“DEATH ITSELF IS NOT THE WORST THING.
worse still is to live when you want to die."
Bexley Briar is back from the dead.
Her first thought is exactly that. Well—I am back from the dead.
The second one is: Raum isn’t.
The third one she both thinks and casts down into hell, like a well-wish for the sinners, with a laugh: suck on that.
Bexley Briar is back from the dead. The amount of times she has narrowly avoided needing a graveplot should have been evidence enough that even a year in the aether, a year gone from the surface of the world, would not be confirmation of her death. (Whenever it does happen—if it does happen—the only valid attestation will have to be the body itself. Anything less would be an enemy’s wishful thinking.) So Bexley is less surprised by this development than she is resigned to the fact of it. She is not even particularly sure that she’d rather be alive than dead, but for revenge’s sake she’s committed to the bit, and anyway, fate has convinced her—being dead doesn’t really suit me.
But there is a stop between the stations of the dead and living that Bexley did not know existed until she stumbled into it. And this island is that stop.
When she wakes up—when she realizes, I am back from the dead—it is swifter than a gunshot.
Cleaner than a slash across the throat. One minute there is only darkness: the backs of her eyelids are patterned with paisley. The world, if there is anything left of it, is dizzingly far away, a shipwreck bound to the bottom of the ocean. There are noises, voices, that seep in from the outside, but they are muffled by those twenty thousand leagues. The world, if there is anything left of it, and the noises and voices that inhabit it, were all willing to drown to get away from her.
For a moment she wants to cry. The world is full of leaving; for her to leave it too would not be such a terrible loss. Acton has already left. And Florentine. And Seraphina. For a moment she wants to cry. The feeling builds in her, builds and builds, and every inch it crawls closer to her brain it seems to grow infinitely more powerful, more overwhelming, and now her whole body is searing hot, and her chest falls in on itself like it’s carrying the world’s greatest weight, and even in the darkness tears prickle behind her eyes until it feels like fire, and salt rises in her throat—
And the next second, she is up.
The world unfolds at breakneck speed.
Cold. Ice. When she blinks, her gaze is half-clouded with the snow that clings to her lashes, as though she has been laying out in the open freeze for days and days. The air has teeth; underfoot the grass is crackling with a thin iridescent layer of frost. And just as she notes all this a snow-flecked, loud-enough-to-roar gust of wind comes rushing out of the trees, making a keening noise like a wolf-howl, and smashes into her. First her chest; then it pours over every inch of skin and leaves her abruptly, aggressively, shivering.
It’s winter.
The realization does not creep up. It hits her—fast and sharp and hard, Joan of Arc’s arrow. For a moment she struggles to remember what season it had been when she—died, or left, or whatever it was—but some part of her, more awake than the rest, gently suggests that remembering at all might be a bad idea.
Yet, even without really remembering, Bexley is certain the island didn’t look like this the last time she was here.
There are no trees. No bushes, no animals. Instead, the vast expanse of the island is broken up by huge, towering shards of star-silver and glass. It is, as far as Bexley can see, a forest of mirrors: mirrors that reflect the weak light of the sun until it becomes bright, Solterra bright, hurt-the-eyes bright; mirrors that play off each other until they become a maze, dizzyingly cold and infinite; mirrors that show her, her, her.
(Bexley realizes, very faintly, and with a mild sense of disgust, that it must have been months since she’s last looked in a mirror.)
She steps forward.
In perfect time, a girl pours like molten gold into a mirror on her left.
The girl is... small. Rangy. She carries herself with an almost exuberant bounce. Her eyes are bright with mischief, and when she turns her head to call to someone behind her—someone, or some mirage, even these magic mirrors are not powerful enough to make an image of—her face is unblemished.
She opens her mouth to laugh, and the reflection shatters.
Bexley steps forward again. This time a body shows up on the right, and it’s far closer to matching the real one that precedes it. This one is full-grown and dull-gold. Her white hair is shorn into a long, blunt cut, and her head snakes low as she walks. She has the same scar, eye to nostril, but hers looks darker and more deeply healed, and white hair is even starting to grow over the edges. Bexley realizes what is wrong with her with a start.
Her necklace is gone.
She steps forward and another one follows, this time trailing a young Apolonia at her hip, the sight of which makes Bexley’s eyes burn; and again, and a new reflection shows her collapsed on the floor of the canyon, breathing in bright dust; the one after that shows her panting, spit-slick, with Acton’s blood spattered over her chest; and the one after that she cannot look at; and the one after that is—
Bexley stops.
“Well,” she says sardonically. “You’re not me.”
