toward them, screaming Althea’s name while the ice that had spread across most of Caul’s body began, very quickly, to recede. By the time Miss Wren reached them, he was nearly free of it. But then the ice everywhere was melting, too—fading and retracting just as quickly as Althea’s life was—the ice in the attic dripping and raining down through the ceiling just as Althea’s own blood ran down her body. She was in Miss Wren’s arms now, slack, going.
Bronwyn was on the table, Caul’s throat in one hand, his weapon crushed to snow in her other. We could hear the ice in floors below us melting, too, and then it was gone from the windows. We rushed to look out, and could see water flooding from lower windows into the street, where soldiers in gray urban camo were clinging to lampposts and fire hydrants to keep from being washed away by the icy waves.
Then we heard their boots stomping on the stairs below and coming down from the roof above, and moments later they burst in with their guns, shouting. Some of the men wore night-vision headsets and all of them bristled with weapons—compact machine guns, laser-sighted pistols, combat knives. It took three of them to pry Bronwyn away from Caul, who wheezed through his half-crushed windpipe, “Take them away, and don’t be gentle!”
Miss Wren was shouting, begging us to comply—“Do as they say or they’ll hurt you!”—but she wouldn’t let go of Althea’s body, so they made an example of her; they tore Althea away and kicked Miss Wren to the ground, and one of the soldiers fired his machine pistol into the ceiling just to scare us. When I saw Emma about to make a fireball with her hands, I grabbed her by the arm and begged her not to—“Don’t, please don’t, they’ll kill you!”— and then a rifle butt slammed into my chest and I fell gasping to the floor. One of the soldiers noosed my hands together behind me.
I heard them counting us, Caul listing our names, making sure even Millard was accounted for—because of course by now, having spent the last three days with us, he knew all of us, knew everything about us.
I was pulled to my feet and we were all pushed out through the doors into the hallway. Stumbling along next to me was Emma, blood in her hair, and I whispered, “Please, just do what they say,” and though she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew she’d heard me. The look on her face was all rage and fear and shock—and I think pity, too, for all I’d just had snatched away from me.
In the stairwell, the floors and stairs below were a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves. Up was the only way out. We were shoved up the stairs, through a door and into strong daylight, onto the roof. Everyone wet, frozen, frightened into silence.
All but Emma. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded.
Caul came right to her and grinned in her face while a soldier held her cuffed hands behind her. “A very special place,” Caul said, “where not a drop of your peculiar souls will go to waste.”
She flinched, and he laughed and turned away, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. From his shoulder blades jutted a weird pair of knobby protrusions, like the stems of aborted wings: the only outward clue that this twisted man bore any relation to an ymbryne.
Voices shouted from the top of another building. More soldiers. They were laying down a collapsible bridge
