He dropped his shirt. It mushroomed briefly as it fell.
He turned away from Zoe’s father, and stretched out his arms. The muscles in his back and shoulders were aching. The cold air stung his skin.
He summoned up the man’s sins. He could feel the terrible images starting to crawl across his back.
Zoe’s father let out a sob.
“I know what I did!” he shouted through his tears. “You don’t have to show me. I know everything I did!”
X was in such turmoil that the words cut through him. He felt more keenly than ever that—whether or not he was only doing what the lords had commanded, whether or not the punishment was just—he was piercing another human being’s heart. Ripper said they were dustmen, but that was a kindly lie. She knew better, and so did he. He was a killer. And worse: he was a torturer.
He lowered his arms before the movie was over.
His back went white.
Behind him, Zoe’s father gave a grateful sob. He tried to stop crying but couldn’t.
When X turned, the man’s chest was heaving and his face was a storm of tears. He looked raw and terrified. A helpless bird.
“Wait, stop, please,” he said. “Talk to me for a second. Just for a second, okay? You love my daughter, right? I can see that. I saw the way you hugged her. I saw the way you looked at her. It’s the way—it’s the way I used to look at her mother.”
X refused to listen. This man was nothing to him. He was just the 16th soul.
“Stop your mouth,” he told Zoe’s father, just as he had once told Stan. “Or I will plug it with my fist.”
Zoe’s father ignored the threat. He knew this was his last chance to speak.
“But if you love Zoe—why do this?” he said. “Why murder her own father?”
X knew he shouldn’t answer, but the words rushed out of him.
“I do it because she asks me to!” he shouted. “I do it because you have hurt her who is dearest to me! I do it because either you or I must be banished to the Lowlands, and I have endured that darkness long enough!” It was as if X were defending the monstrous act not just to Zoe’s father, but to himself. He could not stop. “If I do not take your soul, I will never see Zoe again—never feel her touch, never hear her voice, never curl her hair around my fingers. My heart was born in winter, sir, and I will not go back to the cold.”
Zoe’s father said nothing.
He had run out of words, as they always did.
But just as X was about to take the 16th soul down from the shed and plunge him into the lake, the 16th soul started screaming Zoe’s name.
His voice was startling. It tore the air open.
“Zoe!” he screamed. “Zoe! Please!”
X turned frantically, and saw that Zoe and Ripper were still ascending the hill to the woods. They stopped now. Ripper held Zoe tightly, urging her not to turn.
“Zoe!” her father shouted. “Listen to me! Zoe!”
X leaped at him, and struck him hard across the face.
“I showed you a kindness, damn you!” he said. “I could have forced you to behold all your sins, but I did not! And yet you beg your daughter for sympathy? She will not save you. She is not your daughter anymore!”
“I don’t want her to save me,” said Zoe’s father, and again he began screaming: “Zoe! Zoe! You don’t have to look at me, just—just listen. Zoe, I’m sorry! Please, please, please know that I’m sorry. I was a disgrace as a father. As a man. As everything. I disgust myself. I don’t deserve to live. And life without you and Jonah and your mom—it’s not really living, anyway. I love you, okay? I absolutely freakin’ love you. If you don’t believe anything else I ever said, please, please, please believe that.”
He was breathing so hard now that he had to collect himself before he could say more.
“If me dying helps you somehow, then I’ll do it,” he shouted with what energy he had left. “I mean, I already died once. It’s gotta be easier the second time, right? I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I think you’re awesome, Zoe—and you’ll always be my girl.”
Zoe’s father turned to X now.
“If you want my soul, just take it,” he said. “Take it.”
X was closing in on him, when, up on the hill, Zoe finally turned toward them. She walked back down to the lake, her steps heavy and trancelike. Ripper could not stop her. Together, they descended and stepped on the dead reeds, which crackled under their feet.
Zoe was not looking at her father, but at X.
Nearby, a cluster of wild turkeys, black and red against the snow, raised their heads to X now, too. Even they seemed to be waiting.
X took the man’s slender neck in his hand. Zoe’s father gasped, but he did not resist, did not speak, did not look away.
He just stared at X—stared at him with Jonah’s eyes.
X began closing his fist around his windpipe.
And then he stopped, not knowing why.
He felt a kind of stirring in his brain—a wind almost, as if someone had cracked a window or pushed open a door.
It was Zoe. She was searching his thoughts.
She’d told him that he was never to search hers. “There will be no mind-melding—or whatever that is!” she’d said. Yet here she was trying to figure out what he was thinking, why he was hesitating.
She was walking toward him across the lake, with Ripper following close behind. She was stepping around the holes. She seemed to know where they lay even without looking. And all the while, she was delving deeper and deeper into X. She was unfolding him—gently, like he was a piece of paper that might come apart in her hands. Surely, she knew what she would find? She’d taught him the word herself.