The music changes and she guides him into a turn. The incandescent ghosts around them spin.
“I don’t remember all of the times I died,” Mirabel continues. “I remember some with perfect clarity and other lifetimes fade one into the next. But I remember drowning in honey and for a moment, smothered in stories, I saw everything. I saw a thousand Harbors and I saw the stars and I saw you and me here and now at the end of it all but I didn’t know how we’d get here. You asked for me, didn’t you? I can’t really be here since I’m not dead.”
“But you’re…shouldn’t you be able to be wherever you want?”
“Not really. I’m in a vessel. An immortal one this time, but still a vessel. Maybe I am whatever I was before again. Maybe I’m something new now. Maybe I’m just myself. I don’t know. As soon as there’s an unquestionable truth there’s no longer a myth.”
They dance in silence for a moment while Zachary thinks about truth and myth, and the other dancers circle them.
“Thank you for finding Simon,” Mirabel says after the pause. “You set him back on his path.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. He’d still be hiding in temples if you hadn’t brought him back into the story. Now he’s where he needs to be. It’s sort of like being found. That was all unforeseen, they did so much planning to have me conceived outside of time and no one ever stopped to think about what would happen to my parents after the fact and then everything got complicated. You can’t end a story when parts of it are still running around lost in time.”
“That’s why Allegra wanted to keep the book lost, isn’t it? And Simon and his hand.”
Zachary glimpses another couple out of the corner of his eye and for a moment it looks as though the glimmering man in the coat quite similar to his own dancing next to them is missing his left hand, but then it catches the light, transparent but there.
“Allegra saw the end,” Mirabel says. “She saw the future coming on its wings and she did everything she could think to do to prevent it, even things she didn’t want to do. She wished she could preserve the present and keep her beloved Harbor the way it was but everything got tangled and restricted. The story kept fading and the bees wandered back down to where they started. They followed the story for a very long time through Harbor after Harbor but if things don’t change the bees stop paying as much attention. The story had to end closer to the sea in order to find the bees again. I had to trust that someday someone would follow the story all the way down. That there could be one story to tie all of the others together.”
“The bees said hello, by the way,” Zachary tells her. “What happens next?”
“I don’t know what happens next,” Mirabel answers. “Truly, I don’t,” she adds, in response to the look Zachary gives her. “I spent a very long time trying to get to this point and it seemed such an impossible goal that I didn’t give much thought to what waited beyond it. This is a nice touch, back to the beginning and all. I didn’t think we’d get to finish our dance. Sometimes dances are left unfinished.”
Zachary has a thousand questions still to ask but instead he pulls Mirabel closer and rests his head against her neck. He can hear her heartbeat thrumming, slow and steady, in time with the music.
There is nothing now save for this room and this woman and this story. He can feel the way the story spreads out from this point, through space and through time and so much farther than he ever imagined but this is the beating, buzzing heart of it. Right here and right now.
He’s calm again. Relieved to have his Max back and even though he knows they both have other people they belong with there is still this room and this dance and this moment and it matters, maybe more than any of the others.
There is a humming noise all around them beyond the walls. The dancing ghosts fade one after another until only the two of them are left.
“I don’t know if you will ever understand how grateful I am, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “For everything.”
The music falters and the ballroom begins to shake. One of the walls cracks. Honey