Outside, the church grounds were quiet, but they weren’t empty at all. Five women stood around us, their hair fluttering in the wind. They each held a Spade, the metal tips glinting in the sunlight.
Theo and Dante slowed, laying Noah in the snow, his head facing the sky. Seeing him in the light was startling, his lips the same muted shade as the clouds, as though he were already fading back into the folds of the universe. I wrapped my hand around Eleanor’s, feeling the cool touch of her skin as I squeezed her palm.
The Keepers looked almost identical, though I could see the difference in age. The first woman’s cheeks were far more sunken than the others, her youth sucked from her too early. The second woman had withered lips, her mouth falling into a wrinkled pout. The third woman’s face had hollowed into a pinch, her nose spotted with sun splotches. The fourth woman had clouded eyes, her irises now a foggy white. And the fifth had gnarled and knotted hands, her fingers wrinkled as she gripped her Spade.
There was something about their faces that looked familiar, beyond having seen them over the past few days, though I couldn’t place how I recognized them.
“What do you want?” Theo said, pointing his Spade at them.
Instead of answering, the first woman spoke, reciting a line from Descartes’s riddle.
“Sounds, they fade to the ground, the earth’s music unsung,”
she said, then turned to the woman on her right.
“Then taste, until food is but dirt on the tongue,”
said the second woman.
“The nose, it next decays, death the only stench to stay,”
the third woman said.
“The eyes follow, the jaws of the mountains a colorless gray,”
the fourth said, then turned to the fifth women.
“Touch, the noblest, is last to decline,”
she said.
“The final
remainder of life in this soul of mine.”
The five Keepers. One for each point. That’s why their faces had aged so differently—they each occupied a separate point on the map, one sense decaying while the others lived on. I remembered Monsieur’s note.
You have their protection.
Show it to them
. The five women in front of us, the Keepers, were supposedly the descendants of Ophelia Hart, the ninth sister, the one who had hidden the chest in the lake for us to find. Which meant that they could only want one thing. “The box,” I said.
Dante squinted at me, his thoughts meeting mine.
“In
its world it is dust, in the hand it is coal,”
he said, reciting the final lines of Descartes’s riddle.
“At long last I found it, the
ephemeral soul.”
He lowered his bag and took out the small black box. The Spades of the Keepers wavered.
“In the hand it is coal,” he said to himself. “Does that mean that this is—?”
“A soul,” I whispered, completing his sentence. Was that what the final lines of the riddle meant: that in the Netherworld, the soul took on the form of dust, and in the hand, it solidified into a rock, just like the one we’d found in the chest? Was that how Descartes had taken a soul to use on his deathbed?
Anya had been right, back in Paris; it had never been a box in the first place. All this time we’d already had an extra life with us, and we’d had no idea.
The Keepers didn’t answer. They lifted their Spades, and speaking in harmony, they each whispered, “A soul is not given; it is earned. It is yours to use.” Their white figures shrank back.
Ours to use? An itch inside me wanted Dante to press it to his lips and take a new life. But where would that leave everyone else? Where would that leave me?
The others were thinking the same thing; I could tell by the way they eyed it, their faces greedy.
“Give it to Noah,” Anya said finally. “I don’t have any elixir that can bring him back,” she continued, looking at Dante, “but you do.”
None of us spoke as she stepped toward Dante and took the black box from his hands. I could see its weight tugging against her as she knelt over Noah. She pushed the hair away from his face. His lips parted slightly at her touch. She held the black box over him, its heaviness making her arms tremble. When she lowered it to his mouth, its black edges began to dissolve. The dust swept itself into a thin black thread that seeped between his lips, twisting down, down, until there was nothing left in Anya’s hands but a smudge of black.
Noah’s muscles twitched, the veins in his arms lifting as the blood began to pulse through them. His chest heaved. His lips parted. He gasped.
Anya backed away, so startled that she stumbled over herself.
The Keepers swept over Noah. “Go,” they said to us in unison. “Go.”
But I couldn’t move; I was too stunned. Was it real? Had it worked?
I felt Dante’s hand on my arm. “We’re almost there,” he said. “We have to go.”
As Dante pulled me away, following the others toward the valley, I turned and watched over my shoulder as Noah’s hand, which had lain lifeless in the snow, curled into a fist. He was alive.
“Good-bye,” I whispered to him.
Following the etching on the chest, we made our way down the valley toward the third lake, inside of which lay the fifth point. The path cut through the surrounding hills like a dry riverbed. The snow on the ground grew spotty, revealing dry and rocky earth.
A twinge of pins and needles prickled the underside of my skin. It traveled down to my fingertips, where Dante’s hand was interlaced with mine. His palm felt suddenly distant, his touch no longer familiar, his skin no longer cold. Though I could see the wind blowing the dirt in swirls over the snow, I could barely feel its icy sting against my face, and though I could see the sun, I could no longer feel it warming my face.
Touch, the noblest, is last to decline, the final remainder of life
in this soul of mine
. We were nearing the end of Descartes’s riddle.
The landscape broke open into a vast lake, its shore crusted with ice, its water black. It was so serene that it almost looked like it wasn’t a lake all, but a strange extension of the land around us, reflecting the clouds and the French Alps like a world inverted.
I bent over the surface. I felt Dante, Theo, Anya, and Eleanor kneel beside me. The water rippled, shifting my reflection until the Renée that appeared before me had changed. She stared up at me, bewildered, as though she could see me, too. She reached up, her hand trembling as it neared the surface, trying to touch me.
As it came closer, the memories spilled from my fingertips, so tactile that I felt the smooth texture of Dante’s shoulder blades beneath my hands; the chalkboard, dry and dusty against my neck as he pressed me against it. His sheets, rough against my cheek as I nestled into his bed in Attica Falls all those years ago, and his body, heavy beside mine while I fell asleep next to him. His hand wrapped around mine as he guided my pencil across the page in Latin. The first time we touched, his hand sending a spark of electricity under my skin beneath the desk in science class.
The memories dissipated like dust, replaced with the scratchy knitted blanket that lined Anya’s couch; the squish of the beets that the fortune teller made me peel before reading my fortune; the velvety texture of Eleanor’s cashmere sweater as she wrapped her arms around me. The sticky feeling of sunscreen and tanning oil; the salt of the ocean clinging to my hair. The warm breeze as I held my hand out the window, letting the summer sun kiss my skin.
I tried to cling to the last part of my soul, but it slipped from my grasp, unwinding until I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be chilled to the bone, to be warmed by the sun, to feel the grass beneath my feet or Dante’s fingers tangling with mine.
I felt nothing as the last bit of touch left me. The ice beneath my hands no longer felt cold, the bag on my shoulder no longer felt heavy. My hair blew in front of my face. It should have tickled, but I registered nothing.
I stared down at the Renée in the water as she reached up and broke the surface, disturbing the glassy reflection of the lake. The water sloshed out, and when it did, I caught a glimpse of something straight and long beneath, like a beam of wood. I leaned closer, following the beam as it slanted down into the shape of a roof.
“What do we do now?” Theo said beside me, but I didn’t respond.
I threw a rock into the lake, and then another until the houses beneath began to appear. There were dozens of them deep beneath the surface.
“There are houses under there,” I said. How many were there? I scanned the perimeter of the lake. It spanned almost the entire width of the valley.
The others gathered around me.
Anya’s eyes widened. “The lost city,” she said. “I’ve heard stories about this place: an ancient city of Monitors who were protecting a secret. But it soon became overrun by Undead. The Monitors flooded it, washing it clean of the Undead and burying them for good at the bottom of the lake. I always thought it was just a children’s story.”
“Washed clean,” I said to myself. “Like the soul.”
This was it, I realized. The Netherworld. It was somewhere beneath us; we just had to find the way in.
“It’s at the bottom,” Dante said beside me, reading my thoughts. “We have to swim.”
“Underwater?” Eleanor whispered. “But that will kill me.”
She knew just as well as I did that the Undead couldn’t sink; their bodies naturally had to float. And for good reason: sinking beneath the earth had the same effect as burial. It would put them to rest.
“I think that’s the point,” I said.
“But what are we even looking for?” Eleanor asked. “How will we know what to do?”
I bit my lip. The riddle said nothing about this part of the journey, nor did the chest. I had no idea.
Anya dropped her bag. “Not everything is guaranteed,” she said. “We just have to take a leap, and hope that we’re right.”
Eleanor fell quiet. “But how will we even get down there?” she said. “We can’t swim against the force of our bodies.”
“But we can,” Theo said. “Hold on to us.” He dropped his bag and began to strip down, as did Anya, quickly slipping off all of the gear that might hinder any ability to swim. While they prepared themselves, I turned to Dante. His eyes reflected the sky and the clouds, as if he was already drifting to another world. Was this good-bye?
Gently, he unbuttoned my coat and let it slide off my shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “This is just the beginning.”
Though his eyes were clouded, behind them I could still see the softness of his irises, the pupils sharpening as they took me in. He was a part of me, and I a part of him.
His hand slid down my arm. I could barely feel it. Still, I laced my fingers through his.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“No,” I whispered. I knew now that there were some things in life I would never be ready for. Our eyes met. I could see my reflection in his gaze. I didn’t say good-bye. I had to believe that there would be time for me to say it later.
“Don’t let go,” I said.
I took a deep breath, feeling my chest expand with air, and before I could change my mind, I dove beneath the surface.
I waited for the shock of the cold to make my muscles seize, but I felt nothing but numb. The weight of his body pulled against me as we plunged beneath the earth. I spread my arms wide and pushed harder, dragging him deeper into the lake.
I didn’t know where I was going; I only hoped that when I saw it, I would know. Beside me, Theo and Anya pulled Eleanor underwater. Dante’s grip loosened on my hand, threatening to slip away. I tightened my fingers around his and swam faster, leading us toward a slant of rooftops. The houses looked centuries old; their walls were covered in a film of algae. The windows looked in on abandoned rooms, the furniture covered in a thick layer of sediment.
Dante’s body grew weak, his arms beginning to quiver.
Not yet
, I pleaded. We were close. We had to be.
A white stone steeple stood tall over the houses. The tower, I realized, remembering the last card Anya had placed on the table during Dante’s tarot reading. Beside it stood a thick stone gate. I swam toward it, pulling at the handles of the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. Theo swam beside me, tugging at them until they cracked open. Clutching Dante’s hand, I pulled him inside.
The water from the lake gushed in, carrying us with it into a dry cavern. I gasped, my lungs starving for air, while the others slid in behind us, the press of water pushing the door shut. I scanned the rocky enclave for the others. Anya was coughing on the floor. Theo helped her up, then slung Eleanor’s arm over his shoulder. She was barely conscious, her body trembling from the weight of the ground above her. The last bit of life was leaving her. There was no time. I stumbled through the water toward Dante, who was lying against the rock, almost lifeless, each rise and fall of his chest slighter, weaker. “Dante?” I said. “Don’t leave me yet. We’ve almost made it.” I waited for him to speak, but he said nothing.
Unsure what to do, I scanned the cavern around us, searching for an answer. Around us loomed a vast underground cave, the walls made of a hard black stone, the same as the sealed box. Inside, it was dry. There was no end to the ceiling, only darkness as far as I could see. A swirling black lake lapped at the rocks by our feet, its waves made of dust rather than water. I reached down and touched it, watching as the dust hardened in my hand like a black stone.
In its world it is dust, in the hand it is coal,
At long last I found it, the ephemeral soul.
I could hear the soft murmur of voices rising from the surface: laughter, whispers, shouts of pain, of joy.
The waves twisted and looped up, contorting up into shapes. They shifted into a face, followed by a narrow set of shoulders and a pair of skinny legs. The thin frame of a boy materialized before me like a shadow. I recognized him. “Nathaniel?” I whispered. One of my first friends at Gottfried. He pushed his glasses up his nose and opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, but no sound escaped his lips. Had he been put to rest? Is that why I was seeing him here? I reached out to touch him, but before I could, he shattered, the dust dispersing around me. Out of it emerged others, friends and family, all long-dead, each of them dark and grainy. Black memories.