Page 36

S onder had their newest thieved body open on his makeshift examination table in the solarium.

They’d had to hurry, digging as quickly and as quietly as they could manage under the cover of night in Trinity Cemetary. They’d dumped a corpse from Gallaghers’ into the empty grave, but they’d only been able to fill the dirt back in hastily, without nearly the precision they would have liked. If anyone came in daylight—presumably the same person whose light they’d seen on the grounds at night—it would be obvious someone had tampered with the grave.

On the drive to Sonder’s manor, had the idea that they should have made it look like an animal had gotten to the grave. Maybe it would appear that way, anyway. After all, who would dig up dead bodies? What was done was done, and they’d hauled the body into Sonder’s laboratory.

After they’d run between the lab and the atrium, clear across the house and grounds thrice to tell one another something regarding their separate research, Sonder moved his endeavours to the hawthorn solarium with .

Sonder cursed, wiping black blood on his leather butcher’s apron. He said the leather kept the blood from seeping onto his clothing so he didn’t have to wear hospital-grade rubbish .

“What is it?” asked, glancing up from her inspection of a unipinnate leaf.

He was wiping in between his fingers, having not bothered with gloves. “Damn. I’ve gotten some on my sleeve.” He had them rolled all the way up his forearms and she wondered how deeply he’d reached into the chest cavity. “See, this is why I always wear black at Achilles.”

“Did you find anything of significance?”

“No.” He sat on a chair they’d dragged in, brushing the hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “I don’t understand why some of the bodies flower and others don’t. The presence of the flora must be why Agamemnon is burying them.”

“Planting them,” clarified and Sonder tipped his head to one side, considering.

“I suppose you’re right. But why? Why the flowering, why the possession at all? Is the flowering happening as a failure of the possession?”

stood up and brushed off her plaid trousers. “In my. . . visions , let’s call them, I’ve seen glimpses of a strange place. It’s beautiful with all manner of flora, but there is always decay slipping in.”

Sonder scrubbed at the stubble on his jawline, and for a split second, was distracted by the thought of what it might feel like against her fingertips, her lips. “Are you suggesting that their world is crumbling?”

She hadn’t been suggesting that, but now her mind spun with the idea. “And now they want ours?” She poised it like a hypothesis to gauge his reaction.

He was silent for a long moment, lost in contemplation. “Are they trying to inhabit humans to be us, or. . .”

let out a small gasp. “‘ Humans in the crucible .’”

“Come again?”

“‘ Humans in the crucible ,’” she quoted again. “It’s a line from W.B. Yeats’s treatise on Irish Folklore. “It always stuck with me.”

Sonder rose, a light flicking on behind his eyes. “, what is a crucible used for?” He moved his hands as he spoke, beginning to pace. “In science, in alchemy. What is a crucible used for?”

Excitement skittered up her spine. “To heat, to melt down?—”

“ Why ?” he urged her, ever the professor begging for his students to locate the answer themselves.

“To make something new.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, they locked eyes. “Sonder,” she ventured. A question. A fear. A thrill.

“We have to stop this. I think they’re growing more successful.”