The only way to get the body through the woods is to drag it, walking backward, skull pressed facedown into his chest. Boots digging into the underbrush. Ferns shuddering in their wake. Starlight striping the length of the cape, shadows gathered in its stiff folds. Lone owl. Rustle of fox. He has to go slow, step carefully, arms and legs burning. Weave through the birch. Past the dead tree. The stream peeling back from the rocks. Walk right into the water. Splash and drag. Pull him through the gate. The sunflowers nodding on their stalks. Panting. Stepping over the threshold and something like gold, coming from the body, all around. No time to marvel. Still the ladder to go. Will have to. Undress him first. The wide skirt, the breastplate, each long boot, hinges at the back stiff with age; he takes it all off, exposing the armor’s lining of thick red velvet, unfaded, wet from where the water came through the boots. A pile of silver and gold on the living room rug but the treasure is here. Can you believe. That it is yours. The body pure, unadorned, so small without its armor. You must. Take care. Skull against his chest, legs hooked over Xie’s arm. Up the steps, then laid gently on the bed, quick stroke of the ribs and then several trips for the armor, stacked in the back of the small closet, the cape the hardest because it is almost too wide to fit, it scrapes the paint off the wall as he wedges it through. Lock the door. There. Turn to see. The skull nested on the pillow, barely a dent. Look at me. He kneels on the mattress, naked. Candlelight brightening the sides of the bones. The ribs a narrow bell, holding their fistful of air. Xie’s hand where the heart would be. He caresses the spine, the most beautiful, reptilian line in the body, fused with glue to replace the lost tissue; the coccyx, hands, feet, and jaw also glued, too delicate to articulate with the crude metal joints fastening the rest of the bones together. Only the bones held in place by the meat of a living body have been lost; the patella above the knees, three tiny bones in the inner ear. Otherwise the body is complete. He crouches between the femurs, kissing the top arch of the pelvis as he fits his arm through the gap, slow, as far as it will go, all the way to the shoulder, filling the hole with his flesh. Hand crawling up the spine, vertebra by vertebra. As deep inside the body as it is possible to be. He lays his head on the thigh, his arm gleaming between the wings of the pelvis, twisting beneath the ribs, finger grazing the darkest place on the body: the foramen magnum, a jagged circle the size of a silver dollar floating at the bottom of the skull, through which the spinal cord once connected the rest of the body to the brain.