. I blinked and the scene darkened, as though my vision were fading. Startled, I squinted into the light. Though I could tell that the wood had been stained in the same shade of red as the rest of the temple, the columns in the courtyard looked dull, as though all of their color were being drained into the ground. Likewise, the Alps rising behind them lacked the luster they had held just moments before; the sky above them was now flat, the clouds stagnant.
I blinked again, and the world went darker still, spots forming in my eyes. I strained to focus, until I spotted a girl’s face peek around the column on the other side of the courtyard, her long hair fluttering through the mist. She looked like the girls I had seen at each of the points before. But when I looked again, all I could see were clouds. They hung low around the courtyard, folding in on themselves.
Beneath them stood a reflecting pool. It was asymmetrical in shape, and looked wild and jagged, as though it had been a natural feature of the landscape, the monastery built around it. It grew blurry, its details darkening, slipping away from me. I froze, steadying myself, before pressing my eyes shut. When I opened them, I could just make out the black water of the pool. I stepped toward it, letting the clouds surround me, and leaned over the pool until my face appeared on the surface.
The Renée that looked back at me seemed drained of all her color. Her hair looked brittle, her skin pasty, as though all her pigment were in grayscale. The water rippled and her eyes rolled back in her head. She grasped her face, her arms moving without mine, and clutched her eyes, her mouth opening to cry out in pain. As she did, I felt a cold stream of air whirl up my throat, the clouds around me coaxing it through my lips.
The memories swirled out of me in textures and colors so rich they made my eyes water. A brass bell. The chrome frame of a bicycle. A mess of auburn hair, the same color as the autumn leaves. A freckle, then another. Spinning wheels. Then soapstone, the clean lines of the Gottfried dormitory. A blond ringlet. A green slated chalkboard. The crisp cuff of an Oxford shirt. The outline of his chest beneath as the rain matted the thin cotton to his skin. A strand of brown hair falling loose from a knot. His eyes, so soft they seemed to melt. Gone, all gone.
I rubbed my eyes, trying to bring the monastery back into focus. All looked the same as it had before, though now the shapes looked flatter, the colors muted as though a thick film had collected over everything around me.
Dante stood beside me, the gray haze creeping over his eyes. I watched his irises contract, struggling to focus on me the way they used to. Was he still beautiful? His features looked the same as before, though their arrangement seemed somehow less vivid, less alive. All I had left was the prickle his touch sent up my arm, the curvature of his arms, his chest, his neck, as I ran my hand over him; reassuring myself that he was still here, that he was still the Dante I knew.
Dante took my hand as if I were slipping away from him.
“Look,” he said.
I followed his gaze through the columns of the courtyard to the east, where I could make out a familiar collection of shapes on the horizon. Three lakes in the valley below. Dante opened the chest and held it up. On the map within, three circles marked the path, the fifth point circumscribed within the third circle. It was inside the lake. Someone else may have called the sight beautiful. I could no longer see anything but lines and shapes, the colors monochrome like an old photograph; and yet, it made my chest swell with hope.
I turned to go back through the monastery when a draft of cold air lapped against my neck. Two Undead swept down the passageway, pulling Anya and Theo behind them. I recognized their silhouettes: they were the Undead who I had seen diverting the other boys away from me during the fight.
“Renée,” one of them said.
How did they know my name? I stepped toward them, studying the shorter of the two. Though I remembered that his hair had been blond, I could barely make out its color now. The candlelight flickered off his face, giving me a glimpse of his button nose, his lips, and his cheeks, so full they looked like they belonged to a girl. But no—could it be?
“Eleanor?” I whispered, recasting what I thought was a boy’s figure into the slim profile of my roommate from Gottfried Academy.
Her lips spread into a smile. “It’s me.”
I dropped my shovel and ran to her, throwing my arms around her slender frame. I knew it was her when I felt her hair against my cheek, as soft as silk. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“It was for your safety,” said Eleanor, her sweater soft beneath my touch. “It was important that you didn’t try to leave the Monitors and find us. If you did, and the Liberum found you, they would have killed you. We didn’t want to show ourselves until the last possible moment.”
Suddenly I understood why she and the other Undead had been diverting the boys away from me during the fight on the mountainside, and during the attack at the inn. They’d been protecting me.
I turned to the boy standing behind her. He was taller than she was, his broad shoulders filling the passageway. But there was something more than just his height that looked familiar. A draft blew through the corridor, making the light from the candles dance across his face.
“Noah?”
He stepped toward me until I could just make out a freckle beneath his eye. I reached out and touched his arm to make sure he was real, but the shock of it made my hand recoil. His skin was ice-cold, as if he’d just surfaced from the depths of the frozen lake at Gottfried. I still remembered the way he used to feel, like the first perfect day of autumn, his soft hair tangling around my fingers, his arms smooth and strong as they wrapped around me, warming me in the evening breeze. All of that was gone now.
I wanted to tell him how much I’d thought about him, about how much I’d missed him. I wanted to tell him about my dreams, about how I kept reliving that awful day, about how his death had haunted me. With every step, I could feel the guilt reaching up through the earth and pulling me down by the ankles, as though it were trying to bury me in his stead.
I wanted to tell him about my regrets. If only I had done something differently. If we had missed our train down from Montreal; if we had run out to the lake five minutes earlier. Or the one that hurt most of all: if I hadn’t let him come along with me in the first place. Maybe then, things would have turned out differently; maybe then I could have saved him.
He spoke first, his voice so lifeless that I barely recognized it. “The Undead have followed us. We have to leave.”
They each stepped into the courtyard, their eyes bleary and unfocused as they emerged. We ran down the mountain toward the three lakes in the distance, each larger than the next, until we spotted the first sign of life. Trees. Dante and I led the way, weaving through the snow until we were under the cover of the woods, when a shout rang out behind us.
“Wait!” Theo said. He was far behind us, huddled over Anya, who was lying in the snow.
I ran to them. Her face was ashen, her hair tangled with ice. The clothes hung limp around her frame, which looked astonishingly thin. She had lost weight. Her chest heaved, her breath so quick it frightened me.
“What happened?” I asked, but Anya didn’t answer. Her eyes fluttered shut, as though she were struggling to keep them open.
Theo shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “She started to slow down. I turned to ask her what was wrong, and she collapsed.”
I knelt over Anya. “What’s wrong?” I said.
She pressed her lips together, still trying to regain her breath. She took my hand and placed it on her heart.
I didn’t understand why until I felt it beat, its rhythm quick and irregular, like the heartbeat of an Undead.
My arm recoiled. “What—what is that?”
“Is it still beating?” she asked.
I nodded. “Though not like mine.”
“Good,” she said. “It’s hard for me to tell anymore if I’m alive or dead. The line is so thin these days.”
“But it feels like...”
“An Undead,” Anya whispered, finishing what I couldn’t bring myself to say. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“I’m dying,” she said. “I’ve been dying.”
Her words struck Theo in the face. He shrank back into the snow, stunned. They knocked the breath from me as well. I sat back on my heels, feeling a pit form in my stomach. I finally understood why she had carried around a tin of elixirs, why she had always reserved a few pills only for herself, why she frequently looked tired and breathless. I thought back to her tarot reading, to the card of the woman dying of an illness. It hadn’t been referring to her mother; it had been referring to Anya.