Chapter 133: Golden White Lilies

Marek stayed in the courtyard until someone finally asked where they were supposed to take Mara.

He had stopped noticing the others moving around him. The reflecting pool remained still, the broken mirrors carried no light, and Mara rested against his chest with her head beneath his chin.

Rhovan answered on behalf of Marek.

The botanical institute was on the other side of Venielle’s protected courtyard, but the passage they had used was no longer open. They would need her to make another way back.

Venielle stood beside the largest broken mirror with one sleeve darkened by dried blood. She had stopped trying to follow the attacker’s route, and when Marek looked at her, she seemed to understand the question he did not want to ask.

"I can return you to the institute," she said. "Not through the route she used."

"Then, do it."

No one objected to his tone. Venielle placed her hand against the unbroken edge of the frame, and silver-white lines spread through the glass more slowly than before until a narrow reflection of the institute formed across its surface. Marek could see a damaged tile and part of a corridor on the other side.

Rhovan offered to carry Mara. Marek shook his head and carried her through himself.

The ordinary botanical institute returned around them with the smell of damp concrete and dead plants from the damaged greenhouse nearby. Staff who had remained in the building moved aside when they saw what Marek was holding, and nobody tried to stop him as he passed.

Venielle came through last. The mirror behind her clouded over before returning to an ordinary reflection.

Kellan reached Venielle before she could move away. "That woman. Where did she go?"

"I don’t know. Moreover, don’t ask me to find her. She remains a hidden danger to all of us here." Her eyes moved briefly toward Mara in Marek’s arms before returning to the damaged mirror. "She took control of more than one route in that space. If I chase her now, I could leave her another way back here. And we wouldn’t want that."

Kellan looked like he wanted to argue, but his eyes followed hers toward Mara. "How about the other kids with you? Are they safe?"

"Yes, they are."

After a moment, he gave a short nod and stepped aside.

Marek had heard enough from where he stood. "And after that?"

Venielle looked at him. "I find what I can."

He wanted to say that he was coming with her, but Mara’s weight shifted slightly in his arms, and the words never left him. Rhovan noticed and said nothing.

Venielle’s eyes remained on Marek. "Do not follow me."

The instruction struck harder than it should have because Mara had told him the same thing once.

Venielle looked away first. She uncovered one of the reflective panels near the corridor, opened a thin silver route across it, and stepped through alone. The surface darkened behind her, leaving no direction Marek could have followed even if he tried.

He did not ask when she would return, or if she even intended to.

They found an unused storage room inside the institute with empty shelves and a single stainless-steel table. The first sheet they found smelled faintly of mold, while the second had a brown stain near one corner. Marek rejected both without explanation. The third was clean. Rhovan helped him lay Mara on the table, and Marek pulled the sheet carefully over her.

"You’re cold," he said.

The words came out before he could stop them. Mara had always complained about being cold while refusing to carry the jacket Amara told her to bring.

Their mother usually told her, "Then be cold quietly," and Mara would complain even more after that.

Rhovan remained outside the partially closed door, intercepting most of the people who came looking for Marek.

Through the gaps in those conversations, Marek learned that Dario had found someone who could register the death. Nadia had also located a damaged church several districts away that had been taking in the dead since Day 367, mostly from families who had nowhere else left to bring them. It was far enough from the institute that getting there would take time, but they were still accepting bodies and arranging simple services.

Marek did not ask how Nadia had found it so quickly. He was so fixated on Mara that everything happening beyond the storage room reached him as information he understood without really taking it in.

Sitting still became somewhat unbearable for him, so he opened his backpack.

Ten noodle packets remained inside. Eight had already been there when Mara returned the last two before the procedure began. The missing eleventh had gone to the hungry trainee she had fed, which was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the number and did nothing to make the ten in front of him easier to look at.

The folded note lay between them.

Marek stared at it for so long that the paper became the only thing in the bag he could see.

Later, Kuya Marek.

He unfolded it.

DON’T EAT BOTH. I WILL KNOW.

His first breath left normally. The next stopped halfway.

Marek tried to fold the note along its old crease and missed. His fingers would not stop trembling, so he pressed the paper flat against his knee.

"You won’t know," he said.

He tried to brush the comment aside, although it bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

She would not know whether he ate the noodles, whether he found Amara again, whether Tomas was alive, or what the Twelve Houses eventually decided Earth was worth to them. Every ordinary question she had asked before the procedure had suddenly acquired an ending he had never considered.

Marek lowered his head.

"I found you," he said after a while. "I actually found you."

A tear landed on the back of his hand.

He wiped his face once and gave up when more followed.

What hurt now were the ordinary things that had returned with her so easily—the sound of her complaining, the way she reached into his bag without asking, the certainty that there would still be another conversation later.

When she chose to leave with Venielle, he had let her because the choice belonged to her. When she asked him not to interfere with the procedure, he had listened again.

He still believed respecting her choice had been right, and that was the part grief refused to organize. There was no clean mistake he could point to and hate instead.

The door moved slightly. "Marek?"

He wiped his face with his sleeve. "What?"

Rhovan stayed outside. "Dario found a registrar. They need a family member."

Marek looked at Mara beneath the sheet. "Mom isn’t here."

Rhovan did not answer.

"Dad isn’t here either." Marek kept looking at the table before finally standing. "But... I am."

He got up with no trouble, and for a moment he hated his own body for still knowing how to do something so simple.

The registrar waited in the corridor with a clipboard and apologized before asking him to confirm Mara Vale’s name, age, and relationship. Marek answered each question until the man asked whether he was the available next of kin.

"Yes."

The form already contained the word DECEASED. Marek stared at it until the letters stopped looking like language, then signed beneath them.

His hand barely shook when he signed. He noticed, and wished he hadn’t.

Marek remained beside Mara until the light period ended. By the next one, the damaged church had prepared a simple funeral in its covered courtyard, where part of the roof had collapsed during Day 367, and several uneven rows of plastic chairs had been arranged beneath what remained.

The photograph at the front showed Mara at thirteen beside their apartment window in the gray jacket Amara had once repaired. Her hair was tied badly, one sleeve pushed halfway toward her elbow, and she was not smiling because Marek had taken too long to press the camera button.

The funeral worker offered to find another photograph.

"Keep that one," Marek said, and the funeral worker said no more words.

By the time the rows began filling, a few things had appeared near the photograph that no funeral worker had arranged. Nadia had brought a packet of noodles despite admitting she had never properly met Mara, and Kellan left a bottle of water after quietly explaining that it was the brand that did not taste like metal. Rafe’s folded route map rested near the flowers.

Marek understood all three without needing anyone to explain further.

Two of the Gemini minors who had stayed with Mara sat near the front. One of them cried quietly with his head lowered while the other remained beside him.

Rhovan watched them for several seconds. Something in his expression tightened before he looked away.

Marek noticed it, but there were too many other things hurting to ask what had caught his attention.

When the funeral worker asked whether anyone wanted to speak, the entire courtyard became quiet.

When nobody spoke, Marek looked at Mara’s photograph. She would have hated the silence.

So, he went to the front without the notes he had tried to prepare.

"Mara talked a lot," he began, his voice already rough. "She’d probably be annoyed that everyone suddenly got quiet when it was time to talk about her."

A few weak smiles appeared.

He told them about the water dispenser she refused to use because she claimed she could taste the pipes, and about being twenty-three minutes late picking her up from school. Mara had called him the worst brother in Linden, then held the back of his shirt while they crossed the road, still angry with him the entire time.

"She was angry at me a lot," Marek said.

Marek looked at the photograph again and had to stop speaking. For one stupid second, he wanted Mara to move—to roll her eyes at the picture she hated or tell him he was taking too long again. When she stayed exactly as she was, he lowered his head and pressed his lips together.

"I... I found you," he said, and this time he was speaking to Mara rather than everyone else. "I spent all that time looking, and I found you. You were fine. You were complaining. You had food. Noodles. You had someone stronger than me protecting you, which I found somewhat annoying, but... I was glad."

His fingers tightened against the edge of the stand in front of him.

"Then you chose something I didn’t like, and I listened because you didn’t need my permission. I still think that was right." His voice broke. "I just don’t know what to do with the part of me that wishes I had ignored you."

No one moved while Marek tried to steady his breathing. A small hiccup caught in his throat, then another, and he pressed his lips together until he could speak again.

"I... I wish I had been a worse brother that day. I wish I had dragged you away while you yelled at me. I wish you hated me for it. I wish Mom came back and yelled at both of us until the whole thing became stupid enough that we had to eat afterward. I miss eating with you... both..."

Marek left the stand before the rest of his voice disappeared. The coffin was only a few steps away, but he stopped halfway there. His breathing hitched again, and for several seconds he could not make his legs move.

He eventually forced himself forward. Each step brought Mara closer until there was nothing left between them but the side of the coffin, and somehow reaching her felt harder than all the days he had spent searching for her.

At the coffin, he took the two packets Mara had given him before the procedure and placed them beside her photograph, then tucked the folded note between them.

"Here," he whispered. "I didn’t eat both."

His fingers rested beside the note. "You said you’d know."

No answer came.

He stared at Mara’s photograph until his knees weakened. Rhovan reached him before he hit the ground, and Marek caught the front of his coat with both hands.

"Dad disappeared. Mom left." He buried his face against Rhovan’s shoulder. "She... You weren’t supposed to leave too."

Rhovan held him in his embrace.

"Please don’t leave your big brother," Marek said, and whatever control had survived the service finally went with it. "I... I don’t know where to go home to anymore."

Rhovan’s hand settled against the back of his head. For a while, he said nothing. "I am still here."

Marek clutched the back of his coat harder. The question came out between uneven breaths, so quietly that Rhovan almost had to lean closer to hear it.

"Would you also leave me too?"

Rhovan’s hold tightened around him. "Not while I still have a choice."

Marek shut his eyes, another broken breath catching in his throat.

"And if you don’t know where to go home now," Rhovan continued, "then don’t go home yet."

Marek cried for a while before he managed to answer. "That’s... a stupid answer."

"It is," Rhovan said, without letting go. "But you don’t have to know where to go right now."

When the coffin had to close, Marek kept one hand on the lid until the funeral worker quietly told him they could not continue while his fingers were still there. He removed them only after looking down as though the hand belonged to somebody else.

The lid came down with a dull wooden thud, and Marek flinched before he could stop himself.

At the grave, Marek watched every shovelful of soil and refused to look away. Rhovan remained beside him until the last of it had been packed down.

Gold spilled quietly from Rhovan’s hand and ran over the fresh earth in thin veins of light.

<anno data-annotation-id="4d731a1e-d951-6304-24d3-3dfe9333fefb" data-title="Where it passed, lilies began to rise from the soil, their long stems unfolding beneath broad, trumpet-shaped blooms that would have been pure white if not for the gold running through every petal.">Where it passed, lilies began to rise from the soil, their long stems unfolding beneath broad, trumpet-shaped blooms that would have been pure white if not for the gold running through every petal.¹</anno>

The flowers opened one after another until luminous golden lilies surrounded the grave, soft light gathering along their edges. When the last one bloomed, every flower slowly bent toward Mara’s grave.

No one spoke as the last flower bent toward the grave.

Meanwhile, Marek stared at the lilies with swollen eyes.

Rhovan kept his hand lowered beside him. "They’re for her."

Marek’s throat tightened again. He looked at the lilies surrounding the grave, then at Rhovan.

"She would’ve liked them," he managed.

Rhovan kept looking at the grave.

By the time people started leaving, Marek had lost track of how long he had been there.

He crouched beside his backpack and opened it almost without thinking. Eight noodle packets remained, and his hand closed around one with the immediate thought that he should keep it for Mara in case she got hungry later.

He stared at the packet until his mind caught up with what he had just thought, then bent over the open bag, unable to straighten again for a while.

He eventually returned the packet and went back to the grave. The golden lilies Rhovan had made were still glowing around the fresh earth.

"I left you two," he whispered, wiping his face with his sleeve.

He stayed there until Rhovan finally touched his shoulder, and even then, Marek looked back twice before he could make himself walk away.