Page 79 of Installment Immortality

Lilu are empaths. Most of the focus gets put on their preternatural attractiveness, which they encourage with their incredibly potent pheromones, but they can also read, manipulate, and amplify emotions. Elsie got a stronger dose of the empathy than Arthur did—his big trick had always been pheromones so strong that sometimes he wasn’t willing to leave the house—but they both had it. And maybe that was going to be the answer to getting me the hell out of here.

I settled in to wait, trying not to pick at the raw wounds the fog—which I now knew to be a mixture of water, salt, and iron shavings—had opened in my psyche by dragging me back and forth through the memories of my worst moments. It felt like I’d gone ten rounds with a cheese grater, and the cheese grater had scored a decisive win.

As I watched, Elsie’s eyelids began to flutter, until finally, with a groan, she opened her eyes and blinked up at the ceiling. She raised a hand, pressing it hard against her temple like she thought she needed to hold her brain inside despite its desperate attempts to escape.

Groaning louder, she pushed herself into a sitting position and looked around the attic, squinting and blinking, like she was trying to clear a film from in front of her eyes. She paused when she saw Arthur, then scrambled over to shake him with one hand.

“Artie? Art—thur?” she whispered. “Arthur, wake up. We’re not in the boardinghouse anymore.”

The urgency in her voice was unmistakable, and I was quietly proud of her for remembering to keep her voice down. If she shouted, someone would probably hear her, and she’d have to deal with the armed Covenant assholes downstairs even sooner than she was already going to. Not fun. She and Arthur had been allowed to keep their clothing, but I had little doubt that they’d been searched for weapons.

Too bad for the Cunninghams that every child of the currentgener— No. Every child of thepreviousgeneration had been trained in unarmed combat and improvised weapons as well asthe more common forms. Elsie might prefer a couple of knives and a nice garotte, but if you forced her hand, she’d be perfectly at home smashing a chair and stabbing you with a leg.

She kept shaking Arthur until he groaned and started to swat at her hand, trying to push her away. Relief washed over her face and she grabbed him by the shoulders, yanking him into a seated position so she could hug him. He opened his eyes and blinked, pure bemusement in his expression.

“Wha’?” he asked.

“I thought you weredead,” she said. “I thought I’d lost youagain.”

“You’ve never lost me before,” said Arthur, pushing her away. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not your brother?”

“But you are my brother. My pheromones don’t affect you, and yours don’t mess with me. We have the same blood type, and you still have the scar on your collarbone from where I shoved you—or the body you live in—down the stairs when I was seven. I know I used to say I didn’t want a baby brother, but I didn’t mean it. Youaremy brother. You may not be the same brother I used to have, but youaremy brother, and I don’t want to lose another one.”

Arthur frowned, then rubbed his face with one hand. “I guess that’s fair,” he said. “I didn’t really think about it like that. I just thought you were trying to wish Artie back, and I don’t know how to give him to you. Sometimes I wish I did.”

Elsie nodded then, before she pulled away from him and sat back on her heels, resting her hands on her knees. “I guess it’s hard to find yourself living a life where everyone expects you to be somebody else,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t made that easier for you.”

“I don’t think anyonecouldhave made it easier for me,” he said. “SometimesI’mmad at me for not being him. I can’t imagine what it feels like for everybody else.”

Now that they were awake, I started thinking about everymoment of their lives that had ever gotten an emotional rise out of me. I’d been present for Elsie’s birth. Not Artie’s—when you have a babysitter who can watch the existing child during labor and delivery, you take advantage of it—but Arthur’s, the moment when Sarah slammed the last broken pieces of memory into place and the patchwork boy came to life under her unpracticed hands. I thought about my terror when we’d thought that Artie was dead, and my lonely, lost regret when I’d realized he truly was, no matter what the living seemed to think.

I thought about Elsie’s first girlfriend, her first kiss, the dress she’d worn to prom and the joy she’d taken in every scrap of it all, like she was the first high school girl in history to fall in love and figure out who she wanted to be when she grew up. I thought about how much she did and didn’t look like her mother, all the ways they were similar, all the ways they were different, and how much both the similarities and the differences could hurt. She had Jane’s way of biting her pinkie when she was thinking really hard, and Jane had learned that mannerism from Laura, following the woman who’d had most of the job of raising her like a child in a fairy tale following the Pied Piper off the edge of the world.

Laura was still with us in the shape of the children she’d raised, just like I would always be with the Price family, carried in a thousand little gestures and turns of phrase, a generational tendency to mouth off to danger when running away would have been the better choice. Maybe letting people with poor senses of self-preservation breed and then hand those children off to a dead girl for care and feeding had been a bad idea, but we did it, and now we were reaping the rewards.

Arthur started crying, fat tears rolling unchecked down his cheeks. At first, he didn’t seem to notice. Then he blinked, swiped a hand across his face, and looked at his wet palm in confusion.

“Is the roof leaking?” he asked.

“What? No,” said Elsie. “What’s going on?”

“I just felt really sad all of a sudden. Like something bad was about to happen.”

Elsie gave him a flat, disbelieving look. “Arthur, we’ve been drugged and kidnapped, and I can tell even without groping myself that someone’s taken the knives out of my ankle sheaths. I’d say something bad already happened.” Then she started to giggle, eyes going wide with surprise as she did. She put a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sound.

It didn’t do any good. The giggles continued as I stared at her, thinking hard about the trip we’d taken to the state fair when she was four, when she’d gone to her first petting zoo and made friends with all the sheep. We had laughed so much that day, just laughter piling on top of laughter, endless and bright, like the world was a kinder place than I had ever known it to be.

“Elsie?” asked Arthur, sounding concerned. “Elsie, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know! I can’t stoplaughing!” She turned away from him, looking at the shelves of mist-filled jars surrounding them. “I think I’m picking up on feelings from inside one of these jars.”

Oh please, oh please, you can do it,I thought.You’re halfway there already.

“Mary said they’d been jarring ghosts to turn them into weapons,” said Arthur uneasily. “You need to be careful.”

And normally I would agree with you, but right now, let’s not do that, okay?

“Most of these jars feel like static, like emotional slurry. But one of them is making big, clear feelings, like it’s trying to get our attention,” said Elsie stubbornly. “It feels like Mary.”

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