Page 92 of Mortal Things

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she whispers, and pulls me close. I smell the clean scent of her hair. “I’m so sorry. I will see you again someday.”

As if the infant can sense the coming end, she starts crying once more.

“Be good now, be good,” my mother is saying to her. Then she’s letting go, and I stand next to her, both of us watching as the woman takes the crying baby into her arms.

I try to get my mother’s attention, as if she can see me. I try to speak to her. I thought you didn’t want me. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I love you. I love you.

But she doesn’t see me. Her eyes are still fixed on her baby as they rush me away, and as the distance grows, she suddenly takes a step forward. “Oh, hold on,” she says, pulling a soft square blanket out of her pocket. “Wait, I forgot her lovey.”

Beside her, the woman holds her back and offers her own hand. “You can give it to me,” she says, her voice cool and professional. “I’ll make sure she gets it.”

“No, it’s okay,” my mother says, “I’d like to hand it to her.”

“I’m afraid that’s not a good idea. You’ve already said your goodbye. Seeing you again will stress the baby.”

My mother’s eyes well with tears as she hands the blanket to the woman. Her eyes stay on where the baby has already disappeared around the corner. “Wait,” she says again, her voice cracking. “I wanted to give it to her. I wasn’t ready.”

I can’t bear it any longer. I turn to face her, then wrap my arms around her in a tight embrace.

Instinctively, she hugs me back, as if I’m really here, but her attention is not on me at all. She just hugs me unknowingly, her grown daughter, as her eyes stay on the hall, and she cries as I sway with her in my arms.

I’m not ready. I’m not ready.

I bury my face in her shoulder. I want to tell her that I would give everything to go back to this day with her, to see her in reality. To try another timeline where she—where I—was given another chance. I want to tell her that I’m sorry for thinking she didn’t care.

That I’m sorry she wasn’t allowed to love me.

I’m sorry that I always thought something had to be wrong with me.

Because nothing was ever wrong with me. All my life, I’ve been searching for a reason that doesn’t exist, trying to figure out why I was so unwanted, hoarding knowledge like a starved person, as if it might answer this unanswerable question in my head.

And just like that, the knot in my chest, the ache that had been there as long as I could remember, loosens. The feeling had never come from the first light of the universe in my soul, or being different, or being Raven’s Harbinger, or anything in the immortal world. It had only ever come from myself.

Nothing was ever wrong with me.

She hadn’t given me up. I was taken from her.

Everything turns into a blur of white and red. Threads of souls, billions of them, that have been ripped out of the timeline of life by Raven, his attempt to right the universe.

I reach up to wipe away my tears. Étienne. I have to find him. He must be here.

The memory around me has vanished, replaced instead with a vast, pale space woven together with thousands of threads, souls of every color fusing together into white.

It is reminiscent of when Raven had once guided me inside here to see the memory of his own mortal soul, of a war-torn field, of his mortal self with his medic’s helmet and uniform. The only difference now are the jagged red lines cutting through the space at irregular intervals.

The fabric of our lives has already been woven, and in no version of the universe can the thread of my soul return to it. So I turn around and look forward.

The space around me is gray and dim and empty. But still, I step inside it, until I find myself passing through a narrow hall, until it finally opens up into a bar. There is a piano in one corner, where Étienne must have once performed before he became a Harbinger, and a small stage surrounded by empty chairs and tables. The place is both realistic and not, the ceiling missing, the counter and the wall stretching out into infinity.

Even though I’ve never seen the bar where Étienne said he once worked, I know this is the place. And as I think it, I realize that the air is hazy, as if with smoke, a memory of his final day.

He’s here. I can feel the presence of his soul within these walls.

“Étienne,” I call out, covering my mouth as the smoke seems to thicken. “Étienne!”

At last, as I reach the back of the bar, I see a massive white tree in the center of the floor, gnarled and ancient, rising up into the endless space above me, branches stretching up into a nonexistent sky.

There is a boy chained to the trunk of the tree, his hands shackled against the wood, his body slumped, his head bowed.