I didn’t realize until I backed away that I had been gripping the handle of my shovel within my coat. My voice quivered. “And I would never let you,” I said. I knew then that I had to be careful.
As I finished speaking, a man and woman from the street stumbled into our alley, laughing and holding hands. When they saw us, they jumped, then apologized and ran back into the street in a huddled whisper. To them we were just two people kissing beneath a fire escape. Except we couldn’t kiss.
Dante held his fingers just above my lips, as if he were afraid to touch them. Guilt filled his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said.
We walked in a somber silence as I led him through the streets. We didn’t have a destination; just a path that we could walk along, marked invisibly by the maze of catacombs lying beneath the city. The tombs under the earth pulled one foot down, then the other. Their presence felt heavy, as if gravity was stronger along the path we were taking. The trail of the dead. I followed it blindly, taking a right, then a left. To anyone watching us, we looked like we knew where we were going—like we had chosen this route—but the constant tugging at my feet reminded me that our path had been set a long time ago. We couldn’t veer off it now.
We stopped when we reached an empty street corner. The streetlamp overhead flickered until it switched off, as if it knew we needed cover. Between the buildings, we could just make out a bridge lit up in the distance. “The Seine,” said Dante, keeping his distance beside me. “Hundreds of years ago, the Catholics massacred the Huguenots. They threw the bodies into the river. There were so many people that the water ran red with blood.”
I shivered.
“People claim that some of that blood is still there, staining the banks, and if you stare into the water while it ripples, you can see the way you’re going to die.”
I already knew what Dante would see if he looked into the river. I remembered his death as if it had been my own. I remembered his little sister, wrapped in a blanket and shivering with fever while Dante and his family boarded a small plane headed for the closest hospital. I remembered how quickly the pressure in the cabin had changed, the way his stomach flipped as they plummeted, the sound of his father’s voice while he prayed, the sheer force of them hitting the ocean as if it were a cement wall, and finally the water—first blue, then a deep, endless black.
“What do you think I would see?” I asked him.
“Long, gray hair,” Dante said, touching the ends of my locks as they fluttered in the wind. He traced the smooth patch of skin on my temple. “Wrinkles here,” he said, and slid his finger down the side of my cheek. “And here,” he said, pointing to the edge of my mouth, “from smiling.” He passed his hands over my eyes, his fingertips grazing my lashes. “You’ll fall asleep. It will be easy, painless, like drifting into a dream.”
The richness of his voice drowned out the street around us, until I could almost see my future self through his eyes.
“And I hope,” he continued, “that if I am given a second chance to die, it will be with you.”
“Me too,” I whispered.
In the distance, the lights of the city at night gave the horizon a brilliant glow. I imagined all the people beneath it, strolling down the snowy streets arm in arm; laughing at the end of a long dinner, a plate of cheese getting soft on the table; sitting in their apartments, sipping wine and staring up at the sky, just like I was. We weren’t there yet, but maybe one day we would be.
A gust of wind interrupted my thoughts. It swirled around my legs, picking up the hem of my coat and sending a shiver up my skin. It was the same sensation I’d felt just before Clementine’s father had called out to her, though this time it felt even stronger. The Undead, a lot of them, all moving away from us to the east. Their presence grew stronger, pulling at me with a strength I could barely resist.
“The Liberum,” I said.
The wail of a siren pierced the air. We both turned just in time to see flashing blue lights crest over the hill. A rush of air pushed me back from the curb as police cars sped past us. An ambulance trailed behind them, slowing as it rounded the bend. They headed in the same direction as the vacancy. Their lights flashed in the night, giving the street an eerie blue glare. I followed the drone of their sirens until they faded behind the buildings. “Are they—?”
“Going in the direction of Pruneaux’s shop,” Dante said, my thoughts slowly becoming his. Without saying anything more, we started to run.
The narrow street that led to the map shop was blocked off by police cars, their lights cycling through the falling snow. Two men in uniform stood in the intersection, directing cars to a detour. I crept past them and leaned over the barricade. Shattered glass was strewn across the sidewalk. I followed its trail up to the window, now jagged with shards, a dim light still on inside; to the maps fluttering out of the gash, their edges already damp from the snow; to the tiny fingerprints pressed into the white flakes collecting on the sill. There were dozens of them, all so small that they could only have belonged to children.
The Undead. As soon as I realized what had happened, I started to see signs of them everywhere. The footprints were scattered across the sidewalk, like dozens of children had run barefoot through the snow. In the midst of them were two wobbly lines scraped into the ice. A chill wrapped itself around me as I imagined the heels of a man’s loafers cutting through the snow, the Undead dragging him away.
I turned to Dante, whose face had hardened into one I barely recognized. It was fierce and wild. The face of an Undead.
A task force of people was busy closing off the area with tape and sheltering it from the weather with a tarp. Two bodies lay in the street, the snow already accumulating on the sheet pulled over their faces. All I could make out was one limp hand peeking out from beneath the tarp. It was so pale it blended in with the ice. My heart began to race. It reminded me of my mother’s hand, lying delicately in the dirt. Of my father’s hand a few feet away from hers. Of Dante’s hand. I reached out and touched the back of my hand to his. His cool skin comforted me.
“Who are they?” I whispered, just as the paramedics rolled a stretcher past them with a third body strapped to the top. It was already zipped in a black bag. The wind swallowed my gasp.
A few feet away, two police officers spoke. I listened in, trying to translate their French, but they were speaking far too quickly for me to catch everything. I turned to Dante. “What are they saying?”
Dante leaned in and began to whisper. “Found on the scene: three people. One elderly woman. A business man, middle-aged. A woman in her thirties. Bystanders, I’m guessing. None of them connected to each other.” A car honked behind us. Dante strained to hear. “Cause of death: unknown. No wounds or internal damage, only a few slight scratches around the mouth.”
I could feel Dante’s cold breath against my ear as he spoke, his words transporting me back to two years before: my sixteenth birthday, when I had found my parents dead in the redwood forest.
Dante continued. “The paramedics seem to think they all died of heart attacks. I don’t see how that is possible.”
A heart attack. That was what the coroner said my parents had died of. It was what they always listed as the cause of death when an Undead had sucked away someone’s soul.
“We believe that the shopkeeper, Monsieur Jean Pruneaux, was there at the time of the burglary. His wallet, coat, and personal belongings are still in his office. The mug of coffee on his desk was still warm when we arrived. The cash register was left untouched, as were many of his high-worth items. Judging from the scratches in the snow, he was dragged into the street while he was alive. He may still be. His body has yet to be found.”
An officer bent down to survey the zigzag of little footprints in the snow. He shook his head, confused. Beneath his feet, charts and maps lay matted to the pavement, turning to pulp. He nudged one with his foot, then stood and adjusted his hat.
One of the police directing traffic approached us. “Excusez-moi, ma
demoiselle, mais vous n’êtes pas censée être ici.”
A lump rose in my throat. I couldn’t speak. The Liberum and their Undead boys must have followed us to the map store that morning. They had taken Pruneaux.
“Mademoiselle?”
Dante touched my arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
“Home?” I said. “Where is that?”
CHAPTER 7
The Soundless Gap
A THUDDING REVERBERATED through the air. It made the ground shudder and the crows disperse. I had been here before. The frozen lake at Gottfried Academy was gray and hazy like the eye of an Undead, the black water seeping up through the cracks beneath in thin veins. A hand pounded against the underside of the ice, trying to break through. Thump thump thump thump: like an irregular heartbeat. The naked trees lining the campus trembled with each blow.
The ice buckled, a force pushing upward until a loud crack rang out through the morning air. It clapped off the buildings, their windows dark and vacant. Then an ashen hand shot up through the gash.
A boy pulled himself out from the hollow, black water spilling off of him as his shoulders uncurled toward the sky. Noah. His cheeks were ashen, his auburn hair dripping around his face. His eyes sharpened until they were in focus.
Noah looked up at the sky, at the sunlight peeking through the clouds, his face bewildered, as though the world looked foreign to him. The playful glimmer in his eyes was now dull. All traces of joy had vanished from his face. He was no longer the Noah that I knew.
With a blink, he was running through the woods faster than I had ever seen him move, the branches of the evergreens snapping against his legs. He looked lost, desperate. His feet were bare as he trekked through the snow, yet he didn’t seem to notice the cold. He stopped when he reached a cabin, one that I recognized. The same cabin that Dante and I had slept in, just before we had been forced to split up. The windows were dark, the front door ajar, from when the Monitors had thrown it open to search for us.
Noah stepped toward it, inspecting the muddy footprints tracked through the entryway. “Renée,” Noah said, his lips so pale they looked blue. “I’m coming for you.”
I gasped and opened my eyes. I was sitting in a smooth felt seat, my hands gripping the armrests. The green, hilly landscape of the European countryside whizzed past the window. Relieved, I slumped back against the headrest, and let out a long breath. The train hummed softly beneath me, rumbling slightly as we crossed a bumpy patch of rail. Thump thump thump thump.
“What’s wrong?”
Dante’s voice shook me out of my thoughts. He sat beside me, his shoulder touching mine. He was reading Pruneaux’s notebook on Descartes, which Theo had only agreed to let him read after the train left the station with all of us inside it. He shut it and studied me.
I could still see Noah’s eyes, as handsome as they were before but now dull, the spark behind them extinguished by the icy depths of the lake. I realized then that I owed Noah my life as much as I did Dante. I pressed my eyes shut. “Nothing,” I said. “Just a nightmare.”
It had to have been a dream. Though I’d had visions like it before, of Dante’s past, of his death, of him searching for the clues left behind from the ninth sister, those were different. I had been seeing into Dante’s life because we shared a soul, because a part of me had been planted within him. I had no such connection with Noah. Now, it was just my memory and my guilt that were haunting me.
“About what?” he asked.
Across the aisle sat Anya, her face nestled into a sweater while she slept. Beside her, Theo fiddled with a bit of rope from his backpack, tying elaborate knots and then unraveling them. His eyes shifted to me as if he had been listening in on our conversation.
I swallowed. “I—I can’t remember.”
Dante didn’t believe me; I could tell by the way he studied me. “You can’t change the past,” he said, reading my thoughts.
“I know,” I said, though I couldn’t help but wonder what I was supposed to do if my past caught up to me, and became my present.
The Netherlands met us like the start of a new day. A brilliant swath of sun broke through the windows at Amsterdam Central Station. It was a beautiful old place, lined with arched metal beams that made it look like an industrial cathedral. Birds chirped from the ceiling. Every so often three chimes sounded over the station intercom, followed by a woman’s voice speaking in melodic Dutch.
We lingered on the platform, unsure of what to do next. A rush of people pressed past us, coloring the station in tweed and khaki and wool. Through the wall of windows behind them, I could just barely glimpse the blue sky reflecting off the glassy waters of a canal.
According to Pruneaux’s notes, Descartes had lived in or visited dozens of places in the Netherlands, any of which could be the first point on our map. “Or none,” Theo added, though if that was the case, we had no hope. So we decided to believe.
This was what we knew: Descartes first came to the Netherlands when he was twenty-two, to fight against Spain. After the war was over, he was stationed with his army in various other countries, where he claimed to have had strange dreams and visions that influenced his later writings. Before returning to France, he completed his first philosophical essay. Yet for some reason, a few years later, he moved away from his homeland and went back to the Netherlands, where he stayed for over twenty years.
While he was there, he led a secretive life. He enrolled at one university, but soon quit, and much of his life during that time was a mystery. He later emerged as a professor at Utrecht University. By then he had a daughter from a maid he had met in his travels, but in a cruel twist of fate, the girl died when she was only five years old, of scarlet fever.
The grieving Descartes spent the rest of his time in the Netherlands wandering from place to place, haunted. As time passed, his peregrinations became almost obsessive. He moved to one town, only to pick up and leave less than a year later. Was he running from his past, or searching for a future?
Dante flipped through his notes. “Out of all of the spots Descartes traveled to, three stand out to me. The first is the city of Leiden, where he quit university and dropped out of society for a while. He returned far later in his life. There has to be a reason why he chose to disappear while he was there, why he decided to return years later.
“The second is a town called Oegstgeest, where he purportedly finished writing Seventh Meditation, his essay on souls and the Undead.
“And the third is a small village in the countryside called Egmond-Binnen, his last residence in the Netherlands. It was the last place he lived before disappearing for months. When he later resurfaced, wandering the French countryside, he was taken to Stockholm, where he died. It seems significant that after his twenty years of traveling within the Netherlands, he decided to stop at Egmond-Binnen. Maybe he found what he was looking for there.”
The intercom chimed in the background.
“I think we should start with Leiden,” Dante said, lowering his voice. “It seems too suspicious that Descartes continued to return there. He must have been there looking for something that he didn’t want anyone else to find.”
But Anya didn’t agree. “Theo, you said that Descartes had a daughter who died in the Netherlands. What about the city where he buried her? Don’t you think that if he had discovered the path to the Netherworld, he would have taken her there first?”
“If he had discovered it by then, yes,” Dante said skeptically. “But then he never would have buried her in the first place. And thus, there would be no tombstone.”
Anya shot back. “Of course there would be. It would be a symbolic tombstone. And anyway, it’s not like you have any more proof that it’s at Leiden.”
“You’re both idiots,” Theo said. “It’s obviously in Oegstgeest. How else would he have had the idea for his Seventh Meditation? He probably discovered something there, and then sat down and wrote about it. It’s the clearest clue. And we know he wanted to
leave clues behind. Why else would he tell the nurse a riddle with his dying breath? He could have easily taken the secret with him. He wanted people to know.”
“That’s too obvious,” Anya said. “And anyway, Seventh Meditation isn’t about the Netherworld, it’s about the Undead.”
“Shh,” Dante cautioned.
They argued back and forth, neither actually listening to the other. Anya took out her deck of tarot cards, announcing that she was going to ask the fates. Finally, they turned to me. “What do you think?” Dante asked.
Leiden intrigued me, though if Descartes had found the first point on the path to the Netherworld there, why did he keep leaving, then returning? It seemed to me that he might have had a strong suspicion that it was there, which was why he kept going back, but in the end, he found it somewhere else.
Anya’s idea seemed plausible, too, though no more so than Dante’s, and with just as many flaws. The town of Oegstgeest, where Descartes wrote Seventh Meditation, also seemed hopeful. Though if Pruneaux was right when he warned us that each of the five points was shrouded in shadows that no earthly being had encountered before, then it seemed unlikely that Descartes would have settled down and written a treatise in such a dangerous place. Which left only one option.
“I think it’s in Egmond-Binnen,” I said. “The town where Descartes last lived in the Netherlands.”
Dante studied me. “Why?”
“If Descartes was in the Netherlands to search for the path to the Netherworld, he would have left once he found it. So it can’t be Leiden or Oegstgeest. If either of those were where the path began, then why would Descartes keep going back to them? Why would he keep searching?”