The car smelled of leather and pine.
They drove for hours, or so it seemed. Maya sat between the two men, hands bound loosely in her lap, staring at a spot on the seat in front of her. She could not cry anymore. She'd cried all of it out in the cream-and-gold room, and what was left in her was a silent, cold, spreading blankness, like frost on a window.
She watched the trees go by through a gap in the curtain. Pines. Pines. A gas station. A billboard for a car dealership, a smiling family, a banner reading DRIVE HOME HAPPY.
She thought: I have never been so afraid in my life, and I am not afraid at all.
She thought: I think that's called being already dead.
She did not see the small shape curled under the folded blanket in the footwell of the back seat. No one did. A little foot, in a little blue sock, had slipped out from under the wool for a moment, and then tucked itself back.
…
The old villa had been burned in places.
Scorched stone rose in black tongues up the east face, and one wing had no roof at all. Men in work clothes were hauling timbers out of the courtyard. The dry fountain was full of broken glass. And yet the front hall was clean, polished, perfectly lit, and the old man was standing in it, waiting.
He was smiling.
"Miss Maya."
Her skin crawled.
"You've had a long journey. Please." He swept an arm toward a narrow stair at the back of the hall, a stair she had never seen, hidden behind a tapestry. "We have so little time, and I would not have you suffer anxiety."
"You lied to me." Her voice came out hoarse and flat. "You said I could stay. You said I'd be safe."
"And you were." Mildly. "Safe, and well fed, and cared for, and kept in perfect health. I have taken great pains with you, Miss Maya, since the day you set foot in St. Jude." He tilted his head. "There is no cruelty in this. I want you to understand that. No cruelty at all."
Something in his tone, the quiet, reverent, almost tender note of it, made her stomach heave.
Since the day you set foot in St. Jude.
Since the day.
She did not understand it. She understood only that it was meant to be a kindness, and that it was the most terrifying thing he had said.
They took her down.
The stair was narrow and cold and spiraled round and round, and the air grew thinner and sharper as they descended, until it smelled of nothing at all, a clean, chemical, hospital smell. At the bottom there was a door of white metal, and beyond it a corridor of white tile under flat white lights, utterly out of place in that decaying house, like a modern wound sewn into the belly of an ancient animal.
There were no windows. The only sounds were the hum of machines and the squeak of their own shoes.
"Here," said the old man.
A second door slid open.
Maya looked into a room of dazzling white.
There was a surgical table in the center, under a great round lamp with a dozen lenses, and a cart of silver instruments laid out in rows. There were screens, and tubes, and a cabinet of vials. There was a plastic curtain, half-drawn.
And behind the curtain, in a narrow bed, a woman lay perfectly still.
Maya's eyes fell on her, and could not move.
She was thin, and very pale. She might have been thirty. Her hair, black and long and glossy, lay brushed across the pillow like a spill of ink, and her hands rested on the blanket with their fingers slightly curled, as though somebody had arranged them there. Tubes fed into her arm. A machine at her side breathed quietly: in, out, in, out.
She had a small chin. A straight nose. A mouth that looked as if, once, it had laughed easily.
And when Maya's gaze reached her face, the room began to spin.
Mark.
It was Mark's face, softened and changed by years, the same brow, the same mouth. The only thing that was different was the eyes, closed in a long, endless sleep, and Maya knew with perfect, awful certainty that if they opened, they'd be ash-grey.
"Elena," said the old man, and his voice was a whisper. "My darling girl."
Behind them, the guards stood in the doorway with folded hands.
Maya couldn't speak. Her tongue felt thick.
"She is the reason," the old man said. He walked to the bedside and rested a hand, so gently, on the woman's hair. "Everything. All of it. The war with that boy. The war with your Mr. Travis, who stole her and killed her, so he said, with his bad luck and his hard hands. The house. The men. This room." He glanced back at Maya, and his eyes were wet. "I would have burned the world for her. And one day, when I'd all but given up, you walked into a school."
Maya's lips moved. "You... you said—"
"Your heart, Miss Maya." He smiled through his tears. "Your heart is perfect. It is the most extraordinary coincidence. A girl without family, without name, without anyone to come looking for her, and a heart that fits my daughter as if it were made for her. The blood tests do not lie. I have run them nine times."
Remarkable, really.
"You're going to take it." She heard herself say it, in a small, level, unreal voice. "Aren't you? You are going to cut me open and take my heart."
"I am going to give her back her life."
"I'll die."
"Yes." Quietly. "I am sorry. I am. But a life for a life, child. I lost a daughter. A boy lost his mother. If there is a God, he will understand."
The two guards took her arms. She didn't fight. She didn't even try. A nurse appeared from nowhere and began to peel the sleeve from her left arm, and Maya stood and watched her own pale skin appear in the cruel white light, the blue veins running down her forearm like tiny rivers. She felt oddly distant from it, from the table, from the lamp, from the silver instruments laid out in rows like a banquet.
I wonder if it will hurt.
She wondered if it was strange that her last thought wasn't of Travis, or of Chloe, or the cotton rabbit. It was of a classroom. A rainy afternoon. A little boy at a window, clutching a stuffed robot, waiting for someone to come.
"Ms. Maya?"
A thin, high, trembling voice from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
In the white frame of the door stood Mark.
He was in his pajamas, bare-footed, one blue sock missing. His hair stood up in tufts. He was holding the cotton rabbit with the grey ribbon, which he must have snatched off the bed, and he looked at the room, at the nurses, at the guards, at the table, at the sleeping woman in the narrow bed, with enormous, perfectly steady eyes.
"Mark!" Maya screamed. "Mark, go back! Go back! Run!"
"Take the child away," the old man said sharply. "Who let him in?"
But Mark did not run.
He stood in the doorway for one long moment looking at the woman in the bed. His small face did not change. His lips parted.
"Is that my mom?" he asked.
No one answered.
"Is that her?" He took one step into the room. "The one who went to a faraway place?" He looked at the old man, then at Maya, held between the guards. His eyes widened in slow, awful comprehension. "You said Ms. Maya was going to stay," he said to the old man. "You promised."
"Mark." The old man's voice cracked, wavering. "Mark, darling, go with Mr. Dalton, please. This is not for children."
"Ms. Maya is my mom!" Mark screamed.
Maya's heart split.
"She's my mom! You can't! You can't!" The little boy flew at the nearest guard and sank his teeth into the man's hand; the man howled and flung him aside. Mark hit the tiles and rolled. A nurse caught him. He thrashed in her arms, shrieking, kicking, clawing, "Let go! Let go of her! Ms. Maya! Ms. MAYA!"
Hands guided her toward the table.
A needle pricked her arm.
Warmth spread up from the place where it had gone in, slow and honey-thick, rolling through her veins like a sweet tide. The lights began to blur. The white ceiling lifted away, and the cries of the little boy grew distant and strange, as if heard from underwater.
She turned her head.
Mark was standing in the doorway again. A nurse was holding him, but he'd stopped fighting. He just stood very still, tears streaming down his face, his eyes locked on hers.
Count your stars, she tried to say. Count them.
Her lips would not move.
One.
Two.
Three...
"Ms. Maya," said Mark, from very far away.
The world went white.
…
Later, much later, in the white room, a woman's chest rose on its own for the first time in three years.
A machine began to beep faster, and a line on a green screen leaped, and settled into a new, steady rhythm.
The old man, standing by the bed, put both hands over his mouth. He waited for her eyes to open.
They did not.
In the corridor, a little boy sat on the floor with a cotton rabbit in his arms, and did not speak, and did not cry, and did not look up when the doors opened.
YOU HAVE REACHED A BAD ENDING:
You trusted the wrong person.
When the night of gunfire came, you chose to run, and let the man who had cried in the rain become the man who held the key. By the time you learned who Elena was, and why your heart was perfect, it was already too late.
PLEASE RETURN TO [CHAPTER 32] TO MAKE A DIFFERENT CHOICE!
