Chapter Two

The moment her fingers closed on it, the dead-house went away.

Wren had touched ten thousand pieces of glass. She knew what it was to catch the bleed — the half-smell, the borrowed ache, the stranger’s laugh that surfaced and was gone. This was not that. This was not catching a thing as it left. This was a door opening under her feet and Wren falling through it, all at once, into somewhere that was not the cold back room and not Lowmere and not any when she had a name for.

She was standing in green.

That was the only word her mind could find, and it didn’t fit, because Wren had never seen green, not living green, not a field of it stretching away under a sky that was blue — another word she knew only from old songs, blue, the color the sky had been before, the color the sky was supposed to be — and there was a light pouring down over all of it from above, warm and white and everywhere, with no lamp and no Beacon and no source she could find but the great burning eye of it directly overhead, too bright to look at, pouring warmth down onto her upturned face like water.

The sun, said the word at the bottom of the Well, the word that had been reaching for her. This is the sun. This is what we lost. Remember it. Someone has to remember it.

And then the green was gone and she was somewhere dark and vast and ringing, a hollow the size of a city carved out under stone, and there were lights moving in it like a galaxy brought down to earth, and a sound, a deep slow sound like a heart the size of a mountain, and the voice again, fainter, frightened now: they’re going to let it die. They know what it is and they’re going to let it die rather than share it. You have to —

“WREN!”

The dead-house came back so hard that Wren’s knees gave. The cold slammed into her. She was on the floor, she realized distantly, on the gritty cold stone of the back room, and Cole had her by the shoulders and was shaking her, Cole’s hard chapped face an inch from hers and white with a fear Wren had never once seen on it, and Cole was saying her name over and over, Wren, Wren, look at me, look at me, girl —

“I’m here,” Wren got out. Her mouth tasted of copper. There was blood on her lip; her nose had bled, a thin warm line of it down to her chin. “I’m here. I’m — what — ”

And then she saw the shard, and she stopped.

It was lying on the floor where she must have dropped it, between her knees, and it was no longer black.

It was burning. Not with flame — glass didn’t take flame unless you fed it to a furnace — but with light, a deep steady honey-gold light, brighter than any lamp in the house, brighter than a thumb of glass had any business being, and it was warm, she could feel the warmth of it on her face and her hands like a small sun brought down into the dead-house, like the green field, like the thing the voice had called the sun. The dark that had drunk the lamplight an hour ago was gone. The shard shone, and shone, and where it shone the cold back room of the dead-house looked, for the first time in Wren’s whole life, almost like a place where someone might want to live.

Cole had stopped shaking her. Cole had gone very still. And in the new gold light, Wren watched the older woman’s face do a terrible slow thing — watched the fear in it curdle, watched it turn into something worse than fear, the thing Wren had been dreading her whole life without having a name for it, because she had seen it turned on the Hollow and on the strange and on anything that didn’t fit the small shape the world allowed.

She had never seen it turned on her before. Now she had a name for it. It was the look you gave a thing that was no longer one of us.

“That was dead,” Cole whispered. “I gleaned it dark with my own hands. That was dead, Wren, and you — ”

“I didn’t do anything.” It came out high and fast and childish, and Wren hated it, hated the whine of fear in her own voice. “I didn’t — I only touched it, I swear it, I didn’t mean — ”

“Glass doesn’t come back.” Cole was on her feet now, backing away, one hand groping behind her for the door-frame as though she needed to know where the way out was. “Glass doesn’t come back. That’s the one thing. That’s the one true thing in the whole rotten world, girl, the dead can be heard and the dead can be burned but the dead do not come back, and you just — I watched you — you just — ”

“Cole.” Wren got one knee under her. The shard’s light flickered when she moved, as though it were tied to her somehow, as though it were breathing with her. “Cole, please. It’s me. It’s only me. Whatever it is, it’s still just me, you’ve known me since I was —”

“I don’t know what you are.” Cole’s back hit the door-frame. Her voice cracked. “Sixteen years I’ve fed you and worked you and I never — your mother left you dark, you came to me with nothing, no light, no people, no name worth the saying, and I thought — I thought you were just unlucky, I thought you were just a poor dark child like the rest of us — ” She was crying now, which was worse than the fear, because Cole did not cry, Cole had buried half the town and never once cried. “What did she leave with you? What did that woman bring into my house?”

And Wren, kneeling on the cold floor in the impossible golden light, thought of the dull shard she had carried against her own skin her whole life, the keepsake, the only thing her mother had left her, the dead splinter of nothing that she kept on a cord around her neck and had never once been able to read — and she felt it, now, against her sternum, where it had lain cold and quiet for sixteen years.

It was warm.

For the first time in her life, it was warm.

---

The door banged open and Pip came through it at a run, the way he did everything, and stopped dead three steps in.

“Wren?” His voice was small. He was looking at the light. Of course he was looking at the light; you couldn’t not. It filled the room, it threw their three shadows huge and wavering up the walls, it caught in the rime of salt on the high window and made the whole sad little dead-house glitter like the inside of a geode. “Wren, what — is that — where’d you get a lamp like —”

“Pip, stay back,” Cole said, and the warning in it was so raw that Pip actually obeyed, freezing with one hand still on the door.

“It’s all right,” Wren said. She wasn’t sure who she was saying it to. She reached out — slowly, the way you’d reach for that frightened animal again — and she picked the shard up off the floor.

It nestled into her palm like it belonged there. The voice was gone; the green field was gone; there was only the warmth, and the light, and the faint sweet smell coming off it now, not pipe-smoke, not bread, but something Wren had no word for, something clean and high and aching, like the memory of a sound. It didn’t feel dangerous. That was the thing she would think about later, lying awake. It didn’t feel like a curse or a wickedness or a door to anywhere bad. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. It felt like the first time anything had ever fit her hand.

“It was Marda’s,” she said slowly, working it out as she spoke. “It came out of Marda, after. Cole said. But it isn’t — it doesn’t feel like Marda.” She turned it. The light pulsed, gentle. “It was already dead when it came out. Black-dead. Faded. And I just — I held it, and there was a — there was somebody in it. Older than Marda. Older than anybody. And they showed me — ” the sun, she did not say, because she did not have the courage for how it would sound, they showed me the sun, and a place under the ground the size of a city, and they were afraid, they were so afraid that we were going to let something die — “they showed me a green place,” she finished, weakly. “With light coming down from the sky. And then it woke up. The glass. It just — woke up.”

Silence. The Little Light’s distant bell groaned once, far off up the hill — the ration-bell, the upper vents closing, the warmth pulling back toward the center of town for the night. The dead-house, by rights, should have been going cold and dark around them.

It was the brightest room in Lowmere.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Cole said.

Wren looked up.

Cole had stopped crying. She had her arms wrapped around herself and her jaw was set and she had the look of a woman doing sums she didn’t like the answer to. “You can’t tell anyone, do you hear me? Either of you. Not Hessom, not the other pickers, not — ” Her eyes went to the wall, in the direction of the Light, the direction of the town, the direction of the factor’s men counting glass. “Especially not the factor. Especially not anyone who answers to the Hearth.” She crossed the room fast and took the shard out of Wren’s hand — Wren let her, though it cost her something she didn’t expect, a small wrench, as if Cole had taken a finger — and she wrapped it tight in a fold of salt-cloth, and the light went out of the room all at once, and they were standing in the dark and the cold with only the one poor lamp again, and somehow that was worse now than it had ever been, now that Wren knew what bright could be.

“Cole,” Pip said, very carefully, in the voice of a child who has understood that the grown-ups are frightened and is trying to be brave about it, “is Wren in trouble?”

Cole looked at the bundle in her hands. She looked at Wren — kneeling, bloody-lipped, sixteen and small and scared — and whatever she saw, the look on her face was not the not-one-of-us look anymore. It was older than that, and sadder, and it frightened Wren more than the other look had, because Wren had seen it before too, on the faces of the grievers who came to the dead-house already grieving for someone who wasn’t dead yet, but soon would be.

“There’s a thing the Lumenate men want more than tithe,” Cole said quietly. “More than glass. More than anything. They want it so bad they’ve got a whole order of folk whose only work is to go and find it, and they’ve been finding it and taking it away quiet for longer than this town’s been standing, and the ones they take, nobody ever sees again, and nobody asks, because asking is wicked talk.” She knelt, slow, her bad back protesting, until she was level with Wren, and she put one rough hand against Wren’s bloody cheek, gentle, the way she had never once been gentle in sixteen years. “And what they want, girl, the thing they want above all the things in the world — is somebody who can do what you just did.”

Outside, far off across the unlit Pale that ringed the town, where no one was looking and no one ever looked, a single small light had appeared on the black horizon. Gold. Steady. Neither gaining nor falling back.

It had been a long time coming. It had been, in fact, sixteen years.

But the patient ones always arrived in the end.