Page 51 of All Her Ghosts

I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what Iam.

You are my daughter, my mother swore to me, so vehement. But when she said it, was she looking me in the eyes? I can’t remember. My head spins, scrambled, half out of my body, bobbing along like a hot-air balloon on a flimsy tether.

You are my daughter, and they called it theDemeterProject—Demeter, Persephone’s mother, stealing her back from the underworld.You aremy daughter.

But I…

I don’t think I am. I’m not the soul she went fishing for. I’m something much bigger, older,worse. And pulling me out…

Istarted the Ghost War. It wasn’t a bomb, wasn’t terrorists or pollution, no enemy nation at fault—it was me. I’m the thing that broke the world. And I’m breaking it even wider now with every mile, asphodel blooming in the gutters, streaking across the yards.

“No ghost lamps,” Bas says quietly, pointing ahead, down a side street with houses from the ’80s in the gentle, middle-class disrepair that comes with long, begrudging hours and little energy left for lawn care.

Cain nods, agreeing. “No budget for new lamps; no budget for traffic cameras.”

He turns down the street and winds us deep into the warren, to the very back streets of the cul-de-sac. We stop outside a house with grass longer than its’ neighbors and afor salesign in the yard. As soon as the engine flicks off, Bas pulls a license plate and screwdriver from his backpack, passes it to Cain through the gap.

“You found a derelict?” Cain asks.

“Better. It had an old tarp, but new tires. Must have used it this summer, so they probably won’t notice the plate missing until next.”

“Current registration.” He nods, approving. “Cops won’t think twice if they run it. Good man,” he says, and hops out.

Alone with Bas in the RV, I… I don’t know what to do. My guts distort in a hundred directions, ripping me apart. And I know him—he’smy other half, the man in my memories, my missing piece—but I’m not the massive, ancient thing I used to be. I’m seventeen and I’mafraid.

He stares at me, still reaching—God, would he juststop reaching—and my throat swells shut. My eyes sting, burning with all the venom of my rotting stomach, my exposed ribs, my burning flesh and bone hands.

“Jenny,” he starts.

“Don’t.”

I throw myself between the seats, dragging my bag after me. Retreating into the little bedroom at the back of the camper, I lock the door behind me, huddle with my back against the headboard of the bed. It doesn’t help. Putting space between us doesn’t teach me how to breathe. Every time I shift, I smell the sheets. Freshly washed, they waft the smell of Mom’s fabric softener, the hint of her perfume.

I scrub my sleeve across my eyes. When that doesn’t help, I shove my palms into the sockets, trying to trap my weakness in my rattling skull where it belongs. I don’t feel like a weapon. I feel like a fuckup.

How many people—living and dead—are in pain right now because ofme?

How many more are in danger? How many are suffering? God, I didn’t even text my mom. She must be so worried. This whole time, I hated her, but she’s only ever been worried.

And I left her behind, no note, all her ghost trackers broken and DNR bearing down—she didn’t deserve that. She was just trying to keep me safe, six schools in three years and her unrelenting silence the currency she used to buy me a childhood. She thought she was helping. She thought she was saving her child from the monster in the night.

You are my daughter, she told me.Nothing is more important to me than you.

Maybe she wasn’t lying. Or, at least, maybe she didn’t mean to.

How could she have known her baby was the monster all this time?

Fabric shuffles outside, a weight sinking down into the mauve shag carpet.

“I don’t understand why you’re mad,” Bas murmurs, his voice so close he must be sitting with his back against the door.

My chest constricts. I have to swallow twice before I can speak, spend a long minute scavenging the wasteland of my head before I can even think of something to say to him—to sum up every fear, every injury, every agony of the last seventeen years and salt ground in the wound with this gentle new betrayal.

I settle on, “You knew.”

“Of course I knew. I’ve never not known.” He huffs, something like a laugh, something like the broken edge of grief clotting my own throat. “I knew you when you hung the stars. I knew you in the Nile, in the asphodel and in Helheim. I knew your legs under a shitty library table. I’d know you anywhere, any piece of you. I havealwaysknown.”

“So you chased me across the country? Youhunted me down?”