Chapter 56 Inside the Wake

Crossing the tide's edge felt like walking into the space where a shout had just been. The pale country did not empty all at once. First the color went out of the ground underfoot, then the grain, then the certainty of footing, until they walked on surface in the abstract — firm, featureless, faintly warm, like page seen from the paper's own side. Sound shortened. Ten yards away, Rosa's breathing was rumor. The horizon neither near nor far simply declined to be located, and overhead there was light with no source for it, evenly, forever, like the inside of a lamp. "Hour one," Clary said aloud, and her voice arrived small and flat in her own ears. "Vane, Clary. Guardian of the balance. Retouching." She drew a fresh line along the cuff of her jacket, an inch of ordinary stitching, and felt the little warmth of it take. One by one the others stated themselves — Tamsin, Rosa, Jem, Wren last and loudest — and the statements hung around them like lanterns. They walked west on Rosa's compass logic alone, since compasses here pointed at nothing so cheerfully that she'd stopped swearing at them, following the deep-strided ghost of boot prints that appeared and vanished like a phrase repeated through water. Twice they passed places where the wake still held the shapes of what it had taken: a lane's worth of hedges present as an absence you could feel with your teeth, a stone bridge existing only as the clean arc where falling rain refused to fall. At the third hour the lures began. They stood up out of the mist ahead at intervals, the false doors, hanging unsupported like shop signs lit from within — each one drawn in that wet tall hand, circle and broken diagonal — and each one spoke. Not words, at first. Recognition. A pressure on the mind like a hand fitting itself over a doorknob you thought you'd locked. Then, softly, personally, the voices came. For Rosa it was an old survey partner, dead twenty years, calling her out of the fog to check a benchmark before the light went. She answered him steadily — *you're dead, Tom, and this isn't the coast, and I'm retouching* — and kept walking with tears cutting clean lines down her weathered face. For Jem it was his name, his whole name, scratched lovingly in the dark. He told it to stop. It did not stop, but he kept pace anyway, white-knuckled, muttering coordinates like a rosary. For Clary it was her mother. She heard the front door of the house she had grown up in. She heard the particular two-note hum their mother used when she filled the kettle, and then the voice itself, warm across seventeen years and a garden and a death: *Clary-love, come and see what I've drawn you.* It was perfect. It was exact. That was how she knew it for forgery, because the real voice was gone beyond any wearing, and grief that perfect could only be bait. She said, aloud, to the mist and to herself, "My mother drew me a map once. It said Home. This isn't home. Retouching." And she drew her stitching line, and walked on, and did not let herself shake until the next hour marker. Wren heard Colm and did not answer, because Wren had stopped hearing anything but her own blood. She marched at the head of the line with the torch unlit in her fist like a weapon from a country without weapons, and Clary let her march, because some anchors are named people. They found the held ones at dusk-that-wasn't, in a place the wake had made into a garden. It was laid out with terrible care: borders and beds of kept things, arranged in the negative space like pressed flowers under glass. Here, a streetlamp's cone of light, preserved entire, mid-pool on invisible pavement. There, a staircase going up into nothing, carpeted in somebody's memory of somebody's hallway. Whole weather systems hung in jars of absence. And moving among them, tending them, were people — or the drawings people leave of themselves when most of their lines have been taken. Faint ones. A man whose face you had to work at. A girl of maybe twelve holding a bicycle that existed only as its shadow. An older woman, silver-haired, upright, nearly solid, who turned at the crunch of their arriving feet and looked at them with the wildest relief Clary had ever seen on a living face. "You're inked," the woman said. "All of you. Fully inked." She came forward, hands out, stopped herself short of touching as if they might smudge. "Elspeth Carew. Fifty-four years old, forty days lost. Tell whoever keeps your maps that I held on." "We know your name," Rosa said hoarsely. "It's in my ledger. We came—" "I know why you came." Elspeth's eyes went past them, and the garden seemed to lean with her gaze, and at its center, kneeling over a bed of kept lamplight, was a young man rendered in about three-quarters of himself — tall, broad-shouldered, sketchy at the edges, his school bag still on one shoulder like a boy pausing between classes. He looked up when Wren said his name, and his face did the thing faces do when a word arrives from very far away. "Wren," Colm Halloway said. Just that. Her name, held like a full cup. "It's me," Wren managed. "I brought the pencil." Something changed then — not in the garden; behind it. The pale distance organized. Mist drew itself upward into a form too large for standing, a slow vast rising like a shelf of sea, and the garden's kept things guttered, and every faint figure in it turned to watch with expressions that were not afraid, which somehow was the most frightening thing yet. The rising shape opened. It opened the way a book opens, from a spine of darkness, and showed them a picture: a shoreline at the bottom of everything — the first shore, the original edge of the first page, drawn and worn and patient — and upon the shore stood a figure assembled of margins and footnotes, thin as a ruled line and tall as weather. *You drew over me,* it said, and its voice was pencil-scratch and turning pages and, underneath, unmistakably, every name it had ever been given. *I am not your hunger. I am not your monster. I am the edge, and you have taken my edge away.* It closed, gently, like a book being finished for the night, and left hanging in the air where it had been a single line of writing, tall and wet: *I ONLY WANT MY EDGE BACK.*