THE LAKE INSIDE

Day 100 of 100

It did not hurt, which was the worst of it.

Mara had braced for pain. She had imagined it for weeks: a tearing, a burning, a scream. Instead there was a long, gentle unspooling, as though someone had found the loose end of a thread in her breast and begun, very patiently, to wind it onto a spool. Each turn took a little more of her. The Sanctum went pale at the edges. The hum of the Mirror dwindled to a single high note, and then to nothing, and the floor was no longer under her feet.

Ninety seconds, she thought. I only have to hold on until the dark.

But the dark was not yet come, and the thread was running out.

Vesper, she thought. Vesper, now. Not later. Now.

She let go.

…

She stood on ice.

It was a lake. She knew it at once, the way one knows a room in a dream: a vast flat lake under a low pewter sky, frozen to the horizon, the snow swept off it in long pale ribbons by the wind. There were no mountains. There was no shore. Far away a single bare tree stood up out of the ice, black and crooked, and at the foot of the tree something small and bright was burning.

It was very cold. Her breath smoked. She looked down at herself and found she wore the gray pinafore of the Ashgrove Home, the one with the scorched sleeve, and her hair was in two plaits, and she was nine years old.

No, she thought. I am twenty-four. I will not be nine.

The plaits vanished. The pinafore became her own gray cloak. She stood a moment, steadying, and then she began to walk toward the tree.

The ice sang under her boots. Beneath it, in the black water, she could see things moving: pale shapes, slow and numerous, like fish in a winter pond. Faces. Hands. A child's red mitten. Dozens of them, turning gently, each wrapped in its own small light.

The lost, she thought. The ones he took.

She did not stop. She did not dare look too long.

…

The fire was a stove, a little black iron stove such as a schoolroom might have. It stood in the snow with its door ajar and a red glow within. Beside it, on an upturned crate, sat a woman in wine-colored velvet with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped round them.

She did not look up.

"You're early," said Vesper.

"I'm not. I'm late by ten years."

"Hm." A pause. "Sit, then. It's the only warm place."

Mara sat on the snow, an arm's length from the stove. For a time neither spoke. The wind went over the lake with a long thin sound like a held note. Vesper stared into the fire. In its light her face was Mara's face, and was not: softer at the mouth, sharper at the eye, with the shadow of something wild in it that Mara had never been allowed to keep.

"I read your notebook," said Vesper at last. "Before I left it. All of it. Page by page."

"I know."

"You wrote I will not be afraid of her." The corner of her mouth moved. "Liar."

"I wrote it so I would believe it." Mara hugged her knees. "It didn't work."

"No." Vesper laughed, short and unamused. "It never does."

The stove ticked. Far down under the ice, a pale hand drifted by.

"I'll tell you what frightens me," said Vesper, "since we're to be honest, and there's no time to be anything else. I'm frightened that you'll take me back and I'll be nothing. A shade in a corner of your head. A taste you can't quite name. I have had a hundred days of wine and velvet and being looked at." She lifted her eyes. "I have had Callum Rooke say my name as though it were a thing worth saying. And I'm afraid you'll swallow it all. And that I'll go on being, somewhere, in the dark, and watch you wear my life like a borrowed coat."

Mara did not answer at once.

It was true. That was what made it hard. She had come to this place with a speech, a good one, rehearsed in the pines. We are the same woman. We were always one. Looking at the face across the fire, she knew it for a lie.

"You are not the same as I am," she said slowly. "I thought you were. I thought you were the part of me I'd lost, and getting you back would be like finding a glove. But you aren't a glove." She drew a breath. "You're a person. You have wanted things I never dared to want. You laughed in the library and I would not have. You were kind to Josie, Vesper. In a way I've never been, because I was too busy being careful."

"That was hardly—"

"It was." She shook her head. "My mother wrote something. A note, in a button. She said a guest is welcomed, not absorbed."

Vesper went very still.

"I don't want to erase you," said Mara. "That's what he wants. He wants one of us gone, and the other to be his lamp. And the Bureau wanted it, and I wanted it too, for ten years, I think, in a way. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be finished." Her voice shook. "I don't want to be finished. I want to learn to live with you."

"With me."

"With you in the house. At the table. Talking when I'm too proud and silent when I'm too loud. I'll be a worse person than I am now, in some ways, and a better one in others, and neither of us will win every argument." She tried to smile. "I don't know how it is done. No one does. No one has ever done it. But I should like to try."

The wind dropped. The lake held its breath.

Vesper rose from the crate. She came around the stove slowly, a tall woman in red, her hair blown back, and stood over Mara with her face unreadable. Then she knelt in the snow. Her hands were shaking.

"Shall I tell you the truth?" she said. "I've been lying to myself that I wanted to win. I never wanted to win. I only wanted someone to say, stay."

"Stay," said Mara.

"Even though I'm difficult?"

"Because you are."

Vesper put out her hand.

It hung in the cold air between them, palm up, long-fingered, trembling. Mara looked at it. She saw the red-gold sigil on the wrist, whole and brilliant. She saw her own gray one, cracked, dull. She saw the faint rice-grain scar that both of them shared, because it had happened before the tearing, and so belonged to both.

"If you lie to me," said Vesper, very low, "I shall still choose to trust you once. Once. That's all I can promise. After that I shall make my own decisions, and you'll just have to bear it."

"I'll bear it."

"Then take my hand."

Mara took it.

Nothing happened.

She had expected fire, a flash, some sign. There was only a warm hand in hers, and the stove ticking, and the wind. For one terrible breath she thought: It is not enough. Wanting is not enough.

"There you are," said a voice.

It came from the whole sky. It was gentle. It was Halloran's.

"My dears. How touching." The pewter clouds moved, and in them Mara saw a shape, a vast silver-coated figure, bending over the lake as a man bends over a basin. "I confess I had not expected sentiment. But then, sentiment is a form of fuel. Do go on."

Vesper's fingers tightened. "He's in the Mirror," she said. "He can hear us."

"I can do rather better than hear." The voice softened. "Let me make you each an offer. It is only fair; you have been so very brave."

The ice beneath the stove turned clear.

Mara looked down and saw herself. A woman of twenty-four in a gray dress, sitting at a desk in a quiet room with a window onto a garden. There was a ledger. There was tea. There was no ache in her at all, no gap, no dread. She turned a page and smiled, mildly, at nothing. Whole, said the voice, and untroubled. No more sigil. No more fear. Only let the other one go.

She looked at Vesper. Vesper was staring at the ice with her mouth slightly open. Under her own feet a different picture lay: a ballroom, all candles, and she at the center of it in red with a hundred faces turned toward her, and Callum Rooke's hand at her waist, and no one, no one anywhere, saying the word Doppel. Loved, said the voice. Chosen. Simply say the girl in gray is a ghost.

It was beautiful. It was, Mara thought, the most precisely cruel thing she had ever seen. He had not offered them wealth, or power, or revenge. He had offered each of them the thing she wanted most, and the price was the other.

"It's a lie," she said. Her voice came out small.

"Is it?" said the sky. "Look at her. Look how she wants it."

She did look. Vesper's face was wet. Her hand was still in Mara's, but loosely now, as though it had begun to forget itself.

"Vesper."

"I know." A whisper. "I know. I'm so tired of being the one who isn't real."

"You're real." Mara's own tears were falling on the glass. "You are the realest thing I have ever met. You made me laugh in a library. You made me brave. I don't want the gray room. If I sit in that room I shall know, every day, that somewhere there was a woman who would have stayed, and I let her go. I'd rather have the quarrels."

"Would you?"

"I'd rather have you shouting at me over the dishes for fifty years," said Mara, "than have peace, and be alone."

A long silence.

Then Vesper laughed. It was a rough, astonished sound, half sob. "Over the dishes."

"I don't know what else people do."

"We'll hire someone." Vesper gripped her hand again, hard. Her chin came up. She raised her streaming face to the sky and said, clearly, in the voice of a woman who has stood in many ballrooms: "Thank you, Director. We decline."

The picture beneath their feet shattered.

"Foolish," said the sky, and for the first time it was not gentle.

…

The light came.

It did not come from above. It came from beneath, from the black water, from every pale shape that drifted under the ice; it rose, a slow tide of silver, and the lake turned to glass. And then to light. Mara felt the cold go out of her bones. She felt the thread, the unspooling thread, stop. Reverse. Wind back, turn by turn, into her breast, and with it came something else, something large and warm and strange that smelled of vanilla and of woodsmoke and of rain on stone.

Memory.

She was nine, and standing in a nursery with the sun on the floor. She was twelve, and her mother's hands were smoothing her hair. She was nineteen, on a dock at night, and a boy with a scar through his brow was weeping, and she was saying, Please, Callum. Please take it. I can't carry it anymore.

She had never forgotten. She had only never known.

"Oh," said Mara.

She opened her eyes.

The tree was gone. The stove was gone. Only the hand in her hand remained, and the face above hers, and the sound, from far off, of a voice she loved shouting her name through the ice.

"Mara!"

"We have to go back," said Vesper. "Now. He's—"

The lake cracked.

A fissure ran across the glass from horizon to horizon, black and sudden, with a noise like a rifle shot; and through the crack came a cold that was not the cold of winter. It was older. It was hungry. It came up the lake like a tide.

"The Mirror," breathed Vesper. "He's pulling us under."

"Hold on," said Mara.

She gripped the hand with all her strength. She looked up, past the cracked sky, to where a thin gold light was beginning to burn at the edge of the world: a ring, a halo, a crown.

Totality.

"Hold on," she said again. "It's time."