Chapter 17 What the Shadow Remembers

The heart of the seal was a room made of darkness, and in the center of the room sat Maya's mother. Mei Chen was thin in a way that had nothing to do with food. She was thin the way a candle is thin, the way a voice is thin when it has been speaking for a long time in a very empty place. Her shadow lay around her on the floor in a great dark pool, and the pool was not still. It moved in a tide that matched the pulse of the door, and every pulse was the heartbeat of the thing on the other side of the seal, vast and patient and waiting. "Hello, Maya," Mei said. Her voice was soft and clear, and it sounded exactly like the voice in the mirror, and exactly like the laugh Maya had carried in her chest for eleven years. "You look so much like your grandmother. She would have loved you. I never got to tell her about you." Maya could not move. She stood at the edge of the dark pool, looking at her mother, and everything she had planned to say was gone. "I'm sorry," Mei said. "I know this is not how a daughter should meet her mother. I wanted so badly for it to be different. I wanted to be at your graduation, at your wedding, at the terrible first dinner you would cook for someone you loved." She smiled, and the smile was tired and brave and exactly the smile from the mirror. "But the door needed holding, and I was the only one who could hold it, and you were the only one I trusted to come and tell me it was all right." "It's not all right," Maya said. Her voice came out rough, and she did not care. "You've been here for ten years. You've been alone in the dark for ten years. It's not all right. It was never all right. Why didn't you come back? Why didn't anyone come for you?" "Because no one could," Mei said. "The seal only opens from inside, and only for my blood, and I could not leave it, because the moment I let go, the door would open, and the Hollow would come through, and everyone I loved would be on the other side of it." She looked at Maya, and her eyes were full of a love so old and so tired it made Maya's chest hurt. "I stayed because I could not leave. I held on because I believed you would come. And you did. You came faster than I dared to hope, and you are stronger than I dreamed, and you brought friends, and that is the part I never counted on." "Friends?" "Your mother spent ten years alone in the dark," Mei said, "and she learned, slowly, that the seal was made wrong. I made it alone, and that was the mistake. A seal held by one person is only as strong as one person, and one person grows tired, and one person cannot hold forever. I was dying slowly, Maya. I have been dying slowly for years. The only thing that kept me alive was the hope that you would come and I could tell you the truth before I was gone." "What truth?" Mei Chen reached out, and her hand passed through the air between them, and Maya felt it, a warmth where there should have been nothing. "The seal can be remade. It does not have to be held by one person in the dark. It can be woven by many hands, together, in the light. I did not know this when I made it. I was alone, and I was brave, and I was wrong." She looked at Maya. "You are not alone. You have never been alone. That is the gift I could not give you, and the one I am most proud that you found for yourself." "How do we do it?" Maya asked. "How do we remake the seal? Tell me. I'll do anything." "You will not have to do it alone," Mei said. "That is the whole point. Listen." And she began to speak, and what she said was not a spell, not a Working, not anything Maya could write down. It was a shape, a way of folding shadow that could be shared, a pattern held by a hundred hands at once, each taking a thread, each thread braiding with the others, no one thread bearing the whole weight. It was simple. It was beautiful. It was the thing her mother had spent ten years learning, alone in the dark, so that her daughter would not have to. "Do you understand?" Mei asked, when she had finished. "Yes," Maya said. And she did. She understood it the way she understood her own shadow, the way she understood her own name. "Good." Mei's voice was quiet. "Then there is one more thing. When the door opens again, the Hollow will come through. It will not wait. You will have minutes, not hours, to weave the new seal. And while you weave it, someone will have to hold its attention, someone the Hollow has already learned to hate." She looked down at the dark pool around her, at the tide that was her own shadow, stretched thin across ten years of holding. "I have held it for ten years. I know how to make it angry." "No." Maya's voice broke. "You can't. You've already given everything. You can't give more." "I am not giving more," Mei said gently. "I am giving what I have left. And it is exactly enough." She reached out again, and this time the touch was real, a hand closing around Maya's, warm and solid and there. "I have been waiting for you for ten years, Maya. I have been holding on so that I could see you, and tell you I love you, and tell you I am proud of you, and then let go." Her eyes were full of tears, and she was smiling. "That is not a tragedy. That is a gift. You are the gift. You were always the gift. The door was just the price." Maya was crying. She did not know when she had started. Her mother held her, and it was exactly as she remembered: a laugh, a scent of lavender, the feeling of being held safe and warm. "I love you," Maya said into her mother's shoulder. "I never got to say it. I never got to say it to your face. I've been saying it to your grave for eleven years." "I know," Mei said. "I heard." She pulled back and looked at Maya, and her face was radiant, the face of a woman who had finished the hardest thing she would ever do. "Now go. They are waiting for you. The door is opening, and the Hollow is waking, and you have friends on the other side who are about to do something very brave." She smiled. "I would not want them to do it without you." Maya turned. The door of woven shadow was opening, and through it she could see the light and the faces, and she heard Cassian shouting her name. She looked back once. Her mother stood at the center of the dark pool, and she was not thin anymore, and she was not tired anymore, and she was smiling. "Go," Mei said. "And when it is done, tell your father I loved him. Tell him I chose this. Tell him it was worth it." Maya went. ---