Novels by Mila

EpilogueThe light took eleven seconds to fade. Wren counted them, because counting was what she did when the world went sideways, and afterward she would say that eleven was the longest number she had ever known.When it was over, the basement was quiet. The stone floor lay whole and dark, without a seam in it. The pipe stood up out of the center, straight again, its rust bright as old copper. Where the man had knelt there was no man, only a low crate and a folded gray coat, and on the coat sat a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, set down carefully, as if someone meant to come back for them.Zara was on her knees with Ryan's head in her lap, she did not remember getting there."Is it gone?" he mumbled. His eyes were closed. His right arm lay across his chest, pale and ordinary, the black threads faded to thin silver lines like the veins of a leaf."Zara. Is it gone?""You're going to be so annoying about this," she said, and her voice broke in the middle. "You're going to tell this story

RyanThe first thing I notice is that I can't feel my hand anymore, and the second is that I can hear it. It sounds like a kettle just before it boils. A thin, high hum runs up the black threads under my skin and settles behind my ear. I keep my arm tucked against my chest like a stolen thing, and I watch the iron pipe bend.It doesn't bend like metal. It bends like a spine, slow and reluctant, with a sound like a long breath let out through clenched teeth."You're late, Edmund."The voice coming out of my own mouth, because that's what it is, that's what the thing is, a mouth borrowed from me, makes the hair on my arms stand up. It's a woman's voice, and it's older than I am. It's been sanded down by thirty-one years of nobody answering.Edmund gets off the crate. I don't think he decides to. His knees just quit holding the argument, and he slides to the floor and stays there, one hand out, palm up, like a man waiting to be handed something."Ada," he says."Don't." Her voice goes th

ZaraMy hands come off the floor with a sound like tape peeling from skin. I don't decide to move them, they simply stop being held, and I go over backward, and the stone rushes up to meet my spine, and for one stupid second all I can think is that I can feel my fingers again. Ten of them...every one, stinging."Ryan!"He's already on his knees where I left him, cradling the hand that was welded to the pipe. It's black to the elbow. The lines run up under his sleeve in fine, branching threads, and he's looking at it the way you look at a dog that's turned on you."It let go," he says hoarsely. "Why did it let go?""Because it got what it wanted," says the man on the crate.We all look at him. He hasn't stood. He hasn't smiled, either. He's staring at the thing in the torn shirt with an expression I've only seen on people at funerals, when someone else's grief turns out to be louder than theirs."That," he says slowly, "is not part of it."The thing wearing Ryan's face crosses the floo

RyanThere's a particular kind of stupid that only shows up after you've won. It's the stupid of a man who drives a pipe into a floor, watches a monster peel off him like smoke, and thinks, briefly and with total sincerity, well, that's that. I get to enjoy that feeling for maybe 4 seconds. I've decided to be proud of those 4 seconds, since they're all I'm going to get.Then the floor under Zara begins to open, and I stop being proud of anything.It doesn't crack...it would be easier if it cracked. It turns, a slow, greasy rotation, the stone sliding back on itself in wedges like the iris of an eye. Zara is in the middle of it, both palms flat, her hair hanging in her face, and she's not screaming, which is what scares me. Zara screams at parking meters, she's looking down at her own hands like they've said something she can't forgive."Ryan." Small. Flat. "I can't lift them.""Okay," I say. "Okay. That's fine. That's a problem with a solution.""You don't have a solution.""I have a

ZaraNobody warns you that the worst part of being brave is the paperwork. There's the decision, and then there's everything the decision drags in behind it: the shaking, the arithmetic, the tiny cowardly voice that wants to know if this is really the moment or if there might be a better one next Tuesday.I've been having that argument with myself for the last 40 seconds, and I'm losing it."Ryan," I say. It comes out cracked down the middle. "Don't let go of the pipe."I can't see him. I can see the shape of him, a darker piece of the dark, hunched on the stone 8 feet ahead of me, and I can see the second shape crouched at his shoulder, so close it looks like it's leaning on him. It has my outline. My hair. The tilt of my head when I'm listening hard.It's wearing me like a coat it found on a hook."Ryan!""I hear you." His voice is a scrape. "I hear both of you. That's the problem.""It's the one behind you. I'm the one who sounds scared.""She would say that," the thing beside him

RyanCrawling turns out to be a lot like everything else I've ever done for the people I love: stupid, necessary, and much more expensive than I budgeted for.My hand finds Zara's knee, and I hold on. The stone under my palm is slick with something I've decided not to identify. The wound at my throat pulses in time with my heartbeat, a wet, insistent little drum, and every time I swallow, the world tilts a few degrees to the left. I don't say that out loud. Zara's got enough to carry. She's got a whole night's worth of black up to her elbows and a voice like she's been dragged behind a truck, and if I add by the way, I think I'm bleeding out to the pile, she'll do something brave and reckless with it.So I say, "I've got you," and I try to make it sound like a fact.Her skin under my fingers is wrong...not cold, exactly. Cold I could handle. It's humming, a faint vibration like a phone buzzing against a wooden table in another room. I flinch before I can stop myself, and I feel her fe