And where is Elodie?
She is not in the darkness of the crypt. Jane does not see her as she staggers through the impossible maze of passages and does not see her as she lies on the slab. Where is she? She is meant to be trapped, but she is as absent now as she was in the windows up above.
This is a problem. This is a problem not because Jane wants Elodie there to suffer, or even to be freed, but because without Elodie’s spirit, there is no death, or life, or Jane. Without Elodie, Jane is lost a hundred times over, and time, incomprehensible and tangled, falls apart to dust.
What has happened? What has gone wrong?
Jane’s initiation. Her vision. She must resurrect it into bloody, screaming life, study it for clues. Jane peels herself from the flow of time, the ply of her life twisting back on itself. She sees Elodie split open on the plinth, her heart in Augustine’s hands, and then—
Nothing.
Elodie is gone.
Forward and backward, she is gone. In the past, the great nothingness of where she was still grows. There is wrongness. There is rupture. Jane touches the margins of Elodie and feels cold, feels her fingertips fragment away. Shame coalesces in their place. She draws back, stunned, then turns once more to herself. The white has slowed its advance, held back by her redefinitions. The variable of Elodie must be replaced, the fragmentary rupture of the past papered over with Jane’s will, until Elodie can be restored.
So she exists in those moments Elodie comes to her, searching for that yawning nothing. Does it climb out from Jane’s vision and jump from moment to moment, obliterating as it goes?
But there is no blankness in the windows. Elodie is simply not there.
She continues to search. She hides in the study, pursued by a hungry thing wearing the face of a boy dead before his time. She gives herself Augustine’s text. She builds the circle, learns magic, begins stumbling down the path again.
So many moments threaten to fracture, even moments when Elodie never was. The doctor’s bag that will almost be her undoing is not in the third-floor bedroom hearth. She sees Vingh leave his unattended, and does not know if they are the same, or different, or both. She takes it anyway. She burns it. The scalpel cuts into her finger. The ether burns her nose and mouth. Her mother’s skirts wrap around her.
Jane flees, blood streaking from her arm, and Augustine chases just behind. Augustine is slow, but not slow enough. He will reach her. He will catch her, and drag her back down here, and she can see the shame in him, a living, twisting thing that curls around his heart and gnaws at his spine.
This is not how this moment goes. She must change it. She must recalculate.
Must she? The whiteness is held at bay, steady and distant. Perhaps she has done enough. Perhaps, here, she can fix what comes next, truly fix it. If she lets herself be caught and dragged back down, she will never conjure the stone that will doom Augustine.
But she might die. The light in Augustine’s eyes is not sane. The creatures that feed upon his shame have stoked him to a fever pitch, because what would be more shameful than to think he is about to save his new wife, only to be the indisputable cause of her death? In the morning, when the clouding clears, he will hate himself. It is genius. It is horrible. She must stop it, for her own sake, for his.
She shouts his name.
He falters.
Jane reaches the door and slams it shut. Augustine looks back once over his shoulder, searching for the cry that staggered him, but continues his climb. He beats himself against the wood, howling, “Jane! Jane, open this door!” On the other side, Jane is slipping, weakened, whispering.
“Jane, please!” Augustine begs.
I am well. Jane mouths the words in the crypt and says them in the hall. This is when she falls. This is when she is too weak to keep fighting.
The stone wall does not appear.
She does not know enough to will a wall into existing. She can’t even draw a circle.
Is that true?
Yes. And no.
She does know enough. She can draw a circle. She knows what will happen if she does not summon the wall, if she does not lock Augustine away.
Jane reaches out and conjures the stone herself. The white expanse of an unknown future begins to crumble.
She condemns Augustine to suffering.
Augustine falls back. He stares at the unyielding stone for one long moment, then turns away. He sees her, standing at the base of the stairs, and his whole face falls. He is confused. He is despairing. He knows something is very wrong.
He comes to her. “Jane? Jane, I saw you, I saw you leave.” He collapses at her feet, staring up at her. “I don’t understand.”