“I have to find my brother,” he demands. “I have to bring him home.”
They are standing in the kitchen, the only four people in the too-large house. Edgar scrubs the garden from his hands, and Hannah twists a kitchen towel between her fingers, and Matthew paces, the color high in his cheeks, and Olivia wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake.
Back at Merilance, she learned about life. The way it started, and the way it ended. It was always talked about as a one-way street, first alive and then dead, and even though she knew it was more complicated—because of the ghouls, who had clearly been alive, and then dead, and now were something else—the truth is, she isn’t sure what to make of the boy in the fountain.
She doesn’t think the boy was dead, but she also didn’t see the rise and fall of his chest, the subtle stirrings of a body just asleep. If it is a spell, she hopes it’s one that she can break. Hopes that she will touch his hand and he will wake.
Then there is the fact of time. It’s been two years. He should be fourteen, but the shape on the cracked stone floor was still a child. Then again, nothing seems to grow beyond the wall. Perhaps it is the same for people.
“Is it even possible?” asks Hannah, busying her hands with a pot of soup no one intends to eat. Olivia has told the story now, of her trip beyond the wall, or at least of finding the boy, and Edgar has done his best to translate, his brows knitting more with every word.
He clears his throat. “I hate to say it, but it could be a trap.”
As if that isn’t obvious. Of course it is a trap. A stolen child, left out like bait. But traps are like locks. They can be picked. They can be opened. A trap is only a trap if you get caught. Olivia knows better now, and when she goes back—
“I’ll go tonight,” says Matthew.
“No,” say Hannah and Edgar and Olivia at the same time, two out loud, and one with a single cutting swipe.
“He’s my brother,” persists Matthew. “I left him once. I will not be the one to leave again.”
Olivia lets out a short breath. And then she walks up to her cousin and pushes him once, hard. Matthew staggers back into the counter, looking more shocked than hurt, but she has made her point. He can barely stand. The color in his cheeks is not health, but sickness. He is worn thin, hollowed out by lack of sleep, and she has been beyond the wall and back again. She has seen what lurks in the shadows, what lives in the dark.
She looks from Matthew to Edgar to Hannah.
She doesn’t know how to tell them about the ghouls, the way they rise to meet her when she calls. She makes no mention of the life that stirs beneath her fingers there, sudden and wild. She doesn’t say that she is her father’s daughter, too, that some part of her belongs beyond that wall. That if anyone can cross into a world of death and come out alive again, it’s her.
Matthew’s hand clenches into a fist against the counter. “He’s my brother,” he says again, a pleading in his voice. Olivia nods and takes his bandaged hand in hers.
I know, she says with a look, the subtle squeeze of her fingers. And I will bring him back.
They have six hours until dusk.
Too much time, and not enough.
Hannah thinks she should eat, and Edgar thinks she should rest, and Matthew thinks he should be doing this instead. Olivia cannot eat or rest or hand the burden over. All she can do is prepare—and the more she knows about the workings of this place, the better. She has spent the last few days learning the layout of the halls, but now she looks around, at the walls and the floors, and wonders.
The world you saw beyond the wall is a shadow of this one.
Matthew’s words turn inside her head, like the houses in their metal frame. The houses, Gallant and not Gallant, one soft and frayed, the other in a state of disrepair, but otherwise, they are the same.
Olivia returns to the study, her cousin on her heels.
She goes to the wall behind the desk, to the place where shelf meets paper.
“What are you doing?” he asks as she runs her hand over the wall, trying to find the seam. It was there in the other house, and so—
Her fingers find a groove in the papered wall. She presses her palm flat, and the hidden door gives, just a little, before swinging open onto a narrow corridor. She knows if she follows it, she will find herself standing in the kitchen.
Matthew stares at her as if she’s just performed a magic trick.
“How did you know . . .” he begins, and she doesn’t have the time to tell him, to draw the ghoul, its hand over her mouth, so she goes to the model with its two miniature houses, its concentric metal rings. She points first at one house and then the other, drawing an invisible line between the two.
Matthew’s eyes narrow and then brighten.
“What’s there is here,” he muses, and she nods and turns to the drawing she did in the garden, the one of Gallant itself, taps the pencil expectantly as if to say, Where else? Understanding blooms across his face.
“Follow me.”
Every house has secrets.
Merilance had no hidden tunnels or false walls, but it did have a loose floorboard in the hall, a nook just wide enough to hide in at the top of the north stairs, a dozen cracks and shadows to exploit. Gallant’s secrets are far greater.
Olivia learns them now, presses each into her mind like a wildflower between the pages of her sketchpad.
There is the passage she’s already found, the lightless tunnel that runs between the study and the kitchen. Matthew shows her another. He leads her to the ballroom, to the wooden molding that runs along the far wall, as high as her waist. She watches him feel along the wood until he finds the notch.
“Here,” he says, taking her fingers and guiding them to the trim. It feels like a chip, broken away, but when she presses down, the wooden panel swings out, revealing a cubby too small for all but a child—or a narrow girl. She crouches down, squinting into the dark, until Matthew lifts a lamp, and by it, she can see a set of squat stone steps.
“It leads down into the cellar,” he explains.
The cellar. She has only seen it once, the morning after she arrived, when Hannah emerged with the basket on her hip. But she can think of a hundred places she’d rather go than the drystone crypt beneath the house. Still, as she eases the door shut, she forces herself to note the chip in the wood, how far it is from the corner, until she’s sure she could find it in the dark.
They are not alone on their quest. As Matthew leads her through the house, she sees them, watching. A ghoul in the corner. Another on the stairs. Half-formed faces she knows from the paintings in the hall outside the study. Members of a family she never knew she had. Priors, just like the ghouls beyond the wall, the ones who never made it home.
She follows Matthew into the music room next. Her fingers itch, wishing they could simply sit and play, wishing he would teach her another song. But he doesn’t stop at the piano. He goes past it, to the right corner of the room, finds the groove where two strips of wallpaper seem to meet.
“Right here,” he says, pressing his hand flat to the wood. And for a moment, she expects him to command the hidden door, to order it open or closed the way he did the garden gate. But there is no blood on his palm, and he gives no order, simply presses down, and a panel pops out.
“Come on,” he says, gesturing for her to follow.