“All right,” she said agreeably. “Einstein never got it to work, anyway. All I’m saying is, maybe when you walk into one of those places—if you have the right genetics for it—you, um, die. Physically. You dissolve into stardust, if you want to call it that—and your particles can pass through stone, because they’re smaller than the atoms that make up the stones.”

Roger felt a distinct lurch in his insides at the memory of what it felt like. Being dead wasn’t putting it too strongly, but …

“But we come out again,” he pointed out. “If we die, we don’t stay dead.”

“Well, some of us don’t.” She’d sat up, too, arms curled around her knees. “If we believe Otter-Tooth’s journal and that skunk Wendigo Donner, some of their companions made it through the stones but came out dead. And there are all those incidents in Geillis Duncan’s journal—strange people, often in odd clothes—turning up dead near stone circles.”

“Aye,” he said, with the faint internal squirm that affected him when his green-eyed five-time-great-grandmother was mentioned. “So … you think you have a notion why that doesn’t happen to everybody.”

“I’m not sure it amounts to that much,” she admitted. “But it kind of goes along with what you were saying about what Christians believe—that we go on living after death. If you think about what it feels like”—she swallowed—“in there. You feel like you’re coming apart but you’re trying as hard as you can not to; to keep your—your sense of your body, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said.

“So maybe what we are in—there—is the immortal part of us; souls, if you like.”

“As a Christian minister, I like it fine,” he said, trying for some semblance of normality in this conversation. Like it or not, he was remembering that spectral cold, and the skin down his arms and legs prickled with gooseflesh. “So …?”

“Well, see, I think that’s maybe where the gemstones come in,” she explained. She moved closer to him, putting a warm hand on his bare and prickling leg. “You know what it feels like when they burn up—when the chemical bonds between their molecules, or maybe their atoms or subatomic particles, are breaking. And when you break a chemical bond, it releases a lot of energy. Since it’s releasing that energy inside our—our clouds of dissolving stuff, maybe …?”

“Maybe that’s what keeps the bits of our bodies together, you’re saying?”

“Mm-hm. And—this just occurred to me …” She turned to him, eyes widening. “Maybe you can lose a few bits in transit, but still make it out—just with a little damage. Like an irregular heartbeat.”

Neither of them spoke for a bit, contemplating.