table.
And I got the heck out of there.
“I’m disappointed, Miss Hawkins,” she said as I walked away. I didn’t turn around and I couldn’t quite hear what she said next but I knew what it was.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER is dead.
His world is an impossibly quiet darkness, empty and formless.
Somewhere in the formless darkness there is a voice.
Hello, Mister Rawlins.
The voice sounds very, very far away.
Hello hello hello.
Zachary cannot feel anything, not even the ground beneath his feet. Not even his feet, for that matter. There is only nothingness and a very faraway voice and nothing else.
Then it changes.
It is like waking and not remembering falling asleep but it is not gradual, his consciousness returns suddenly and shockingly, his existence suspended in surprise.
He is back in his body. Or a version of his body. He is lying on the ground wearing pajama pants and no shoes and a coat he still thinks of as Simon’s though both the coat and this death-worn version of it know they belong to the one who wears them.
On his chest is the mark of a freshly burned key but no wound, no blood.
He also has no heartbeat.
But the thing that convinces him beyond any doubt that he is truly dead is the fact that his glasses are gone and still, everything before his eyes is clear.
Zachary’s ideas about any possible afterlife have always varied, from nothingness to reincarnation to self-created infinite universes, but always came back to the futility of guessing and assuming he would find out when he died.
Now he is dead and lying on a shore much like the one he died upon, only different, but he is too angry to notice the differences just yet.
He tries to recall what happened and the memory is painfully clear.
He had Dorian back. Right there in front of him. Just for a moment he’d found what he’d been seeking but then the story didn’t go the way it was supposed to.
He thought he’d finally (finally) get that kiss and more than that and he replays those last moments over in his head wishing he’d known they were the last moments and even if he had known he doesn’t know now what he would have done, if he would have had time to react.
It was definitely Dorian, there on the shore of the Starless Sea. Maybe Dorian didn’t think it was him. He hadn’t thought Dorian was himself at first either, back in the snow. He’d raised the same sword then but this time Dorian did, in fact, know how to use it.
It feels as though all of the pieces were put in place to lead to this moment and he put half of them there himself.
He is mad at himself for so many things he did and didn’t do and how much time he wasted waiting for his life to begin and now it is over and then he has another thought and is suddenly, distinctly livid at someone else.
Zachary pulls himself to his feet and screams at Fate but Fate does not answer.
Fate does not live here.
Nothing lives here.
You’re here because I need you to do something that I can’t.
That’s what Mirabel had said, post–elevator crash and pre–everything else.
She needed him to die.
She knew.
She knew the entire time that this would happen.
Zachary tries to scream again but he doesn’t have the heart.
He sighs instead.
This isn’t fair. He’d barely gotten started. He was supposed to be in the middle of his story, not at the end or in whatever post-death epilogue this is.
He hasn’t even done anything. Accomplished anything. Has he? He doesn’t know. He located a man lost in time or maybe he became one. He made his way to the Starless Sea. He found what he sought and he lost it again, all in a single breath.
He tries to decide if he’s changed since this all started because isn’t that the point and he feels different than he did but he can’t weigh feeling different versus having changed from inside himself with no heartbeat, standing on a shore with no shoes.
A shore.
Zachary looks out at the sea. This is not the shore he stood on before, moments (was it moments?) before. It resembles it, including the cliffs behind him, but there are differences.
On this shore there is a boat.
A small rowboat, its oars neatly placed against its seat, half in the sea and half on the shore.
Waiting for him.
The sea