Will bush's Arc

Chapter 7 of 26

Will's leg gave out at the edge of the next clearing. He went down on one knee in the wet moss. The injury from the pale woman's slope was deeper than he'd let himself feel before. Ahead, Lily walked on. The butterfly hung above her palm, thinner now, wings like wet paper. Between him and her, a faint line bent through the reeds. He could see it only because she saw it. If he lost sight of her back, the line would close, and Kate's road would close with it. "Lily," he said. "Slow down." She did not slow. "I can't," she said. "If I stop, it stops." Ollie doubled back and got under Will's arm. He was a ghost boy and weighed nothing, but the idea of a shoulder helped Will stand. They limped forward. The gap between them and Lily grew. Will watched the butterfly pull away like a lamp carried into fog. He counted three breaths he did not need. On the fourth, he stopped. "Ollie," he said. "Go with her. Keep the petals coming. Don't let it die." Ollie's face went flat. "You'll lose the path." "I know." Will pushed the rest of the crushed roses from Ollie's shirt into his hands. "She needs someone who can keep up. I can't. If I follow, we all stop, and she never finds her body. Take her to it. Then come back for me if you can." Ollie looked at him a long second. Then he ran. He caught Lily at the tree line and held the petals under the butterfly. The wings beat once, hard. Lily did not turn around. She kept reading her line through the reeds. The two of them stepped between the dead trees and were gone. Will sat down in the moss. The path behind him, the one that led back to Kate, thinned at the edges like the butterfly's wings. He watched it fade. He had chosen to send the child on without him, and the choice was final. He would not reach Kate tonight. He might not reach her at all from where he was. But Lily would get home. That was the promise he'd made first, before he knew what it would cost. Something moved in the reeds behind him. Not the pale woman. Smaller. A person, breathing hard, boots in the muck. A girl in a green hood pushed through the alders with a knife in one hand and a scrap of paper in the other. She stopped when she saw him. She should not have been able to see him. Her eyes tracked his face and stayed. "You're the one from the notices," she said. Her voice was flat and low. "Kate's brother. She's been looking. Can you walk?" Will tried his leg. He could not. "No," he said. Marrow Fen crouched, put the knife away, and got her shoulder under his arm.