Vivi smiled. “The Halfway. Grey’s made-up place. Oh my God, she used to tell us stories about it when we were little.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“It was this weird place somewhere between life and death. Somewhere people ended up if they couldn’t let go of something—or if someone couldn’t let go of them. Some people get stuck there after they die. The ones who can’t move on.”

“Like . . . limbo?”

“I don’t know. Grey never made it sound religious. It was more like a version of the afterlife that you’d find in a dark fairy tale: Everything was kind of stuck halfway. Like, it was always dusk and always dawn at the same time. All the trees were rotting but they never died. Food only ever left you half-full.” Vivi laughed. “I haven’t thought about this in years.”

“What does the door have to do with it?”

“That’s how you get there, I think. You fall through a broken door.”

Bring the key. Find the door.

Vivi and I waited to see if the flames would prick through the fabric, but the fire had been starved. I peeled the quilt back slowly, like removing dressing from a wound, and let it fall, still smoldering, in a heap. Smoke curled across the bed but the flames didn’t reignite.

“The body burned so quickly,” I said as I picked through the journals and drawings and jewelry that had survived. It took hours for muscle and teeth and bone to burn, but more of Grey’s possessions had survived than the dead man.

“What answers does she want us to find?” Vivi said as she continued to comb through the charred debris, more frantic by the second. “What door are we looking for?”

My gaze drifted back to the decay the man’s body had left. Who was he? Had he attacked her? Had she killed him trying to defend herself, then gone into hiding? Who was the man who came back for his corpse?

Where did she want us to follow her to?

“I need water,” I said. The air was still stained with the smell of death, and the smoke from the fire hung over us, snaring in our throats. “Want some?”

Vivi nodded absentmindedly. I wandered out into the hall, rubbing my eyes, and took two or three steps before I looked up and stopped.

“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”

9

The man in the skull was standing at the end of the hall, staring at me. He’d come back for something—maybe to make sure the fire had taken, or to retrieve something he’d forgotten. He hadn’t been expecting to see me, and I hadn’t been expecting to see him, so both of us stood in shock, unmoving. For a sharp, strange second, it appeared that the creature was afraid of me. Then he was fumbling with something at the back of his waistband. I caught a glint of metal.

“Shit, he’s got a gun,” I said, diving into the room as the first shot rang out. The bullet shattered the mirror behind me and sent a shower of glass into my hair. Vivi slammed the door closed behind me and locked it, but that only bought us a second or two. Bullets ripped through the wood, splintering it into toothpicks.

Vivi yelped and doubled over. My world contracted to the size of a pinhead.

No.

No.

Not Vivi too. I couldn’t lose both of them.

But she sat up when the shots stopped, her right hand pressed to her left arm. A red stain was spreading beneath her fingers. “Jesus, he shot me. You shot me, you psycho!” she screamed at the door. There was silence for a moment, then the door began to groan as the man leaned his weight against it. The wood swelled inward, fabric stretched across a fat gut.

“Get it, get it,” I said as I collected a handful of singed treasures from Grey’s bed and threw them out the window onto the wet street one floor below. Vivi followed suit, using her free hand to pick up a journal, some photographs, her backpack. We both scrabbled out of the window backward as the doorframe popped with a relieved sigh and the man tumbled toward us. I lowered myself down until I was hanging. Vivi, unable to grip with an injured arm and a hand wet with blood, fell and landed in a sprawl below me. Grey’s flat was only on the second floor, but the ground still felt far away. I let go and landed hard on my feet, an impact wave rolling up my spine, forcing the air from my lungs and making all my bones feel crumpled. We gathered up what we could of Grey’s things and ran. The man in the skull watched us from the window, our arms full of a few of the sodden, bloody trophies he’d tried to burn.

We ran for half a mile, leaflets of paper and drops of blood trailing behind us as we weaved through the backstreets of Shoreditch, past murals and trendy restaurants, sure he was right behind us. Two fire engines screamed past us in the direction we’d come from. We slowed to watch them. A thin column of smoke was rising in the distance now. We stood, breathing hard, and found each other’s free hand, knowing that the man had set our sister’s life on fire and all that was left of it now was what we held in our arms. Wherever Grey was, whatever had happened to her . . . we’d have to figure it out using only what we’d managed to salvage.

“Are you okay?” I asked Vivi breathlessly. My fingers were tacky with her drying blood. The left sleeve of her jacket was soaked through. She eased out of it, using the other sleeve to wipe away the slop of red. The bullet had only grazed her arm. There was a lot of blood, and it would leave a scar through her wisteria tattoo as wide and long as a finger, but it wasn’t deep. Vivi dug in her backpack for a scarf and started tying it over the wound to stymie the bleeding.

A passerby, an older woman in fur coat, slowed and stared at us. “My cat is vicious,” Vivi said with a shrug, totally deadpan. The woman hurried away.

“I got shot,” Vivi said to me. “Can you believe that? Shot. With a bullet!”

“I know,” I said as I helped her tie the makeshift bandage.

“What the fuck?” said Vivi.