Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(21)

Christopher winced. Jack had always been so self-assured, so mature; even when she’d first arrived at the school, she’d carried herself like she was much older than her actual years, like she was just waiting for the calendar to catch up with the woman she already knew herself to be. That girl was gone. In her place was a wailing, keening child, tears streaking her cheeks and snot running down her upper lip as she struggled to gather the hidden man’s bulk in her arms.

Sumi trotted after Jack, not stopping until she was close enough to look down and see what Jack was clinging to so tightly, what she was trying so hard to pull into her arms. A flicker of sympathetic pain crossed her face, replaced almost instantly by her customary air of unconcern.

“Is it harder to resurrect someone who doesn’t have a head?” she asked—and if she pitched her voice so it would carry to Christopher and warn him of the situation, Jack didn’t seem to notice. “It seems like it would be harder.”

Jack bent forward until she was folded nearly double, wails dwindling to an almost-inaudible weeping. Chris topher took a deep breath and stepped through the gate, walking along the bloody path until he could see what was going on.

He immediately wished he hadn’t.

Dr. Bleak’s body was massive: it filled most of the space between two garden beds. He hadn’t gone down without a fight: deep gashes marked his arms, and his chest looked like it had been sliced nearly in two. Most of the stump of his neck was hidden by Jack, who was kneeling where his head should have been, her folded arms resting on his chest as she sobbed into her hands. There was blood in her hair. For once in her life, she didn’t seem to notice, or care.

Sumi circled the windmill, humming and picking ripe tomatoes from the garden beds. “I thought you needed sunlight to grow tomatoes,” she commented idly. “You could sell a shade-growing variety for a whole lot of money, I bet.”

“Sumi,” hissed Christopher.

“What? The world doesn’t stop spinning because you’re sad, and that’s good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is. They’d make it out like it was a good thing, a few crying children in exchange for a peace that never falters or fades.” Her face hardened. “We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done. It’s time to get up, Jacqueline Wolcott. It’s time to remember what needs to be done for this cookie to crumble the way you want it to.”

Slowly, Jack lifted her head. Alexis had reached the gate.

“The ocean caught your mermaid,” she said, voice soft and broken, like the wind whistling through the eaves. The lightning in her heart was running out. “She’s gone to the Drowned Gods. The goblin went after her. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop her.”

Jack looked at her with an all-encompassing blankness in her eyes. “What?”

“The mermaid ran and the goblin followed,” said Alexis, before repeating, “I’m sorry.”

“Ah.” Jack closed her eyes for a moment as she stood, running gloved, bloody hands over her hair. “Complications. Why must people be so difficult? We’ll go to the abbey. We’ll get them back. And then I want Dr. Bleak’s head, and the time to bring him back, and my own body, and for my sister to pay for what she’s done.”

“Sounds like you want a lot of things,” said Sumi. “Let’s get started.”

Jack looked at her. “Aren’t you worried about your friends?”

Sumi shrugged. “They’re your friends, too, or Kade is, anyway, and you don’t sound worried.”

“I’m too terrified for anything as simple as concern.”

“Good enough for me,” said Sumi. “You don’t live long enough to come back through the doors if you’re not a hero. They’re heroes, or they were. They’ll remember themselves or they won’t. If they do, they earn themselves a little closer to home. If they don’t…”

She shrugged again.

Jack blinked, slowly. “Sometimes I can forget how terrifying you are,” she said. She pulled off her soiled gloves and dropped them into the mud. “This body is too weak for any real lifting. Will those of you with more upper body strength than a dead rat please bring the body? We have a great deal of work to do.”

She turned and walked inside without waiting to see whether they were going to listen. It was clear she already knew the answer—and equally clear that she needed a moment to settle her thoughts.

Christopher walked around to the—well, the head of the body, which felt like a terrible joke—and looked thoughtfully down at the breadth of it. “I can hoist him, but we’re going to need to work together. Sumi, if you can get the feet and Alexis can take the middle, we can do this.”

“Yeah,” chirped Sumi.

“Of course,” said Alexis, shaking off her silence. They moved into position, and together, they hoisted Dr. Bleak off the ground, carrying him toward the windmill like pallbearers in search of a funeral. Sumi’s mouth was slick with juice and seeds from her stolen tomatoes. Christopher looked away, swallowing bile. Under the red light of the rising moon, she looked far too much like a vampire.

The interior of the windmill was like Jack’s room at school writ large and gloriously unconstrained. Shelves lined the walls. Each was laden with tools, raw materials, and the instruments of scientific sorcery. Strange taxidermy and bundles of herbs dangled from the vaulted ceiling, which extended upward to a pair of skylights, each surrounded in turn by a complex system of weights and pulleys. A spiral staircase wound its way up the direct center of the structure, pausing periodically to put forth narrow, dangerous-looking catwalks. Those connected, in their turn, to doors set into the windmill walls. All the additional rooms must have been constructed around the exterior, since there was no room in the middle.