Will bush's Arc

Chapter 20 of 26

Will held the thread and waited. The void gave him nothing to count by. No sun, no candle, no breath. Elspeth had said he would feel the reach or miss it, and most miss it. He could not sit still for five years and trust his own attention. He needed a clock. He pushed along the line toward Kate and found her end of it steady, but he could not see her. He tried to hold the thread and count, and lost count almost at once. The void ate numbers. He pulled back and reached sideways, feeling for anything that moved on a schedule he could borrow. He found the small ghost girl who had guided him down the slope. She stood barefoot on a floor he could not see, her white dress hanging still. She saw him. Her eyes went wide and then settled. He asked her, without words, if she knew a place that kept time. She lifted one hand and pointed past her shoulder. She led him to a broken house sagging in a field he half remembered. The porch had fallen in. One shutter hung by a nail. Inside, wild daisies had grown through the floorboards, a bright patch of white and yellow in the gray. The girl knelt by the flowers and touched a petal. The petal closed. She touched another. It opened. She looked up at him. The daisies here answered her because she had died near them, she made him understand. They would answer him too, if he tied his thread through the room. He understood the offer. The flowers in Kate's garden would turn when Kate reached. These daisies were not Kate's garden, but they were rooted in the living world, and they closed at night and opened at dawn. If he anchored a second strand of his line through the daisy patch, he would feel each open and each close. One count per day. Not many, over five years, but countable. He reached for Elara through the thin channel that still linked them and asked her to witness. She answered short and plain. She said she would watch the patch each morning from her path and mark the days on her wall. She said if the daisies stopped opening, she would tell him through the line. She did not promise more. He accepted it. The little ghost girl held his thread against the stems until it caught. A small tug came back through him, steady as a pulse. Will settled into the broken house and felt the first petal open at what must be dawn. One. He would not miss Kate's reach now. He had a count and a witness, and a place to wait that was not only dark. The thread to his sister held taut. Somewhere on the other end, she was still there, not yet reaching. He would know the day she did.