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Sonder only gave her the briefest of nods, a pained look in his eyes before he used his scalpel to slice the heart irreparably. The last breath, the first Mr Byrne ever took when he was free of his mother’s womb, left him.

There was no longer any need to rush. Something about that fact was what caused the first fissure in her heart. But there was still no time for that. Not yet.

On wooden legs, Atta bent to retrieve the open specimen jar next to their satchel filled with the embalming liquid of Sonder’s own design.

“Move the heart,” she directed Sonder, who reached into the chest again. “Careful of its eyes,” she warned. He nodded and looked away, moving the heart just so. “A little more to the right,” she instructed, hoping the faerie was still in the same position she’d sensed, so that her eyes would meet only its bony feet.

There they were, skeletal. Tiny.

She pushed away a leafy frond with her fingers, pinching at the creature’s phalanges with tweezers. Still as stone, as if it were frozen or taxidermied, it slipped free from Mr Byrne and Sonder let the heart go. He moved to hold the specimen jar for her, but his hands were too slick with blackened blood. Cursing, he wiped it on his coat and managed to get a grip on the jar. Very carefully, Atta slipped the faerie inside.

Sonder closed it, and they stood back, watching in awe as the embalming liquid sizzled. The faerie twitched and went still again. Dead. Frozen in time. It was a scientific success. It was miraculous. But Atta looked at Mr Byrne’s body. Thought of his wife. And the success felt hollow.

While Sonder slipped off his ruined coat and called the medics using a phone down in the kitchen, Atta collected samples of the flora that had crawled up the wall behind Mr Byrne as they’d worked. It had all but taken over the ceiling, too, the fan drooping like a weeping willow.

“Shall we?” Sonder asked quietly from the doorway and Atta nodded, pulling a sheet up and over Mr Byrne.

They gathered their supplies and walked outside to alert Mrs Byrne of her husband’s death.

Atta

Atta sat numbly in the car, barely registering where Gibbs was driving to.

She’d been so dissociated that, at some point, Sonder made Gibbs pull over, and he climbed in the back seat with her.

“Talk to me,a stór.”

“If only we’d been there sooner.”

She watched his chest rise and fall in her periphery as Dublin proper passed by. “You can’t do that to yourself.” His words were so gentle it made her want to weep.

“But if we’d left earlier. . . We were—” She abruptly cut herself off, unsure if it was out of embarrassment, shame, or not wanting to say anything that would lead him to believe she regretted what they’d been doing that morning. “We were frivolous with our time this morning.”

He brought one of his arms around her and scooted her until her thigh was flush against his. “No, we weren’t. We’d only just heard of this man at all, and we showed up exactly when we were asked to. Twelve minutes early, actually.” She rested her head on his shoulder, staring ahead at the back of Gibbs’s hair. “Just because someone else is dying doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to stop living. That would spit in the face of the days they did have. Don’t get lost in if-only’s. Today was not a total failure. You trapped a faerie—for good. We can study it now.”

“They hunt for pairs.”

Sonder stiffened and Gibbs caught her eyes in the rearview. “Pardon?”

She picked at her thumbnail. “The Fae. To be fully successful, they need a host and then another person to provide the nourishment. Seed in the soil—the sacrifice—then a living host to make it flourish. Ms McDonough had her son, Lauren had her roommate, and Mr Byrne had his wife.” She didn’t mention Sonder’s parents, not with Gibbs around, but one glance at his face showed he was adding them to the list as well.

“Atta, then you saved Mr Byrne’s wife. That faerie was almost successful. You saw how close it was. And nowwe’reone step closer to figuring out why this is happening and how to stop it.”

“Atta has a theory,” Gibbs piped up from the front seat.

“Oh?” Sonder looked at her with one brow raised.

“You didn’t tell him?”

Atta glared at Gibbs in the rearview. “I’m beginning to think they aren't just possessing people. It isn’t that they want to walk around as us in the flesh, but they want our world.” She let her words sink in as Sonder’s brows furrowed, but he remained silent. “I think their world is dying.”

She didn’t need to explain why she thought that. Gibbs didn’t know about her visions, and he already thought the two of them mental enough. “The reason they’re using flora is to make a suitable environment for their species.”

“‘Humans in the crucible’,” Sonder quoted.

Atta nodded. “Humans are the soil.”

They rode on in silence until Gibbs pulled up to the treeline outside Achilles House. “I have to gather some things Lynch asked me for.” He tossed Sonder the keys. “Be back in a couple of hours and I’ll take you home.”