Chapter Text

The Body in the Fen

May their awful Fate be a warning to others.

(Inscription on a wooden plaque, attached to the tower of the church of Ely.)

Her face looked peaceful under the dim light of a clouded, sinking sun. It rendered everything in a soft glow, making edges blurry in a sea of grey, green, and brown. Nearly dead plants covered the soil, mud upon more mud.

She couldn't be older than twenty-five. Her skin had turned greyish-white, with blue under the fingernails and purple on the lips. Emma gazed long at that face, the stretched arms and legs, the wet dark hair, stiff with dirt at the ends. She crouched near her left hand, watching the way the light yellow t-shirt with blue dots disappeared into the surrounding brown.

If it were not for the eyes —glassy orbs looking at the darkening sky with the disappearing sun— Emma would have wondered what the woman was doing there, sleeping on top of the reeds and the meadowsweets. But she wasn't sleeping, and Emma found that, despite all experiences, dead things still made her heart freeze —a tiny bit, a fleeting second, until time resumed.

The patrol officers were scattered around the scene, boots covered in mud, eyes looking without seeing. Emma wondered about the last time death had passed through these marshes like an uninvited visitor. Someone had once told her that Death created time to grow the things that it would kill, and back then, she had understood that to mean dying was the natural end of everybody's road.

Maybe it was the sight of the young woman, pale and wet, affecting everyone in concentric waves, but looking at these men —pretending to be calm, hiding how unnerved they really were underneath their blank faces— she revisited a different meaning in those words, one that she had chewed on more and more lately. Cruelty and darkness were ingrained in the world. And she was there to keep them at bay, to keep bad men from good people's doors.

Emma looked at the officers again, more carefully this time. She filed their gestures away for later. During her extended stay in the Met, she had learned every movement mattered when a woman was dead.

"Who found her?" Emma noticed the scratchy quality of her voice, a hoarse caw in the stillness. It felt like she hadn't spoken in years, and now she had broken her vow to announce the woman's passage to the other side.

"Her," the patroller closest to the body said, pointing a shaky finger.

The woman stood apart from the others. She had positioned herself a little behind the patrol truck, off to one side, as if she were weighing the odds of folding herself into the machinery and simply ceasing to be visible. Sixtyish, maybe older. Her coat was dark and too wide for her frame, damp through at the collar; her rubber boots were caked to the ankle in the same black mud that had swallowed everyone else's shoes. She wore a knitted hat pulled low, and she did not look up; her gaze was fixed somewhere between the earth and nothing, a place Emma recognised.

She was afraid.

It was the particular quality of her stillness that gave it away: almost practised; it came from spending a long time learning that drawing attention was a gamble not worth taking, especially when surrounded by uniforms, with their notebooks and their questions.

Emma moved slightly to get a better look at her hands. They were clasped together in front of her now, not in prayer but in containment, fingers wrapped tight over knuckles that had split and cracked at every joint. The skin around her nails was roughened by a series of small lacerations, some of which had healed. Emma pictured those hands doing the same motions thousands of times in cold water and wet soil, hands that had been out before dawn, and would be again tomorrow, regardless of what lay in the marsh.

"Does she speak English?" Emma asked quietly.

The patroller hesitated. "A bit. She was frightened when the rest of us arrived; she almost ran." He lowered his voice, which was unnecessary; the woman was too far away, and Emma was fairly certain she would not look their way again, regardless. "She works on the Kerwick estate. One of the seasonal lot. Been here three, four months."

Emma filed that information away alongside the hands, the hat pulled low, and the avoidance.

"Name?"

He checked his notepad. "Marin. Florina Marin."

A younger constable was making some gesture toward the car door. Florina moved toward it without lifting her head, steps slow and careful. She got in. Through the window, the patroller said something, probably calming and almost certainly useless.

Emma looked at the body again, then at the door that had closed behind Florina. She breathed in slowly and closed her eyes, all the information trying to fall into place but very much failing to. "I'll need you to repeat all of it for me, once more. Start from the top."

"There isn't much…" the patroller answered. Emma could hear the same soft hesitance in his voice and wondered again why this scene was such an abnormality in the village of Welney. Women were frequently found dead, most of the time murdered. That was the way of the world.

But it seemed to the villagers and patrollers that the body of this young woman was akin to an apparition, unearthly. They avoided the sight, they talked quietly, their hands shook.

To Emma, there was sadly nothing strange in it.

"…she went back to the chapel and asked Donny here—" he pointed at another constable further back, "who lives in town and takes mass in the morning to come see. He called the guys…" he shot a quick look at Emma. "The Norfolk Constabulary, I mean. There was nothing or no one around when we came, just the body."

Emma — still imagining old Florina overcoming her fear and searching for help in the only place she thought possible — observed the dark, squishy soil, but there was no sign of extra footprints or vehicle tracks.

"Did she touch the body?"

"No, nor Donny. As far as I know."

Emma glanced up at him. "As far as you know."

"Nobody touched her."

The officer had a rounded, boyish face that made him look younger than he really was. He licked his lips, but held her gaze. There was no defiance there, no fury or lie. Just a tint of fear. At least that's what Emma felt. So far, she had learned to deal with liars and thought she was quite capable of noticing one in the wild.

"Fine." She leaned to the side, still observing.

"Is this part of your investigation?"

Emma didn't answer.

The patroller pressed. "This is not the woman you were looking for; they look nothing alike..."

"What was your name?"

He stopped talking and swallowed. "Eliah."

"You're right, Eliah. She isn't. What's that?" she pointed at a mark on the ground, made as if a finger had drawn a line in the mud, disappearing under the woman's back.

The officer's brow furrowed. "Not sure."

"Have pictures been taken?"

"A couple."

"Then take a couple more," she brushed her gloved hands together. "Then, you'll help me move her aside, very carefully."

The patroller looked perturbed at the idea, but didn't refuse. Another officer, holding an old camera, took pictures from all angles under Emma's careful guidance.

Click. It resonated loudly, an echo out of place in the wetland.

While he worked, Emma turned around and caught sight of the small figure, walking slowly in the distance, her legs hidden in the overgrown grass.

Click. Click.

The figure was almost at the edge of a pool of water, her dark coat starting to blend in with the background, like a fading ghost in the reeds.

It could have been a calming view, just someone taking a few moments to breathe some fresh, fragrant air. But there was no smell, Emma realised; not even the flowers had scent, nor the puddles of rainwater. Nor the body.

Click.

"It's ready, ma'am."

She looked at the figure one last time, with her coiled brown hair and long charcoal coat. "Thank you, officer. Now we need to take the body for examination. Please, be careful. I need to preserve the scene as much as possible."

The skies were quickly growing darker, deep blue advancing on the horizon, padded by clouds. Thin rays of orange tried to pierce through, to no avail. Behind that cover, the Sun would set soon; then all that was left to hide in the dark would undoubtedly be lost.

For a brief moment, when the woman was lifted, she looked as if she were sleeping again, arms hanging by her sides. The coroner placed her in the gurney and covered her quickly.

Emma breathed in again and noticed a pressing sensation growing in the pit of her stomach. That morning, she had already got out of that old bed with a bad taste in her mouth and a tug of anxiety for what was to come, an instinct to brace herself. But she had managed to keep it under control the entire day, and the news of a woman dropping dead with no clear wounds or sign of struggle had removed any other thought that evening.

Before hopping into the car an hour before, she had rubbed the point in her stomach, trying to alleviate the tension, a futile gesture she had carried around since she was a child. Maybe it was this village and its people, the pressure to find Leah, the sensation that she was on an edge, an animal dangling off a cliff.

The tense feeling was spreading to her legs and knees now. She lowered her eyes to the earth, trying to ground herself.

There, she saw it.

The short line she had noticed in the mud continued. It branched into five thinner lines, three on the left and two on the right. Emma cocked her head to one side, and then to the other, trying to appreciate better what she was seeing. She noticed the ground was slightly redder where the lines had been drawn —for lack of a better word— and something powdery sat in them, red like clay. Or brick. Or rust. It looked like someone had etched a stem with five very thin red leaves on the soil. So completely out of place, but strangely part of the scene.

"Officer," Emma beckoned to the one with the camera. "Please."

Click.

Maybe it was just the mud. This entire unforgiving, waterlogged landscape was crisscrossed with scrapes, channels, dykes, and ditches. Perhaps this was one of them.

Something told Emma it wasn't the case. The lines in the mud caught her eyes, and she found it difficult to break away and look back.

There was only a line of fire now, far beyond the cloudy horizon, signalling the end of the day.

Louisa was walking back to the crime scene, her dark coat tight around her, a single brown curl of hair right on her cheek. As she grew closer, Emma saw that her eyes were bright, but she looked sad.

She always looks sad. Emma let that thought go.

"Did you find anything?"

"Nope. The whole thing is grass and water," she gave Emma a tiny, dispirited smile. "You?"

"Well, look for yourself."

Louisa approached her, carefully avoiding the area marked as the center of the scene. She stood right beside Emma, shoulder almost to shoulder. Emma noticed her perfume, not too sweet, not too earthy, but fitting… for the place, not the circumstances. Then, she realized it was the first scent she had perceived since they had arrived.

"That looks…. deliberate." Louisa was eyeing the mark.

Emma's attention went back to the scene. "It does," she cleared her throat. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm not sure. This whole thing is… weird."

They looked at each other.

"You told me Leah was a misper case."

"That's what Taverner implied."

Louisa shook her head. "And thus, not true."

"More like the official story. Until further information comes up."

Louisa exhaled sharply. "So, who is this woman?"

"We'll know soon enough. What do you make of that?" she pointed at the etching again.

"A rock or a branch was moved out of the way?"

"You just said it was deliberate."

Louisa scratched her forehead; her hand fell to her chest, a finger pressing the golden pendant of her necklace. "I know, but the other alternative is that somebody put it there. Like a… a drawing."

"I think I don't like that alternative."

Their eyes found each other again.

"Anything else worth noting?"

Louisa smiled more openly this time, but there was sarcasm mixed in it. "I feel like I'm the newbie and you're testing my detective skills, Miss Ex Met."

"Nope, I need a second pair of attentive eyes. I told you."

"Don't know about attentive eyes…" Louisa turned around and took some steps, with her face up to the sky. "But do you notice it?"

Emma looked at her, and then at the sky. Despite all, it was a peaceful evening. Quiet. They were the only ones there, a swarm of dark figures tracing circles, dancing around a piece of wet land, with the red sign right in the middle.

Nothing else could be seen.

"Do you hear that?" Louisa asked, eyes fixed on the horizon now.

"No, I don't."

"Exactly," she held two fingers up, as if listening. "No insects, no birds, no animals. No breeze. Nothing, for miles. It's been like this since we got here."

Emma swallowed and looked around.

Indeed, the Fens were dead silent and still, as if all life had been interrupted in the course of the last hours.

And that feeling, the one that had followed Emma the entire day, crept into her spine, somehow still unnamed and shapeless, but stronger. It told her that she and Louisa were standing in a rift and life would not be the same for either of them after that body, that woman. It seemed, right then and there, that when the young woman's last breath had escaped her, the world had held its own, frozen in time.

Emma wondered whether perhaps that last breath had sounded like a rattle.

Or a gasp.

Elsewhere, before

The motorway had released them somewhere near Royston, and since then, London had been peeling away in layers.

The retail warehouses first — those vast, windowless sheds that squatted on the outskirts of every city as if ashamed of their own function, their car parks full at midday. Then the last service station, its flag bent sideways in the wind, the café inside visible through the glass, orange and falsely cheerful. Then the villages of Hertfordshire, with their duck ponds and their expensive cottages and their general agreement that history was a thing to be preserved rather than lived with. Finally, the fields, which were all greener than Emma had expected.

She drove. She liked it; lately, there had been little chance to do it, carried around in black USVs, but now there was something almost peaceful in it; the slow, controlled motions, the familiarity. And Louisa had been watching the passenger window for the better part of two hours without anything that resembled complaint.

The A10 cut through the countryside with a kind of blunt resolve, straight and undeviating. Emma kept both hands on the wheel and tried not to rehearse, for the fourth time that morning, the precise chain of events that had resulted in her driving into the Fens with a Slough House irregular in the passenger seat and a misper case that was already something more complicated than a misper case.

The landscape was changing.

It was slow at first — incremental, easily ignored — but unmistakable once you started paying attention, which Emma was professionally incapable of not doing. The gentle undulations of Hertfordshire had begun to subside: the hedgerows thinned and then stopped entirely; the fields widened like something uncurling after a long sleep. And the sky moved forward, gradually, the way a tide moves.

Emma had read about the Fens before leaving London. First, in the case files spread across the kitchen table the night before, with Leah Nash's face looking up at her from a printed photograph. Then, in the accounts of the land itself. She had a habit of researching the places that required something of her, as if geography were a form of evidence. Sometimes the earth gave her what the people would not.

What she had found was this: the Fens were not natural; they had been made. Drained over centuries from wetland, bog and flood plain, the soil was ancient peat — dark, compressed. And restless; it was sinking. That was the detail that had lodged in her brain at half past eleven the previous night and refused to be dislodged since: the land was subsiding, back toward what it had always wanted to be. The drainage channels that cut every field into obedient rectangles were not so much a conquest of the landscape, but a temporary negotiation.

Relentless, Emma thought. It kept going regardless; that was something she could understand.

"There's Ely," she said.

Louisa stirred, turned her head. On the far horizon, at the point where the land seemed to exhaust itself entirely, a shape rose. Ely Cathedral; enormous and improbable, its west tower and two transepts assembled above the flatness. It floated there in the grey afternoon light, detached from the bungalows, pylons and sugar beet fields that surrounded it at ground level, its stone almost golden against the cloud.

Louisa looked at it for a moment. "It's… imposing. Big."

"Norman, mostly."

"Still very big." Louisa looked a moment longer, then turned away.

Emma kept watching the road. The A10 carried them north through Littleport, then gave way to smaller roads that turned and doubled back on themselves. The sat-nav insisted on a route Emma didn't entirely trust, and the landscape offered no reassurance. Fields of black soil turned raw by machinery that had passed through recently and left long ridges of upturned earth. Poplars had been planted in thin, joyless rows as windbreaks; they stood bare and shivering, flags of last year's leaves still caught in the upper branches, rattling in the wind coming off the open land. The dyke banks came after that, running ruler-straight to the horizon. Then, a grain silo, cylindrical and enormous, rose from nothing.

Some time after, signs appeared at farm entrances; large, weathered boards with telephone numbers and the names of agricultural contractors, several of them in Polish, one in Romanian. Further along the verge, half-hidden by an overgrown dyke bank, there were two caravans, curtains drawn, a washing line between them with two pairs of work trousers and a blue anorak moving stiffly in the wind.

The car kept moving through it all, and Emma became aware — through the glass, even with the heater running — of something in the quality of the air out there: carrying the smell of land that had once been water.

The two times Emma had lowered the window briefly, it was noisy out there; in the way the countryside always surprised city people into realizing it was noisy. Lapwings called from a ploughed field, and the wind made a continuous low note against the car, punctuated by the occasional lorry going south, packed with produce from the farms.

"So, Leah," Emma said.

It was a change of subject. More like a break in the silence because the subject had never properly started; some things needed to be summed up, and this was as good a moment as any. She felt, rather than saw, Louisa's attention shift.

"Leah Nash," Emma continued. "Twenty-seven years old. Oliver Nash's niece — his sister's daughter. His sister married a diplomatic attaché; they've been posted abroad for years, most recently in Beirut." She paused. "Leah came to London to finish a training course. Contemporary dance. She's been here eighteen months. Dark hair, dark skin, about one-sixty-seven. She ran every morning on Clapham Common."

"Ran," Louisa repeated quietly.

"Until five days ago."

Louisa was silent for a moment. A field of leafless vegetation passed on her side, with the roots of something already harvested, and the plants collapsed and browned. The sky to the north had taken on a flat, pewter quality, making it difficult to judge the light.

"Nash is a very powerful hand in the Park," Louisa said. "Limitations Committee means money, which means… everything else."

"It means he has oversight of what the Service spends its money on. Which, in practice, means he can make things very uncomfortable for anyone who catches his attention."

"And Taverner has caught it."

"Taverner catches everyone's attention, eventually. Nash has been trying to pull the rope tight for years. Before him, it was his predecessor. Before that, someone else." Emma kept her gaze on the road. "The problem is that Taverner has never quite operated as if other people's opinions were relevant to her."

Louisa made a small sound that might have been of amusement. "She usually holds the leash."

"She does."

Emma felt the pause and registered Louisa turning to look at her with something in her expression. "She keeps it tight, doesn't she?"

Emma didn't answer right away. She shrugged. "I'm trying to do my job well. AKA, following orders."

Louisa looked back at the passing landscape through the window. After a moment, she murmured almost to the glass: "They're not called the Dogs for nothing."

Emma heard it.

But kept driving.

Welney, when it appeared, offered nothing by way of introduction. There was no sign on the approach, or if there had been, it was long gone. All of a sudden, there was a terrace of brick cottages flush to the verge, their front gardens mostly gravel or concrete, a few with ornamental windmills that no longer turned. A pub with its curtains drawn at half past two in the afternoon. And then a church, a modest Victorian-era building in pale brick, all sorts of small and unremarkable.

The high street was approximately sixty yards long. There was a post office, seemingly already at peace with closure. A butcher's, open and lit, with three pale carcasses suspended in the window and a handwritten sign offering lamb and pork. A Costcutter with a piece of card in the door advertising reduced-price bread.

Then the road narrowed, and the village ended, and the fields resumed; the settlement had been only a brief interruption.

Emma pulled onto the verge beside the church gate. She cut the engine. The sound went at once — the heater, the low road noise, the shell of the car's interior — and the outside came in in layers, one at a time, until the picture assembled itself. Wind in the churchyard elms. A door somewhere at the far end of the lane, creaking open and shut on an unoiled hinge. A dog barking from inside one of the cottages.

Emma reached into the back seat for her bag.

In the mirror, Louisa's face was still, dark eyes tracking something past Emma's shoulder, toward the church.

Emma had registered the sadness in those eyes from the moment Louisa had appeared at the car that morning, earlier than asked. She was carrying it redistributed into her posture, her silences, the slight blankness with which she observed things passing. Emma had decided not to name it out loud because there was work, and then there would be time, and she would decide then what the right thing to say was.

"Strange place," Louisa said.

Emma looked at the church. "Not more than others I've seen. It looks… peaceful."

"Yes, but it feels…" Louisa considered. "Off. Did you notice where the fields were lower than the road? Four, five miles back. The road was built up above the level of the land on both sides."

Emma had noticed. She hadn't commented because she had still been thinking about what had brought them there.

"The land subsides," Emma said. "The peat dries out, compresses. The drainage channels take the water away, and the ground sinks toward where the water used to be."

"And the roads don't."

"The roads don't."

Louisa looked at the dyke running along the far edge of the churchyard, its water still and dark. "You seem to know a lot about this place."

"Just doing due diligence." Emma opened her door, and the air came in cold and edged.

Louisa shivered. "The whole place feels like waiting."

Emma got out of the car. "That's about right."

Then she turned and walked away, and Louisa followed.

The pub was called The Horseshoe, which told you everything and nothing about the place. Dark wood, a carpet whose original color was close to blue, although impossible to tell anymore, and a fruit machine in the corner, blinking. Three men sat at the bar. They did not turn when Emma and Louisa came in.

The barman looked up and said nothing. Emma ordered two halves of whatever was local, which turned out to be something called Fen Gold. They took the table furthest from the bar.

Louisa sat with her back to the wall. So did Emma, which meant they were side by side rather than opposite each other, both looking out at the room. Neither of them commented on this.

The food, when it came, was a pie that had clearly been reheated from an earlier, more hopeful pie. Emma ate without complaint, but Louisa pushed chips from one side of the plate to the other.

"Small," Louisa said.

"The pie?"

"The village." She looked toward the window, where the inky darkness outside was total and immediate. "It'll know we're here by morning."

"It knows now."

The three men at the bar had not looked at them once since they had sat down. In itself, that was its own kind of vigilance. The fruit machine in the corner emitted a sequence of sounds and then went quiet.

One of the men at the bar said something low to the other two, and the barman refilled a glass. Behind the wall at the back of the building, a door opened and closed.

"I'm going over that last payment on the cash app," Emma said, choosing to break the contemplative mood. "To the driver working out of Tottenham: 14:32 on the first, her phone went dark forty minutes later."

"What did the driver say again?"

"He didn't know who she was until we traced him. Drove her north, she told him to stop on the A1101, just before the turn for Welney. He dropped her on the verge and left." Emma tapped a finger on her glass. "He said she seemed fine. His word. Fine. Bag over her shoulder. Didn't look back."

Louisa's hands were playing with the golden chain around her neck again, pressing the pendant against her throat. "Not enough to say it yet, but maybe she chose to come here."

"It looks like it," Emma's skepticism seeped through the words.

"But…"

"But a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose dance career is finally taking off doesn't come to this town in the Fens because she wants to take a holiday."

"Maybe she got tired," Louisa said. "From the family, the diplomatic life, all of it. Maybe she needed a break. Taverner's version."

Emma's expression didn't shift. "Taverner's version is that Oliver Nash is a powerful man with a missing niece, and the correct response is to send one person to chase a lead she doesn't expect to produce anything, so that when Nash asks what was done, there's an answer."

"And the incorrect response?"

"Would be to take it seriously enough that it becomes a problem when it doesn't resolve cleanly."

Louisa looked at her. "Something tells me you expect it won't," she pulled at the chain, and lowered her hand. "However grateful I am you decided to take me for a walk outdoors, I've felt it in my fucking stomach the whole day; this place is too quiet for my liking. Too… different to her."

Emma noticed Louisa's hand on the table now, flexing and releasing. A gesture of thought, of anxiety, she wasn't sure yet. "When a woman is missing, you need all the eyes you can get."

"And Taverner didn't let you borrow any official ones."

"She didn't. What did you mean? Different?"

"She seemed lively, sure of a future in contemporary dancing. Involved in her artistic projects. This place is neither lively nor prone to the future."

Emma nodded silently.

"I'm not sure I would choose to stay here."

"Me neither. Hopefully, we'll get answers soon enough."

Louisa took a bite of the potatoes and swallowed. "I'm guessing you don't really believe that."

"What I know for certain is I would like very much to be wrong about the feeling I've had since we arrived in this village."

They remained silent for a while. Emma had taken off her coat, and the sleeves of her shirt were rolled once at the cuff. Louisa noticed it without intending to: the small raised seam of scar tissue on the forearm, pale against the pale skin, running all the way up, where the wound had healed badly and in a hurry.

She looked away, but not quickly enough.

"Do you still have yours?" Emma said. She kept her voice even. "The one from the shards."

Louisa was quiet for a moment. "Of course I have."

"I wondered. You never…" Emma stopped. She picked up her fork and put it down again. "It's fine."

"What were you going to say?"

"Nothing important."

Louisa looked at her then, more directly than any previous time that day. Her expression was the one Emma still found difficult to read: sadness open on the surface, sealed at every relevant point.

"I know you're angry," Louisa said.

Its directness caught Emma off guard, which was probably the intention. She adjusted. "I'm not angry."

"You went to Wales," Louisa said. "And you didn't have to. And you got…" She glanced once, briefly, at Emma's left shoulder, at the place where the collar of her shirt fell open slightly, where the other edge of the scar was just visible. The glance lasted less than a second. Louisa looked away.

"Perks of the job," Emma gave her a faint smile. "I mean, I wasn't fully employed back then. And, in any case…" Emma took a swig of her beer. "I didn't get hurt because of you. It was because of a sequence of events that neither of us had full control over."

"Look at you, all professional and rational."

Emma put her glass down. "I went to Wales because I was worried you were going to try and do something irretrievable and…"

"Fail."

"Well, not exactly. More like…" She stopped. The three men at the bar were not listening. The barman was wiping a glass. "I went because I thought it mattered. What happened to you."

Louisa said nothing.

"Wales was a shit show. I thought we were going to die. But we came back."

"We did."

"And you were…you were all right, broadly. And I thought…" She shook her head.

"I did my best."

"I know, Louisa. People process things differently."

The silence between them had gained this specific texture: they were both sitting next to a box they had agreed, without discussing it, not to open.

Louisa looked at her plate. "There are far too many things that I don't know what to do with. What I do know is that all of a sudden I was losing the last bit of Min there is…" She paused and exhaled roughly. "You were in a hospital bed, and it was because you'd followed me there."

"I made that choice."

Something moved in Louisa's face and then was gone.

Emma looked at the window. The darkness outside was still total. "I don't hold it against you, if that's what worries you."

Louisa remained silent, and Emma didn't push.

One of the men at the bar laughed at something, low and private. The fruit machine resumed its optimism cycle.

They finished their drinks.

The ground was cold.

That was the first thing, and in some ways the only thing, cold that rises from saturated earth, that enters through the soles of the feet and moves upward through the bones, making thought difficult. It had a way of reducing a person incrementally to the simple fact of what the body registers.

She registered the wrists first, a memory of pressure, a ghost of constraint that lived in the skin long after the cause was gone. Then the hollow place behind the sternum that had stopped being hungry two days ago and become something structural instead, a new fact about the shape of her from the inside. Her lips were cracked at the corners. Swallowing was a small, careful effort. These were not dramatic things. They were simply the new conditions of existing in this body.

The soil was dark. The path had been marked with something red and powdery that blossomed outward from each footfall. The feet were bare; they moved slowly because the ground was uneven and the darkness was too intense, and what she heard from either side of the path was not the sounds she had expected.

They had told her it would be like this. That was the first thought that had any real shape. They had told her. The word told was doing a great deal of work. She turned it over while her feet moved, while the red powder stained the mud. Strikes of crimson over dark brown, and then the blackness around, and the feeling of walking while floating, or floating while walking.

She tried to remember the voice that had told her. The particular voice, the one she had trusted, the one that had explained carefully, patiently, what it meant, and why she had been chosen for it. She had believed that voice. But the voice itself had become difficult to locate, as if it belonged to a room she could no longer find the door to. As if it had never quite been a voice at all, only the idea of one, only the feeling of being told something by someone who knew.

The men had known. That much was certain. They had known the path, and the distance, and that her feet should be bare. Someone had made this walk before, had stood where she was standing, and had heard what she was hearing. Someone had come back from it knowing exactly what to tell the next person, and the one after that.

She did not want to question whether the ones before her had really come back.

The sounds around her were wet. A low, continuous movement, close to the ground. A sound like a mouth opening and closing underwater, or like something turning over in sleep.

She kept walking.

The darkness thickened to a point she felt was solid around her. She tried to focus on the path, on the red powder, on the precise placement of her feet. They looked so pale against the soil, white blurs, icy.

Then a faint glow.

It was some distance ahead, which was all that could be said about it with any certainty. Distance, in this place, did not behave in a way she could understand. It was all so very confusing.

It was red-warm, not firelight, not lamplight, and it illuminated nothing around it, only itself, only the shape of itself. She looked at it and then away because looking at it directly produced a sensation behind her eyes that she suspected, if allowed to continue, would become something permanent and bad.

The communion, they had said, is a moment to be expected.

She had expected something else. Something with the quality of an event: a beginning, a middle, a legible end. What was in front of her — what was in the glow, and what was at the edge of the glow, and what she could hear beginning, softly, to move toward her through the wet, muddy dark — did not.

She wanted to go back.

The thought arrived fully formed and urgent, and with it the understanding that going back required knowing where back was, and that the path behind her, when she turned to look at it, was no longer there. There was no red powder, no scratches of crimson to follow. The soil was the same dark in every direction, blending in with everything else above and below.

The sound was closer.

She stood very still. This was not her decision. Her feet had made it for her, locking against the ground, the cold moving upward through the ankles and shins, settling somewhere below the knees. Her hands were at her sides, and she noticed them at a remove, as if they belonged to someone she was watching from a distance, and in them — she did not know how it had happened — she was holding the hem of her t-shirt, very tightly, the fabric bunched in her fists.

Yellow. The fabric was yellow with blue dots.

The glow moved. She could not find the word for the movement, maybe towards her but not quite; shifting, producing a sound that was below hearing and also somehow above it, occupying a frequency that reached the teeth. In the back of the eye sockets. In that locked place below the knee.

Later, although there would not be a later in any ordinary sense, more a last thing, a final moment of organized thought before thought stopped being the mode of experience, she would understand that what she had been told was true. That the communion was a moment to be expected.

She had simply not been told what was expected of her.