They brought him the girl in the dead of night.
Saul Rosenburg had been up since dawn that day, and he hadn't expected the Wardens for some time yet, so the knock on his door came as a rather unpleasant surprise. He shuffled into his slippers and down the stairs, grumbling all the while. He was an old man, even by wizarding standards, older even than the Merlin, so old he'd actually retired from most White Council activities. He was certainly too old for this.
They waited on the porch, three figures like smoke in their grey cloaks and a small bundle of darker grey carried in the arms of the tallest. The one in the lead inclined his head as Saul opened the door.
"Wizard Rosenburg," he said, and Saul recognized the voice as David Casady. "Thank you."
Saul shook his head. "No thanks are needed," he said. "Please, enter my home in good will."
He stepped aside and they glided in, the tallest laying his bundle on the couch. Saul let them close the door and went about lighting candles, touching matches to the wicks rather than using magic. He had lived long enough to disdain the use of magic for such ordinary things, lest an emergency call for more than he had.
"You have brought the child?" he asked, more a formality than anything else, as he lit the last candle.
"Yes," Casady said. He hesitated, as Saul turned around, and added, "Her name is Gabrielle. Gabrielle Benske."
"Ah." Saul did not particularly care what the child's name was; by all accounts she was in no condition to respond to it anyway. "Well, let me have a look at her."
The other Wardens moved away from the couch and let him forward, to unwrap the dark grey cloak and get his first look at this child he had so reluctantly agreed to care for.
His overwhelming first impression was one of fragility; huge eyes and avian bones, a light, thin body lithe as a whip. Very pale, too. Pale blonde hair and pale blue eyes and pale white skin. She almost faded into herself, a transparency against the dark rich leather of his couch and the deeper red of the walls.
She was also totally nonresponsive. She had not even flinched when he moved the cloak away from her face. Saul watched her stare straight ahead, her gaze unwavering even as the rest of the room moved about her, and shook his head. "What happened to her?" he asked Casady, over his shoulder.
"We're not sure," Casady said, reluctantly. Saul glanced sharply over his shoulder and saw the younger man shrug, clearly uncomfortable. "She was hurt, in uncertain circumstances. She was a wizard—well, we think she still is. She can be soulgazed and she still gives a wizard-shock."
Saul touched the girl's hand and nodded; she did indeed set off that tiny spark of recognition one magic-user had for another. "So. And she's in a waking coma?"
Casady shrugged again. "She eats, sleeps, even walks and moves if she's led or pushed, but apart from that, she doesn't respond to anything." He hesitated again. "We did try, Wizard. We tried everything we could think of. But we simply don't have the manpower or the time."
"I see." Saul watched the girl, watched her sit and stare, and shook his head. "Well. God's will be done. Tell Commander Luccio I will care for her as best I can."
"We will," and the Wardens were gone as silently as they came.
---
The girl, to all appearances, had not slept.
Saul stood in the doorway for a moment, looking down at her where she lay under a faded old quilt of his mother's. She stared up at the ceiling with the blank expression of a porcelain doll, a disturbing blankness in a living child.
Or did she live? What did it mean to live? The spiritualists of his childhood had argued that simply to breathe could not be enough, that one had to be "saved" before one could be truly said to live. Disregarding the obvious Christian bunk, Saul could see the beginnings of a point within the idea. There had to be some sense of awareness...
"Good morning," he said, and failed to provoke any reaction, not even so much as a hitch in breathing. Obscure disappointment washed over him—complete nonsense, of course. Anastasia had told him not to get attached, that the body held nothing of the girl. Brain-dead, the mortals called it. The person, the self had died, and the body did not yet know it.
Saul grew frustrated with his thinking; so much to do and pointless musing did not cross items off his list. He strode briskly forward, not bothering with words, folded the quilt back and lifted the girl into a sitting position.
Somewhat to his surprise, she rose automatically, some buried muscle memory propelling her upright. He glanced at her face—nothing, not even a flicker of response, and yet not even at the height of his physical strength could he have lifted her so easily.
He hadn't really believed what Casady had said the previous night, about her moving when pushed, but clearly it was so, and it made his life a great deal easier. He'd cursed Anastasia's name in loud and strident tones while his back screamed—in retrospect carrying the girl to bed had not been the best of ideas, but he hadn't believed Casady, and who would leave even an empty shell to sleep on an uncomfortable couch?
He walked her to the couch, made breakfast for them both and was pleased to find that she could be spoon-fed as well. Whatever had happened to her, she was clearly not catatonic, at least not in the average sense. What was it Anastasia had said when she'd asked him to take her in? A shattered mind? Was it not the same thing?
And why him? Saul carried the dishes back to the kitchen to wash them, and mulled the question over. The child's ability to move when led did lessen his responsibilities, but he still had to care for her, dress and feed her, and perform other functions more suitable to a young father than an old wizard. He'd never married, never had children, never cared for any child below the age of ten or so. His mother had been furious with him, but his older siblings had given her grandchildren aplenty, grandchildren that multiplied as the generations went on and then were buried in the fire...
He shied away from the memory, as always. He had been nowhere near Germany during the Shoah, but he knew enough people who had to sleep uneasily.
It had nothing to do with the girl, anyway. She was entirely separate, almost unearthly. A ghost in the land of the living.
Saul shivered, and turned his thoughts away from the supernatural to focus on the purely practical. He had given her a room. The clothes she wore would suffice for now, though he supposed he should get her some more in the future, and of course more food. Thank goodness he was getting an extra stipend for her care. He could not afford it otherwise.
He stole a glance at the motionless figure on the couch. If he were honest, he did not know that he could afford it now.
---
It was only by contrast that Saul realized the girl needed a bath.
He noticed because he could see her more easily. Her porcelain-white, translucent skin faded so easily into the clear light from the bay window that she all but disappeared at times; when Saul discovered he could see her clearly more often than not, he also discovered that smudges of dust had somehow very faintly discolored her skin, dust that left an obvious grey blot on his thumb when he touched her arm.
A vague horror curled around his stomach at the sight. She was so still, and he was in some ways thinking of her as a doll to be moved around, fed and dressed, but in other ways she was still a child, something alive, and living things did not collect dust. For one wild moment he considered getting out his old feather duster with the fancy curved handle, then he scolded himself. She was still a child, and children took baths.
Awkward as it would be for both of them. Saul dared not leave her alone in the bathtub that was all he had—he had no way of knowing whether she was self-aware enough to keep herself from drowning. He'd have to undress and put her in the bath anyway. Lord, when was the last time he'd seen a naked woman, let alone a breastless girl? The child (he dressed and undressed her without removing her underwear) couldn't be more than thirteen or fourteen.
He wiped his thumb on his shirt and went to run the bath, thinking as he did that he ought to request the files on the girl, if he didn't even know how old she was.
The girl rose at pressure on her elbow, turned and walked where he led, the blankness still present in the loose boneless roll of her arms as she walked and the total lack of expression on her face. And there was another question, the one he kept returning to, the one no one had explained to his satisfaction—what had happened to make her this way? Whatever it was, the Wardens felt guilty about it. Anastasia had gone silent when he asked her, the peculiar silence that from her meant she wasn't answering a question and intended to be sure he knew it, and Casady had shifted, refused to look at him, and muttered only "it was our fault."
He turned the girl into the bathroom, set her on the toilet and tested the water—warm, but not hot, almost amniotic. Perhaps the girl had been fed on by the Reds until she became catatonic. Perhaps she had been enslaved by a warlock, her mind erased. Except... he paused while twisting the knob shut and looked again at that blank face. Vampiric slaves fed on to catatonia usually died. Those taken by warlocks went mad, or killed themselves. And none of the survivors, in his experience, were being cared for by former Wardens.
What was so special about this girl?
He turned off the water and gently stripped her shirt off. It would need a wash too, perhaps even a scrubbing, he would have to buy her some more clothes and there was a scar on Gabrielle's back.
Saul turned her carefully and looked as closely at the scar as he could. A ragged red collection of lines that vaguely resembled a shooting star arced across her back, from the bumpy column of her spine to the very bottom edge of her ribcage.
He flashed into fury so fast it left him breathless. A scar like that on a prepubescent girl who had no business being in bar fights... it meant one thing and one thing only.
---
Gabrielle sat on his couch with her pale feathery hair drying in the sun, and Saul watched her instead of listening to the excuses whichever apprentice working the phones was spouting. Anastasia must have lectured them lately; the poor boy grew increasingly more creative as Saul's silence grew more pointed. It would have been amusing if he had not been so angry.
"Enough," he cut the apprentice off. "I will speak to Commander Luccio if I have to walk into her office and push past you physically. Now fetch her."
The boy went silent, then said, "I will ask her." Nothing more, no title, but Saul had no anger to spare for insubordination.
"Saul?" Anastasia sounded concerned when she picked up. "Is there a problem with the girl?"
"Anastasia," he replied, and even to his own ears his voice was stretched tight as a wire. "Could you please explain to me how a little girl acquires a scar from a broken bottle?"
"We didn't do it, if that's what you were asking," she snapped, then sighed. "We don't know, Saul. She had it when we found her."
He was not pacified. "Is that what happened to her?" he demanded. "Was she beaten into catatonia? Or did someone abuse her until her mind broke? Did she--" Somewhere under his ranting, Anastasia said something, but it was too quiet to hear clearly. He cut himself off. "What did you say?"
"I said," she repeated, quietly, "that as far as we can tell she did it to herself."
He was speechless for a moment, then said, in a soft and dangerous tone, "Anastasia, if you are trying to suggest that the child deserved what was done to her..."
She snorted—Saul got the feeling that if he had not trained her, she would have suggested in strongest tones that he not be too much of an idiot. "Of course not. I meant that rather more literally. She destroyed her own mind."
He looked at Gabrielle, at the way her hair fluffed as it dried, and asked, softly, "How?"
Anastasia sighed again. "You saw that scar. There are others, and I'm certain if we could look we'd find broken bones. You weren't far off, earlier; she was abused, and we think by her parents. Now do you see?"
Sunlight slid through the trees and made the child's pale hair a specious halo. The question he did not want to ask... "She killed them." he said, flatly. "As soon as her powers manifested."
"No," Anastasia said, and he let out a breath. "Casady soulgazed her—there's no malice there. We think--I think--she was trying to get away, and it got away from her. She did too much too soon. That's the burnout, and maybe some mental injuries she's trying to fix, which is the catatonia." She paused. "As for her parents, yes, they died, but she did not intend to kill them."
"And she has no one?" Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew them to be true; why would the Wardens have passed her off onto an old man if she had family anywhere else?
A rustling of papers came down the phone line. "No," Anastasia said at last. "Parents dead, obviously, with no siblings, grandparents died when she was a toddler, no relations closer than second cousins. Certainly no one who would be willing to take her in."
"So you brought her to me," he said, noncommittally.
"Yes." His old apprentice hesitated. "Saul, if it's that much of a problem..."
He surprised himself by cutting her off. "Oh, no, she's a dear. No trouble at all. I just...I was confused."
"Oh," she said, sounding vaguely surprised herself. "Very well, then. I'll leave her with you. I--damn! Saul, I have to go." She hung up without another word.
He replaced the receiver thoughtfully. The abrupt farewell did not bother him. Anastasia had a war to run and apprentices to wrestle with; he felt lucky she'd spared him that much time.
But he understood now; understood Anastasia's silence and Casady's quiet sadness. It hadn't been their fault, not really, any more than the Shoah had been his. But he understood.
It was our fault.
It was our fault because we did nothing.
---
It was a bright, sunny day some five months after the girl had come to him; early June, and his garden sparkled. He brought Gabrielle outside for the first time since he'd been caring for her; he thought she might enjoy the day, and anyway he wanted to tend his garden without checking on her every five minutes.
Life seemed almost normal again. Some of the neighbors came by, and he introduced Gabrielle as his granddaughter, one who dreamed in the sun sometimes and did not respond. She might have been his granddaughter, he thought, for all the generations between his birth and hers.
Saul picked a bluebell and tucked it carefully behind her ear, so that she did not look quite so much like a little ghost.
Little ghost. He would not fail her again.