The Death of Jane Lawrence(94)

All the magic in the world was worthless if she failed. She could not bring him back from the dead. She could not even move a book.

Weeping now, she curled up at the base of the shelf, the wood pressing against her spine. It would be best to give it all up; how much time did she even have left? Below her left ribs, a mass pressed against her flesh; with more magic, it might grow. And without Augustine, what would be left of her? A broken madwoman, her body growing out of order, knowing of the impossible and knowing she could not grasp it. Another failure for Dr. Nizamiev to add to her collection, to study endlessly. And perhaps that was what the doctor had hoped for all along; new data, a new experiment, a new subject.

Perhaps she’d never intended to help.

Jane was alone. More alone than she had been when she had fled Lindridge Hall, more alone than she had been the day she realized she would have to change her life, either by going back to dreaded Camhurst or marrying to stay behind. More alone than when she was a little girl, staring at the ceiling in her room in Larrenton, wondering if the bombs were still falling. Wondering if her mother was alive. Her sobs turned to gasping breaths, and she turned herself toward the shelves, pressing her forehead against all the books. Their dusty scent should have been grounding, but instead she smelled the stench of spreading gas, felt the shudder of buildings barely holding up to assault.

But … if she let that memory wash over her, she could still remember her mother’s touch. What it had been to sleep near her, protected, and to hear a familiar, soothing voice, murmuring in her ear, as the whole world came apart around her. And by comparison, even the pain of Camhurst was familiar; it was terrible, but in the way that old wounds were terrible. She knew its shape, its texture. It offered the comfort of an old friend, rather than a new agony.

She wanted that comfort. And suddenly, selfishly, she was thankful her mother was dead.

Because with her mother dead, couldn’t she appear at Lindridge Hall?

If Jane squinted, the leather bag set atop the bookshelf looked like her mother’s gas mask. If Jane knew her mother’s boots were over by the doorway, they would appear; she still remembered their sulfurous reek, the way her mother had stuffed the toes because the boots were not made for a woman’s feet, the cracking and burns on the leather itself from incendiaries. With every detail, her world narrowed focus, her heartbeat slowed.

She might still call her mother’s spirit, if she learned to blame herself again. And she had shame enough to drown an army.

It would be easy; she’d blamed herself for her mother’s death from the day the notice came, years ago. She had wished she were better: more compliant, more loveable, so that her mother wouldn’t have sent Jane away to safety. She had wished that she were worse, crying and screaming and objecting so loudly, so strenuously that her mother would have had to take her to Larrenton herself, and then be enticed to stay.

Her breathing regained some semblance of rhythm. Yes—she could peel up the scab and feel all her old terrors once more, if it would bring her mother to her. It was something actionable, her will worked upon the world.

Because Jane was alive. She lacked control, perhaps, but not power. As long as she could still think, still know, she could take another step, and another.

She did not even have to conjure her mother; if there truly was no other way to save Augustine, then she could conjure his ghost, for it would be her failure that condemned him. The torment would be worth it, to speak to him, to compare notes, to have him in some capacity.

The thought hurt, but with the hurt came certainty. Logic. Her chest no longer felt so tight, her head so heavy.

She had told Augustine that death always won. But now she was not so sure; now she knew that, in at least some spectral way, the impossible could be made real. Death could not be defeated, but it could be amended.

And there were still five nights left in the ritual. Augustine had not yet appeared to her, and so she could assume he still lived.

She pushed herself upright.

She had her proof, now, that magic was real. All that was left was to make it cohere.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


SHE WOULD PICK up where she had left off the night before. The rituals, the mathematics, the circles—all necessary steps that she must take with thorough care. And when night fell, Renton might return to her. Or Elodie might appear again, ready to divulge wisdom once more. Even if they came in opposition, Jane might still glean some new meaning, some new fragment.

All she had to do was work and keep from sleeping.

She set herself up in the library, sitting against the far glass wall, the chill there keeping her alert as she dove once more into her mathematical treatise. What could she learn there, with her new, more worldly context?

She read through philosophical musings, poetic flourishes that the Jane of a week ago had been irritated by, had skimmed over except where she failed to understand the next proof, and had to go back and untangle the logic. Now, those same esoteric passages held special meaning, seeming to vibrate on the page. The author paired zero with an empty nothingness, but a nothingness that went on forever, for nothing could have no bounds. The infinite and zero were one. Except that the infinite was the greatest thing in the world, and zero was nothing at all. They were opposite.

They were the same.

Surely there was meaning in that?

She watched as the values of equations, plotted as curves, approached zero, and watched, too, as their component parts shot off into infinity. Another curve, complex and oscillating, seemed to go mad as it approached zero, swinging through every value on the chart on its way. She followed along as the mathematician inscribed triangles beneath an arc, until there was no empty space left. The answer, of course, was that it would take an endless number of triangles to reach zero, even though the space beneath the curve was fixed.