Page 60 of All Her Ghosts

South, they said.

Except, we aren’t headed south.

And my mother doesn’t pray.

“Wait.” My mind spins, lurching and spitting, seizing on these awful little crumbs. “We never mentioned Cain. Mom clearly had our texts, but wenevermentioned Cain.Ididn’t even know he was coming.”

Bas stares at me like I’ve gone crazy.

“So?”

“So, I don’t think this is my mom hunting us. She wouldn’t have put out that Amber Alert. This is—is DNR again, it has to be. They must have broken into our house—into Mom’s computer.” My stomach churns, threatening to heave. Did she know they were coming? Did she have time to get out? Did they—

No. I need to focus. I can spiral later.

“They’re trying to flush us out,” I say. “But why like this? Why do they think he, specifically, would steal me and headsouth?”

“I don’t know! Because that’s where the facility was?” he hisses, throwing up his hands. “But there’s nothingleft, Jenny. Your mom made that place a ghost town with what she did, then I brought the whole facility down.”

He did. The barest residue of a burnt-film image—a cracked-egg ceiling—flits through my head. He shook the walls down to their foundations, but my mother got out. Cain got out. And both of them were right there at that wicked iron table, in that awful prison room. My mother bent over my wailing, useless body. Cain with his back to the stone wall, firing, firing—

A stone wall. They were all stone walls. Solid, without windows.

Bas brought the building down, but we weren’tinthe building. We were in itsbasement—

Just like my mother always sets up her evil lair in the basement.How even in the flattest states with the most prefab houses, Mom always manages to find the one old farmhouse with a cistern, a root cellar, a tornado shelter. Anything underground.

Underground and near the ley lines—the threads of old energy, earth magic, ancient and unbending—that keepreaching for me.

“Hell isn’t just where we are,” I realize. “Hell isfollowing us. But that means there’s a place where it started. The impact crater where my”—I swallow hard—“babynapper first broke the world. I think we can fix it. I think that’s what the DNR is afraid of—why they knew it’d be Cain, why they think we’re going south. I think we must be able to undo what she did—because Mom would never risk sending these DNR assholes to stop us from going to aflea marketafter seventeen years of hiding me from them.”

“Well, we’re not going to be able to fix anything if we don’t leave now.” Bas grips me tight by the shoulders, eyes wild and pained. “I can’t lose you. Iwill notlose you, do you understand me? I don’t give a shit about these people. Not the living or the dead. The only thing I care about isyou.”

“They’re suffering—”

“Fuck them,” he snarls, shaking me. “They wanted to uproot the harvest—why should I stop them? Let them reap what they sow. Let them wander undying for the next fifty years, a hundred—” His voice cracks. He throws his hands up and his fingers catch the light, every vein highlighted and burning with sunlight, living flesh smoking, struggling to contain what he is, what he’s doing to the world just by living in it.

Another helicopter swoops the parking lot, so loud its roaring engine vibrates in my empty chest, my un-beating ocean thrashinghigher than a hurricane. It consumes me, drives every human thought out of my head until the only thing left is the broken god, the ancient thing missing pieces, watching her other half break down in terrible pain.

I reach for him. I can’t help it. Even when his hands blaze molten, hotter than a stove, I hold him.

I’ve held worse. When the sky broke, I burned my bones on falling stars. When the world cracked open, I cut my palm on its shards.

“I didn’t climb in a body for kicks,” he whispers. Sunlight burns in his black eyes, haloing them in awful, bitter gold. “They forced that on us—onyou. So fine, we’re human now. What if we don’t want to stop?”

“But we’re not human.” I drag his burning hands to my face, cup his sun-gleaming palms to my cheeks, force him to look at me through the smoke of what we aren’t flaking away in the face of what weare. It hurts, sure, but not any more than the Band-Aid ripping off the lie my mother told me every day for seventeen years.

You are my daughter, she said.

Yeah, right. So why is Cain the only one dying to keep me safe?

I swallow hard, step closer. I press my palms to Bas’s blistering cheeks.

“The people who did this to us are not the ones suffering. The ghosts are.Cainis. Right now, this second, for us. If you told him what you wanted to do, what would he say?”

Bas closes his eyes. His hands cool, steaming in the chill October air. When he looks at me again, he’s the boy I met under the library table, eyes black once more and glittering—but in the human way, wet with unshed tears.

“He’d say I have a responsibility,” he croaks, shaking his head. “Fine. You win. But you know what else he’d say?”