Asunder

all these flowers were.

I turned off the light and shut the door behind me, and met Sam on the front steps, picking the lock.

Why did anyone bother to lock things?

He ushered me in first, out of the falling snow. “I called his SED. He didn’t answer.”

“He might have gone back to Purple Rose Cottage to get those roses. He said he might.” I stepped farther into the cluttered house. “Cris?” I yelled again. Only the eerie quiet answered, thickened by the sheet of white forming outside. If he’d gone to Purple Rose, surely he would have covered his garden here first.

Plants and journals filled the parlor and all connecting rooms I could see. Shelves held pots and trays of seeds. Heat lamps stood in two corners, though I couldn’t tell what they warmed. It was practically another greenhouse, though some of these plants looked edible. The whole place smelled green and loamy and floral.

I followed Sam into the kitchen. “What’s that?”

He was in the process of lifting a tray of seedlings and picking out a folded sheet of paper from beneath it. “This is yours.”

How could he tell? “Yeah, he said he had a few thoughts.”

The paper was damp and smudged with soil, but Sam carefully unfolded it on the tabletop to reveal the list I’d given Cris after our gardening lesson. “Look.” He brushed away dirt.

I pressed my shoulder against his and peered at the new lines on the page. “‘Gate or portal? Arch?’” The symbol next to Cris’s guesses did look like an archway, but only if I tilted my head.

“That seems reasonable enough.”

Hmming, I swept more dirt aside. Damp grains stuck to my fingers. “I remember this one.” I tapped a symbol that was a pair of vertical wavy lines, thick slashes between them like shading. “‘Shadow.

Darkness. Nighttime.’ I was looking at it the wrong way.”

“How do you mean?”

Thoughts snapped, clicked together like the first time I’d understood a waltz had three beats, not four.

Suddenly it made sense.

I bounced on my toes. “I get it!”

Sam put on his most expectant look. “The writing?”

“No, why paper cuts hurt worse than knife wounds.” I rolled my eyes. “Of course I meant the writing.”

“All right. I don’t get it.”

I made my fingers like a spider on the paper and turned it around and around. “This is what I was doing when I was trying to read the spiral. Turning the book upside down when I reached the top of the spiral. That’s also how I copied the symbols, like this one.” I pointed at the one Cris had marked “gate.”

“But?”

“Why would anyone write like that in something as unwieldy as a book? They’d spend all their reading time turning the book around and getting dizzy. This symbol”—again I pointed at the gate symbol

—“was on the side of the spiral when I copied it. That’s why it’s sideways now.”

Understanding bloomed on Sam’s face. “So you read in a spiral, but all the symbols are oriented the same, no matter their location.”

“Exactly.” I bounced again, and Sam twitched a smile. “I get it! I love that feeling. I want to go read all the books right now.”

He stared at me like I’d grown a second set of eyes. “You said lo—” His mouth made a line as he looked away. “Well, Cris isn’t here. Shall we try the next person?”

As soon as he spoke, I halted mid-bounce. I’d said love. Out loud. Did I mean it? Did he expect me to say it to him now? There was a huge difference between loving a feeling or event—and loving a person.

I felt like a whirlwind, with all my thoughts and emotions. Or maybe they were whirlwinds, and I was just a butterfly or blue rose.

“Sure.” Trying—and failing—to pretend like nothing happened, I shook the rest of the soil off the paper and put it in my pocket. Cris had left only a few guesses, and they might be wrong, but they’d be good places to start.

“Whit is next.” He led me through the maze of potted plants and out the door. Snow fell thicker, a solid white coat. “I don’t think the weather will let up any time soon. We may have to quit early, before it gets too difficult to walk. Home is on the other side of the city.”

As we emerged onto the road again, I looked southwest toward our house, but there was only dark and snow. And the temple light making a million flakes shimmer as they fell.

The dark streets remained empty, our passage the only sound. I wished we were at home having music lessons, because playing in a group last night had given me ideas. And music was far less hurtful than thinking about the explosions, or our argument.

Cold swirled and made me shiver as we passed by a white shell, which had once been someone’s house. Now the occupant was gone, lost to Templedark. Someone had cleared away the debris from outbuildings. I wondered if there was anything left inside, or if the darksoul’s belongings would stay there until they rotted—a memory of someone loved and lost.

We kept walking. The silence and weight of history drowned me.

“What happened between you and Cris?” My words turned into mist, barely visible in the temple light.

“It’s nothing.” Roughness edged Sam’s voice.

I knew better than to push, but—“I don’t think it was nothing to him. I see the way you are together, and the way he looks at you.”

I didn’t think he was going to say anything at first, but then: “It was two lifetimes ago.” He had that somewhen-else tone again. Good memories or bad? Suddenly I wished I hadn’t asked. “Cris was working on the roses, and I was composing a nocturne about them, so I asked to stay with her a while and study how they grew, how she cared for them.”

Sam had lived in Purple Rose Cottage? With Cris? I tried to imagine I’d always felt his presence there, even before I became aware of music and what it meant to me. “What happened?”

“It was fine. I went between there and my cabin, learned more about roses than I thought possible, and after a while, we grew to appreciate each other’s company—more than I want to talk to you about.”

“More than I want to hear about, I’m sure.” I wanted to pretend he was really only eighteen and everything he was telling me had actually happened to someone else. I wanted to pretend he’d only ever loved me. “The song you composed—”

“Songs have words. You can’t use ‘song’ for everything.”

I smiled. “Your song ended up being a serenade? For Cris?”

He nodded, his movement barely discernible in the darkness. “We played it as a duet. I’d mostly forgotten about it.”

Would he forget about the waltz he’d written for me? Most nights, I fell asleep listening to it on my SED. It wasn’t as good as hearing Sam play it on the piano for the first time, but it always made me happy, made me remember the evening I’d discovered he wasn’t just Sam, he was Dossam, the musician.

Oblivious to the way my heart tied itself into knots, he continued. “After that, it was my fault. We wanted different things, we argued, and she told me not to come back to the cottage until I was less selfish. So I left. I could have stayed and tried to work things out, or find a compromise, but I didn’t. By the time I was reincarnated, I realized I regretted my decision.”

“What did you fight over?”

He glanced at me and shook his head. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about that.”

It must have been huge. Dedication-of-souls huge? What else could drive them apart if they still looked at each other awkwardly, hopefully? I couldn’t forget my first morning in Sam’s house, when Stef had whispered, Don’t let him break your heart, sweetie. He never settles.

Now I knew part of that was because she loved him. Cris loved him. He hadn’t stayed with either of them.

And did I love him? The word still made me choke. Even more frightening was the sudden understanding that my feelings for him—whatever they were—might be bigger than his feelings for me. I didn’t want to end up