After her mother's death, her father had brought her into Elisabeta's garden, into the embrace of roses. There is your mother, Victor said, guiding Odette's gaze to the flower beds, the mounds of freshly turned earth. There she sleeps and dreams roses into being.
There had been no funeral; Odette had not seen her mother's corpse, and nor had she demanded to see it. She had allowed grief to silence her in those days, gleaning Elisabeta's status from discussions adults held behind the closed door of the embalming room. She had squatted by the hinges, gathering into her palm the murmuring voices that slipped through cracks in the door like water.
They did not use her mother's name. She was only ever The Body, ripped into twelve pieces that village women had carefully harvested from the bloodstained grass and carried onto the embalming table. These same women tended to the pieces on that table, deliberated among themselves how best to preserve them for the afterlife to come. It was through these stolen discourses that the child came to know that all parts of The Body had been disinfected, filled with embalming fluid, then wrapped up in individual pieces of linen. Then, under Victor's supervision, they buried the twelve parcels in the rose garden at night when Odette was asleep.
There is her head, dreaming beneath the bushes of pale Damask roses, which are among the oldest rose species in the world. From the Damask rosebush, Victor swept the compass needle of his arm clockwise, and Odette followed, charting the landscape of Elisabeta's grave. When her father mapped it this way, it transformed from a mausoleum into the Garden of Paradise. There is her dreaming head, her eyes. Here is her torso, her womb, giving life to Bourbon roses.
They had been your mother's favorite, the elegant Bourbons with their endless petals. She had gone as far as to train a generation of such roses to climb up the walls. It was all she did when she was pregnant with you, coaxing them to run up to the window that was to be your nursery. They bloomed the week you were born, red, pink, and white, their rich petals filling the square of your bedroom with their heady scent. You wouldn't have remembered them; you were so new, and they were so delicate. After a cold and difficult winter, they never bloomed again.
And remember this, Odette. Beneath the bed of striped Gallicas, which can be used for medicine, is where I have buried your mother's hands.
—
Odette is deadheading roses now, moving through the circle of bushes, her practiced eye selecting the dying blossoms. She tears off spent blooms, and dead rose hips from their stalks to make room for fresh buds next spring.
The act of severing. It is the only thing Odette can think of doing after the sentinels had dragged Victor away and Uriaș drove the end of his rifle into her stomach when she had pushed against his embrace. Whether he held her to restrain all her anger or keep her for himself, she did not know. Does not want to know. Outside, amongst her mother's roses, she is safe from the ruin of her home.
She decapitates a dying Mollineux bloom with a flick of her wrist and casts its fist of yellow petals to the ground. If her mother had been alive to see her, she would not have approved of such savage pruning. Nor would her father.
"But they're gone, now," Odette snaps to the listening air. She steps back from the bushes, into the pool of ruined petals and rose hips, presses her temple against the flood of another memory which comes to her so vividly she can play it before her eye like an old film reel fed through a projector. She can see herself twenty years ago: a child in mourning clothes, lying on the ground as though she were lifeless, a straw bear in her arms, mourning the loss of her mother. That film repeating itself now, this time substituting the mother for the father, the girl for a woman. Everything else in the scene remains the same. The overcast sky. The circle of roses. Doom on the horizon. The old hag shambling through the gap in the Florescu garden.
It is the first time since Adam Athansiu's execution that Odette has seen her up close. The crone had kept her distance all these years, a tattered shape shuffling at the margins of Odette's vision, shaking her staff crowned with skulls and muttering prayers at all hours of the evening when she was known to patrol the church's circumference. Her hair full of bones, feathers, and decaying animal limbs so that you could smell her before you could see her. The putrefying stench thickening the air, coagulating the throat.
"Little Miss One-Eye is now alone," the old woman croons, each syllable accompanied by the rattling of skulls. "What will she do, now that they've taken her father away?"
Odette resumes her pruning of roses.
"She loses her father, and what does she do? She gardens. It's not a good use of your time, child. You rip the flowers out to make space for new ones, which will bloom for a season or two, then die. Die, die, die. They will always die."
The crone circles the garden, her rasping voice turning into a jagged chorus of die, die, die. Finally, when it becomes unbearable, Odette faces the witch and grabs the neck of the skull staff to halt her movements.
"Why haven't you died yet?"
Twenty years. Old as the crone is, she has not aged a day since Odette's childhood. A strange phenomenon, to be this ancient and not turn into an atrophied heap of bones and wrinkles. Perhaps it is a quirk in the old woman's genes or the side-effect of feasting on castle slops. A scientific riddle that would have occupied Victor Florescu's thoughts until he found the answer, or else until the universe's death. Odette had not inherited such patience. While the father would have preferred to solve the enigma in solitude, it is the daughter's way to hold the mystery in her hands, look at it in the eye and interrogate it.
"I live by the grace of the Black God!" Hissing and baring a row of broken, yellowed teeth, the hag tugs her staff from Odette's grip. "I thrive under the auspices of Mother Miranda! That is my secret to long life, which I give to you willingly. I am not like you, keeping secrets from her old granny. Selfish, little one-eyed miss!"
Dancing from Odette's reach, she plucks a living rose from the bushes. Sniffs at it, grimacing. She bites into the petals before blanching and spitting at the ground.
"Pah! The secrets in this rose taste bitter. And you, my child,"—she thrusts a gnarled finger into Odette's chest—"You have the stench of bitterness about you. How many secrets did your father give you before they took him away? You stink of mysteries."
Seething, Odette shoves away the withered wrist, not caring if she might break all its tiny infinite bones. Instead, she thinks of her father's notebook, which she had left on the kitchen table, out in the open. Somehow the sentinels had missed it in their raid; Chief Uriaș had overlooked it entirely. The hag would not.
"You already know my answer to that, grandmother. You've been watching me all my life, and you have learned nothing."
Odette leaves the hag's orbit, no longer the terrified child who could not escape until her father stepped into the garden and frightened the crows away. Turning her back on childhood terrors, she moves towards the house, her mind now preoccupied with the notebook and the gun Stelian had given her the day before.
Behind her, the hag sways and cackles.
"You can save him, Miss One-Eye. Appeal to the great mother, for she is infinitely merciful. Mother Miranda always listens. She is always listening. Give her only your worship, and she may spare your father's life."
There is the sudden flutter of feathers, the cawing of crows. After pausing and considering the hag's words, Odette moves to face her. She is already gone.
—
It is early in the afternoon when Stelian hears a knock on the door of his house. He glances at the wooden clock that crowns a side-table, a Hermle timepiece from Rothenburg, Germany, which his father had bought from the Duke and given him when he had announced his engagement. This clock, this house with its two bedrooms, backyard garden, and chicken coop, had been arranged by his father to suit a newly-married couple and their growing family.
The Hermle timepiece tells him it is an hour until Victor Florescu's trial begins. The visitor must be his father or a fellow sentinel come to accompany him to the underground cathedral. Stelian swings open the door expecting a soldierly greeting, a brotherly embrace, the exchange of knowing glances. Comrade, it is time.
Once the door opens, Odette aims the revolver between Stelian's eyes. She steps into the room, forcing her fiancée to take a step backward, his hands raised. She takes another step. He follows suit. And then another. Movements in a strange dance between lovers who have long spent their affection for the other.
She positions him in the center of the room that would have been hers if she had married him.
"Don't do this, Odette," he finally says.
"You've condemned my father."
Stelian folds his hand over the gun's muzzle without taking his eyes off of Odette's face. Always look an enemy in the eye so that they cannot trick you. So that they know you are not afraid.
"I am a sentinel, and it was my duty."
Something in the fortress of Odette's face shatters; Stelian feels the gun barrel quivering against his palm. In proximity, he can see the track of tears that had traveled down her right cheek and dried there, hours before. He wishes she would weep again now, at this moment, so that he can wipe or lick her tears away, gather her body in his arms, soothe her into forgiving and loving him again.
"Is not your duty to me, who would become your wife?"
"You asked me to go into the bone trees. I did that, Odette. I did that only for you."
He lowers the gun gently until the muzzle is pointing at the ground. He moves close to her, his body a bright object burning through the atmosphere. When she looks away from the scorching glare of it, he cups her chin, turning it so she will face him again.
"I did not know I would find your father's ring there. I would have left it well alone had it not been for the disturbed graves or Petre Borcea's disappearance. They think your father killed him, Odette. They think he is behind all the grave-robbing that's been happening all these years."
"He couldn't have. He's my father, and I wouldn't love him if he did all those things."
"You've said so yourself: he sleeps very little. Two, three hours? Imagine the other five, six hours of the night digging up bodies. All the evidence lines up too neatly for it to be a coincidence. I know he is your father; I've always thought of him as my father once I knew I wanted to marry you. I love him, but you must understand, Odette: I am a sentinel, and it is my duty."
"Fuck your duty."
But Odette is already collapsing under the siege of conjecture; he can see all the ramparts of her body crumbling. The lowering of her eye, her sagging shoulders. The finger easing its hold on the trigger. He rests his hand on her shoulders, rubs at the tops of her arms.
"If it had been my ring you found last night, would you have told your father?"
The question is the clawing of an angry, frightened animal. This new attack stuns Stelian, the Hermle clock ticking out the seconds of his silence as he ponders the answer which will guide him back into her good graces. She is scrutinizing him. How best to approach her inquiry? In all his years of knowing her, he does not yet know what made her fall in love with him, and he can only respond in the way that soldiers respond to approaching bullets.
He steps back, sideways, to dodge the line of fire that is Odette's gaze.
"I would if you were the sort of person who digs up graves. But you are not. You are my Odette."
As she drops her gun, the meteorite of his body collapses against her. He envelopes her in the heat of his embrace. Exhausted, she allows this cataclysm. If you believe that, then you do not know me, she thinks, as Stelian tucks her head beneath his chin and presses kisses into her temple. He closes his eyes, but she leaves hers open.
—
"So my father will be facing trial. I can accept that. But I want to be there."
Surprised, Stelian releases Odette into the air, which is now turning cold at the enormity of her request. Victor Florescu will be tried in the underground cathedral, an unfinished place of worship in a cave beneath Castle Dimitrescu that admits only a select few: Mother Miranda and the Four Lords. Then the village chief, the sentinels, and the accused. The rest of the world shut out.
"What you are asking is impossible. You know that."
"Not if you sneak me in, hide me." Odette rests her hand against his suit, her fingers brushing against the shine of his brass buttons. "Put me in this uniform; I know you have more than one. Give me a cap. I'll keep my gaze lowered."
Her lips against his ear, warm and coaxing, reminding Stelian that neither of them had finished the other the previous night. "Also impossible." His fingers travel from her back and up to her hair to trace the line of her eye patch. "They'll know it's you."
"How many sentinels will be in that church?"
"About four dozen. No—fifty and counting, including myself. Maybe you."
Her lips at his jawline now. "Will it be bright inside?"
"There's a hole in the ceiling. Apart from that, some torchlights. They don't use the chandelier." He is beginning to see the genius of her plan. He can keep her in the darkness of the second balcony beneath the shadowed arches, and none would be the wiser.
Odette detaches from his embrace and sets aside the leather-bound book he has just noticed she is carrying. "You can hide me then. And I can hide this." She unbuttons her shirt, takes a shirttail with both hands, and tears out a long strip of cloth which she winds over her skull, her eye patch, over her left cheek, then up again, tying both ends behind her head—a soldier's bandage. "I'll pretend I got burned on this side of my face, or my face got clawed out by a bear, whatever. I'll wear a cap, talk like a man. Anything."
They are suddenly children again, dressing up as pirates. Stelian, who had never been an imaginative child, had allowed Odette to ferry him through the ocean of her savage imagination, its storm-tossed waves, its mermaids, and leviathans. The pirate queen and her lovestruck boatswain, whom she liked to use as bait, dangling him before the jaws of krakens, then snatching him away to safety at the last moment. Every story she spun always ending in triumph: the harpooning of the beast, the successful procurement of treasure. All these years later, Stelian wants to laugh at the audacity of her plans. Their heroic absurdity. But her expression stops him—the face of a woman who has nothing left to lose.
"I am no fool, Stelian. I know that my father won't leave that building alive. I only ask that I see his face one last time. Grant me this, and I will never question your duty, either to your father or to me." I will be a sentinel's wife and bear his children. And I will live in this house, in this village, until the day I die.
—
The Cathedral of Neomartyrs. That would have been the name of the cave church once its construction was complete. A patriarch of the Dimitrescu line, a known devotee of the Romanian Orthodox Church, had begun construction of the building in 1917, an expensive endeavor interrupted by the First World War. Then the patriarch's untimely death, along with the shortage of supplies, the dying of capable men, and the region's flagging interest in Romanian Orthodoxy, soon obliterated the structure's original purpose.
A new religion gave it new life. After Mother Miranda resurfaced from a cave in the mountains in 1919 to spread the Gospel of the Black God, she turned the cathedral into a court that judged and sentenced apostates, atheists, and outsiders. She forbade villagers from witnessing such trials lest they expose themselves to the naming and cataloging of heretical evidence and renegade teachings—the revealing of alternate truths. Her Gospel thrived upon the ignorance of her people. Whatever verdict emerged from this half-completed basilica was readily accepted by a populace that never questioned why or how all defendants were judged guilty.
Then we have the reversing of myth: Orpheus leading Eurydice into the world of the dead. Stelian guides Odette through winding subterranean passageways illuminated by torchlight. Unlike the lyrist of legend, Stelian does not look behind him. He already knows what Odette looks like: a sentinel with half his face burned. She is wearing an infantryman's winter coat, the brim of the gray cap obscuring her forehead so that only her nose and mouth are visible to the world. Inside the coat are the revolver, her father's notebook, and her left eye.
They emerge late into the trial proceedings, arriving at a balcony already packed with bodies. Stelian jostles through the sea of spectators, his hand pulling at the fabric of Odette's coat. She moves close behind him, the tip of her boots nearly brushing his heel, her ears ringing with the sounds of judgment from the floor below. Stelian navigates them to an open railing in a corner dark enough for Odette to lift her head without being recognized.
"There's your father, look."
Odette follows the direction of Stelian's pointed finger, her gaze trailing across the nave's ruined flagstones and pews to the blade of sunlight lancing down like a guillotine's blade from an opening in the ceiling, illuminating the man kneeling beneath it. Her father's back is facing her; she can only see the hunched shoulders, the gray head lowered in defeat. Odette grips the railing, fighting the urge to run to him, hold him, put herself in his place.
Seven figures surround him as though characters from a play—The Tragedy of Dr. Victor Florescu, Act Three, Scene Five. Odette has never watched a play in a proper theater with curtains and painted backdrops, her only exposure having been a black-and-white photograph of her mother as Swanhilda from Coppélia leaping across the stage in a grand jeté. A newspaper clipping from 1962, which the Duke had managed to unearth in his journeys across the nation.
Despite all her dread, the scene unfolding before Odette appears rehearsed, the cast in dramatic costuming. Mother Miranda is standing upon a dais, her haloed figure wrapped in feathers the color of midnight, her bright eyes peering through an intricate golden mask in the shape of a crow's beak. At her left is a figure veiled and robed in black, her pale hands clasped in her lap: Lady Beneviento from beyond the suspension bridge. The dollmaker from the waterfall. At her right is Lord Moreau of the waters, a deformed creature shrouded in an oversized suit, his hood crowned with bones, his hunchbacked body swaying to the music of Miranda's voice.
There is Lady Dimitrescu in the flesh, a direct descendant of the man who had orchestrated the cathedral's building. A giantess draped in red, her curls resting like black roses at her cheek. Lord Heisenberg in his greatcoat, moving in her wake, resting his hammer across his shoulders. A doll the size of a small child, clad in a tattered wedding dress and veil; a cackling, whirling automaton the likes of which Odette has never seen before. Even Chief Uriaș looks spectacular in the painted gloom of the derelict cathedral, his magnificent lion's mane catching the glare of torch flames. They circle her father like planets orbiting a dying star.
"Looks like they've already gone through the evidence," Stelian mutters grimly. "We haven't missed much. My father would have told the Lords what I've already told you."
Odette swallows the sob rising in her throat. Now is not the time to close her eye and weep. She is watching her father for what may perhaps be the last time in her life, imprinting the thin, fading lines of his bowed figure into her memory. Remember him. Remember how you love him and will never stop loving him despite his crimes.
The doll bride is prancing around her father, chanting a mocking canticle. "The doctor is a dead man, doomed and done for! Doomed and done for, doomed and dead!" She tugs at the chains that bind his wrists, kicks at his shins. Chief Uriaș is rubbing his hands together, his hungry lion's stare shifting between the judge and the doctor. Mother Miranda moves towards Victor, each wing unfurling from the line of her body to reveal the rest of her: her ornate vestments, her delicate, taloned hands.
"Doctor Victor Florescu, you have been tried and found guilty of grave-robberies spanning three decades. Have you anything to say before my children pronounce your sentence?"
A shake of the gray head. "I only beg for your forgiveness, your infinite mercy."
Uriaș grabs the doctor's collar and spits into his face, the act sending the doll bride into shrieks of laughter. A roar of approval rises from the balcony. Cheers and the stamping of booted feet. "You deserve neither, you damned wretch!"
Behind him, Lady Dimitrescu clicks her tongue. "Calm yourself, Uriaș. We are in a court, not a madhouse, and we'll have none of your slavering theatrics." She stands before the doctor, producing from the folds of her dress a scarlet handkerchief which she drops from her great height into Victor's bound hands. Silently, he lifts the cloth to his face, wiping the spittle from his cheek, the corner of his mouth.
"He deserves a little mercy. We mustn't forget that for every corpse he's unearthed, he's cured a dozen villagers, many of whom wouldn't have been alive if it weren't for him."
At this, Lord Heisenberg releases a searing laugh. "That's mighty rich of you, talking of mercy." He crouches before Victor, lowering his spectacles a fraction as he examines the face of the accused. "I think she likes you."
"Nonsense," rumbles the giantess. "What I like is civility, the definition, and importance of which has long escaped you, little brother. You and the chief may be content to snarl and drool like animals, but the rest of us would like to carry on and put a civil end to these sordid matters. Mother Miranda, I beg you: let us pronounce the doctor's sentence before the day ends."
Another thunder of applause from the audience, the whistles of approval. In the shadows, Stelian grips Odette's wrist to stifle her movements, her desire to sweep across the floor, to spirit her father away from the room. When Mother Miranda raises a taloned hand, the court falls silent.
"Offer me your punishments, my children, and I shall deem the one most fitting of the crime."
The doll bride tugs at the doctor's chains again.
"Let's nail him to a coffin and bury him alive and see if someone will come along, dig him up!"
The creature at Mother Miranda's right hobbles into the blade of light, the plush outline of his obese fish lips forming slow-moving syllables as though dragging words from the muck curdling in his bulbous throat. "That one. I like that one. Put the doctor in the ground."
From Dimitrescu, an impatient sigh: "If that is the best my siblings can come up with, then I suppose we'll go with that motion. I've no use for an aging man-thing in my castle, especially one that looks like he'll topple over at the next breeze. He can take my handkerchief with him if he wants; I've no use for that either."
"And you, Lord Heisenberg?"
The machinist is still crouched by the doctor, still studying the tired, graying face. A look passes between them, then the invisible exchange of nods, each apparent only to the other.
Heisenberg grabs the doctor's hair and rises to his feet, making Victor rise with him.
"Leave him to me," he growls, shaking the doctor's head, turning him to the audience. "He's got secrets. I'll dismantle him, piece by piece, until he tells us everything he knows."
Her poor, broken father. Even from the balcony, Odette can see his pained grimace, the bruise blossoming over his right eye, his left temple swollen from a sentinel's fist. In the rain of applause, she lets out a shattered sob. There is a sudden shift in Stelian's body. Sensing his wanting to embrace her and, in doing so, betray her true identity to the room, Odette moves from him, edging further into shadow. He does not follow her.
Below them, Mother Miranda stretches out her arms, a queen demanding silence. A collective hush falls at her gesture.
"A promising endeavor, Lord Heisenberg. You may have him."
—
A shout from high above them. All eyes turning to a moving figure in the shadows of the balcony, a gray shape hurtling down a crumbling stairway, collapsing at the final step. The sentinel pauses to collect himself, then stumbles up the nave toward Heisenberg and the doctor. He is wearing a winter coat, the left side of his head heavily bandaged. He kneels before Heisenberg, the breath gasping out from the cavity of his heaving chest.
"Spare my father. Take me instead."
A sentinel with a woman's voice. Before anyone can answer, the sentinel has removed her cap, unwound the cloth from her face to reveal the black medical eye patch beneath. Heisenberg loosens his grasp on the doctor, his dark glasses obscuring the spark of surprise. Beside him, Victor's face splinters into a thousand shards of terror: a father watching his daughter placing her head on the chopping block for his sake.
"You." The woman who had stalked his waking dreams ever since he listened to her sighs and moans in another ruined church, another world. She has appeared before him like lightning ahead of a new storm. Heisenberg's lip curls. "What use are you going to be to me?"
"Oh, but I could think of a dozen for this one—a hundred, in fact."
"Stay the fuck away from her, Dimitrescu," Heisenberg snarls suddenly. "She isn't yours yet."
"Temper, temper, little brother," Lady Dimitrescu chides, her pale, beautiful face now alive with new interest. "I think he likes you." She palms Odette's cheek. "As do I."
A shiver moves through Odette. Beneath this unwavering appraisal, she stands, twists away from the giantess's touch. She stretches out her hands to the winged figure upon the dais. The veil of light falls over Mother Miranda, silhouetting all of her so that Odette cannot see the look on her face.
"You know me to be Victor Florescu's only child. I am the only person in this room that he trusts. In trusting me, he has confided in me all his machinations and experiments. His secrets and his mysteries." And he has given me his book, which I keep against the beating of my heart
"She's lying," Victor says. The words explode from him like gunfire.
Odette pauses, recovering from the wound her father has given her before moving her arms anticlockwise, to Heisenberg's direction. "And he'll lie too if it's just his life on the line. If you keep him, he won't tell you a thing. I know my father. He'll be silent as long as I'll be safe."
Where does this boldness come from? Decades later in America, she will understand this phenomenon of fearless conviction that braces the body when a loved one is in danger. She will recognize it when she plunges into the heart of a frozen lake to pull up her only son from its depths, her body ignoring the sharp cold, the numbing of her blood vessels. At this moment, she ignores the racing of her heart, the prickling at the nape of her neck, the doom she measures out for herself with every word she utters.
"The village needs a doctor. People can and will die without one. Mother Miranda, I implore you to spare my father out of your endless mercy. The people will thank you for it, praise your boundless grace. I will thank you for it, offer you all my prayers every day I am alive. Spare my father. He is useful to this village. I am not. I am only the keeper of his secrets."
Her father has fallen to his knees, his chained fists pressing against his face. Heisenberg, meanwhile, has chosen this moment to light up a cigar, exhaling a silver plume of smoke. A tried and true tactic to obscure the play of guises across his scarred face. He, who would have, by now, uttered a dozen snide remarks or protestations, is now silent.
With one sharp finger, Mother Miranda lifts Odette's chin so that their gazes meet.
"You have offered a powerful proposition, my child." Her voice possesses the lacquer of ageless honey. It is a voice that even as a whisper can entrance and command legions. "You put yourself in your father's place; you promise me his secrets and your worship. Victor Florescu, meanwhile, gets to return to his clinic and carries on as though nothing has happened. Do you see the flaw in the arrangement, my child? How could I expect your father to remain heeled while he is free and unpunished?"
Her father's wracked, stifled weeping fills the air, louder now—his body a star collapsing into itself.
"His punishment is my capture. My father won't commit a single crime if his obeisance ensures my safety."
At this, Mother Miranda sighs, stroking her fingers through Odette's hair. The gesture is frighteningly familiar, reminding her of an old woman's fingertips against her skull like tiny pinpricks of crow's feet.
"My child, how can you be so certain? This is a man who has lied to you all your life. The good doctor by day, the body thief at night. If he lies to you, then he would have no trouble lying to the rest of us."
"Because he is a father. And any father, any parent, would do anything to prevent the loss of their child."
Her words are arrows in the air, each syllable finding its target. Mother Miranda pulls from Odette as though she is burning, and stillness falls upon the Cathedral of Neomartyrs like a shadow from an eclipse. Somewhere in the village, a Hemle clock ticks out the seconds of silence.
—
"Of course," Mother Miranda says softly. "You are right. If only you knew just how right you are."
To Heisenberg, she commands: You will have the daughter in her father's stead.
To Victor, she declares: You are free.
She moves through the dagger of light towards the doctor, closing the distance between them. She removes her golden mask, revealing ageless beauty. Miranda holds the doctor's weeping face in her delicate hands, lifting his chin so that their lips meet in a long, searing kiss. All the mysteries of the world colliding into that kiss now, into the small universe of their pressing bodies. Her mouth enveloping his, his head tilting in surrender. One galaxy consuming another.
"Never forget this, my old love," Miranda murmurs, brushing the tears from Victor's cheeks and caressing the edges of his bruises. "Never forget that I was merciful to you."
—
Her mind burning in the chaos that erupts after. Odette will barely remember it all, the explosion of events, the hurry, and the blur of moving bodies. Stelian's cry of anguish, his desperate attempts to get to her, only for sentinels to swarm him, beat him back into the shadows. The chains sliding from her father's wrists to wind themselves around hers. Miranda transforming into a flock of crows, rising through the opening in the ceiling.
Heisenberg tugging at her chains through mining tunnels beneath the earth where the passage of time turns into an illusion. She does not remember how long it takes, this journey through the womb of the world before they emerge into fields of rolling wheat. Waves of it moving like liquid gold in the dying sunlight. Here and there, amongst the sea of grain, are islands of vehicles ruined and abandoned from the great wars. Tank destroyers and armored tractors gathering rust. The skeleton of a monoplane resting, dragon-like, at the base of a water tower. In the distance, a smoldering factory.
"Home sweet home," Heisenberg says with a chuckle. The first words he has spoken to her since the trial.
He rests a foot against the hood of a hollowed-out Dacian truck, releasing one last cloud of smoke before hurling the burning cigar across the field—a point of crimson trailing across the sky. Odette hunches over, rests her hands on her thighs, drawing in the cold air as though it is rare and precious, like water from the only oasis in the desert. When her lungs are full of breath, she wipes the sweat off her brow, studies the ragged profile of her captor: his wide-brimmed hat, the shoulder-length hair threaded with gray. The growth of beard climbing down his neck, almost reaching the hollow at the base of his throat. Even though the evening is near, he does not remove his smoked glasses.
How can he still see, in the gathering dark?
He catches Odette watching him. He grins. "Like what you see?"
Odette turns her head to the movement of a sudden breeze, refusing to allow Heisenberg to study her face. I will do the watching, she decides.
"It's none of your business what I like."
"Damn right it isn't." Heisenberg pulls at the length of her chain. "Saves me the trouble of fixing up the place, making it nice. Because it won't be."
Inside the factory, something within her body shatters, and she collapses suddenly from the weight of her exhaustion, her grief. In the rising gloom, she hears the cold drop of chains against concrete floors, the heat of Heisenberg's body enveloping her. The odor of sweat, smoke, and leather. She feels gloved hands lifting her, carrying her through the labyrinth of corridors, passing her through clouds of steam, delivering her, at last, to a thin mattress at the floor of her cell. Those hands grasping the back of her neck, now, forcing her to sit up, pressing a canteen of water to her mouth.
"Have a drink. You're no use to me if you get sick."
She parts her lips, allows the tepid liquid in before coughing, spluttering. This water is bitter, tastes of iron.
"Told you it wasn't going to be nice. Drink."
The canteen's mouth against hers once more. Odette allows in a gulp of water, then another. A gloved hand cups her cheek, the thumb wiping at the corner of her lips. Blindly, she turns to press her face against the glove's roughness. She has never been this tired.
He leaves before she finishes the canteen, his absence as abrupt as a dream's end. Clutching the rust-flavored water against her chest, Odette rests her head against the flat, moth-ravaged pillow, allows herself to slip into the darkness of a new world.