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In the palm of my hand, the crucible pulsed like a heartbeat.

A glimmer of silver caught my eye. I looked to the left, to where my other arm should be. Extending from the remaining bit of my shoulder was a pale, ghostly limb, transparent but bright. I flexed my fingers. Nothing I had read had hinted that my flesh and blood would be taken and replaced with a spirit arm. But I had also neverread of someone using a crucible cage they had not made themselves. Perhaps this was payment for not sacrificing enough, or perhaps there was some dark magic Bennum Wellebourne had placed on the burned bones of his own hand. Trembling, I tried to touch this shadow arm with my real right hand. I felt nothing—my fingers slipped through the air—until the ghost arm touched the iron crucible.

ThatI felt.

I let go of the crucible with my real right hand. It rested in the shadow hand as if that pale mist was solid.

Help us,the voices cried. They were weaker now.

They didn’t have much time.

I held my shadow hand out, the crucible in it small and insignificant looking, and in my mind, I called back to the voices that called to me. I saw the golden mists rise up from the bodies—most, but not all. They swarmed to me, to the crucible, and the light poured inside, swirling like a black hole eating a star.

I felt their souls. I knew each of them in a way I had known no other person—bare and true. My ghostly fingers clenched the crucible—it was both hot and cold at the same time, the temperature so extreme it felt as if it would burn me, and yet I couldn’t let go, even if the hand that clutched it was not real.

In a brilliant supernova of light, the souls shot out of the crucible and back into the bodies of the people they belonged to. They each took a huge breath of air in, their backs arching, then exhaled, sinking back down. None of them breathed again.

And, one by one, they stood.

FIFTY-FIVE

Nedra

The faces ofthe dead tipped to me.

I could sense each person—dimmer now than when I’d held their souls—and I knew them. I understood their thoughts. Their feelings. There was sadness within them, but also hope. And I knew that hope came from me.

There were three who remained dead. They were the souls that had shrunk away from me. They had not wanted a second life, so I had not given it to them.

But twenty-seven others watched.

It wasn’t a true life.

But it was enough.

Ernesta.I turned on my heel and darted back onto the landing. The shell of my sister stood there. I reached for her unwittingly with my ghost arm, stroking her cheek, and her head tilted into my touch as if she could feel the hand that wasn’t there.

“Follow me,” I said, intending to drag her to the stairs if I needed to. But she moved at my command without my touch, followed me as I raced down the spiral staircase, the only sound throughout the entire hospital our clattering footsteps.

I reached Ronan first. “Did you see her?” I asked, shoving Ernesta toward him. “Wherever you were...?” My voice trailed off.

He shook his head. “No.” And because he could sense my sorrow, he added, “I’m sorry.”

Something shifted in my vision. There was a glimmer of gold inside the boy, shining through his eyes.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said, standing up on his disease-withered leg. “In fact,” he said in a slower voice. “I don’t feel... anything.”

“But you can talk. You can think?”

He nodded.

But Ernesta couldn’t. I scrutinized her, trying to figure out why she was different.

Other revenants drew closer. “Did any of you see my sister? In the other place?” I asked desperately.

They all shook their heads, but there was some hesitation within them. “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

A woman stood from the crowd. I had not known her before, but I knew her now—her name, Phee, her three small children, who all died before her, her husband, who killed himself when he saw her blackening hand. She pointed now with her withered fingers. At the crucible I still held.