The words took a long time to travel across the clearing. Alex felt as though the slope tilted steeper, dropping away under his feet. He stumbled, then sat on the damp ground. Still, the world kept lurching downward. He looked up, trying to steady himself. Sunlight glinted among black leaves. Birds cawed to one another not far away, ravens maybe, and his grandfather spoke again.

“They killed him, Alex. Harry’s dead.”

XV.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY THIS TIME

“Dead . . . ?” Alex finally whispered.

“Yes.” The old man lowered himself by Alex’s side. Water dripped from his hat brim as he bowed his head and turned up his coat collar. “Afraid so.”

They sat in silence. The sensation that the world was spinning slowed. Alex felt tears spill out, briefly hot among the cold rain on his face. More gathered like acid in his throat. He swallowed and moved his hands in a useless arc.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Didn’t want you worrying.”

There was no answer to that.

“Okay,” Alex said. He noticed he had picked up leaves without realizing and was twisting them between his fingers. He let them drop. “But I don’t understand. Why are we up here, Grandad? What do you want to do? Do you want to try to . . . move him?”

“In a way.” His grandfather looked off down the slope. “That is, I want you to try to move him.”

“I, uh . . . what?”

“I can’t remember how much we spoke about the golem legends,” the old man said. “Invisibility and all that. Well, one of the other powers it had, according to many stories, was the, ah”—the old man cleared his throat, half burying the rush of words—“abilitytoraisethedead.”

Alex tried to blink away the sting in his eyes.

“We talked about this before,” his grandfather went on, warming slightly to the task of delivering a lesson in strange history. “What powered the golem is a force of life itself. There were tales about trials in the old Prague courts, you see, where the golem would, ah, summon up dead witnesses to appear and give evidence—”

“Wait.” Every inch of Alex’s skin was suddenly crawling in different directions, as though trying to get away. “Hang on. You want me to . . .” He searched for words. Nothing sounded right. “Bring him back? To life? Harry. From being dead. You want me to try to bring him back.”

“Well . . . yes.”

“That’s . . . I can’t do that,” Alex stammered. He had started to protest that the idea was impossible, ridiculous, but these words no longer meant much. Indeed, what horrified him most was that he knew his grandfather was entirely serious. “I thought we were going to rescue him. Break him out of somewhere. I thought you’d want me to . . . I dunno. Smash down walls or blast robots or . . . but this . . . I can’t.”

“Alex, you don’t know what you can do until you try—”