Belbalm was going to crack her open. She was going to drink Alex dry.
A wave rose over the stone plaza of Beinecke; a beautiful dark-haired boy was
shouting. Let all become mid-ocean!
She could drift into the Pacific, past Catalina, watch the ferries come and go.
The wave crashed over the plaza, carrying away a tide of Grays. Alex remembered
cowering on the floor of that beautiful library, tears streaming down her cheeks, singing her grandmother’s old songs, speaking her grandmother’s words. She’d been hiding from
the Grays, hiding behind … Darlington, his name was Darlington … Darlington in his dark coat. She’d been hiding the way she had her whole life. She’d sealed herself away from the world of the living, for the sake of being free of the dead.
Let all become mid-ocean.
Alexandra. Belbalm’s voice. A warning. As if she knew the thought as soon as it entered Alex’s head.
She didn’t want to hide anymore. She’d thought of herself as a survivor, but she’d been
no better than a beaten dog, snapping and snarling in any attempt to stay alive. She was
more than that now.
Alex stopped fighting. She stopped trying to close herself off from Belbalm. She
remembered her body, remembered her hands. What she intended was dangerous. She was
glad.
Let all become mid-ocean. Let me become the flood.
She threw her arms wide and let herself open.
Instantly she felt them, as if they had been waiting, ships on an endless sea, forever searching the dark horizon, waiting for some light, some beacon to guide them on.
Throughout New Haven she felt them. Down Hillhouse. Up Prospect. She felt North
climbing his way back from the old factory site where the death words had thrown him,
felt that kid forever looking to score tickets outside the vanished Coliseum, felt the Gray
running wind sprints outside Payne Whitney, felt a thousand other Grays she’d never let
herself look at—old men who had died in their beds; a woman pushing a crumpled pram
with mangled hands; a boy with a gunshot wound to his face, reaching blindly for the comb in his pocket. A desiccated hiker limped down the slope of East Rock, dragging her
broken leg behind her, and out in Westville, in the ruined maze of Black Elm, Daniel Tabor Arlington III drew his bathrobe tight and sped toward her, a cigarette still hanging
from his mouth.
Come to me, she begged. Help me. She let them feel her terror, her fear burning bright like a watchtower, her longing to live another day, another hour, lighting the way.
There was no end to them, flowing over the streets, past the garden, through the walls,
crowding into the office, crowding into Alex. They came on in a cresting wave.
Alex felt Belbalm recoil and suddenly she could see the room, see Belbalm before her,
arm outstretched, eyes blazing. The Wheel still encircled them, bright blue flame. They stood at its center, surrounded by its spokes.
“What is this?” Belbalm hissed.
“Call to the missing!” Alex cried. “Call to the lost! I know their names.” And names had power. She spoke them one after another, a poem of lost girls: “Sophie Mishkan!
Colina Tillman! Zuzanna Mazurski! Paoletta DeLauro! Effie White! Gladys
O’Donaghue!”
The dead whispered their names, repeated them, drawing closer, a tide of bodies. Alex
could see them packed into the garden, halfway in and out of the walls. She could hear them moaning Sophie, Colina, Zuzanna, Paoletta, a rising wail.
The Grays were speaking, calling out to the scraps of those souls, a murmur of voices
that rose in a broken chorus, louder and louder.
“Alexandra,” snarled Belbalm, and Alex could see sweat on her brow. “I will not
relinquish them.”
It wasn’t up to her anymore.
“My name is Galaxy, you fucking glutton.”
At the sound of Alex’s name, the Grays released a unified sigh that gusted through the
room. It ruffled Alex’s hem, blew Belbalm’s hair back from her face. Her eyes went wide
and white.
A girl seemed to emerge from inside her, peeling away from Belbalm like a pale onion
skin. She had thick dark curls and wore the apron of a factory worker over a gray blouse