He stops as he sees how frozen Seth is.
As he sees where Seth has brought them.
“Mr. Seth?” he says, puzzled.
Seth says nothing, just steps over a low stone wall into the overgrown field. He knows where to go. He doesn’t want to know, but he does. The grass is as tall as he is, and he pushes it away in fistfuls. Tomasz follows right behind him, trying to keep up in the grass jungle. Seth isn’t sure what Regine is doing because he’s not looking back. He’s keeping his eyes forward, looking, seeking.
He lets his feet lead him.
There are paths here, hidden behind the grass, and he takes them without hesitation, turning where he needs, orienting himself with a tree and turning again –
And then he stops.
Tomasz comes up behind him. “What is happening? Mr. Seth?”
Seth hears Regine arrive, too. “Regine?” Tomasz asks her. “What does it mean?”
But Seth says nothing. His legs feel weak beneath him, and he kneels down. He reaches forward and parts a stand of grass, breaking it, clearing it away.
To what’s underneath.
He reads what he finds.
And he both knows it’s true and knows it must be a lie.
But it isn’t a lie. It isn’t.
Because he remembers it now. He remembers it all.
“Is that –” Regine whispers. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Tomasz says. “What?”
But Seth doesn’t look back, just keeps kneeling there, reading it.
Reading the words carved into marble.
Owen Richard Wearing.
Taken from this world, aged 4.
His Voice was Musick and his Words a Song
Which now each List’ning Angel smiling hears
Seth has brought them to a cemetery.
To a tombstone.
To the place where his brother lies buried.
60
It was how silent his parents were at the table across from Officer Rashadi that upset him the most. They weren’t crying or yelling or visibly distressed in any way. His father sat glassy eyed, staring unfocused at a spot somewhere over Officer Rashadi’s shoulder. His mother, head hung low, unkempt hair hiding her face, made no sound, gave no signal she knew anyone else was there.
“This will be no solace,” Officer Rashadi said, her voice low, calm, respectful, “but we have very strong reason to believe that Owen didn’t suffer. That it happened soon after the abduction and was done very quickly.” She reached forward across the table as if to take one of their hands. Neither his mother nor his father responded. “He didn’t suffer,” she said again.
His mother’s voice, raspy, quiet, said something.
“What was that?” Officer Rashadi asked.
His mother cleared her throat and looked up slightly. “I said, you’re right. It’s no solace.”
Seth was sitting on the bottom step in the hallway. Neither Officer Rashadi nor the other officer who’d come in saying that Valentine had been found was watching out for him after they’d sent him from the room. He’d snuck back down and listened.
“We’ll take you to see him,” Officer Rashadi said. “We’re just waiting for the all clear, and then we can go.”
His parents still said nothing.
“I’m so, so sorry for your loss,” Officer Rashadi said. “But we’ve caught Valentine, and he’ll pay for what he’s done, I can promise you that.”
“You’ll put him back in jail?” his mother said. “So he can read his books and do his gardening and walk right out again whenever he feels like it? Is that your idea of him paying for what he’s done?”
“There are other ways, Mrs. Wearing,” Officer Rashadi said. “All prisoners are now automatically placed into –”
“Shut up,” his mother said. “Just please, shut up. How will anything ever matter again?” She turned to his father, still glassy eyed, as if barely there. “I was going to leave you.”
His father didn’t seem to have heard her.
“Are you listening to me?” his mother said. “I was going to leave you that day. I’d stashed money away. That’s what I went back to get that morning. I’d managed to leave it on the counter of that stupid bank.” She turned to Officer Rashadi. “I was going to leave him.”
Officer Rashadi looked back and forth between them, but his father wasn’t reacting and his mother remained in a kind of terrifyingly still anger, like a leopard waiting to pounce.
“I’m sure that’s something that can be worked out later,” Officer Rashadi said. She paused, then her voice changed slightly. “Or maybe it’s something you don’t have to work out at all.”
The other officer piped up at that and said what must have been Officer Rashadi’s first name. “Asma –”
“I’m just saying there may be a way,” she said. “A way so that none of this ever happened.”
For the first time, she had the attention of both his mother and father.
“The world was changing,” Seth says quietly, his eyes still on the tombstone. “Had changed. Become almost unlivable.”
“Well, that much is obvious,” Regine says. “Just look at this place.”
Seth nods. “For a long time, people had been living two lives. And at first, I think, it was two. You could do both. Go back and forth. Between the online world and this one. And then people started staying online and that seemed less weird than it was even a year before. Because the world was getting more and more broken.” He looks back at Regine and Tomasz. The sun is shining behind them, and they’re almost in silhouette. “At least it’s what I think happened.”
Regine hears the question. “I don’t remember anything from before,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s how we made it, I think,” Seth says. “So we’d forget there was ever anything else. Your own memories rewritten to make it all work, and then your life was there in front of you. Online. The real one, as far as you ever knew.”
Seth turns back to the tombstone. He runs his fingers across the carved letters of Owen’s name.
“He died,” Seth says simply. “The man who took him murdered him. He never came home.”
Seth can sense grief stirring in his stomach, his chest, but the weight of new and old knowledge is still too heavy to deal with, and all he feels at the moment is numb.
“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “I am so sorry.”