The Death of Jane Lawrence(112)

So many moments threaten to fracture, even moments when Elodie never was. The doctor’s bag that will almost be her undoing is not in the third-floor bedroom hearth. She sees Vingh leave his unattended, and does not know if they are the same, or different, or both. She takes it anyway. She burns it. The scalpel cuts into her finger. The ether burns her nose and mouth. Her mother’s skirts wrap around her.

Jane flees, blood streaking from her arm, and Augustine chases just behind. Augustine is slow, but not slow enough. He will reach her. He will catch her, and drag her back down here, and she can see the shame in him, a living, twisting thing that curls around his heart and gnaws at his spine.

This is not how this moment goes. She must change it. She must recalculate.

Must she? The whiteness is held at bay, steady and distant. Perhaps she has done enough. Perhaps, here, she can fix what comes next, truly fix it. If she lets herself be caught and dragged back down, she will never conjure the stone that will doom Augustine.

But she might die. The light in Augustine’s eyes is not sane. The creatures that feed upon his shame have stoked him to a fever pitch, because what would be more shameful than to think he is about to save his new wife, only to be the indisputable cause of her death? In the morning, when the clouding clears, he will hate himself. It is genius. It is horrible. She must stop it, for her own sake, for his.

She shouts his name.

He falters.

Jane reaches the door and slams it shut. Augustine looks back once over his shoulder, searching for the cry that staggered him, but continues his climb. He beats himself against the wood, howling, “Jane! Jane, open this door!” On the other side, Jane is slipping, weakened, whispering.

“Jane, please!” Augustine begs.

I am well. Jane mouths the words in the crypt and says them in the hall. This is when she falls. This is when she is too weak to keep fighting.

The stone wall does not appear.

She does not know enough to will a wall into existing. She can’t even draw a circle.

Is that true?

Yes. And no.

She does know enough. She can draw a circle. She knows what will happen if she does not summon the wall, if she does not lock Augustine away.

Jane reaches out and conjures the stone herself. The white expanse of an unknown future begins to crumble.

She condemns Augustine to suffering.

Augustine falls back. He stares at the unyielding stone for one long moment, then turns away. He sees her, standing at the base of the stairs, and his whole face falls. He is confused. He is despairing. He knows something is very wrong.

He comes to her. “Jane? Jane, I saw you, I saw you leave.” He collapses at her feet, staring up at her. “I don’t understand.”

Jane, fading fast toward oblivion, hears him speak to her from upstairs in the hall. His voice is distant. It is close. He is reaching for her. She cannot see him. She watches everything.

She flees, unwilling to see Augustine alone, afraid, because of her.

The maze of the crypt folds around her. She steps past frozen statues, peers at their faces, and tries not to hear Augustine behind her.

He collapses without a sound and curls up, weak and drawn. She does not face him, but still sees his hunger, fierce and gnawing, tangled in his abdomen and pulsing with bright fury in the lines of the world. He has tried to work magic. Tried to feed himself with wishing, tried to conjure water, conjure warmth. He cannot do it, because he does not know the ritual forms, and the forms control him, though they are man-made, and magic, Jane knows, is not.

He is weak, and Jane is, too. She holds him in her arms, and he curls into her, whispering her name. She strokes his hair. She cradles him as he shivers, but she is not alive; she can provide no warmth, no help.

He dies.

He dies afraid. His body grows cold. He did not last long at all. She smells the smoke of blood-soaked sheets burning in the library fireplace.

So soon.

She never had a chance of saving him. He was dead as soon as Jane conjured the stone door, desperate to save her earlier self, heedless of the consequences. Just now? A lifetime ago? She looks at the body in her arms. And yet he comes to her, in the study. She feels him move inside her. His hands are deep within her body. His lips are hot against her cheek. But no; it is not him.

She looks at this form that is shaped from him, shares the lines of him. In some places, like his hands, his face, there is intricate, exacting detail, fine-sketched shapes against a chalkboard. But in his chest, his legs, there are gaps. Great, gaping holes where magic cannot describe him, because Jane does not know him well enough.

She stares. She frowns. She touches the chest of the Augustine who operates on her, and the chest of Augustine, nervous on their wedding night, and feels both, warm and solid beneath her fingertips. And yet they are not the same.

What is her surgeon? What is it that has killed her at her demand? Is he free to leave, or will he, too, evaporate with the dawn?

She does not want him to. She wants him to be real. She wants to have had some chance at success.

Augustine dies. Augustine lives.

Both are true, here in death. She wishes that could be true elsewhere. But in life, time is linear. One thing happens, and then the other. There is no changing that.

And then there is Renton.

He exists two feet off the ground, his limbs knotted back on themselves the way his bowel had twisted and killed him. He stinks of filth, the scent pungent and real in a way the burning sheets are not. His head is bent back, tucked beneath one arm, and he looks at her calmly.