Page 86 of Installment Immortality

“Come on, honey, get moving,” I said, still holding out my hand. Elsie looked at it dully. I shook it, trying to transmit the urgency of our situation to her without explicitly vocalizing it and running the risk of her getting stubborn the way she used to as a child, digging her heels in and refusing to be budged.

She wasn’t a child anymore, and after a few seconds of looking at my hand, she reached out with her uninjured arm and took it, letting me lever her up off the pavement. She staggered a bit, putting her other hand to her temple.

“Woozy,” she proclaimed.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“I didn’t lose it,” she said. “I know exactly where it is.” Then she cackled, and there was a hysterical note I didn’t like to the sound,an element of brittleness that hadn’t been there before her mother died. But this wasn’t the time to dwell on it. I tugged her out of the middle of the road, moving toward the grain, and plunged us both into the gold without hesitation. I couldn’t see any sign of the anima mundi’s farm or homestead, but they had to know that we were here by this point. I wasn’t sure the anima mundi’s landcouldbe accessed without them knowing someone had crossed their boundaries.

I led Elsie onward, deeper and deeper into the gold, until swaths of short, stubbly stalks began to appear around us, patches where the harvest had already happened. She staggered, yawning, and said, “I’m tired. I think I just want to sit down for a little while. Can’t I sit down for a little while, Mary?”

We weren’t in the lands of the dead. Elsie was alive, and that meant she could die here. I tugged a little harder, trying to keep her moving with me. She grumbled and groaned, and I felt bad for not allowing her to rest, until finally she just let go of my hand and sat down on the grain with a hard thump.

“No,” she said, petulant as the child she’d been when officially in my care. “I don’t go any farther than this.”

“Okay, baby.” I tilted my head back, addressing the air. “You’re the living world. She’s alive. Can’t you help her? Just this once, can’t you find it in your heart to help? She wouldn’t even be in this situation if not for what you asked from me.” I paused. The wind whistled around us, cool and scented green. “Please,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry, Mary; I was busy elsewhere,” said a familiar voice behind me. I turned, and was facing not the anima mundi but Jane.MyJane, mom jeans and loose blouse and all, the way she’d looked in the days before she died. Younger than she thought she was, older than she felt, healthy and vital and breathing and so veryalivethat it made my heart ache to see her so.

“No,” I said.

She blinked. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean Jane chose to move on. She didn’t have any unfinished business, and she didn’t linger. That means you’re the anima mundi wearing her like a Halloween mask for reasons I don’t understand, andno.I don’t want you doing that to Elsie. She deserves better.”

The anima mundi—because it was them, it had to be—blinked, and then narrowed their eyes. “So you brought a living girl here and now you think you can give me orders? I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood our relationship, Mary Dunlavy. I think it may be time to disabuse you of a few direly incorrect notions.”

They snapped Jane’s fingers, and we were no longer in the wheat. Instead, we were standing in the middle of a blueberry field, chest-high bushes dripping with fat berries stretching out in all directions. It was less obvious here where the harvest had already happened. Pails of berries sat alongside bushes that looked completely untouched, so full that fruit was tumbling out to land in the grass. Elsie was still sitting on the ground beside me, eyes closed, seemingly unaware of what was happening right in front of her.

Good. Sometimes ignorance really is the best option. “What are you disabusing me of?” I asked.

“You have no say in the faces we wear,” said the anima mundi. “For you, we appear as a combination of the women of the world, because it brings you the most comfort. We are not a woman ourself, but we are a mother to this noosphere, as well as a product of its growth. When the living face us, we show them the face that will comfort them the most. When your Antimony came before us, we showed her your face, and she called us ‘Mary’ until she saw how wrong she was. A dead woman’s face to comfort a living one. Why should this child be any different?”

“Because Jane was hermom,” I said. “Look. Mothers and daughters are complicated. Even when they don’t like each other very much—and they don’t always like each other very much—losing your mother is a life-changing event. You don’t have to grieve for her to know that you’re never going to be the person you were before you lost her. Elsiejustlost Jane. She’s in the process of losing her brother—her second brother, who was built on the bones of her first one. She’s grieved enough. Please. I know I don’t get to order you around, but don’t do this to her. She deserves better.”

The anima mundi sighed. “Really? Better than the chance to say farewell?” They looked past me to where Elsie sat. “We think she deserves that opportunity.”

I paused. Elsie hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Jane. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Artie, either—he’d gone to save Sarah, moving too fast to think about what he was doing, and then only his empty body had made it home. Arthur was dissolving a little more every day, and there was the chance that she wouldn’t be saying goodbye to him, either. The last few years of Elsie’s life had been all but defined by not getting that final farewell.

“You said you want to disabuse me of several things,” I said. “What else?”

“You don’t command us,” said the anima mundi. “We aren’t your friend, or your servant.”

“But you want to be my employer,” I said. “That means sometimes I get to need things from you. Even the crossroads understood that I needed things.” They’d been sullen and unkind about it, but they’d been able to understand. “And sometimes those things will be a part of doing whatever it is you’ve asked me for, like this time.”

“Oh? The Lilu’s well-being is part of answering my request?” They moved toward Elsie, stooping down and helping her off the ground. She unfolded easily, rising with no sign of weariness or weakness, and only swayed a little as the anima mundi stepped back. “She looks less like a fulfillment and more like a favor.”

“She is,” I said. “She needs medical help or she’s not going to make it, but if she opens the door and goes outside, she’ll break the wards keeping the ghosts from the spirit jars contained. That house is a phantom nuke in the middle of a populated area. Bringing her here lets us keep the wards intact a little longer, while we figure out how to disarm it.”

“I cannot heal the child,” said the anima mundi, sounding genuinely sorry. “She’s too small. I would heal her into nonexistence, make her into something else, and lose whatever of her it is that you treasure so.”

“I didn’t expect you to heal her. Just to help me get her out of the house. Please.”

The anima mundi didn’t answer. Instead, they leaned in and kissed Elsie, ever so gently, on the forehead. She took a shaky breath and opened her eyes.

Then she blinked, rapidly, like she was trying to clear her eyes. “Mom?” she asked, with fragile, burning hopefulness.

“Yes, and no,” said the anima mundi in Jane’s voice. “I was, but I died and I moved on, and now I’m a part of the great beating heart of the world. I belong to the anima mundi now, the spirit of Earth.”

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