Fullepub 
Chapter 21
21
I wandered in a daze back into the dark water that lapped at the wall around the house and waded in until I was hip-deep. Tyler thought I was mad—“Your father is still out there!” he shouted from where he stood by my grave—but I was covered in blood and mud and the remains of dead children and even though the water was black and cold, I lowered myself into it until I was fully submerged. I stayed under until my aching lungs urged me to the surface a minute later.
Alive. I was alive. My heart beat fast and pumped warm blood around my body. My lungs drew breath. I was alive—and Iris Hollow was not. The child that had fallen through to this place ten years ago had never left. I was sure of that now. The dark-haired girl who’d disappeared on New Year’s Eve a decade ago was buried in a shallow grave a few meters away.
Something else had come back in her place.
Something that had looked almost like her, but not quite.
A changeling.
Me.
“What do you mean, ‘I’m not Iris Hollow’?” Tyler asked as I made my way back to shore. I examined my own hands as I waded through the water, then touched my fingertips to the scar at my throat. The pustule had gone down, whatever angry thing that had been nesting there quiet for the moment.
“What if my father wasn’t crazy?” I said. I thought of Gabe, of the morning he’d killed himself. I thought of Grey’s small hand on his arm in the car and the way she’d ordered him to take us home. The air had smelled sweet and potent.
I squatted in the mud. My stomach felt wet and shuddery. I tried to keep my breathing steady. “He knew,” I said. “My father knew that we weren’t his daughters. He knew from the moment he saw us.” I wiped my hand on my wet jeans and then pressed my fingers to my teeth. Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed. “He was convinced that we were impostors. Things that looked like his children but weren’t really. I think he was right.”
“Are you suggesting you’re not . . . human?” Tyler asked. “Then what does that make you?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re not Iris Hollow, why do you look like her?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Well, try to explain it,” Tyler said.
“It’s not just that I don’t remember the month that we were missing. I don’t remember anything from before the night we were found. It’s all gone, the life I had before. My grandparents, my cousins, the house I grew up in, my friends at school, the TV shows I liked to watch. It all disappeared. When I came back, I was a blank slate. We all were.”
Tyler looked disbelieving. “You can’t not remember anything.”
“I remember nothing. It’s like I was born the night I was found. There was only darkness before that, and then someone switched on a light, and that is where my memory starts.”
Tyler’s expression softened. “You were seven. You were young. I hardly remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday. I mean, I don’t eat breakfast, but you know what I mean.”
“Do you know how my father died?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. I wondered if he knew because Grey told him, or if he knew because he’d read about it on the internet.
I thought of the note Grey had pulled from his pocket when we found him, the note she’d torn into shreds so our mother wouldn’t find it: I didn’t want this, it had said.
What if Gabe really hadn’t wanted to die?
What if . . . what if Grey had made him?
Because she knew. Of course she knew. Grey knew that she wasn’t Grey.
She remembered everything.
“There are three little girls in a grave wearing necklaces with our names on them. What if, in the story Grey tells about what happened to us, we were not the three little girls?” I said. I met Tyler’s eyes. “What if we were the monsters?”
I fastened Iris Hollow’s locket back around her neck before I reburied her with her sisters. When it was done, I put my palm against the soft dirt that entombed them. “I’m sorry,” I said to all of them. “For whatever happened to you. I’m so sorry.” Rosie stood statue-still at their grave, still draped in Vivi’s green tweed coat, while Tyler went inside to fetch Vivi’s backpack.
There would be no more tartan way markers to follow now, but that didn’t matter—I knew that we were getting closer to Vivi and Grey. My Vivi and Grey. Whatever linked us together told me that.
“Wait,” Tyler said as I set off into the marsh once more. He was close behind me, but Rosie hadn’t moved from the grave.
Tyler went back and knelt in front of his sister. “Come, my darling,” he said, tugging her hand gently, but Rosie shook her head. “Don’t . . . you want to come home? You can see Eomma and Appa. They miss you so much. You can see Selena and Camilla. They’re all grown up now. You would be so proud of them. Lena became an architect and Cammy is a pediatrician. She just had a baby girl a few weeks ago. She named her Rosie, after you. I think you’d like her. You can play together, you can go back to school, you can do all the things you—”
Rosie reached out and placed her fingers against Tyler’s lips to quiet him. “Let me go, Ty,” she rasped. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was small and sweet, her throat dry from years of disuse.
Tyler shook his head, his lips mashed together to keep from breaking down. “No,” he said. “No, I want you to come home.”
“Let me go,” she said again, still gentle, her small hands stroking the sides of his face.
Tyler’s ribs were convulsing with silent sobs now. Tears tracked down his cheeks, and his jaw quaked. “I’m staying with you,” he managed, his voice thick with pain. “I’m not leaving you again. I’m staying right here, like I should have the first time.”
Rosie smiled and leaned in to whisper something in Tyler’s ear. Then she looped her arms around his shoulders and hugged him tightly. Tyler was crying hard now, the type of crying you usually do alone in the shower when you think no one can hear you.
And then, suddenly, the green coat she had been wearing dropped to the ground and Tyler stumbled forward, his hands sinking into the mud.
Rosie Yang’s soul was untethered from her brother’s grief.
Rosie Yang was gone.
We walked through the Halfway for an another eternity. We rarely spoke to each other as we fell into a monotonous slog, one foot after the other. After a time, the marshland dried up and we found ourselves on solid ground again. We took off our wet shoes and slung them around our necks by their laces to dry. We inspected our darkening toenails, the way they had begun to pull away from their beds.
There were more rivers of the dead. There were more figures gathered around doors. The Halfway kept unfolding itself to us, stretching on and on and on.
I was glad for the ache in my bones, the sharpness in my chest. I was glad for each pluck of pain that would not let me sink too deep into my thoughts, because my thoughts were a well of horror.
You are not you.
Don’t think that.
If you are not you, what are you?
Don’t think that.
Three little girls fell through a crack in the world. Three things that looked like little girls came back.
Don’t think that.
What did Grey do to the Hollow sisters?
Don’t think that.
What didyou do?
We stopped to rest in the roots of a soft tree, its bark skin-warm and splitting with rot beneath our backs. I was exhausted. A prickle of bone-deep pain nudged against my thoughts with every movement from my ribs. I wanted to cry, but I was too tired.
Grey and Vivi were close now. They were alive, both of them, but they were weak and fading. I worried that the thin thread that tied me to them might break if I slept, but my mind was running hot with fatigue and my body yearned for rest.
I collapsed back against the tree, then sucked in a hard breath through my teeth as a rocking wave of pain battered me again and again.
“Let me see your ribs,” Tyler said. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours.
“Why?” I snapped, my eyes still closed. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll have you know that my mother and my older sister are both doctors. I have seen a splinted bone or two in my time. Now, do you want help or not?”
I sat up and begrudgingly lifted my shirt from my chest. I felt like a fragile thing, a baby bird. I wanted to go home to my mother. I wanted to take a shower and gorge myself on hot food and let Cate braid my hair as I fell asleep.
Tyler took off his mud-spattered floral shirt and began tearing it into strips. Beneath his shirt, his arms and chest were covered in tattoos, delicate imagery of angels and flowers and a woman’s face: Grey’s.
“Doctor mother, hey?” I said as he worked, drinking in the way his skin stretched tight across his abs, the way his collarbones pushed through his skin in a way that made me want to press my lips to the space where they met at his throat. “She must have been really excited about your modeling career.”
“She was predictably and boringly disapproving. Such a cliché. She’s made her peace with it now that I’m wildly successful, but I left home when I was sixteen. Also a cliché. Part of the reason your sister and I got on so well, I think.”
“It’s not easy to leave everything you know and strike out on your own. You must have some guts.”
“Yes, well.” He began wrapping the makeshift bandages around my chest. “More than I generally get credit for. It’s hard being ridiculously good-looking. No one takes you seriously.” He tucked in the end of the bandage and put his palm against my side. “There. All better. Actually, a bandage on broken ribs does precisely nothing, but at least it made me feel useful.”
“And you got to take your top off,” I added. “Win-win.”
Tyler laughed. We were sitting very close now. Closer than I dared to get to anyone, lest they go rabid at the scent of me. Tyler took my hand in his and studied the lines of my palm. “Strange,” he said as he trailed a finger over my life line.
“What?”
“Grey taught me how to read palms. You have the exact same kind of life line as hers. Look here, where it’s snapped in two, with a gap in between.”
“What does that mean?”
“If you believe Grey Hollow’s Guide to Palmistry, it means something changed. There was a before and an after. A rebirth, perhaps.” His eyes flicked up from my palm to my face, then back down again. A shudder ran through me. I thought of the graves, of the three little bodies buried together.
“I’m glad you’re here with me, Tyler,” I said. I closed my hand around his and ran my thumb in slow circles over his knuckles.
“Well, I can’t say I’m thrilled to be here myself, but as far as company goes, you’re not horrible, I suppose.”
“A rousing compliment, coming from you.”
“It is, actually.”
There was a moment of silence and stillness between us, and then I leaned in, slowly, to kiss him. I gave him time to pull back, to stop me if he didn’t want it, but Tyler did not pull back, did not stop me. I put my lips against his, hovering there to see if he would go wild, but he didn’t, so I kissed him harder, faster, brought my hand up to hold his jaw as my body came to life at the closeness. I savored, for a handful of seconds, the heat and softness of a kiss that was not filled with teeth and blood and hunger. Then I felt Tyler’s palm pressed gently against my sternum. Pushing me away. I pulled back from him, but only a little.
“I love your sister, Iris,” he said against my lips.
“I know.” I pressed my forehead against his. “So do I.”
I took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of him, and then I lay back in the roots of the tree and fell swiftly to sleep.
When I woke, Tyler was still sleeping—and I had to pee. I wandered away from the tree where we rested, careful to remember my path back. The sound of running water came from nearby. I followed it and came across a brook babbling with movement, but the water was dark and smelled stagnant. I picked up a moldy stone and plopped it into the stream. It disappeared with a puff of white spores, swallowed by the water.
I squatted and peed in the undergrowth, watchful of the forest. It watched me back.
On my way back, my heart jumped at the sight of splashes of red nestled among the leaves. At first, I thought they were drops of blood, but no: They were strawberries. I knelt to pluck one from its stem, but I found it mushy to the touch, its insides putrid. I pressed it with my fingers. Worms and mold squelched out. I threw it to the ground and wiped my hand on my jeans.
There was nothing good here, in this place. Nothing untainted by decay. Agnes had been trapped here for who knows how long, with nothing to eat but rancid food and nowhere to sleep but the desolate remains of knockdown houses. No shelter. No comfort. No clean water or unspoiled food to fill her aching belly.
Why were we different? The Halfway had gotten inside of us, changed us—but not as catastrophically as it had changed others. We were not rotting. We had been allowed to leave.
When I came back to our camp, it was empty.
Tyler was gone.
“Tyler?” I called, but the wood was silent. Nobody answered me. I walked through the surrounding trees looking for some sign of him. Maybe he’d also gone to pee? “Tyler!” I shouted again, but again there was nothing. No birds fluttered. The trees were still.
Something felt wrong.
I ran back to the tree where we’d slept and yanked Vivi’s backpack out from where I’d hidden it in the tree roots—this was definitely our camp, definitely where I had left him sleeping no more than fifteen minutes earlier. I riffled through the bag and found the knife, then worked my way through the woods around the camp again, shouting his name, my whole body shaking. Wherever Tyler was, he had the shotgun with him. I called and called and called his name but he didn’t answer. Like Grey and Vivi, he was suddenly gone.
“Shit!” I spat. I kicked a tree root and then yelped at the pain that darted into my little toe. I shouldn’t have left him.
How long should I wait for him to come back? If I left him here, I had no tether to him, no way to find him the way I could my sisters. If I left him here, I might never see him again.
I thought, in that moment, of my parents. I thought of the night we had gone missing and the terrible, gut-eating panic that must have consumed them.
In the end, I waited for what felt like an hour. Until something in me stirred, certain that Tyler was not coming back. That something bad had befallen him in the short minutes I had left him here alone. I used my knife to carve a message into the flesh of the tree, almost certain that he would never see it: WAIT FOR ME HERE.
Then I left him. I left him there, alone in the woods. I left him to whatever fate had come his way because I had no other choice but to press on and do what I had come here to do: find and save my sisters.
