"And then," Beyond Birthday says, lacing the skinny fingers of one hand over the flashlight he holds beneath his chin, so the light shines through the room in fractured shades of gold and red, "the lady's bones rose up from the earth and clattered on without her."
Atlas watches him, blue eyes wide with fear and wonder. "And what did the detective do?" It's an unspoken rule of storytelling that listeners speak in a hush, lest they disturb the web that's being spun.
B and A are sitting on piles of pillows and blankets in the middle of the room. They're ten and eleven, respectively — old enough that the case files they spend most of their time in the Wammy House looking through are starting to lose their glamour. At first, they were miraculous ideas and ways to prove their own intelligence, toys for two children clever enough to solve mysteries that adults couldn't unravel. Now they're just pages and pages of dead people. Bones and guts. They need Beyond's magic to bring them alive, to make them ghost stories and fairy tales instead of ugly little fables that all end in variations of the same lonely death.
The whole thing feels like what Atlas imagine slumber parties might look like, for normal children. They've even got cookies they stole from the kitchen. (Their door locks from the outside, but they'd be poor excuses for detectives if they couldn't manage that.)
He wants, desperately, to be a normal child.
Beyond leans in and flashes his white teeth, slips the pink of his tongue between them like a snake, and brushes his yellow hair away from his face. His eyes, in this half-light, burn crimson. "The detective put his hand to the gun at his waist," he says, whispering back. "He had already solved the mystery of her death, but what good would that do him if she ate him before he could speak the answer?"
Atlas leans forwards, too.
And as Beyond opens his mouth to finish the story the door clunks open — they spin to face it, Atlas shoving the box of cookies guiltily beneath the blanket — and the light flicks on. Roger stands in the doorway, watching them with an expression of perfect melancholy on his face.
"I thought I heard voices," he says. He doesn't sound upset, exactly — just mournful. Atlas has never quite understood this sadness of his. It is endless and ever-present. "I won't disturb you much longer. I wanted to let you know that I've just received word that L will be visiting for Christmas."
He looks at them, sadly and benignly, as if he's delivered news of no consequence whatsoever. As if the room hadn't suddenly gone quieter than quiet. He peers into both of their eyes, then nods once. "Well," he says. "Carry on."
The door clunks shut beneath him, and then comes the sound of the lock.
Atlas shivers.
He wants to hear the rest of the story, but he knows that he won't. Not after that. He breathes out, slowly, then turns around.
Beyond's stillness is absolute. He stares at the door. All the light that had been in his voice and his eyes is gone now, replaced by — what? Quietness. An absence. A perfect distillation of intent. Atlas might as well not be in the room at all.
His chest feels heavy. He gathers up the blankets he needs to sleep, stands, pats Beyond once on the shoulder as he passes, and curls up in the bottom bunk. A while ago he might have counted the minutes until Beyond chose to move again, but now he doesn't bother. His friend will be frozen like that for a while. Thinking, he guesses. Plotting, maybe, although about what he doesn't have the faintest clue.
Fuck this place, he thinks. It's eating us alive.
In the morning, there's breakfast, which Atlas always sleepwalks through anyway so he's barely got the energy to notice that Beyond's usual riverbed of chatter is missing. Roger has put frosted pinecones and garlands on the table, to be festive. Atlas finds that they get in the way of the eggs and toast.
He drinks three cups of coffee, in quick succession. It's taking more and more to wake up.
After that, they've got chemistry — ditto with the sleepwalking — and then math, where he's finally starting to feel alive. He fills out his worksheets diligently. The questions are holiday themed. If Santa's reindeer travel at seventy-five miles an hour …
Beside him, Beyond is staring at the page with a concentration he usually reserves for dissection. (His favourite task — Atlas is glad of this, because something about splitting a person's skin makes him squeamish.) Atlas considers jabbing him with a pencil, just to see if it'll break that glassy-eyed stare.
After that, Roger ushers them out of the classroom and into the lab, where he once again pulls out the files of the woman Beyond had been spinning into a ghost story the night before. They know it's a woman because of the weight of her pelvis and her outwardly-turned ischeal tuberosity — other than that, not much of her has been preserved. The bones have been degraded in salt water, and then mysteriously stuffed into a burlap sack and abandoned in a corner of a out-of-use meat packaging plant. Carved deeply into the six ribs that remain are crude drawings of carnivorous animals. They are not permitted to look at the actual bones. As Atlas understands it (although Roger is always confusingly cagey about these things), this is an ongoing investigation, and they are in the possession of the British police.
Once, he would have thought it was exciting to be on the forefront of detective work. Now he just finds it exhausting. The police, as far as Atlas is concerned, are perfectly capable of pooling their vast resources to solve this mystery on their own. Or else they aren't, and the killer won't be caught. What does it matter? She's dead either way.
He just wants to be permitted to stop looking at dead people.
It's lucky that Beyond still seems to care about this sort of thing, if only for the sake of impressing L. Atlas isn't sure how he'd cope if he were forced to muddle through this on his own.
"I'll give you another three hours alone with the pages," Roger says. "You can give me a call at any time." Recently, they've been trying to encourage independence. Mostly they don't need him anymore. He leaves, and locks the door behind him.
The moment he leaves, Beyond's head snaps upwards. He turns to Atlas, his red eyes gleaming.
"He's coming for Christmas," he says. His face breaks into a sharp-toothed grin.
"Probably," Atlas says, cautiously. "He's changed his mind in the past."
"Not this time," Beyond says, with certainty that is deeply disorienting because Atlas knows perfectly well that there's no evidence behind it. They have the same set of clues. They have the same context, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that L's presence is a moving target. "He really is. I know it." He pushes the files aside and hoists himself up onto the table, letting his legs swing beneath him. "Do you think we'll be allowed to buy him presents?"
Atlas pulls out a chair and sits down in front of him. He feels like a doctor investigating a patient. "I doubt it."
"But it's Christmas." Beyond's voice dips and trills. He tilts his head, to one side and then to the other. His blond hair flops over his face. It's getting too long. He should cut it. "It's the season of peace and joy."
"I'm not sure that L knows what either of those things are."
"Of course he does. He lives in the outside world all of the time."
"Sure, followed by Quillsh all the time. Quillsh could suck the peace and joy straight out of anyone."
That comment could go either way — sometimes Beyond idolizes their teachers, and sometimes he hates them — but today he just laughs, and swings his legs a little more. "Christmas doesn't come every day, Atlas."
"Right. It's usually around the twenty-fifth." He pulls his legs up, and curls them under himself. "Do you know what happened to her?"
"Who?"
"The woman. Animal bones."
"Oh, right. Her. You know I never tell stories about unsolved mysteries."
"If you write it down, we can go outside." He'd seen the snow through the window of their classroom. Falling soft as a dream. "I'll teach you how to make a snowman."
Beyond grins a little wider. "No," he says. "I don't think so."
Before Atlas can ask him what he means, he jumps down off the table and goes to the little white phone hung up in beside the door. He dials Roger's number.
"Roger," he says. "I have a deal to make with you."
Walking through the little town an hour and a half away from the Wammy house, Beyond can't stop grinning, clearly pleased with his trick. He'd exchanged the information about this case for the right to an unescorted trip outside into the town, for the purposes of present-buying. Roger had outfitted them in scarves and mittens and dropped them off in front of the bridge.
Atlas, though, can't help but be a little skeptical. There's nothing about it that's obviously wrong, but still — it feels a little convenient. The idea of outsmarting their minders is absurd. They're smarter than them, that's a given, but they have so little to bargain with. Beyond used the only thing he had at all.
Atlas knows that they're getting better at their work. They're getting older. Soon, it won't be enough for them to work from the confines of their little gabled home. They'll have to go into real police offices, and talk to real perpetrators. The carefully orchestrated experience of the world that they have won't be enough forever.
And they will, of course, have to learn how to manipulate people, in ways less clumsy than this. It's like the locks on the doors. They've been given restrictions so that they can learn to break them.
Still, with the snow drifting all around them and little amber lights strung up all along the rooftops, he can't be unhappy with the outcome. The air is cold on his face — his breath rises from his mouth. It tastes gritty from the fumes of the cars that trundle down these streets.
The village looks like something from a Christmas card. Little and tightly clustered, with paths that meander through the brightly coloured shops. A frozen river runs beneath a bridge strung with lights. Snow is piled up along the paths and the banks of the river. People walk past in long dark coats.
They've come here before, but only in the back of Roger's car. Atlas isn't sure what to do with all this empty space, all this freedom.
He doesn't have time to be afraid, though, because Beyond — apparently unmoved— grabs his hand and tugs him forwards.
And why would he be moved? Atlas knows that he doesn't really care about anything but L. There used to be other things, but now there aren't. The list of things he loves is getting whittled away, month by month.
Atlas doesn't have any particular interest in buying L a gift. He's quite sure that L can buy himself anything he really wants, all on his own. Still, he supposes he'll pick up something, for Beyond's sake. He doesn't know why he always plays along with Beyond's insistence that L is a benevolent creature who cares for him the way that Quillsh and Roger insist.
He used to believe in L, but that's gone now, the space in his body where that faith used to live now gutted as if with golden fire. Like the dying of a god, at once minuscule and catastrophic.
They walk from store to store, Beyond growing increasingly frustrated. There's nothing good enough. He picks up and sets down knitted sweaters (too mundane, and besides, he doesn't know what size L is), comic books (those run too close to Beyond's interests), logic puzzles (as if L wouldn't be able to solve them without even laying his hands on them.) He begins to mutter to himself and doesn't seem to notice when the shopkeepers stare at him. Atlas trails after him. All the stores smell inexplicably of sandalwood.
Mostly disinterested in their task, Atlas buys L a book of Russian fairy tales. The cover is full of intricate linked shapes in gold and red, enclosing a brightly coloured apple. It's as good a guess as any, he reasons, and at any rate the idea of L poring over these strange little stories seems fitting. Beyond has taught him about the magic of stories, their ability to take coal and dry bones and turn them into something golden.
He slips it into the backpack Roger has given him and feigns a need for the bathroom, leaving Beyond in a cramped little shop full of handcarved knick-knacks and iridescent curiosities. The shopkeeper, a man with grey har brushed starkly across his head and piercing eyes the colour of ice water, watches him go.
Roger had given them both forty dollars, and the book was only fifteen. Atlas wanders off through the snow. It's halfway up his shins, now, and getting into his boots. He'd like to get a gift for Beyond, too.
When he gets back, Beyond is taking a brown paper bag from the shopkeeper. "What did you get?" Atlas asks him.
Beyond opens it up to show him. It's a blue swallowtail butterfly, with deep blue wings that shimmer like an oil slick. It's on a little canvas, and silver pins pierce its wings open, pass deep through its abdomen. There's nothing that should be creepy about it. People have these hung up in their offices all around the world.
Still, Atlas shivers.
When they call Roger, he arrives far too quickly, which confirms what Atlas had already guessed — he had been lurking somewhere close the whole time. Maybe Beyond notices, maybe he doesn't. Either way he's far too busy peering inside the package he's just purchased.
Roger has them hang up decorations together — garlands all along the hallways, fake snow around the base of the dissection table. He comes back with a genuine Christmas tree, which smells so powerfully of pine forests that Atlas' whole body aches. When he was little, before they sold him away to Roger for a six-figure sum, his parents used to take him out into the woods. They held his hands and swung him between them. They kicked snow at each other and dug words into the unbroken snow so that the hikers who came next would have strange messages to read. His mother taught him how to stay so perfectly still that the birds who had fallen silent as they walked through the trees would start singing again. "Remember," she'd told him. "You're the intruder in their home. The only way to be welcome is for them to forget that you were ever here."
There are other memories, too, less pleasant than this, but Atlas doesn't pull them out very often. They don't matter anymore. He'll never see them again.
All three of them string popcorn and loop it around the trees. Beyond won't stop eating the kernals. Afterwards, when dark has fallen, Roger makes them apple cider and takes them all outside, to sit on the porch and look up at the silver moon. The snow has stopped falling. The grounds are perfectly quiet. They say nothing whatsoever.
Peace on earth, Atlas thinks.
Hungry, after Beyond is asleep in the top bunk, Atlas picks the lock on their room and slips out into the hallway. There is a perfect quiet to it, all this empty space and only the three of them to fill it. The kitchen is past the cathedral, which he finds deeply unsettling. What use is a place of worship with no one to pray to it? He can't imagine why it's here to begin with.
He's particularly quiet as he walks past Roger's study. The door is very slightly ajar, and a puddle of gold light spills out of it. He isn't going to pay any attention to it when he hears L's voice, coming through Roger's tinny laptop speakers.
He falls back. Pressed his back against the wall and listens.
"The information was good," Roger is saying. "They caught the killer trying to take a flight out to Norway. The police are looking into further stashes. Maybe I'll set A and B on that, too."
"Good," L says, flatly. It's his real voice, not that strange distorted noise that they pump out for police forces. "I'm sure they'll do well. If that's everything, I have things to work on." Atlas can hear something heavy and indiscernible moving on L's side of the microphone. He feels a strange, sharp sense of panic. Don't go.
"They're buying you things," Roger says. "They really do care for you."
"I'll get them something in return," L says. He sounds vaguely petulant. "Of course. What do they like?"
"Beyond likes comics," Roger says. "And bugs, and puzzles, and Gundam fighters. Atlas is quieter. He likes stories. Music. Folk, I think."
Atlas is surprised to find that this is true. He hadn't thought that Roger was paying much attention to what they did or didn't like outside of things that might help them to solve crimes.
"You are going to come, aren't you?" Roger says. "They're desperate to see you again."
There's a vey long pause. Atlas holds his breath.
"I don't want to," L says at last. He sounds defeated. The line cuts out partway through his words, but it comes back again, quickly enough that Atlas is sure he hasn't missed anything. "It's not good for them, Roger. They shouldn't be here. They shouldn't think of me like this. I"m just —" He falls silent. Atlas can hear his own heartbeat, and feel it in his throat. At last L speaks again.
"It's cruel. Inhumane. Have you considered the possibility that we aren't the good guys, Roger?"
He can hear Roger tapping his fingers against something. "But you are going to come?" L exhales. "Yes," he says. "Yes, of course. I will."
Atlas has heard enough. He unlatches himself from the wall and hurries off. I don't want to come. It would break Beyond's heart, but something about the honestly of this exchange lifts him and makes him love L again. Cautiously, temporarily — he's incinerated the place in him where that emotion could take hold — but all the same.
It is cruel, he thinks, and L knows, he knows.
He steals cardstock from the evaluation room and brings it back to their room. There's so much empty space in the Wammy house that he and Beyond could easily have bedrooms of their own, but Atlas is glad that they do not. He doesn't think he could stand being on his own like that.
He cuts the paper into squares and stays up all night folding them into stiff paper cranes. Beyond sleeps without noise or movement. Atlas' eyes burn. The joints in his fingers hurt.
When they leave the room for breakfast the next day, he drinks three cups of coffee and is no more or less tired than usual.
Beyond is restless on Christmas Eve, pacing the length of their room over and over again. He runs his spider fingers through his blond hair until it turns gnarled and strange. He's wrapped his gift in silver wrapping paper which Roger bought for them — they'd both forgotten about paper on their trip into the village — and he keeps returning to it, staring at it like that's somehow going to change something about it.
Atlas lying on his back on the bunk. He throws a little beaker that he stole from the science room over and over again, catching it each time it falls. "Breathe," he says. "He's going to like it."
"He could have a hundred like it," Beyond mutters, more to the floor than to Atlas.
"Why would he have a hundred pinned butterflies? It'll be his first."
"He could hate butterflies. It's a common phobia."
"I don't think L could be afraid of anything. And anyway it's not that common."
Beyond kicks the door. "Don't do that," Atlas tells him, without looking. Looking at Beyond is difficult. It makes him feel inexplicably as if he's drowning.
Beyond does it again. He makes a noise deep in his throat, something like a growl.
Atlas sighs. He catches the beaker, sets it aside. Slowly he sits up, and turns to Beyond. "B. Listen."
Beyond spins around. His mouth is set in a snarl. His eyes are narrowed. "He's going to like you," Atlas says. "He always does. That's not going to change."
Beyond looks at the floor. "Come on," Atlas tells him. "Stop worrying about that. You're the smartest of either of us. You solved the puzzle with the bones." Atlas can't stop thinking about the ugly pockets that had bloomed across them, degradation from contact with salt water and all the funny little things that grew across them. Roger says he just has to set it aside, but he can't, he can't. "You're probably at least as smart as him."
Beyond looks up at that. "No."
Atlas shrugs. He's been thinking about this for a wile. "Well, why not? L started solving his little mysteries and Quillsh found him. Taught him, raised him, gave him opportunities. So what does that mean? He's a smart person who worked with his potential. But he scouted us specifically, before we'd even done anything. Doesn't that mean we have a higher baseline intelligence? And that's not even taking into account the specialized training we've been given."
Beyond narrows his eyes even further, but he doesn't say anything. Encouraged, Atlas goes on.
"I bet," he says, "If anyone could create a mystery that he couldn't solve, it would be you."
Beyond watches him. The impression of some alien intelligence, vast but void, is profound. Sometimes Atlas is quite certain that if he were able to crack open Beyond's mind he'd find nothing but an unending, starless sky. He doesn't find it unnerving, not at all. Beyond is his friend. His best and only. There's no one on this planet who he trusts more.
Finally Beyond turns away. "I bet he likes your present more," he says.
Atlas shrugs. "I bet you twelve dollars we won't be able to tell either way. He's an enigma."
"You're an enigma," Beyond says, and Atlas — to his own surprise — laughs.
But nevertheless he's worried. How could he not be? L is everything. He's all they've ever been asked to be. His parents sold him away for the right to replace this boy, when death inevitably takes him for its own.
He stays awake, staring wide-eyed at the slats which hold up Beyond's mattress. He looks and looks until his eyes begin to hurt and sleep swallows him up, sending into strange dreams full of clutter and noise, entirely meaningless.