第6章 The Penultimate Flame

The brick beneath Elin’s palm was warming.

Not with the heat of a fire, not with the warmth of a living hand. This was a different kind of heat—the heat of a door that had been closed for a very long time and was remembering, slowly, what it meant to be open. The frost that had formed on the brickwork began to retreat from her fingers, melting into droplets that ran down the scorched surface and dripped onto the cobblestones. The droplets hit the frozen ground and steamed.

The hunger felt it. The cold that had been pressing against her back, siphoning the warmth from her body, sharpened with something that was not fear—the hunger was too old to feel fear, too vast, too certain of its own permanence—but was as close to fear as a thing without a heart could come. The threshold was opening. The door that Marta had planted decades ago in a field of summer grass, the door that had been waiting in this alley since before the tenements were built, the door that had been sealed when Marta di