Awaken

curt warning, drifted towards us: “Everyone keep your hands to yourself, or I guarantee you’ll lose ’em.”

The warning was accompanied by a curse word or two colorful enough to make Chloe blush. Mrs. Engle seemed offended, too, since she said, in a scandalized tone, “Really, I’ve had as much of this as I can take. Ghosts and Furies and zombies? Could we please try to remember that a young man is dead?”

She seemed to have forgotten that she, too, was dead.

“Sorry, ma’am.” Frank appeared in one of the archways, pushing back the gauzy curtain and striding, panting and bloodied from a cut on his forehead, into the main room. “But it’s getting a bit dicey out there.” To me, he said, “It’ll be dark soon. What are we going to do about that lot?” On the words that lot, he tilted his head in the direction of the courtyard.

“They’re hungry, but there’s nothing to feed ’em or to give ’em to drink, except beer,” Henry added. “We’re already running low on tea.”

All eyes, I noticed with alarm, were on me, as if I were supposed to do something about the fact that we were running low on tea.

“What are you looking at me for?” I asked. The anger flowing through my veins had definitely been preferable to the despair that had been slogging through them before, but now that it had faded, along with the light outside, I felt tired and confused. “I’m not in charge.”

As if in direct denial of this, John’s tablet began to chime again at my waist to indicate that yet another new soul had entered the land of the dead.

“Actually,” Mr. Liu said, rising to his feet, “I think you are in charge. The captain gave that to you.”

“Right. He chose you. You’re the one.” Henry sounded exactly as he had the first day we’d met, when he’d been just as quick to assure me that I was not, in fact, the one. “Don’t you remember?”

I looked from the chiming tablet back towards their inquisitive faces.

“Well, I don’t know what to do,” I said, though I knew this wasn’t a good thing for anyone in a management-level position to admit. “What have you guys done before when this has happened?”

Mr. Graves’s shaggy gray eyebrows rose to their limits as he stared at a point several feet above my head. “Miss Oliviera,” he said. “The Furies have never destroyed two of our boats and killed the captain before. And certainly no one has ever invited the souls of the dead up from the beach and into the castle.”

I didn’t miss the unspoken accusation in his voice. No one until you, you strange girl who sees red — literally — whenever you get angry.

“True,” Frank said. “But then the Fates have never left us before, either.”

The Fates have never left us before, either. The words caused a chill to go down my spine and the fine hair on the backs of my arms to stand up. I glanced over my shoulder at the still, waxen form of John stretched out upon the bed. Wake up, I attempted to will him with my mind. Don’t leave me alone with this mess. Don’t leave me alone, ever.

His wide chest didn’t move. His eyelids remained shut.

“What are Fates?” asked Chloe in a small voice, from where she still knelt beside Typhon at John’s bedside.

“The opposite of Furies,” Mr. Graves explained to her. “Spirits of good, instead of evil.”

“Well,” Reed said dryly. “There definitely aren’t any of those around here.”

I saw Chloe give Reed’s foot a nudge with her own. “How can you say that?” she whispered.

“I didn’t mean you.” Reed smiled at her. “Your spirit’s looking plenty good from here.”

Alex, having overheard this, curled his lip in disgust.

“Not me,” Chloe whispered, and nodded in my direction. “Her. How can you say that after everything she did to help us?”

Reed glanced towards me. “Oh, right. Her spirit’s looking pretty good, too,” he added generously.

Alex rolled his eyes and said, “Fates aren’t the kind of spirits you can see, you idiot. They’re like Furies. You can only —”

“I always thought that the Fates were Greek goddesses in charge of mankind’s destiny,” Mrs. Engle interrupted, seeming anxious to break the sudden tension between the two boys, both of whom were clearly attracted to Chloe. When Mrs. Engle saw that she had their attention, she went on, “I worked as a school nurse for thirty years — retired now, of course. But those kinds of things do tend to sink in and stay with you —”

“Who cares what the Fates are?” Alex burst out. Mrs. Engle’s scheme wasn’t working. “The question is, where’d they go? And how do we get them back?”

“I don’t think it will be easy,” Mr. Graves said. He sounded annoyed with Alex. Welcome to the club. “I believe they’ve been driven away because there’s an imbalance here. An imbalance is virtually always caused by pestilence —” A note of primness crept into the surgeon’s voice, as it always did whenever he gave a lecture on pestilence, his favorite subject (aside from beer). “Whenever an imbalance occurs and pestilence is able to slip into a system, it causes infection.”

“Like when I got my eyebrow pierced,” Kayla asked, “and I didn’t clean it well enough, and it got infected?”

“You pierced your eyebrow?” Mr. Graves turned his head towards her, his expression horrified. “Good God, young lady, why?”

“Never mind that now,” I said impatiently. “What can we do to fix the imbalance … drive away the Furies and get back the Fates?”

“Well,” Mr. Graves said, returning his attention to me. “If we could determine what’s caused the imbalance, I’m quite certain we could correct it. But until then, I’m afraid we, like the captain, have only one thing to hang on to, and that’s —”

I held up a single hand. “Don’t say it.”

Mr. Graves looked taken aback. “How did you know what I was going to say?”

I lowered my hand. “Because it was going to be hope. And I don’t want to hear the word hope again. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

Hearing this was apparently more than Chloe could bear. She rose from the floor — leaving Typhon looking sad to have lost his ear scratcher — and hurried towards me.

“Pierce, you mustn’t say that,” she said. “These light momentary afflictions are preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison —”

I cut her off with a grim look. “I’ve got bad news for you, Chloe. There’s not going to be any eternal weight of glory unless we get you, and all the rest of these people, to a boat. Mr. Graves, I’ve got some news for you, too.” I turned towards him. “In twenty-first-century America, where I’m from, we’ve got better weapons against infections than hope.”

Mrs. Engle coughed politely. “Dear, if you’re speaking about antibiotics, I believe the doctor was using the term infection as a metaphor —”

“Why, yes,” Mr. Graves said to Mrs. Engle, looking pleased. “I was.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. I lifted the diamond on the end of my necklace. “I’m talking about this.”

“I don’t know what an antibiotic is,” Henry said, reaching around his waist to untie the apron he was wearing, then tossing it to the floor. “But if you’re talking about killing Furies, I’m ready.”

“So am I,” Frank said, drawing a knife from his belt. “Only where do we find them?”

“The same place we can find food for our guests,” I said. “And a couple of new boats to take them where they need to go.”

Mr. Graves looked bewildered. “And where would that be?”

“Isla Huesos,” I said.

Mr. Graves’s expression of bewilderment turned to a frown. “Isla Huesos? That port of degradation and sin?” I’d forgotten he wasn’t a fan. “And how do you think you’re going to get there? Only the captain possessed the ability to travel between this world and the next, and he is, to put it mildly, indisposed.”

“That isn’t strictly true,” I said. “Well, it’s true John’s indisposed, but it isn’t true he’s the only one who possessed the ability to go back and forth between this world and the next.” I glanced down the hallway at the