between wakefulness and dreaming, Grace's body brimmed with loss. The ache, which grew more in tense as she slowly entered consciousness, was not merely physical. She was now a hollow vessel filled to the brim with nothing but grief and illness. Her eyelids flickered open, and she called for Mai Lin to push open the shutters. Outside, day appeared again, casting its stark light on her sorrow.
Grace felt she deserved her unhappiness. She had left her husband behind in that horrible place, and there was no undoing that fact. She rolled over and buried her head in her pillow and longed for sleep to take her again. She wanted Mai Lin to administer to her, even in the morning. She wanted to sleep forever.
But, as she turned in her sheets again, Grace allowed herself to consider her final moments with the Reverend two days before. While it pained her to do so, she also sensed another feeling starting to creep over her. Was it possible that she and her husband had achieved an understanding before they had stepped away from one another forever? She considered this possibility and tried to take solace in it. And, if so, what was it that they had finally shared?
She pictured him again in the wretched opium den. His feeble and withered self brought forth her quiet tears. She recalled what he had said before turning to go: he wished to attend to the dead. Grace sat up in bed and realized that her husband had been signaling to her something both grave and important. And, although she had not understood it fully at the time, she had signaled back, as if they were ships acknowledging one another across a vast and dark sea.
She couldn't go back to sleep now, for the thought in her mind was too potent. With his kind and gentle beacon, he had wished for her to see something on the flat horizon ahead. He had shone forth a light across an inky ocean, lighting her way to a distant shore. She would meet him there. That was what he intended. She would meet him there again someday quite soon.
Grace rose quickly from her bed, slipped on her robe, and shuffled to the window, where she leaned against the sill. Dizziness darkened the edges of her vision until the courtyard came into focus. It was bare. It had always been bare, but now there was nothing but the blankness of cracked ground, a lone tree on which the light green leaves of spring had appeared again, and footprints in the dust. Beside those marks in the earth lay the path where her husband's body had been dragged.
She placed a hand upon her congested chest and understood that while the world outside her window was empty of people, her lungs, her whole body, were filled to overflowing with grief and illness. She sensed a strange paradox: she was most fraught with life when all around her appeared serenely barren. Her mind wanted the quiet of the courtyard to inhabit her, too, but her rattling chest and painwracked body left her agitated and full.
She returned to her bedside and lifted the small white skull from the table. Mai Lin stood at her elbow and made that tsking sound that Grace had come to understand meant she had things she would not say.
"You knew what was in the pouch all along?" Grace asked her.
Mai Lin shook her head, and her black braid slapped her hunched back. "I did not."
"But you have suspicions now about why the Reverend formed such a strong attachment to this gruesome object?"
Mai Lin shrugged, no doubt another sign that she knew more than she was letting on.
"Maddening," Grace said. "The lot of you are maddening." She climbed upon the bed again and sat. Her head spun from the minor exertion.
"Mistress must rest," Mai Lin said. "The damp air was very bad last night."
"What was very bad last night was having my husband finally return home to me— dead." Grace flopped against the pillows.
She waited for the tears to commence where they had left off the night before, but they did not. Her hand squeezed the skull, and somehow it made her not weak and sorrowful but angry and strong.
"Please have Ahcho come to me straightaway."
Mai Lin ignored the request as she fussed with the potions on her mixing table.
"Now, Mai Lin!" Grace said. She knew she sounded like a petulant child. "I would like to see him now," she repeated