Chapter 16 The Return

The world dissolved and reformed. Clary felt herself falling — not down, but through, as if she were passing through layers of paper, each layer a different map, a different place, a different version of reality, until she broke through the final layer and landed, hard, on wet grass, in the cold rain of a Devon evening, with Tamsin collapsing against her, both of them gasping, both of them real, both of them home. The field was dark. The rain was falling. The ancient trees stood in their circle, and the depression was filled with rainwater, and the symbol was carved into the earth, and the river was running beside them, cold and fast and real. Clary lay on her back and looked up at the sky. It was gray and cloudy and beautiful. It was the sky of the world she knew, the sky that had no parchment light and no shifting stars and no source she could identify. It was the sky of home. The rain made noise without meaning anything by it — no syllables, no announcements, just the steady static of a sky doing its job. After the eloquent hush of Lumen, where every sound arrived addressed and signed for, ordinary drizzle felt like a dialect she would have to relearn from scratch. She was glad. Ambiguity, she decided, spitting out a mouthful of moorland, could stay impossible for the rest of her life. Tamsin was crying. Clary was crying. They were both crying, and they were both laughing, and they were both alive, and they were both home, and the rain was washing the ink from their hands and the map from their memory and the city from their skin, and they were just two sisters in a field in Devon, and nothing else mattered. "Tell me something real," Tamsin said at last, because the moment needed an anchor and neither of them was steady enough for silence. "The chip shop burned down in June," Clary said. "What?" "Lightning took the fryer. Mr. Achebe's trading out of a van until it's rebuilt." Tamsin sat down in the heather and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes, and Clary laughed with her — grief and relief and fish and vinegar all arriving on the same tide — because the world had kept its own minutes while she was away, and the minutes were gloriously, unbearably small. This time there was nowhere else to go. The world finished reforming around them and stayed put: the same wet grass, the same gray rain, the same ancient trees standing their quiet watch over the depression. Clary laughed into the mud, a cracked and unhinged sound, and Tamsin joined her, and for a full minute neither of them could stop. Her body filed its own report: knees stung with gravel-burn, one thumbnail cracked sideways, lungs full of wet air that obeyed her without negotiation. The luminous residue was already letting go of her hands, thinning in the rain to a pale ghost of silver, and she watched the last of it wash away with the peculiar grief of watching a fever break — evidence and illness departing together, and only her own testimony remaining either way. Headlights swept the field. Detective Lin came across the grass at a run, umbrella abandoned, radio squawking against her shoulder, and skidded down into the hollow beside them. Up close her coat smelled of train seats and cold coffee, and her hands were shaking almost as hard as theirs. "Don't talk yet," she said, when Clary tried. "Just — can you stand? Can you tell me your names?" "Clary Vane," she said. "This is my sister, Tamsin." Something crossed Lin's face — relief and horror sharing the same expression — because she had read the files, all three months of them, and she knew better than anyone in Devon what those two names meant together. "Your watch stopped?" Lin asked later, catching the angle of Clary's wrist while the paramedics readjusted the foil blanket. Clary looked down. The cheap secondhand watch she had worn for two years showed twenty past seven, and where the second hand should have been sweeping there was instead a small, patient constellation of ticks moving in reverse. "It didn't stop," she said. "It just went somewhere else for a bit. It'll catch up." Lin wrote nothing down, very deliberately, and closed her empty notebook like a verdict being shelved. Lin made them say it twice, writing nothing down, her notebook still in her pocket. Names first, questions later: the questions could wait until there were doctors and lawyers and stronger coffee between here and the answers. She shouted grid references at the radio instead, and kept one hand flat on Tamsin's back the whole time, as if making sure the field did not take them back. The paramedics wrapped them in foil blankets that crinkled like fresh paper, and the irony of it set Tamsin giggling helplessly against Clary's shoulder while a penlight swung past their eyes and blood-pressure cuffs hissed tight and loose. Rain kept falling. The symbol in the earth filled slowly with water until it was only geometry again, only a circle cut by a line, indistinguishable from any pattern the moor had ever worn. Just before they guided the sisters into the ambulance, Clary looked back once. The field lay dark and ordinary under the rain, and the river ran fast and cold exactly where the Ordnance Survey had always said it should run, and nothing — not one blade of grass, not one stone — admitted that anything unusual had ever happened there. She let the doors close on it. Some doors, she was learning, stayed best shut from the outside. Others had to stay open. She would spend years learning which was which, but the first lesson arrived that night, riding through Devon with her sister's head heavy on her shoulder: knowing the difference was going to be the whole job. In the ambulance the doors shut out the field, and the siren began its ordinary climb through the Devon lanes, and Tamsin's hand found Clary's wrist — the right one, where the ribbon lay tied beneath the watch, gray-green-black — and held on. Two sisters, one market town approaching at speed, zero explanations ready. For a first draft, Clary thought, it would do.