That’s when the dead man’s eye turned to her face and looked right at her, accusingly. She felt the swivel of it under her touch.

She leaped backward, dropping her needle and thread and knocking an urn of priceless embalming oil with her elbow. It toppled and shattered.

Vigo looked at her as if she’d gone mad.

“He…” Even as the words started to leave her lips, she swallowed them. The man’s eye was dead and sightless once more. “I … I’m not feeling well.”

It was true: she felt sick. She had imagined it. She must have imagined it. Vigo sent her back to her cell and cleaned up the mess—despite his infirmities—insisting that she rest. Lying on her bed like a corpse herself, staring at the ceiling, she had felt terrible. She played the moment over and over in her mind. Even when Hunter had sat on her chest, purring like a furnace, she’d felt somehow detached from the world, trapped in that moment of horror. Was she going mad?

Later, in the refectory at dinner, she’d asked the other cryptlings if they had any stories—Ancestors moving or twitching as they were prepared. … But it was the usual stuff. The hunchbacked boy who sat opposite Lena told her he’d prepared a corpse that farted. The deaf girl next to her mimed how she’d watched as a dead man’s arm had risen up like a balloon, and everyone laughed. Lena nodded, smiling, pretending her experience had been similar. It was true: the contents of bellies could sometimes flood the body with gas, and that could make a corpse move. She told herself that was what had happened. But deep down she knew it was different. Who had ever heard of gas moving eyes? And besides, the man’s eye had fixed on her like he knew what she was doing—what she was thinking. Gas couldn’t do that.

Next thing Lena knew there were footsteps, and she started from the forest floor, spitting dead leaves from her open mouth, scrambling back toward the protection of the tree trunk behind her. A shadow began to emerge from the fog. Lena tried to raise herself to her feet, tried to run, but she could not; her legs cramped with cold.

The shadow solidified into a darker mass holding a bulb of purple light. The figure stopped before her, as if Lena had been its destination all along. She recoiled. There was something wrong with the face of this creature—a smooth brass surface with glassy black eyes and a gaping mouth. A faint tick-tick-tick noise appeared to emanate from the face, a cog turning somewhere at its jaw. Lena’s hands scrambled at the sides of the tree as she pulled herself upright, shivering, and she hurriedly drew the knife from her belt.

“Get back!” she managed shakily, swiping the blade through the air.