The Death of Jane Lawrence(96)

Just two days. Less than two days until she reached the end of the path and saw where it had taken her. Even her earlier failings had been but lessons; every new step was new knowledge, blossoming inside of her.

Nascent feet pressed against her esophagus as she swallowed down the chick. She choked it down, the sharp, small barbs of early feathers scratching at her throat. Her eyes watered, her lips twisted.

Just a little longer. Just a little—

“Jane.”

It was not the sound of the pipes creaking, or of muffled pleas through unbreakable stone; Augustine’s voice was clear, and gentle, and tired, coming from just outside the study.

He stood in the doorway, correct in every feature as he sagged against the frame. His clothing was rumpled from long days and nights sleeping in stone hallways. He watched her, pale and worn, relieved.

How?

She had swallowed down a half-formed chick, yes, but there were still four more iterations to go. She had not left the study. She had not stood before the crypt wall and willed it down. So how was he standing here, now, looking at her with such joyous desperation?

He needed food. He needed water. And yet she could not make herself leave the safety of the circle. She had already imagined this once, knew what it meant.

If he was here, and the door below still stood, then there was only one way:

She was already too late.

“Stay back,” Jane whispered. Her stomach soured and lurched. She trembled. All her haste and experimentation, for what? He was dead. It no longer mattered.

He lifted his hands and did as she said. “Jane,” he repeated. “You’re still here.”

“Stay back, and be silent,” she hissed.

He winced but nodded.

He didn’t move as she tested the integrity of the wall around her. She built it up higher still, even though her heart was breaking, even though she was filled with rage. She felt dizzy from the effort. Her latest dose of cocaine was wearing off.

Augustine watched the whole while, patient, pained, and far too real. He didn’t plead with her, didn’t argue that there was no need to cast a spell, or that magic was impossible, and when she felt the wall go up, he seemed to feel it, too. His lips curved into the faintest, proudest smile.

“There,” she said, rising to her feet. “If you are a spirit, you can no longer reach me.”

And if he were a man, if he had somehow freed himself without her help, if she was wrong and he still lived, he could walk across and hold her.

There was an old thought experiment, proof of the impossibility of the infinite. A soldier ran at twice the speed of the prisoner he pursued, but the prisoner had a head start of one hundred yards. By the time the soldier crossed that first one hundred yards, the prisoner had run another fifty. The soldier plunged ahead, but when he’d covered those fifty yards, the prisoner was twenty-five ahead. And so on, and on, and the numbers alone would never allow the soldier to reach the prisoner.

But the world did not function on such mathematics; the soldier would eventually be close enough to the prisoner to reach out and seize his quarry. The prisoner would flag, too exhausted by privation to continue fleeing. Reality proved mathematics wrong, and proved infinity impossible, because eventually a step became too small, a space too narrow, for anybody to move and not collide.

Augustine approached, slowly, as if afraid to startle her. He came to the edge of the circle. She could feel his breath on her face. She could see the smallest pore on his cheek.

He lifted his foot.

He stepped across the line.

He was real. He was alive. All her resolve, all the armor she had carefully cultivated over a lifetime, dissolved the instant he reached out and touched her elbow. It was the lightest touch, but the first gentle one she had felt in what seemed like years. Her exhaustion and desperation and loneliness came crashing down upon her, and she threw her arms around him, hiding her face against his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Beneath her hands, Augustine was solid, and he was breathing, and he clasped her tight against him. Her knees weakened, gave out, and she was so heavy, so tired, aching for relief.

“I should never have brought you here,” he murmured, taking her weight in his arms. His voice thrummed through her, a plucked note on a harp’s string.

It was over.

She had won.

She could sleep, and in the morning, her life would make sense again. A whole world rolled out before her, and she realized, trembling, that until that moment it had all fallen away. She’d been floating on her little island of stone and iron and glass, Lindridge Hall set apart from all the rest. But now she could leave. They could leave, together.

And yet …

And yet she did not want to.

Augustine lifted a hand and cupped her cheek, turning her face to his, seeing her exhaustion and sickness. “The surgery,” he said. “You need the surgery, and I as well.”

Jane shook her head. “We have no carriage. It is late.”

“How long since you slept? You’re growing thin.” It wasn’t so different from how he’d looked for signs of yellow fever in her, and yet it felt far more like the night he had bandaged her feet. He was solicitous, apologetic, wholly focused on her. Not distracted, not bewitched. He was not strong yet, and he had not proven his safety again, but it was a start. A perfect start.