“What in the third plane is that supposed to mean?” Joan asks, offering all the spices of pure bafflement with a little irritation mixed in. I bite my lip, nerves screaming that this is a bad idea. But it’s too late now, and she needs to know that Annie is her daughter. For both her sake and Annie’s. I’ve joined her at the table now, so I hide my hands underneath it as clench my fists nervously. I close my eyes for a moment before I respond.

  “I . . . I didn’t realize it, at first. I didn’t know what I was doing, Joan. I was so afraid. So alone. So achingly desperate. My body was being taken away. Forced into someone else’s design. I didn’t understand my own abilities yet. I didn’t know how to control them. How to . . . aim them. I just wanted help. I wanted to be saved. To not be alone anymore. I wanted a way to return to the life I lost, and I just . . . let my power escape me. It had no target. No specific intent. Just raw emotion. Just loneliness and fear permeating me like water and cloth. I didn’t know what I was doing,” I begin. Joan leans forward, clasping one trembling hand in the other and fixing glassy eyes on me.

  “And what was it you were doing?” she asks. My lip quivers a little, protesting the words I form with it.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing for a long time, afterward,” I continue, part of me stalling and another part wanting her to fully understand everything I am trying to tell her. “Not until this last year. When I was a captive of the Kingdom of Endings. Once it started happening more and more frequently and I earned enough power, and enough understanding of it, to realize what I was doing. Not just what I was doing at the moment, but what I had always been doing. I could see it all, from the very first time.” I pause for a moment, unsure how to continue. But pleading eyes from an exhausted woman push me forward. “The first time Annie died, it was a fall that killed her. She had other wounds, but it was the fall that did it. The second time Annie, Lillith, died, it was sickness. You know this, I know. Things get sort of fuzzy after that. But the truth is, Joan, she never came back after that. Not really.”

  “What?” Joan asks, leaning forward. “What do you mean, you mean Lillith never came back, but Annie did?” I shake my head.

  “No. Like I said, I am certain they are the same person,” I assure her, “It’s just that . . . she’s not really alive, like you or I are. Like anyone else is. She hasn’t been since she died in that bed, sick and surrounded by family. That was when my magic first touched her. When it first started pushing the blood through her veins and woke her up. In my aimless desperation, I gave her life again. But I didn’t bring her back to life. Not entirely. She can age. She can breathe, and eat, and, well, live. So long as I am still connected to her. But she has run out of years. Her body . . . wants to die. It does. Every moment she has had since she was seven years old has been tied to my divine magic. My control. I have kept her here, on a leash, and the moment I let it go, she will return to that death. If I die, she will die. If I give up, she will die. If I slip, or use even a little less of the power I am constantly expending to keep her body on puppet strings . . .” I trail off, leaving the final three words unsaid.

  Joan stares at me. Her eyes are steel on a winter day. She is clearly having trouble processing what I’ve said, but one question swims through her eyes as they dart back and forth across my face. “That’s . . .” she begins, wanting to say a thousand things about the implications of what she just learned, tapping one finger against the table as she thinks. Finally she settles on that one important question. “How? How do you know Annie, this woman with a full, violent past, is the same girl as my sweet little Lillith? What does any of this have to do with that, Sarafyna? I want to know how you can be certain my daughter wasn’t replaced!”

  I nod, then look down at the warped wood of the table, counting the different rings of water that have been left in the same spot. “She died a second time, when she was seven,” I answer, “When she drew her magic circle. It was a . . . well she didn’t survive it. No more than anyone Godfrey gave it to did. This one actually helped, a little. She started moving her own blood with mana. Helping me along a bit. But this last year . . . Joan, that cancer killed her. Or rather, it made it harder to keep her alive. Her body suffered too much damage, over, and over, and over. She died nearly every night. Sometimes more. And each time I had to use more power to bring her back. Each time I had to grow stronger to keep Annie here. To keep her in a body that acted human. But each time I brought her back, every single time, her path became more clear.

  “The thread of her life. From death to death. Her soul, if such a thing exists. Whatever it is, it’s . . . the impression of her. Who she is. I can follow it back through her lifetime. Back to when I brought her back the first time. And further. Back to when she fell from that tower, bleeding all the way down. I can see her face, her old one. And Joan, it’s one thread. It’s not tied to an old one. There wasn’t a second that broke off at any point. This thread runs through her death as Lillith, years back to her birth, and into her life as Annie. One thread. One person. I brought her back, and I let her mind travel along that thread too. That’s how she remembers another life. But it is, nevertheless, one thread. She is who she has always been. You didn’t lose your daughter. You just . . . missed part of her life. It’s like she left for twenty years and came back to you. You missed her childhood. You missed when she became a woman. But she returned as herself.”

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  “Isn’t that just the same thing?” Joan asks bitterly, almost with a strange desperation, clenching her fists. Like she wants it to be the same thing, even if she knows it isn’t.

  “It wasn’t to my dad,” I answer immediately. This pours ice water over the room and ages Joan by another few years. I’m not even sure why I said it. But as the air grows heavy, I decide to push through. “My father lost a girl, barely a woman. He lost me for years. Missed so much of my life. My pain. And the woman he found was a disfigured monster in the middle of . . . well it wasn’t pretty. But he was . . . Joan, he was so happy to see me anyways. He missed my life but he was still my dad, and I was still his daughter. I understand it feels different. In a lot of ways it is different. But she is your daughter, as she always has been. You just missed a lot of her life, and that is a tragedy to be mourned. Believe me, I know. Your daughter knows.

  “Has she ever told you about her parents, in her other life? The way she was rejected? Just as her dad rejected her in this one. But you, you actually love her. The confirmation that you still love her, after she told you the truth . . . even as you doubted who she was . . .she holds it close, Joan. It is precious to her. Cherished. She’ll never show it. But she does. She saw the lie in the name you chose before sending her off, and she buried that wound deep. She has one parent who loves her still, and she desperately needs her mom to just . . . be happy to see her. She needs you to be her mom. To want to be her mom, even if you missed her growing up. And now you know. You know that she is the same Lillith you spent those first seven years with. You know that she is your daughter, and she is hurting with you. So please. For your own heart. For hers. Hurt with her as well. She brought Autumn with her because she was desperate to have someone to hurt alongside her. Even if she is too afraid to show the pain to anyone but me. She wants to share her grief, the same way you do. And to her, you are a mother.”

  Joan sniffs, choking back a cry as she examines me with red eyes. I didn’t mean to lay all of that on her. This started as my confession, about what I’d done. But I love Annie so much, and no one ever sees how much this is all eating away at her. Her mom took the name ‘Lillith’ back, at least in her heart, and it just . . . it flowed out of me. Joan loses the battle and tears start to flow.

  “I can’t,” she whispers with a trembling voice. “Now more than ever I can’t. She’s dead. She’s already dead. You said so yourself, you are keeping her alive with your power alone. I . . . I don’t know how to even process that. Everything is so strange now. So foreign. The whole world I knew cracks around me every day and I learn some new impossibility is reality. New species. New lands. New countries. I can’t fit all of this in my mind. I can’t comprehend it all. You say you brought my daughter back when you were what, fifteen? You have been keeping her alive since, before you even met her? Why? Why would your abilities do that? I don’t understand any of it, Sara.”

  “I don’t know, yet. I don’t know . . .” I reply. She chokes back a sob.

  “All I have, Sarafyna, the only thing that feels real, is my children. All I can do, as the world crumbles, is love my children. Is be there, happy to see them like your father was for you. If I can care for my children, I can accept the rest of this. I can accept dead kings and revolutions and endless hat shops. So long as I have my children. But . . .” she looks up at me with suffocating hope and red eyes. “But children don’t always come back from war, do they? Sometimes you send them off and all you get back is a story from someone else who loved them. I said goodbye to Lily. I sent her out into the dark and I can’t see it. All I can see is the black and the emptiness and the half-broken promise of getting her back.

  “I need her to be Annie, and not Lillith, Sara. I need her to be someone other than my daughter. Because Ed is out in the dark too. And he’s lost and confused and I can’t do anything but hope to be happy to see him when he comes out. Gilbert is on the front lines too. And I am never going to see Henry again. I was his mother and his last moments will only ever be a secondhand story to me. But don’t you see? Ed, and Gil, they might find their way back to me. They will eventually do enough, and stop going back into the dark. I can offer them that shattered smile when they finally emerge. I can hope for it. But Lily is a fire all her own. She burns bright and furious and violent and she won’t come back from the dark. She won’t come back until it is gone from every corner or she burns out. She will never do enough to stop and live in peace. She will never save enough people. When I say goodbye to her, when I send her out there and lose sight of her, I know that someday, she won’t come back.

  “If she’s Annie, I can live with that. I do love her, and I know she loves me. But I can lose a friend I love. I can bear the certainty that she will keep fighting until she has nothing left to fight with and no energy to say goodbye. I can accept her death as a secondhand story, if only barely. But if she is Lillith, if she is my daughter . . . It will break me. That certainty will break me, Sara. It will kill me,” she says, finally breaking down into full sobs. I bite my lip. She had no harsh words for me, for my secret. No admonishments. No hate. Just a fear she couldn’t face on her own. But . . .

  “I understand, better than anyone,” I whisper, standing and crossing the room to place one hand on her back. “I ache for every agony your Lily goes through. I know that my life with her will likely be a short one. Maybe shorter than my life in the woods. But she does burn bright, and she is so warm, and she is your daughter. She deserves to be your daughter, Joan.”

  She cries for several moments, nearly speaking but choking on the insistent sobs as she does. I am just deciding to spend the evening here and check on the victims tomorrow when she finally speaks again. “I know. I know she is my daughter. I know. I know.”