Liv had believed it most of all, as she always did. And looking back, she was the one who needed to believe it. It wasn’t the world that needed fixing, it was her. And Cass had promised her that Persephone would give her the kind of peace she so desperately needed.
And so we’d done the rituals. We’d made the offerings. And all along, she’d been just some poor dead girl who’d dreamed of escape just like we did.
I picked up a string of beads, flinging them angrily away from the skeleton. We’d turned her into this thing, an altar for our own unhappiness. We’d never treated her like a person. Like someone who would be mourned and missed. If we’d told someone what we’d found, her family might have answers by now.
Liv might still be alive.
I clawed at the other offerings. Moldering playing cards, a brooch, an earring missing its mate, four wave-polished stones. I gathered them all, moving first mechanically, then with manic energy, shoving them into a pile at the back of the little cave.
I grabbed something smooth and wooden. At first I thought it was just a stick, something that had fallen down here among the bones, but then my thumb brushed against a bit of metal. I looked at it in the slanting light. It was a folding knife. I flicked it open. The blade was caked with something dark. The wood was stained with it, too.
My breath hitched. We’d never left a knife here. It wasn’t the sort of thing Persephone would have liked.
I lifted the edge of my shirt, and set the tip of the blade against my skin. Against the ridge of scar tissue just below my ribs.
If I’d been dead, they might have been able to make casts of my wounds and learn exactly what shape the blade had been, but inconveniently, they’d had to stitch up my flesh, had to widen some of the cuts to operate and to check that nerves hadn’t been damaged. The exact blade had remained a mystery, so they couldn’t match it to any of Stahl’s preferred weapons. Not inconsistent had been the most they could prove.
I turned the knife in my hands. There was something stamped into the wood at the base. A maker’s mark: two Japanese characters inside a circle. I knew this knife. I’d watched Kimiko pull it out of her pocket countless times, to prune a tomato vine or slice open a bag of fertilizer. She took good care of her tools. She kept her knives sharp. A dull blade was more dangerous than a sharp one, she would say. A sharp blade cut what it was meant to cut; a dull blade slipped and cut you instead.
Liv and Cass were the only ones down here. They had hidden, and they had watched it happen.
Except that wasn’t right, was it?
They were the only ones down here. The only ones here at all.
Seventeen times I’d been stabbed. Chest and stomach and ribs. Seventeen times, and I hadn’t died. A miracle, they always said. Had it been rage that led my attacker to plunge the knife in over and over?
Or had it been because they weren’t strong enough to finish me off?
If a man the size of Jim Green, of Alan Stahl, of Oscar Green—or even of Marcus Barnes—had wielded that knife, I would not have been granted the centimeter’s grace that kept my heart from being punctured.
Maybe I hadn’t survived out of pure luck. Maybe I’d survived because the hand wielding the knife didn’t have the strength of those men at all.
I shut my eyes and tried to remember. The blow from behind. The pale sky, my vision blurring. Liv and Cass above me. Shouting. Screaming. The knife. This knife. Coming down again and again. But the shouting and the screaming, those came after. Didn’t they?
Cass, shouting. Liv, weeping.
The knife, flashing. The knife coming down. The screaming and the shouting and the knife, all of it at once, and then silence. Pain and silence and the impossibility of breath.
“Is she dead?”
I didn’t know whose voice it had been.
My fingernails dug into the flesh beside the scar on my wrist, memories writhing out of reach.
They’d said they stayed quiet. They watched Stahl attack me, and they hid, because if they made a sound he’d come after them, too. So the shouting had to be after he left. After the knife.
But it wasn’t. I’d heard them shouting, screaming, as the knife came down. They hadn’t been hiding. They hadn’t been hiding, and Marcus Barnes had given my father thirty thousand dollars and never looked me in the face again, and why would he do that? Who would he have done that for, except his only daughter?
Seventeen blows. You had to be angry, to do a thing like that. Filled with hatred. Or fear, and the horrible grip of a delusion that felt like the most powerful truth in the world.
Liv said we’d never finished. We’d done six rituals that summer. We’d never gotten around to the seventh. Cass said we had to think of something big for the final one. Something dramatic. And Liv had been consumed by the thought of it—by the game and the Goddesses. Her illness was a wildfire, and the game was the spark that set it ablaze.
Liv had thought her death would complete that unfinished final ritual. What ritual could be completed by death except a sacrifice?
I couldn’t breathe—didn’t want to. I didn’t want to draw breath in a world where this could be true. Not Liv.
Liv was my best friend. She was troubled, but she had never been violent. The only risk she had posed was to herself. To our too-often broken hearts. Not to me. Never to me.
My certainty fractured. I couldn’t remember. My memories had been too firmly overwritten with lies; I couldn’t trust them. Wouldn’t. Because if there was the tiniest sliver of doubt, the smallest chance that Liv had nothing to do with what had happened, I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t betray her like that.
Whatever had happened in these woods, we weren’t the only three who would have had to lie to keep up the fiction that my attacker was Stahl. Cass could have lied through her teeth until the day she died, but Liv?
She couldn’t have kept those secrets on her own. She would have needed people to protect her. Shield her. Coach her. Marcus Barnes would have known. Kimiko, too, probably.
I couldn’t condemn my best friend based on the murky memories I could dredge up. I needed to be sure. I needed to talk to Olivia’s parents.
I put the knife in my pocket and walked back toward the road.
I sat on the Barneses’ porch, still in my funeral wear, my black dress caked liberally with dirt, my ruined shoes beside me on the step. I had been there fifteen minutes or so when they pulled up. I stood, watching them, as Marcus got out of the driver’s seat and Kimiko stepped out of the passenger side. She started forward. Marcus put out a hand, said something I couldn’t catch. She waited by the car as he came up the walkway.
Marcus stopped a few steps away. “Naomi,” he said. He took in the dirt, the scratches on my arms, the state of my shoes. “You shouldn’t be here.”
I had practiced a speech on my way here. Words of confrontation and reproach. Eloquent and angry. But now my throat closed tight. All I could do was hold out my hand, the folded knife balanced on my palm.
He stepped forward and took it gingerly from my palm, brushing the dirt from it. “What is this?” he asked.
“You know what it is,” I croaked.
He balanced it in both hands, inspecting it like an artifact. “You’re a mess, Naomi. You should go home.”