Teeth. He cuts the rope, reverses the lever and the gates grind shut. For a heartbeat the world is silent around us, the sound of our own breathing muffled by the mist. His duty complete, my mother's body given fully over to the Unconsecrated, the Guardian places a hand on my shoulder. Whether it is to comfort me or to hold me back does not matter. I imagine that I can feel his pulse through his fingertips. We are both so alive in that moment surrounded by so much death. I can't decide if I want to watch my mother Return. If I can bear to see it. But I can't help but wonder what that moment is like. Is there a spark or an instant where she will remember me? Where she will remember her old life from before? My mother used to tell me stories about how, long before the Return, the living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty. Now that we know what happens after death, a new question has risen up to take the place of the old: why? Suddenly, regret screams through me. I wonder if I should have dressed her in something different. If I should have put her in warmer clothes or better shoes. If I should have pinned a note to the inside of her dress telling her that I love her. I wonder how long it will take for her to find my father and if she will recognize him. An image of the two of them holding hands at the fence line flits across my mind. She is on her feet before I even know what's happening. She stares at me and for a moment all I can think is Mother and then she opens her mouth and my world shatters with her screams that fall off into moans as her vocal cords give way. I cannot bear it and I start to move toward her, struggling under the weight of the Guardian's hand, but then I hear my name being called out in warning. It is Jed. I didn't hear him approach but I can smell him now, the scent of woods and work and the smoke from our house. I don't bother to look at him, I just know that he is behind me and I sag back against him. He's home from his rotation on the fence line just in time to see our mother die and Return. Later, the Guardian in him will question me and chastise me. Because I allowed my mother to make this choice and because I failed both him and her by dallying near the stream. Because I was too selfish to understand that my mother would go to the Forest without me and because I was not there to stop her. But for now he is my brother and both our parents are gone and we are all we have left.
T he first thing the Sisters do when Jed walks me back to the Cathedral is strip off my clothes and half-drown me in the sacred well. I wait to see if the water will burn off my flesh now that I no longer believe in God but nothing happens as the Sisters chant prayers and scrub my body. Through the water and past the arms of the Sisters, I see Jed being escorted from the Cathedral. They pull me out of the holy water, my eyes stinging and my long hair like a spiderweb over my face so that I sputter and cough. “You will stay here within the Cathedral walls,” the Sisters tell me. “We cannot have you going back to the fence line.” I understand this and I know that no amount of protesting will change their minds. But still, it irritates me that they think I would be so stupid as to go after my mother. She no longer exists. A blanket finds its way to my shoulders and I am led along a hallway I never noticed before, down a set of stairs and into a room with stone walls, a stone floor, a cot and a window that looks out past the graveyard toward the Forest. I want to laugh; if they are so afraid of my doing something drastic after facing my mother's death why do they place me in a room that overlooks the site where she turned? I can clearly see the series of gates through which she was dragged and I can even see a few Unconsecrated pressing against the fence line. Their moans slip lightly through the open window. “Why