“Wait,” I said. I pointed to what I wanted Tyler to see: another red-and-black way marker called us deeper into the fen.

“No,” he said as I took a step into the water. “No.”

* * *

Eventually, of course, he followed. There was only one thing more frightening than wading into a swamp of the dead, and that was being on your own in this place. Our feet sank into the ankle-deep water and mush as we trudged over spongy ground. Here, the tree branches sagged into the shallows, making the terrain hard to traverse. It seemed darker in this part of the forest. The trees seemed wilder. The going was slow. Things moved around us, unseen. Bodies bobbed by, eyes flicking open like lamps as we passed. We abandoned our coats to the marsh; they were too heavy to carry. I tucked Grey’s knife into my bra and folded my jeans up to keep them out of the water.

We came across more ruins sunk into the marshland. Not doorways now, but low stone walls ground down to hip height by age. The bricks that made them were crumbling into the moor, greedily devoured by hungry tree roots. Soon we began to see other structures, tumbledown stone houses that were infected with lichen, their windows smashed and trees bursting from their roofs. Many were surrounded by decaying stone walls. I’d seen a documentary on ghost towns once, about how nature slowly reclaims signs of human habitation and leaves only eerie remnants behind. Roads eaten through by vegetation. Unkempt buildings withered by sun and wind. Concrete dissolved by rain, terra-cotta red roofs caked in grime. That was nothing compared to the utter desolation of these ghost houses. The forest crept in and around them, tearing them apart, but they also rotted from inside, sagging into the water, their walls collapsing into soft masses of putrefaction. And in each one, the spirits of the dead drifted from room to room, window to window, unable to let go or move on.

The hours bled together. There was no sunrise, no sunset, no time. We walked until our legs ached and we began to drift into sleep standing up. I hadn’t eaten since Vivi brought me breakfast the morning before and my hunger was a chasm inside me. We steered clear of the empty shells of houses, cautious of what we might find inside. We followed the tartan way markers deep into the marsh, where the water was hip-deep and so dark I couldn’t see my fingers in it if I submerged them. Fog curled across its surface, squeezing our visibility to no more than six feet.

Bodies drifted everywhere. The twisted skeletons of dead things floated by. I lifted the skull of a bull from the water and stared into the hollows where its eyes should be.

And then the fog curled back like a curtain to reveal her.

A child sat cross-legged and naked on a low mud island, her dark hair stuck to her back in wet curlicues. Tyler and I both stopped when we saw her through the haze, afraid of catching her attention, but she already seemed to have heard us and half turned her head in our direction. She was sweet-faced and very young, perhaps only six or seven. I could see webs of veins beneath her sodden flesh. Her black eyes reminded me of spider eyes. There was mud and reeds matted into her hair, mud leaking out of her ears, as though she had recently emerged from the water.

“Rosie?” Tyler said quietly.

“Oh my God,” I breathed as Tyler thrashed through the shallow water and sank heavily into the mud in front of the girl.

In front of his sister.

19

“No,” Tyler said as he cupped Rosie’s small face in his hands. The last time he saw her, he would have been younger than her, smaller than her. Now he was a grown man and she was still a child. Her face fit in his palm like a piece of fruit. “No, no, no, no, no. Why are you here? Why are you here, Rose?”

Rosie mirrored Tyler’s gesture. She reached out to stroke his cheek, leaving a stripe of mud beneath his swollen eye. There seemed to be a flash of recognition behind her dead eyes, a moment of sadness and longing that crinkled her young brow. That was all it took. Tyler scooped her out of the mud and held her like a baby against his chest.

“What are you doing?” I whispered as he waded back into the water, in the direction of the next way marker.

“I’m bringing her with me.”

“You can’t bring her home.”

“Why not?” he snapped. “You came back. You got your sisters back. Why shouldn’t I get mine?”

“Because . . . she died, Tyler,” I said gently. “Rosie is dead. She can’t come back.”

“You said she wouldn’t be here!” he yelled. “You said she had no reason to be caught here! Why is she here, Iris? Why did you lie to me?”

“I thought—because she’s so young. What unfinished business does a kid have?”

“I left her once. I’m not leaving her again,” Tyler whispered, and then he was striding ahead through the water and mist, his dead sister clinging to him like an insect. “I can see something!” came his voice a few moments later.

Ahead of me, another house appeared from the vapor. It was a roofless stone structure built on a slip of island. Water lapped at the stone wall built around it. Like everything else in the Halfway, it was abandoned and tumbledown, overrun by a fever of flowers. Windows smashed, bits of it sliding into the water. A rudimentary gravestone had been erected on one side of the yard.

And there, fluttering on the twisted metal that passed for the front gate, was a strip of red tartan from my coat.

It was still dusk, the haze rolling across the swamp tinted the color of late evening. If it were not for the stink and the thousands of bodies floating in the marsh, the place might have been beautiful. We stood for a long time, watching and waiting in the stillness, and then we took a silent loop around the place, peering through the windows for signs of habitation. No shapes moved in the half-light. The house appeared empty.

As we stood in the water, I took out the journal and handful of drawings Vivi and I had saved from Grey’s apartment, back when I had understood less of our story. I shuffled through the pages. The fifth page was the one I was looking for: a sketch of a tumbledown house with broken windows and withered stone walls and a strip of tartan fluttering from the front gate.