Page 76 of All Her Ghosts

Swallowing, throat dry, my mother points with a fluttering hand. “The parking garage is through there.”

With a wary glance at the ridge behind us, Bas cuts across the river. Standing, I keep watch over his head, my hip braced against his shoulder, his free arm looped around my knees in case he needs to catch me. But on this opposite end of the broken snow globe of a city, even the distant gunshots fade. Our motor drowns out everything but the startled protest of a mourning dove as we dip beneath a curtain of weeds that was once a street sign, plunging down a narrow lane between two buildings.

“Where did all this water come from?” I ask, once we’re safely out of sight and earshot of any potential pursuit. “Cain said there didn’t used to be a river here.”

Mom’s gaze goes distant.

“When we…” She starts and has to stop, swallow, start again. “When the building came down, we escaped through the maintenance tunnels. It was the worst storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Cain called it biblical. Said it was proof…”

Her eyes cut away but there’s nowhere to look but at Bas or me, so she ends up looking down at her hands, checking her gun—and when there’s nothing left to check, cracking the joints of her fingers.

“You and Cain?” I press. “You escaped together?”

“Never leave a man behind,” Bas mutters. “Even one who broke the world.”

Mom nods.

“He knew the tunnels. He got us out.”

Something in the way she says it leaves a bruise deep in my breastbone. The way she stares at her left hand, fingers clawed on her bouncing knee. Or her tone maybe, the quiet resignation, history sleeping in every word and finally,finally, honesty.

I asked her once if Cain was my father—was it only the day before yesterday? It feels like a century. It feels like a second.

“Were you…” I start and don’t know how to ask it again, here, at the end of the world. “Close?”

I don’t know why I’m asking. Does it matter? Do I need to hear her say it? Isn’t it answer enough the way she looks at me?

Quietly, she says, “We were a mistake.”

More truth than I expected; more than I deserve. After all, it’s not my skeletons I’m digging for, is it?

This is somePet Sematarybullshit,Cain told her.And that is not your daughter.

Or did I hear him wrong? Am I remembering correctly? Or did he look at my tiny prison in horror and swear,That is notourdaughter?

Longing stabs me through the gut. I wish I could ask him, but I shove the impulse away.What does it matter now, Jenny? Stop picking at scabs that aren’t yours.

I don’t belong here. This body isn’t mine—and that hurts more than I expect, unmoored anxiety rising in my chest. I may be a sometimes god, but what else have I been for seventeen years butme? So what if this body wasn’t mine at first; my boots weren’t, either. So I borrowedsomeone’s surplus, slipped inside a thrift store corpse? Doesn’t that make it mine, at least a little, even if I bought this life secondhand?

Cold in my bones, frosted to my shoulders by a mist I can’t outrun, I dangle my fingers over the side of the inflatable raft, into the river. The water laps at my skin, icy with October chill. I feel that—Ifeel that. I’m human enough to feel it, all the right nerves and bones and skin.

Drawing my knees close to my chest, I wrap my arms around them, close my eyes. I miss the undercroft beneath my bed, the stupid RV. I miss skipping school with Bas and kissing him in the blue-raspberry rain. I wish I had another week, another opportunity. But I think I missed my chance.

A massive structure looms ahead of us. On the left, floor upon floor of steel slats peer onto open concrete. On the right, a blank-faced, hulking tower juts above our heads. A crack runs down its featureless flank, and its only windows are the holes that gape between its flaking cinder blocks. A tunnel opens underwater in the parking garage’s center, the tip of a black-and-white striped bar just barely visible in the murk. A rusted sign readsparking garage, badge access only.

Even badly broken, its uppermost floors shattered into pieces, collecting algae on the river bottom, the building still stands taller than any around it, its back to the stony mountain and the ghost fence rising like a crown above its head. Massive pillars hold up the individual floors, open to the air. Cars still wait inside, dusted over but surprisingly intact, three feet above the water line.

Fumbling for a bag from the bottom of the boat, my mother comes up with a tiny folding anchor and wings it out around the strut between empty-eyed windows. Tightening the straps on her backpack, shethrows her rifle inside the parking garage first, scrambling up behind it. I expect her to lean down to help us up—at least brace the rope, jeez—but her head disappears around the corner, bootsteps shuffling through the dark.

Warm hands braced around my hips, Bas lifts me into the broken building himself. I scrabble through the gap, breaking already sore fingernails on the brick, twisting my ankle in take-out wrappers so old they’ve lost their logo. But hey, what’s a little pain after the day I’ve had?

Clearing the space for Bas, I plant my boots against the wall and, gripping him by the forearms, haul him up behind me. His hands ghost my arms, gentle fingers tracing the edge of all my bruises, the scratches from the day ghosts attacked the school. His eyes on mine ache. My fingers spasm, caught in the wreckage of his sleeve.

I want to kiss him.

I want to leave.

I want to pretend I never heard of anything to do with Hades or Hel or Morrigan or Persephone.