“I’m right here.”
My body grew rigid as his cold breath tickled my ear. I spun around. “Dante?”
I saw the cuff of his shirt first, followed by the collar, the lock of hair dangling by his chin, the pen tucked behind his ear. “You’re here,” I said, gazing at the stubble on his cheek, at his thin lips as he said, “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“You left me those notes,” I said, my eyes darting around us to make sure no one was watching.
Dante nodded. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said. “But I haven’t been able to find you alone.”
I bit my lip, feeling suddenly guilty. “That night in the cemetery. You never finished your sentence.”
Dante was silent for a minute. “I wish I could tell you what I’m doing,” he said. “But I can’t. I can’t put you in danger.”
I stood back. “Okay,” I said slowly. “But what do you mean? Are you saying you
had
been to the cemetery before?”
Before he could answer, a voice called out to me from the distance. “Renée?”
I jolted at the sound of my name. Dante spun around, his eyes darting around the waterfront.
Noah, I thought. Not sure what to do, I turned to Dante. “He wasn’t supposed to meet me today,” I said quickly.
“Who?” Dante said, narrowing his eyes.
“A Monitor. You have to go,” I said, and glanced over my shoulder. From across the street, Noah waved at me, but I didn’t wave back. “I’m going to go and distract him,” I said, taking Dante’s hand. Above us the seagulls cried as they wove around each other.
“Wait,” Dante said, holding my wrist. “Tell me you believe me. That you believe I would never hurt you or anyone else.”
“I do,” I said, my eyes darting to Noah. If he found Dante, he would tell the professors, and it would all be over.
“Say it out loud,” Dante said, his brown eyes pleading with me. “Please.”
“I believe you,” I said, confused. “You would never hurt me or anyone else.”
A look of relief passed over his face, and he loosened his grip on my arm. “I love you,” he said. “Now go.”
Slipping away from the cold swirl of Dante, I ran to Noah. “What are you doing here?” I said, blocking his path.
“I got out of class early and came to find you,” he said, a little perplexed. “Are you okay? You’re acting kind of nervous.”
“I’m fine,” I said, staring at the reflection of the silos in Noah’s glasses, as Dante walked down the wharf, keeping his head lowered.
Noah must have seen him too, because he said, “Who was that?”
“Who?”
“That guy you were talking to.”
“Oh, he was just a stranger asking me for directions.”
Noah stepped back. “You’re lying. I saw the way you looked at him. You looked upset.”
I followed his gaze down the sidewalk, where Dante was disappearing into a crowd. “I can feel him,” Noah said, squinting. “He’s an—an—”
Undead, I thought, though Noah never finished his sentence. Instead, he turned to me. “It’s him, isn’t it,” he said in disbelief. “Your boyfriend is an Undead.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s just a friend.”
Noah backed away from me. “That’s why you never talk about him. That’s your big secret?”
“No—” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“How could you not tell me?”
“Tell you what?” I said, going rigid. “It’s not your life, it’s mine. You have a girlfriend, remember?”
“Don’t bring Clementine into this,” he said, his voice so firm it was unfamiliar.
“Why not? You’re with me every day. Does she know? Is that why she’s so rude to me?”
“I know you don’t like her, but Clementine would never date an Undead while training to be a Monitor. It’s not right,” he said, his voice low.
I stepped away from him in disbelief. “So now Clementine is my moral standard? What does she know about love? About loss? What do
you
know about it?”
Noah seemed to shrink back at my words, and I immediately felt guilty for hurting him. “She had to bury her brother last summer. He was an Undead. Her father made her do it. She hasn’t told anyone for the same reasons you haven’t told anyone about your secret, I’m guessing. Though her decision was far different than yours.”
July thirtieth, I thought, remembering what Anya had said to Clementine in the hallway earlier this year. That’s what she’d been referring to. My eyes wandered from the waterfront to Noah, but when I looked up at him he was already gone.
When I returned to my room that night it was all I could do to lie in bed with the blankets off and windows open, letting the cold air seep in, as if it were Dante’s presence wrapping itself around me. I needed something to remind me of him; to bring me back to him. So I did the next best thing. I called Eleanor.
“You sound depressed,” she said, after I had told her everything. “Maybe you should see a doctor.”
Eleanor’s suggestion caught me off guard. “What? I’m not depressed,” I said, as I curled up in an armchair by the window, watching the streetlamps flicker to life as night fell over the courtyard.
“You’ve been having visions. Hallucinations. And you’re seeing another guy? What about Dante? He’s your soul mate.”
“Noah is just a friend.” I whispered so Clementine wouldn’t hear.
Eleanor didn’t say anything for a long time. Through the walls, I could hear Clementine yell something, her tone angry. Maybe she was on the phone with Noah.
“I’ve been going to therapy, and it’s really helping me…understand myself,” Eleanor said. “And understanding myself helps me control myself.”
“Therapy?” I said. “But you’re fine the way you are. You don’t need to see a doctor.”
Eleanor lowered her voice. “I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately. Bad thoughts.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“About life and death. About me and what makes me different. About the things I want.”
I waited for her to go on.
“I’m so scared,” she said, the words quivering through the receiver. “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t,” I said automatically, not wanting to even think about it.
Eleanor let out a cold laugh. “Renée, you know I’m Undead. I only get twenty-one more years. That means that unless a miracle happens, I’m almost middle-aged.”
“No,” I said. “We’re going to find a way out. The Nine Sisters. The visions. The riddles. When I find the last one, you’ll—”
But Eleanor cut me off, her voice firmer than I had ever heard it before. “There is no answer, Renée. You’re in denial. I’m going to die. Dante’s going to die. We’re all going to die.”
I swallowed. “No,” I said. “You’re just upset. There’s a solution, I know it.”
I heard Eleanor take a deep breath. “The other day I was walking to the Megaron, and I saw one of the maintenance worker’s sons smoking behind the bushes when he was supposed to be watering the plants. He only looks a little older than me. I couldn’t stop staring at him. I kept thinking, why does he get to have a full life when I don’t?
What makes him more deserving than me?”
“He’s not,” I said.
“I wanted to take his soul, Renée. I wanted to go up to him and just take it.”
I went quiet.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “It wouldn’t help you, though. He doesn’t have your soul.”
“I know,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just so angry. I felt like I had no time. Taking his soul would give me more time.”
I felt the same way. Dante only had five years left, and although I never would have admitted it to Eleanor, ever since Latin, when the professor told us about the Liberum living long past their life span, I had been trying to suppress the one thought that I knew was too terrible to consider: if the Liberum could take souls to extend their lives, so could Dante. “I know how you feel,” I said. “But I wonder if it’ll always feel like we have no time, even if we live until we’re eighty.”
“Not me,” she said. “When I was little, I used to put on makeup and picture the way I would look when I was older. But when I try to imagine it now, I can’t.”
I smiled, remembering the way she put expensive lotion on her face every night when we were at Gottfried. “You were obsessed with wrinkles.”
“I still am,” she said. “Only now, I want them.”
• • •
Eleanor’s words echoed in my head as Headmaster LaGuerre drove us to a small wooded area outside of Montreal. It was an overcast November afternoon, the trees bare and frostbitten. In front of me, Clementine’s head rested on Noah’s shoulder as we crossed a planked bridge. I studied her slender neck and the short waves of her hair, trying to imagine what she would look like in twenty-one years, what Noah would look like. By then, Eleanor would be dead.
Noah and I hadn’t spoken since our fight at the waterfront, and even though I felt terrible about what I’d said, I was still angry. What gave him the right to make judgments about my life? And worse: what if his judgments were right?
We parked on a shoulder and carried our tools to a clearing in the woods, now dusted with snow.
“In order to be a great Monitor, you must treat burial rituals as an art form,” the headmaster said. “You must read the soil just by crumbling it in your fingers; dig the deepest holes, craft the most durable coffins, and wrap the dead as if you were draping a mannequin in delicate silk.
“The object of today’s exercise is to build a funeral pyre. You will work alone, gathering your supplies from the forest. At the end of the class we will ignite them.” He unrolled a cloth bag and handed each of us an ax. “The characteristics of a good funeral pyre are as follows: First, it must ignite quickly and stay ignited. Second, it must be sturdy enough to hold the weight of a human without collapsing. Third, it should generate as little smoke as possible. Drawing attention to a funeral pyre is never in our interest.”
When he was finished, we dispersed, running to the trees to collect as much wood as possible. I passed Anya chopping off the branches of a birch tree; Brett, who was working at a decomposing pine; and April and Allison, who seemed to be working together despite the headmaster’s instructions. To my right, Clementine sauntered through the trees, swinging her ax at the underbrush to make a path.
I gathered only dead wood that I foraged from the forest floor, and piled it at my spot in the clearing.
Across from me, Noah rolled up his sleeves, broke a branch over his thigh, and began to weave his wood together, his hands moving quickly as if he were working a loom.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing when I bent down and stacked the wood in pairs, threading them together until I had formed the base of a winding staircase.
Clementine worked next to me. Her jacket was strewn on the ground, and her shirt was marked with sweat as she tiptoed around a pile of sticks that seemed to collapse in on itself every time she tried to set a new piece of wood on top. Frustrated, she threw a branch to the ground and took a big gulp from her water bottle. When she glimpsed my half-finished pyre, a look of shock flashed across her face, but quickly hardened into a glare.
Ignoring her, I wiped my hands on my skirt and traipsed off into the forest to collect more tinder.
On the way back, I passed Anya, who was sitting on the ground surrounded by sticks and twigs and leafy branches, looking dejected. Her face was streaked with dirt.
“Are you okay?” I asked, stooping next to her.
She threw her hands in the air. “No matter how I arrange them, they always fall over. It’s hopeless.”
I waited until no one was watching, and with swift motions, arranged her sticks into the beginning of a cylinder. “Like this,” I said, before going back to my place.
By the end of class, Noah and I were the only ones who had finished pyres that could support the weight of a person; all of the others collapsed. Mine looked like a spiral staircase that climbed around a pedestal. “Lovely,” the headmaster said, prodding the bottom level to check its foundation. But Noah’s was exquisite. It was hundreds of thin sticks latticed around the center platform like the inside of shell. He looked nervous when the headmaster stood up, his face wide with shock as he ran his hands across the joints of the wood.
“Remarkable,” he said.
“Tout simplement remarquable.”
And with that, the headmaster struck a match and lit it on fire. The flame caught immediately, traveling around the structure like fingers. But when he held a match to mine, nothing happened.
I raised a hand to my cheek, confused, as the headmaster struck another match, and then another.
“Your wood is wet,” he remarked, touching a branch and rubbing his fingers together.
“What?” I said. “But I specifically chose dry, dead wood. None of it was wet.”
The headmaster didn’t respond. Instead, he struck another match, and then another, until the wood finally ignited. But as the fire spread to the rest of the pyre, the clearing was engulfed in thick, black smoke.
Moving away, everyone started to cough and swat at the air.
“Why is this happening?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
The headmaster picked up an ax, and with three rapid swings, he took the pyre down, the wood collapsing outward until the fire went out and the smoke cleared. In the middle of my pyre was a messy pile of damp leaves and weeds, hissing as the smoke curled out of the embers.
“But I didn’t put those there,” I said. “I never put wet leaves in my pyre.”
I glanced around the clearing, but no one seemed to care. As everyone began to pack up, my eyes rested on Clementine, who gave me the beginning of a smile before bending over to pick up her water bottle. It was empty.
I threw my tools on the ground and was about to go over to her, when I saw Noah a few feet away. He had picked up Clementine’s coat but was frozen in place. He must have seen her look at me, because he studied her, his face twisting with disgust as he realized what she’d done. Dropping her coat at his feet, he turned and walked back to the van.
Clementine sat in the back row, and Noah just in front of her, as we drove back to school. When there was a lull in the headmaster’s music, I could hear the low hum of their arguing. As we wound through the streets, I felt a thin strand of cold air wrap itself around my ankles and then break free as we turned a corner.