As the sun slowly climbed its lonely path in the sky, so far from the cold earth, the sound of the wind rustling through the trees’ branches continued unabated, reminding Hilda of nothing so much as the chime of bells in the city. With a strange smile twisting her lips, she felt that they were the bells of Kivv. But what bells? In all the years Hilda had been visiting Kivv, she’d heard a lonely bell or two, played by a wandering musician or a herald hawking news. But the bells in her mind were distant and grand and they rang over the whole city, calling the people in to the warmth of the hearth. Calling them to gather in song together.

Next to Hilda, Kamila shuddered, and laughed, and said, “Hilda. Do you remember…” They kept walking, and it was a half minute before Kamila continued. As Hilda waited, the bells faded, the memory of the old city Hilda had never seen going with them. “Do you remember the bells in Kiev?” Something about the way she said the name of the city made Hilda’s ears perk up, made her blink. She looked up over Kamila’s shoulder. The blue sky was clear and bright with the light of a warm sun, desperate to reach out and touch another soul.

“We…” Hilda found herself struggling to form words, as though they were reaching up from beneath her conscious mind, but a part of her resisted, held them down beneath the surface, wishing to drown the memories that were not her own.

The words came up anyway. “We watched the Nephilim battle over the remains of a thousand dead, and all the things they left behind.”

Hilda’s hand tightened on her sister’s opposite shoulder. She felt a great wave of fear and disgust and rage wash over her, and the emotions weren’t hers. She turned her gaze toward Karla Kamila, she corrected herself, and shook her head in confusion. Kamila responded: “They were ringing the bells, over and over – they kept saying we had to come back to the central keep if we wanted to survive.”

“Once the Nephilim were done with their fighting, the Shells would finally have someplace to go.” Hilda nodded. “But they didn’t have to come to the city. They could have left, and gone elsewhere, and been at peace.” She swung her feet from the precipice, two hundred feet over the ground. Her hands grasped ancient stone, the only thing that kept her from falling to her death.

“Peace?” Kamila snorted. “Ofer, you ought to know better than anybody there’s no peace in a world whose worst forces have been turned loose by monsters in human skin.” She turned her gaze to the deep-orange sky, darkened by a black-red moon.

“You’re trying too hard to be poetic, Kam –“

Hilda coughed, and the sky was blue and bright again. The sun continued its slow climb. Hilda and Kamila stood facing one another, with their hands clasped together, staring into each other’s eyes. A thin mist hung around the both of them, cut through by the sun’s rays. The mist dissipated and Kamila pulled away, backpedaling to get away from her sister.

“What was that?” Kamila shouted, half-panicked. “What did you do, Hilda? Did you cast a spell or something? What?”

Hilda let out a shout of alarm and reached toward Kamila’s arm, but she was too far away and already tumbling to the ground. Kamila landed on her back with a grunt. She lay there until Hilda came to her side and helped her up to her feet. “What just happened?” Kamila asked, rubbing the back of her head. “We were –“

When Kamila looked down to see Hilda standing next to her, her younger sister’s face was more impassive and cold than Kamila had ever seen it before. But there was a curiosity in it as well. “Kamila,” Hilda said. “Did you ever feel like there was somebody else in your head? Like there were thoughts, other people’s thoughts, other people’s memories, mixed among your own?”

Kamila’s silence confirmed Hilda’s suspicion. The younger Zelenko spoke rapidly and without her usual halting hesitation. “When we get to Kivv, somebody may be able to help us figure out what exactly it means. But they taught us a little about inherited memories, as part of the Reaper training.” She wrapped a hand around Kamila’s forearm, and her sister did not shrink away from the touch. “And somehow, I connected to your inherited memories. That’s the power of bonds, I think. It’s all a bit too complicated, but I think I’m beginning to understand the theory of it.”

“But those weren’t just my memories,” Kamila said. “I mean… not just…” She rubbed at her upper arm, the one Hilda still held, fingers tightening as her eyes narrowed and pinching the skin, folding and wrinkling it. “Not just her memories. I feel like you were there too, but it wasn’t you. It was…” Open-mouthed, she shook her head.

“Ofer,” Hilda said. “That’s the name you said. Who you thought I was, for a moment.”

“I feel like I… or, she… knew somebody with that name.”

“This was right at the end, wasn’t it?”

“The end of the old humanity?”

“We were watching a battle of the apocalypse – old forces of chaos breaking from their suppression now that human reason could no longer hold them in check.” Kamila struggled to recall the memory. It came only in vague images, no – only the thoughts of images – but Hilda was right. The monsters that strode the earth and clashed with one another, meaninglessly, without regard for a cause or a faction or family… they were nothing but heralds of an end that was already known and determined. Of that, she was certain – one of the only things of which she could be certain.

Hilda abruptly pulled away from Kamila and began to walk, pulling ahead of her older sister. She was limping heavily but moved with determination and speed. While Kamila watched, dumbfounded, Hilda veered off the road and came to the nearest short tree. She wreathed her hands in reddish-brown mist and pointed a flat hand into the boughs of the tree. Kamila followed the gesture, and saw nothing, until suddenly, a branch of the tree split and fell from its place. It flickered in the air before landing in Hilda’s hands. The stump that had connected it to the tree was perfectly smooth, the tree’s rings intact, as though it were a trunk encased in resin. Hilda returned to the road, using the smooth end of the branch to steady herself as she walked.

“Come on!” she called out to Kamila. “We should get going, and try not to repeat whatever just happened. When we get to Kivv we’ll find an expert who can help us. Until then, better not get lost in visions of the past, right?”

Kamila nodded, and turned to look over her shoulder. Gazing back at the distant trees, she sighed. “Soon enough,” she whispered. “We’ll be okay. And then we’ll save everyone.” She began to turn back toward Hilda.

But.

Someone was walking toward them, moving out of the trees. Kamila called out to Hilda, “somebody’s coming!” and flexed her fingers. She turned her wrists, preparing to activate her gauntlets or reach for her crossbow as the figure approach. But as the one approaching them came out into the full light of the day, Kamila saw that…

“That’s not a soldier!”

The rhythmic phthum of Hilda’s heavy walking stick in the dirt came up nearly to Kamila’s back. “No,” Hilda said. “That isn’t a soldier. It’s…”

Kamila couldn’t contain her exclamation then. “Aleks?”

Departing from among the trees, Aleks did not see the leaves on their branches, nor the overripe fruit still hanging from a few of them. They were presences more than objects, like spots of light in the thick fog that lay over everything. In the far distance, two figures moved together, away from Aleks, but they were the brightest lights in this whole shadow world Aleks inhabited. Finally, approaching them now, he felt the barrier between him and them start to evaporate, the fear and paranoia that kept him away fading. They weren’t enemies anymore – perhaps they never had been. That they survived the attack on Etyslund meant only that they were clever, quick, and lucky enough to escape.

Had it not been for the mantle of the Sower’s Gift over him, keeping him calmer than the dead, Aleks would have shouted out in joy and run to his sisters. Instead, he approached at a brisk but unhurried pace, not wanting to startle them. The Gift was wrapped tight around him – he had not let it go in many days – and his throat had long since grown dry and his hands chalky with dead skin. But he didn’t dare to let the cloak go, even if it reduced the world around him to shadows and lights and fog. The path beneath him was not trodden grass and dirt, but a thin yellow line curving around spots of emptiness that could have been rocks or knolls.

Aleks’ observations of his sisters as they fled from Etyslund toward Kivv told him that they feared reprisal – that they expected to be followed. As Aleks approached, he held up a hand and waved in greeting – a stiff gesture, his eyes glazed over by the fog and not knowing exactly where he should be aiming with his hand. He felt a faint vibration travel far through the air between him and the lights, the ghost of a sound. A voice, perhaps, he thought, as this was a novel vibration, rhythmic, like the staccato outbursts of Kamila’s speech. Even without hearing her, there was a pattern to it that Aleks recognized. The light – the larger one, the brighter one, which flickered and danced fearfully – seemed to turn in its place.

Over minutes, or perhaps only seconds, the lights grew closer to Aleks. He lowered his arm and held his own shoulders, and let the cloak of the Sower’s Gift continue to wrap tight around him. The small, fierce, stubborn light floated its way toward him first, quick. Its movement was lopsided, not graceful like that of the larger light, but it continued to speed up as it approached Aleks. He bent down briefly, reaching out his hands toward the ground he could neither see nor feel. His hands stopped at the earth, and faintly he thought he could feel the light sting of grass across his fingertips. It was still wet with dew. The cloak lightened, and looking up, Aleks saw the outlines of the world around. The distant village, with a plume of smoke from its central fire; the riverbend behind; the trees still sparsely spread around him, hung with cherries and apples and pears.

Before him, the outline of a girl limped rapidly toward him. The brim of that silly cap she refused to leave home without was pulled down over her eyes, but Aleks didn’t need to see her face clearly to feel the rush of relief and joy and pain and fear and sorrow and –

He lost his grip on the Gift, the cloak slipping away. Everything became color, and the sun was bright above him. He nearly choked under its punishing rays, unprepared for the radiance of a real day.

All the pain Aleks had held back for these past eleven days came like a river, once dammed, now set free to run as it should please. The inevitability of it, like gravity, took Aleks off guard, and his knees buckled under him. He tumbled toward the ground, but Hilda caught him, wrapped her arms around him, and shouting his name, put her head on his shoulder. He leaned in, sobbing uncontrollably, so thoroughly torn from his own senses he could hardly hear himself or Hilda. He could not hold himself up, and she was too unsteady to support another’s weight. They fell sideways to the ground, as Kamila rushed up behind them. Aleks looked up, where Kamila stood, blinking tears out of her own eyes. Her jaw was set and steady as she looked down at her brother and sister, but she did not join in their embrace. She reached down and held out an arm to them, which Aleks, numbly, only just aware of his own movements, took.