Page 64 of Aftermarket Afterlife

Casting a curious look in my direction, Annie started for the stairs. I followed her, choosing to do things the slow manual way, rather than popping around and risking winding up in the wrong part of the house. We stayed quiet as we walked down, the distant sound of drumming fading away behind us. The mice knew exactly how far the sound of their various rituals carried through the house, and were careful to keep their mourning rites as close to private as possible. Anyone on the third floor would know, but the second floor and below would be none the wiser.

We walked along the hall, passing the closed doors of various private rooms, and made for the front staircase. Going down that one would put us by the door, and avoid an awkward trip through the family room, where Ted was presumably still lost in his own grief. The mice might send an envoy down to invite him to join them after a little longer, and to be honest, I hoped they would; it would help him a lot to not be alone right now, and there just weren’t enough options for people who could grieve with him safely.

Annie waited until we were outside on the lawn before she turned to me and asked, “What else do you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you could have asked anyone to help you get Aunt Jane on the table. I would have asked Sam, if I were you: he’s strong and he’s not as emotionally attached to her as the rest of us, so he’d have been able to do it without crying. Whereas I’m probably going to cry on you. So you must want something else. What else do you want?”

“I need to talk to you about your time in England.”

Annie frowned as we started walking across the yard, heading for the back. “What about it?”

“I was talking to your mother before I came looking for you, and we agree that this fight is too expensive for us and too cheap for the Covenant,” I said. “They have the numbers to just keep throwing field teams at us, and even if they lose a whole team for every Price or ally they manage to pick off, we’re still taking heavier losses, proportionately speaking. They can do this forever. We can’t. If we want this to end in anything other than a mass funeral, we need to make the fight more expensive for them. We need to make ourselves unattractive as a target.”

“And how are your proposing to do that?”

“Something your mother said, about how us being scattered across the continent makes it harder to take us all out with just one hit,” I said. “That made me think...obviously the Covenant is scattered, but most of their leadership isn’t going to be going out into the field. They’re going to be staying where they feel safe, and ordering other people to die for what they claim to believe in. Where do they feel safe?”

“Penton Hall,” said Annie, without hesitation. “In England.”

“How well do you know the place?”

“Better than I want to, and Grandpa probably knows it even better than I do, since he grew up there,” she said. “It’s one of those big old country homes like you see in BBC miniseries about Jane Austen. The estates that used to host massive balls and employ half the village and barely aren’t castles.”

“Okay. So we talk to your grandfather and we figure out how we’re going to bring the fight to them, in Penton Hall.”

Annie stopped walking to stare at me.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s inEngland,” she said.

“I got that the first time.”

“It’s fortified like a prison. The walls are solid stone, and at least two feet thick. Plus we’d have to take a plane to get there, and we already know they have surface-to-air munitions. We’d just get shot out of the sky.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Sarah and I don’t need a plane to get there.” I wasn’t as certain about that as I was trying to sound. Sarah could pop back and forth between New York and Portland with what seemed—to me—like relative ease but was much harder than it looked from the way she described it.

“And . . . ?”

“And if Sarah can get the location of Penton Hall out of your head, she can go there and call for me, and I can go after her,” I said. We were drawing close to the firepit, where James and Sally were still seated, still talking quietly. “That gets the two of us inside.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“I’m still working on that part, to be honest. But we need them to stop coming after us, and we need to do it in a way that leaves them too weak to immediately pivot to going after the dragons. I’m pretty sure they know about William. This is as much about getting to him as it is about getting rid of us. I don’t suppose you have any ideas about what we should do in Penton Hall?”

“You can’t carry living things through the twilight, or I’d suggest unleashing a few colonies of social huntsman spiders, but that would probably just upset them, not make them stop,” said Annie.

“True enough, and yet still fun to think about.”

James, seeing us, waved. Annie shifted our trajectory to take us closer to the firepit, calling an amiable “Howdy, kids, what’s good?”

“I’m the same age you are,” said James, with a sort of complicated relieved annoyance in his tone. Anyone who questioned whether he had accepted his role as Annie’s brother just needed to listen to him, because that was the “put-upon brother secretly very glad to see his sister but not sure how to admit it without making things weird” voice. I used to hear it from Alex a lot, and from Kevin before him. James was still turned partially toward Sally, but sometime in the time when she’d been missing, she’d gone from comforting and familiar to strange and new, while Annie was now something safe and easy. Watching him try to balance that was going to be fascinating—or would have been, if we’d had the time for it. Right now, I just wanted to tell him we needed everyone at full functionality.

But that would have been cruel. None of us were operating at full capacity, and we wouldn’t be until the worst of our shock and grief had faded into the rearview mirror. Grief keeps its own timetable, and it doesn’t care what else is going on. When Fran died, I put on a brave face for Alice’s sake, but I cried every night for well over a year. If something had attacked during that time, I would have been useless. It wasn’t fair that none of us were going to get the time to mourn for Jane that way.

Sally looked Annie mildly up and down, then said, “If you’re the same age as James, you’re the same age as me.”

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