‘Stay,’ she whispers, and her arms wrap around him and her sweeping lips find his temple and the bone around his left eye and then his high cheekbone and she breathes deep and the motion in her body feels like meaning. And the pilot’s lips touch her skin.
And then a baby cries. The infant wailing of the baby who fell from the sky, and it is the sound of the baby waking from his long sleep but also the sound of Yukio Miki and Greta Maze waking from a dream they both walked into.
Greta breathes and breaks away from the embrace. She rushes to the baby, cradled in the pilot’s jacket. She picks him up and draws him to her chest. ‘Sssshhhh,’ she says. ‘Ssshhhhh.’ She rocks the baby in her arms. Then she looks up at the pilot. ‘Where’s Molly?’ she asks.
OWN ALL YOU CARRY
A girl’s open mouth. The girl in the sky-blue satin dress lying on her side in the sun. Half an orange strychnine fruit sitting in her open palm. Her eyes closed. Brown boots covered in dirt and dust. Duffel bag straps over her shoulder. She lies motionless at the foot of four stone pillars that look like family members standing over a crib, peering down at a newborn.
The girl’s name echoes across the maze of stone pillars. ‘Molly.’
She stirs. Her left boot moves. Her left leg kinks at the knee. Her name echoes again across the stone city. ‘Molly!’
The girl’s eyes flash open. Her view is dirt and spear grass and stone. She looks up to the sun and the sky and she finds the stone pillars of last night. They’re not as threatening in the daylight. Not as monstrous. She feels the fruit in her hand and she brings it to her eyes and she throws it at the rock wall opposite her. The fruit bounces off the sandstone and lands a few feet from the other half of the fruit that she spat out last night because it was so bitter and dry and near impossible to swallow. But she remembers how willing she was to swallow it and she is ashamed of this.
She turns to the sky. ‘Why did you tell me those things?’ she asks.
But she gets no reply.
Then her name again, echoing across the stone city. ‘Moll-yyyyy.’
She knows that voice. There’s projection in it. There’s performance. Greta.
‘Moll-yyyyy!’
She stands and runs towards the voice. She attempts to say her name but her throat is parched and she needs to swallow saliva twice before she can get a single word out. ‘Greta,’ she says weakly.
She runs closer to the voice. She breathes deep and summons a louder call and lets it rip across the stone city. ‘Gret-aaaaaaaaa!’ she hollers. She darts left and right and ducks into alleys running diagonally right, then veers into passages running diagonally left and beats her own path through the maze of stone pillars.
‘Moll-yyyyy!’
‘Gret-aaaa, I’m coming!’ Molly screams.
Hard left, hard right. Pillar after pillar after pillar. Follow the voice, Molly tells herself. She came for you. She cares for you. Because you care for her. The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway. Run to her, Molly. Run, Molly, run.
‘Moll-yyyyy!’
‘Greta!’ Molly screams. ‘I can hear you. I’m coming. I’m coming.’ And she runs. Zigging and zagging through the maze, the voice of her friend as her compass point.
‘I’m coming Greta,’ Molly calls. ‘Keep shouting! I can hear you! I’m coming.’
‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls in the distance.
And the gravedigger girl smiles as she takes a blind corner around a giant pillar that stands some fifty feet tall. She takes the blind corner so fast that her boots slide on the gravel beneath her and her legs lose their footing and she lands hard on her chest and belly, and skin rolls painfully away from her kneecaps and elbows, but she doesn’t care because Greta is close and she pulls herself up with her hair in her eyes and she’s still bent half over when she brushes her hair back and focusses on the impossible vision of her uncle, Aubrey Hook, standing before her. The shadow.
She tells herself it can’t be him, standing within arm’s reach of her, towering almost as high as the monster pillars surrounding him. She tells herself she’s dreaming, still back there in the heart of the maze, back there sleeping with the orange fruit in her hand. She tells herself this can’t be real, but she knows it is when his long shadow fingers reach out and smother her nose and mouth.
*
‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls, holding the baby to her chest. Sun and sweat across her face, she catches her breath at the foot of three pillars that look regal, like a king and queen and a younger, shorter prince sitting down at a sandstone slab that holds a palace feast. Rubble for roast chickens. Fallen stones for goblets. Yukio stands a foot behind her, studying the shapes of other rocks and pillars, committing them to memory in case they have to travel back through this godforsaken maze. He knows they are up high now. He noticed that the stone city sits on an incline rising to a high ridge and when the wind blows in certain directions he can hear water flowing in the distance ahead of them. And although they are up high, this is surely a place created in the underworld. Yomi-no-kuni, he tells himself. The World of Darkness must look like this. Mazes of stone monsters where creatures lurk behind every turn. A place that can’t be trusted. A feeling in his bones. In his heart.
A voice from the north-west. Faint. ‘Greta.’
‘Moll-yyyyy!’
