My mother’s final words to my father. The question she had asked right before she slapped him. Right before he closed himself in the bathroom and died.

I had never told anybody. Not my aunt, not the investigators, not Baqir, not anybody. It was an echo from the past that had always been mine and mine alone, breathed now on a cloud of mist from Ariana’s slack mouth and expressionless face.

“Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?” Ariana said. There was no inflection in her tone, nor the least emotion. “Go back to your room. Jas. Go back to your room. Jas.”

Nausea roiled through me, and with it a black wave of rage. She had no right to speak my mother’s words.

There was another rattle from inside the quarters. My father’s arm was reaching through the gap, stiff and bent at an awkward angle, the shoulder shoving ineffectually against the door, but reaching still, like a puppet jerking on tangled strings. Xiomara made a small noise in her throat. Baqir’s grip on my wrist tightened. I looked back at Ariana.

The light from Xiomara’s headlamp was still fixed on Ariana’s face, which was paled by the thin layer of frost over her light brown skin. Ariana grimaced—but it wasn’t a grimace, her expression wasn’t changing at all. There was a ripple in her skin, a line of frost melting across her left cheek, a subtle undulation moving toward her temple.

Just before Ariana turned and fled into the darkness, leaving us without a sound, with barely a glance, the ripple vanished into her hairline. Something narrow and fast was moving beneath her skin.

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