“I still don’t understand. They’re dead. Of course they’re there. Maybe you were only able to find Joel there, that way I could spot my husband across a room of people, because you cared deeply about him, but you couldn’t do the same with the others.”

“No,” Isidore said with forceful certainty. “That is the truth that I saw in that instant. I saw that their souls were not in the eternal world of the dead. Their souls, their spirits, whatever you want to call them, were not in the underworld.”

“Then where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Isidore said. “I’ve been looking for them ever since that day and I have not yet found them. All I know is that the spirits of the people of Grandengart, the people whose bodies were harvested, are not in the world of the dead. And neither are the souls of the other bodies that have been harvested.”

The silence felt suffocating. Magda had to remind herself to take a breath.

“How can the dead,” she finally asked, “not be in the world of the dead? How is that possible?”

Chapter 31

“That was the very thing I wanted to know,” Isidore said. “I knew, as soon as I grasped the truth of it, that I had to find the answer.”

“But how?” Magda swiped her hair back off her face. “You said that you only hold the veil open for an instant.”

“Yes, but in that moment where all that magic, all that power, comes together, that spark of time seems to last an eternity. In a way, it isn’t an instant at all. In a way, it is an infinitely large piece of forever.”

Magda felt as if she were getting lost. “How can that be?”

“The reason, as I had learned from my father, is that there is no time in the eternity of death. Because there is no beginning, no end, there is no way to measure how long you’re there.”

“But there has to be a way to measure how long an event lasts. Time still exists. A day is still a day.”

“Here, but not in the underworld. Here time is finite. Days start and end. There it’s eternal night.”

“I still don’t understand,” Magda said.