Page 45

“BEHOLD,” Magdalene screams, arms flung back up with triumphant, vindicated force, robes snapping in a wind that’s picked up from nowhere. “I TOLD YOU!”

“It’s a solar flare,” says a tourist staring at an alert on his phone. “A huge, unexpected solar flare.”

The cold arrives before I properly register it as cold. Then Hex is simply there, entirely alarmed, red eyes wide. Already turning in a full circle, scanning the platform for danger.

“Adam,” he says, crossing the distance between them in two strides and pulling him in against his chest like he’s checking with his own hands that Adam’s still whole.

Beside him, Dis appears just as suddenly. Reaching for Felix with the same urgent, wordless need. Felix, for once, doesn’t make a single joke about it and just lets himself be held.

I look around for Dark.

He isn’t here.

There is a gap where he should be. It aches, sharp and specific. All the worse for happening in front of two other reunions I’m not part of. I have to look away from Hex and Dis both, just for a second, to keep my face from doing something I don’t want Magdalene to see.

I scan the platform once more, foolishly, as though he might simply have been standing in a corner I hadn’t checked. There’s nothing there except tourists and fright and the last of the strange green light overhead.

None of the humans have noticed the shadow men. Either too distracted by the strange sky or simply refusing to see something that their minds can’t process.

Hex, still holding Adam, flickers, just slightly, at the edges. The way a badly tuned television does. There and not quite there in the same breath. Dis is worse, his usual sharp solidity gone soft and uncertain, more suggestion than substance. Like he’s having to work considerably harder than usual just to stay visible at all.

“You’re not all the way here,” I say, quietly, to nobody in particular.

Hex glances at me, something flickering behind the alarm in his eyes, and doesn’t answer. Beside him Dis solidifies for a moment, effortfully, like he’s concentrating hard on holding a single shape. Then he eases again, edges softening back into something less certain.

“Dis,” Felix says, quietly and urgently. “What’s happening? Properly. No dodging it this time.”

“I do not fully know,” Dis says, and even his voice sounds thinner than usual, stretched over something too large to fit properly through it. “Only that it is happening to all of us. Every shadow being. At once.”

“Even Dark?” I ask, before I can stop myself.

Dis’s face does something complicated. “Even Dark.”

Magdalene, arms still raised, oblivious to the two shadow beings standing not ten feet away from her, has tears streaming freely now. She turns her face fully to the strange, bleeding sky.

“The Light is in ascension,” she declares, to the heavens, to the city, to absolutely no one who can currently hear her over the sound of Bristol’s entire alarm system going off at once. “Just as it was written!”

Nobody argues with her. Nobody denies the evidence that’s standing beside her, flickering and frightened and barely holding their own shape together.

I feel something far colder than the wind settle into my chest as I watch Hex tighten his grip on Adam, as if he’s not entirely convinced his hands will keep working.

It seems that whatever this ascension is meant to mean, nobody up here actually understands even half of it yet.

Magdalene finally lowers her arms for good, wiping her face with the sleeve of her kaftan, looking suddenly rather smaller than she has all afternoon.

“I must go,” she says, gathering herself. “There is preparation to be done. Proper preparation, not the sort I can manage standing on a windswept tower with an audience.”

“Do you need a taxi?” Adam offers, disentangling himself gently from Hex.

“I will walk to the bus station. Walking helps me think, and there is a great deal to think about tonight.” She pauses at the top of the stairwell, looking back at the three of us humans. Then her gaze flicks to Hex and Dis, still holding onto their humans as if letting go might cost them something. Something in her face softens. “You are none of you alone in this, whatever else is true. Remember that, when the next sign comes.”

“Will there be a next sign soon?” I ask.

“There is always a next sign,” she says, not unkindly, straightening her kaftan as though preparing to face something considerably more difficult than a staircase. “That has never been the question worth asking, Bunny. The question worth asking is whether we will be ready for it.”

She starts down the stairs without waiting for anyone to follow, robes trailing behind her. Her footsteps growing fainter until they’re lost entirely beneath the sound of the alarms still going below.

We follow a few minutes after, once the tourists are all gone, and Hex and Dis seem steady enough to trust the stairs.