vi.

The harvesters of the Mortuary held onto the spiralled staircase as it lowered, a trunk of carved white bone among trunks of dying black wood. Wrapped head to toe against the ashes and against sight, the masks on their faces providing them with the air of the heights even down below, they leaned over the nearly-dead man like pale vultures in the glow of the halos fixed to the back of their masks, testing his pulse against a pocket watch, waiting for his breathing to slow down just enough. He tried to sit up, to point—somewhere towards us—and the little boy by my side turned to bury his face in my hip.

A part of me wanted to run. The part that wasn’t Fayne, the part that collected flowers and grass where they dared to find their way from the outside through the cracks and grow green again in the inside air, simmered with a quiet rage never spoken and never shown, yearning to shatter through those glass walls. Yearning to hold this child up to those masked strangers who chose which heartbeats to wait out and which to stop, who gave each other the right to outlive us, and say give us back or give us forever, or don’t take us at all.

But I knew better—I knew some people died, and others didn’t, and those who wouldn’t had no choice but to wait and see.

“Enair.” Marco again, quiet now, tired, so pale against the black wool of my sweater. “Will he pass through the Door and come back?”

They don’t—they haven’t, not a single spirit. Not for all the years we’ve been alive, not for all these living making their home here, waiting, signing their songs like the Bearers and the rest of us had up there in our clouds.

But the Door, the Door. The mention of it tingled at the edge of my mind that was mine alone, waking up something, somewhere. Something old and forgotten; a sibling holding me close by the fireplace, telling me an old, old story before the harvesters took their place and Bearer Avida told me not to cry, because I was one of them, I would be forever.

“The Mortuary will do what it can,” Enair told Marco in comfort, and the storm of emotions that shadowed the statement gripped my chest and left me breathless. Passion of her hate sparked like wildfire, but from it fell ashes of grief, of guilt where she put her faith in the strangers she couldn’t help but despise, covering like long-unseen snow the buds of hope blooming where she tried so hard to bury them away.

Our stomach ached. Our head threatened to split. Somewhere that wasn’t here, a body that wasn’t hers or ours, that was cold and motionless where it had crumpled by the side of the bed, trembled against the absence of a drumming heartbeat.