Nell remembered something Max had said once when he was trying to show her she knew nothing about science. He’d asked her if she thought he was full of holes. Of course not, she’d told him, imagining a person leaking like a balloon. But he’d said then that everything was full of holes, and hard things were just made up of tiny pieces packed a little closer. Even people, he’d said.
Now she thought: Even iron.
Instead of focusing on the metal, she thought about the holes. She pushed at them with her mind, so many pockets of air, empty as soap bubbles, expanding into space.
And they opened.
With a clang, a piece of metal fell to the ground. Her eyes jerked open, and she looked down to find the lock at her feet, dissolving like sand.
The central garden was more densely planted than any of the others. Shade trees and thick bushes lined its narrow paths, shielding the domed structure at its center. Everything here had been laid out with elaborate care. Beneath a maple sat an iron bench with carved feet, its back a metal tapestry of winding vines and flowers. Another was engraved with faces, metallic silhouettes that sparkled in the morning light.
Nell hurried past them. Ahead of her, she could see the white stones of the building called the heart, the domed structure she’d seen as they walked through the mist.
When she reached it, she realized it was taller than she’d imagined. Its stones were the white of sun on cloud, its door overlaid with a frame of hammered gold set against rose-colored wood.
It had no knob, but a single gold ring, as big around as a young tree, hung from the center of the door. After a moment’s hesitation, Nell reached up and pulled.
The door swung out with a whiff of cool air full of complicated smells: old books, dust, wood, wax, and other things she couldn’t identify. Nell stepped in and dragged the door closed behind her. Despite the age of the place, and the puff of dust that rose when she closed the door, the wood swung silently on its hinges.
Nell blinked in the sudden shadows. She stood in a small foyer, where the white stones of the building gleamed coldly in the walls, reflecting dimly off the polished floor. Light seeped in around the doorframe and ahead, around the edges of another set of doors that ran from floor to ceiling. She pushed through these and blinked. Here, she stood beneath a rainbow, color pouring down on her from above. The dome she’d seen from a distance arched overhead, full of stained glass, skylights that tinted the sunlight striping the tiled floors and the table at the center of the room.
As the Shepherdess had said, the walls were full of tapestries. She stopped at a familiar scene — the man emerging from the pool. Where the needlework over the desk in her room showed only the man, the bright pool, a few trees, and the sky, this one had been rendered so that she saw the scene like someone standing on a hill. A rich, strange wood ran from one end of the piece to the other, layered with sunlit young trees thick with apple-green leaves and cedars woven with malachite and onyx. The primeval wood was full of glinting shadows, but above them, the weaver had laced the sky with sapphire and pearl and flecked silver. Shafts of yellow-silk sunlight streamed to meet the water and the joyful, vibrant figure rising from it with a glittering splash.
Nell thought she had never been in a room more beautiful. So this, she thought, is what they meant by the heart. A heart should look this way, lovely with color and tinted, falling light, with a thick oval table of polished red wood and embroidered chairs, with rosewood doors and tapestries like these on the walls.
She moved around the table, looking from one scene to the next: a broad-shouldered old man marching through defeated warriors toward a tent where a woman stood half concealed, her face etched with joy; people flowing from the gates of a gray city into an amber and green field, wheat bent on either side of them. She rested her hands on the backs of the chairs as she circled the table. Polished cherry, the color of the table and with needlework cushions, they stood five on one side and six on the other, with a larger chair at the head, its arms carved with images of corn and wheat and grapes and flowers.
The last chair, at the foot of the table, was out of place. It was pulled away and faced the wall. Absently, she ran a hand along it as she passed. She had come almost all the way around the room when a cold spot stopped her. There were no windows except the ones above, and she held still, clutching the back of the last chair a minute, in case the outer door had been opened. But it was closed. Still, she felt chilled.
Her heart pounded as she took a step forward. Now she felt like she’d swallowed ice, so that the cold reached down her throat into her belly. It was coming from the door nearest the foot of the table. Curious, she pushed it open. The cold worsened. It was not the brisk, sharp air of a winter’s day but the dank, awful stillness of a cellar that had been shut up too long, full of scurrying sounds and without light.
The room on the other side was dim, lit from above with the edges of the stained-glass skylights that crossed over the threshold. Once she stepped through the door, the cold was bearable. There were warm spots here. Unlike the richly appointed center room, this one was empty except for a long narrow table resting along the side wall. Several objects sat on it, clustered there in the colored shadows.
A
