Chapter 17
My Driftglass Heart
BON DID, INDEED, get us first class tickets, whether at her own whim or because Apple ordered her to do so. We cross an ocean in seats comfortable enough to live in, Laura sipping champagne when not trying to sleep, me drinking cherry Cokes and watching an endless stream of movies and television shows and documentaries on the seatback television screen. TV sure has changed since I was a kid. Everything is bright and colorful and fast, so fast, like they’re afraid we’re so bad at paying attention that we’ll wander off if they let our focus falter for a second.
Maybe that’s true of the living. Only it can’t be entirely, because there’s a whole season of a show about British people baking cakes, and that’s more soothing than frenetic. People are still people. It’s just the trappings that change.
I expect some jolt to run through me when we pass outside the reach of the American roads, some feeling of transition, of change, of something to mark the moment. I don’t get it. The plane glides on, the flight attendants bring us dinner and drinks—more champagne for Laura, more Coke for me—and we’re flying into the blackest night I’ve ever seen, leaving land and love and familiarity behind us.
I’m coming back, I think fiercely, and I don’t know whether I’m talking to Gary, or to Emma, or to myself. Because it feels like my own ghost is standing on the shore behind us, the shadow sketched by all the stories people tell about me, the girl in the green silk gown watching mournfully as her past and her future rolled up in one impossibly present body fly away without her. She needs me as much as I need her, and leaving her behind aches as I would never have thought possible.
I drift off to the sound of the show’s presenters making terrible baking-related puns, and my dreams are full of prom dresses dyed pomegranate red, perfumed with roses and lilies.
When I wake, the plane is in its initial descent into Heathrow. Laura is watching me with wry sympathy, a champagne flute of orange juice in her hand. I’m glad she’s not the one flying this plane; I’m pretty sure there’s more than just orange juice in there.
“You slept through breakfast,” she says. “I would have woken you, but I thought you needed the sleep more than you needed the rubber eggs.”
My stomach lurches at the thought. I grimace. The “fasten seatbelt” sign is on, but . . . “Do I have time to use the bathroom?”
“If you’re quick,” says Laura. “This is first class. International first class. I think as long as you don’t commit a murder, they’ll let you do whatever you want.” She laughs. There’s a bitter note there that I don’t want to examine too closely.
I fumble with my belt and stagger from the seat, legs numb from sitting still too long. There’s a flight attendant on a fold-out seat near the bathroom, her own belt fastened. She smiles indulgently at the sight of me, tapping the wrist where no watch resides in a gesture as recognizable as it is increasingly outdated. I nod my understanding, silently agreeing to hurry, and shut myself in the bathroom.
I’ve been in closets bigger than this room. Peeing is no more pleasant when it happens in a flying bus, but at least it’s something new, and studying my surroundings, sparse as they are, provides a temporary distraction. I clean myself up and wash my hands, feeling a spike of unreasonable pride at how well I’ve managed something normal people do every single day, that I used to do every single day, back when I was accustomed to being a biological creature. The habits of living are easy to fall back into. That should frighten me. It doesn’t. I’m on my way to fix this, to descend into the Underworld and get my death back. I’ve never been farther from home before, and I feel like I’m finally almost there.
Laura looks up when I return to my seat, and asks, “Everything okay?”
I nod. “Totally fine. No problems.”
“I never wanted kids if I couldn’t have them with Tommy,” she says, and sips her probably-orange juice. “I still feel like I’ve just seen my eldest through toilet training.”
I snort and look away, out the window, where a new country is appearing.
From above, England looks like America, or maybe America looks like England: it’s hard to say. There are rolling hills and patches of forest, there are houses and office buildings and highways, gray lines sketched across the landscape like the outline of a picture yet to be finished, and we’re still so far up that there aren’t any details. I’m probably committing some sort of blasphemy, thinking it looks the same as home, and yet there’s a comfort there, because if it looks this much like what I know, it can’t possibly be as hostile as I was afraid it would be. It can’t possibly hate me.
They probably have different gods here, gods of ferry and coach and ancient roads, but I still say my silent prayers to Danny and Celia and Persephone, hoping the landing will be kind, that the next stage in our journey will be forgiving. We’re almost there, and that’s a blessing, because I can’t feel myself aging anymore. It’s still happening, I know; everything that lives ages. I just can’t feel it, because I’m getting used to it. I’m growing accustomed to being alive.
After accustomed comes addicted, and after addicted comes unwilling to let go. Most people are addicted to living. Trouble is, I’m not most people. I know too much. I know about the crossroads, and the Ocean Lady; I know Apple, I know Bobby Cross, and I know that if I want to, I can find a way to live forever. No matter how much damage it does. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to become the version of myself who thinks my life matters more than anyone else’s. I need to get out of this skin before it gets too comfortable.
The flight attendants come around to collect the little cards we filled out during the flight, the ones that state our business and our innocence and our intent to be good little tourists. Mine feels like a falsehood given details, and Laura’s isn’t much better. At least I know all the information they have a way to check will show up as true. Thank Persephone for Apple, and for Carl. I hope she’ll let him come home.
England grows closer and closer outside the window, the houses going from familiar squares to something new, something familiar and foreign at the same time. I don’t recognize the trees or the shapes of the windows. The cars drive on the wrong side of the highways, inverting the usual flow of things, and I wonder whether that’s part of why American routewitches don’t usually make this journey. The distance is the same, but does it translate?
No way to know except to ask, and then the wheels are slamming onto the runway, the plane bouncing once, twice, three times before it settles into a smooth glide. There’s a voice on the intercom welcoming us to London. A few people applaud. Someone cheers. I close my eyes.
We’re almost there.
Customs is a nightmare. Laura flirts and preens, flipping her hair and smiling brightly at the man who checks our passports and our papers. She tells him I’m exhausted from our flight and overwhelmed by the reality of international travel, having never been outside the country before. She’s not lying, exactly, but she’s not telling him the full truth. That seems to help. He’s trained to listen for lies, so she’s just choosing to leave pieces out.
The picture on my passport matches my face; my mumbled answers match the man’s expectations of both a teenage girl and someone experiencing jetlag for the first time. He stamps my form and we’re through, passing the last checkpoint between us and England.
Every step I take seems to wake me up a bit more. I can’t feel the roads, but I can feel something. The tattoo on my back is burning for the first time since I woke in flesh and bone. It’s a hot tingle stretched across my skin, like it knows where we are, where we’re going, what I’m going to do. Whether it’s real or just my imagination, I stand up straighter, the heat in my skin sliding into my veins and filling me from top to bottom with hope.
We follow the signs to the exit, and from there we follow the signs to the Underground, which is the local subway system, all marked with red and white signs that make me think “hospital” more than “public transit.” We stop at the top of the stairs, digging for the fare cards that Carl gave us, and an arm locks around my neck, jerking me backward, through the wall.
The feeling of my body passing through concrete like mist is familiar enough not to become alarming until I elbow my attacker and they let go, dropping me into the dark crevice behind the wall. My breath is loud, the loudest sound in this enclosed space. Only then do I realize there’s no possible way for me to be here. We’re still in the daylight—if I’d been yanked into the twilight, it would have killed me—but people, living people, aren’t supposed to walk through walls. When we try, we die.
It’s dark and my assailant isn’t breathing. There’s no way I’m going to find them, and if I start swinging wildly, I’m just going to bruise my fists on the walls. So I don’t. I stay where I am, folding my arms, and glare at the darkness.
“Nice try,” I say. “Maybe next time you can just stab me from behind, if you’re going to be a cowardly fucker about things.”
“What’s your name, girlie?” The voice is female, with a strong English accent. That shouldn’t be as much of a surprise as it is. I’m in England. Of course the supernatural assholes will have English accents.
“I feel like James Bond,” I reply. “Is your name a terrible sex pun? I bet it’s a terrible sex pun. That’s why you went with an attack instead of an introduction. You’re embarrassed. Well, you shouldn’t be. None of us can help what our parents do.”
“What. Is. Your. Name.” There’s no question there, just growled frustration. I get the feeling this woman, whoever she is, would love to shove me into another wall—not through it this time, into it, all for the satisfaction of hearing my skull crack on the concrete.
I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m very far from home. I glare at the darkness and say, “Rose Marshall of Buckley Township, Michigan, better known as the spirit of Sparrow Hill Road. I’m the girl in the diner and the phantom prom date, and I’m getting a little tired of whatever the hell this is.”
“Good,” hisses the voice, and I’m being shoved again, back through the wall, back into the light. Laura is there, looking like she’s on the verge of panic. Her eyes widen when she sees me, and she flings her arms around me. Good thing, too: I might have toppled over otherwise.
None of the people passing by us seem to have noticed either my disappearance into the wall or my reappearance on the concourse. That’s a little unnerving. The figure that follows me through the wall is sufficiently more unnerving to make me forget about the strange disregard, and start worrying about getting out of this in one piece.
She’s short, curvy and corseted and dressed in black, save for the shockingly pink choker around her throat. Matching streaks radiate through her jet-black hair, which is cut in a style that would have looked more natural in the halls of my high school than it does here, in the modern day. Her makeup is either overdone for the morning or underdone for a night at the club, a mix of black and pink and glittery silver that catches every speck of the light and tosses it back like a gambler rolling a fistful of dice. She looks like the world’s angriest goth, and I don’t know what to do with this. I just stare.
“Rose?” manages Laura. “What are you looking at?”
I start to answer. Then I pause, and point at the angry goth. “Is there someone there?”
Laura shakes her head. The panic in her eyes isn’t fading. I guess I can’t blame her for that. “No. Rose, you went through the wall.”
At least she saw that. I turn to the goth. “She can’t see you,” I say. “Can you fix that?”
“She’s no witch nor hedgemage nor anything else the road lays claim upon,” says the woman, with a sneer. “Why should I show myself to the likes of her, if she’s not equipped to see me on her own? She’s not meant for the likes of me, not as yet.”
“The likes of you meaning . . . ?”
There’s a vicious gleam in the woman’s eye as she reaches up and taps the choker. “Would you like to see?”
That’s answer enough. “Dullahan,” I say, and note the way the gleam in her eye fades, replaced by surprise and disappointment. She wanted to be strange and mysterious for me, to shock me with her existence. Too bad for her that I’ve had a long time to meet most of the strange, mysterious denizens of the twilight. “Apple send you?”
“Rose? Who are you talking to?”
“No one, Laura.” I keep my eyes on the stranger as I speak, challenging her to contradict me. “Just one of the local ghosts who doesn’t seem to want to be helpful, but does seem pretty set on throwing me through walls. She’s not important.”
“You insolent little American,” snarls the Dullahan. “I’m your guide, and you’d do ill to ignore me.”
“Can’t guide us if only one of us can see you,” I counter. “Appear or we leave you here, and I tell Apple and anyone else who’s willing to listen that you were having too much fun being creepy to play fair. Maybe I’ll tell Persephone. She probably cares about that sort of thing, right?”
The Dullahan glares. Laura gasps, and I know she can see the stranger now, standing here on the concourse like she’s been here all along.
“I thought London was full of cameras,” I say. “Why are you willing to appear and disappear like that?”
“London is full of cameras, but it’s even more full of ghosts,” says the Dullahan. “People have learned not to see us, out of self-defense. That’s why you need a guide. American ghosts are only welcome here when they have someone to hold their hand and vouch for them. You should be grateful to have me, little hitcher in a stolen skin. I’m paying off a debt that’s older than you are, and the one who called it in could have asked so much more of me.”
She’s not telling the full truth, but that’s not important right now. Dullahan are like beán sidhe, predators that are neither alive nor dead, but exist in the strange hinterland between the two. Whatever Emma had done for this small, angry woman, it had clearly happened in that liminal space where the living couldn’t go and the dead weren’t invited.
The thought warms me. My friends are still looking out for me, even here. Even now. “I’ll be sure to tell Emma thanks when I get home,” I say. “Although it’d be easier if I knew your name.”
“Pippa,” says the Dullahan, and it’s so incongruous—a preppy, peppy name for a goth specter of death and destruction—that it’s all I can do not to laugh. She eyes me sullenly. “It’s short for Philippa. It’s a fine, traditional name, a name with weight behind it. Better than being named for some hedge flower that anyone can grow.”
“Right,” I say. I indicate Laura. “This is Laura Moorhead. She’s going to descend with me.”
“And lead you out again, from what I understand.” Pippa looks Laura deliberately up and down. “I don’t believe she has it in her, but I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?”
Laura sputters. Literally sputters. It would be funny, if we weren’t standing in the middle of an Underground station stairway. But we are. Whatever effect keeps the people of England from noticing Pippa’s phantasmal actions doesn’t extend to Laura, and people are starting to give her funny looks. We’ll attract attention soon, if we haven’t done so already.
I don’t want to attract attention. No matter how good the paperwork Apple arranged for me really is, there’s no way it can stand up to being arrested. The idea of someone figuring out that I don’t legally exist is even more terrifying when I’m thinking about it happening in a foreign country.
“Can we stop being assholes here and go be assholes on the train?” I blurt. Laura and Pippa both turn to look at me, surprised out of their increasing animosity. “I want to get this over and done with. Don’t you? Laura, I know you’re going to run out of vacation time soon. Pippa, I know basically nothing about you, but I bet you’re the kind of person who gets shit done and then gloats about it. You don’t get to gloat until you get me to the British Museum.”
Pippa’s eyebrows climb toward her hairline. “You’ve flown across an ocean,” she says. “You’re in a place where none of the rules are what you’re likely to think they are. The roads here won’t listen to you, no matter how much you beg them, until you’ve walked far enough to tell them your intent. Don’t you at least want a shower before you bait the gods?”
“I want a gown made of green silk that hits my ankles when I walk,” I say. “I want matching flats, and a corsage around my wrist, and the taste of ashes in my mouth. I want to be dust and glitter on the wind. This is how I get those things. This is how I go home. So no. I do not want a shower. I do not want a sandwich. I do not want to waste any more time in this place, in this flesh, in this parody of my own skin. Take me to the British Museum. End this.”
Pippa looks, for a moment, almost impressed. Then she smirks.
“All right, new girl,” she says. “Follow me.”
We descend into the Underground. People brush by us on all sides, intent on their own destinations, writing us off as another clot of strange tourists. We make an eccentric group, Laura with her college professor’s calm ease in her own skin, me jumpy and uncomfortable with everything around me, Pippa in her tall boots and her lacy skirt, with that eye-catching ribbon at her throat. I’ve never seen a Dullahan who drew that much attention to their neck.
“Is she really . . . ?” whispers Laura, when Pippa draws far enough ahead that she feels safe risking it.
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I reply, in a more conversational tone. Never let a predator think that you’re trying to sneak up on them. That way lies claws and teeth and bleeding. “You could ask her to take off the choker, but she might do it. You probably wouldn’t like that much.”
Laura shudders, face pale. I guess a life spent tracking down one relatively harmless ghost—as ghosts go—didn’t prepare her for the depth and danger of the supernatural world. Every ghost is different, but most hitchers aren’t malicious. We just want to see the sights before we move on to whatever comes next. As ghosts go, you can do a lot worse.
And then there are the ones who aren’t ghosts at all.
Like I said, Dullahan straddle the line between life and death. So far as I am aware, they reproduce like anything else living: no one becomes a Dullahan when they die. They’re cousins of the reapers, harbingers of doom, foretellers of mortality. They’re also a composite, a living, parasitic head controlling and operating what is technically someone’s stolen, modified corpse. If Pippa removes the ribbon from her neck, her head will pop off and keep talking, which is extremely disconcerting the first time you see it. And the fifth. And the five hundredth. Dullahan are disconcerting in general. There aren’t many of them in America, and on some level, we’re all glad.
We reach the fare gates. Laura and I press our cards to the sensor, and they open for us. Pippa simply walks through, her body passing through metal as if it weren’t there. I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes. She’s showing off. It’s working on Laura, who looks less comfortable every time Pippa does something so blatant without attracting attention. I think she’s starting to realize why Dullahan are so terrifying. When they don’t want to be seen, they’re not. When they don’t want to be noticed, they won’t be. I didn’t realize before that they could extend the effect to others. Maybe she’s right about it being a London thing, or maybe she’s just trying to seem more impressive than she actually is. It doesn’t matter one way or the other.
“You’re in luck: there’s no need to take any trains that don’t actually exist today,” says Pippa, after a quick glance at a sign covered in lines so complex that they might as well be summoning sigils for a demon. “The Piccadilly line is running clear, and it’ll get us to Holborn Station. From there, it’s an easy walk to the museum. We’ll have you committing the greatest mistake of your life in no time.”
“If it’s so easy, why are you here?” There’s an undercurrent of venom in Laura’s voice. She doesn’t like being frightened. Pippa frightens her. It makes sense for her to be lashing out, although I wish she wouldn’t. This isn’t wise.
Pippa apparently shares my sentiment. She gives Laura a flat, cold-eyed look, and says, “Because it’s not going to stay easy, and when it becomes complicated, you’ll be glad as glass of someone who understands the way things work here. Your America is stolen land, paved over with the materials of a hundred immigrant lands, but England? Conquer us, cover us, we always found our way back to true. The rules are not as you understand them.”
“Can we not antagonize our guide? Please?” I slide between them, the hot air blowing out of the train tunnel ruffling my hair and caressing the back of my neck like the breath of some great and terrible beast. Signs telling me to “Mind the Gap” seem to be everywhere. I wonder whether these people understand that this is how you craft a god. I wonder if they listen when the absence speaks. “We’re so close, Laura. We’re almost there. You’re going to get your life back. I’m going to get my death back. Let it go.”
Laura narrows her eyes, still watching Pippa. “I don’t trust her.”
“I don’t care,” I counter. “I trust Emma. Emma says she’ll help us, and Emma has never done anything to hurt me.”
“She’s a good one, as the keeners go,” says Pippa casually. Too casually, really. I look over my shoulder at the Dullahan. She’s watching the mouth of the tunnel, studiously not looking at either of us. “They go where their families go.”
Meaning when the family Emma used to be attached to had decided to move to America, Emma had followed, and Pippa had been, for whatever reason, left behind.
“She runs a diner called the Last Dance, these days,” I say. “Her pie is amazing. I bet she’d love to see you.”
Pippa looks speculative at that. The expression hasn’t faded when the train pulls in and the doors open, and the three of us are hustled inside by the crowd.
The London Underground has this much in common with every other public transit system I have ever seen: it’s too small for the number of people who think they can cram themselves into a single train, and there are never enough seats. There’s only one open I can see, a narrow slice of fabric visible between two businessmen with their legs spread wide enough to tell me more than I need to know about their genitals. Pippa’s smile is feral. She wedges herself into that opening without concern for how much flesh she pinches in the process, her elbows hitting their thighs.
Then she crosses her ankles as primly as a schoolmarm, and waits.
The men begin to fidget before the train pulls away from the platform. The one on Pippa’s left begins to sweat, while the one on her right goes clammy and pale. Her smile spreads across her face like blood through cotton until, finally, both men lurch to their feet, moving away from Pippa as fast as they can.
“There you go, ladies,” she says, patting the seats to either side of her. “Come join me, because we’ve got a ways to go before we reach Holborn.”
No one else is taking those seats. I’m not sure any of the people around us can even see Pippa. That doesn’t stop some deep, primal part of them from realizing that those temptingly empty seats are haunted, and they have no interest in joining our ghost story.
I’ve been sitting for the better part of the last day. I’d expect to be done with sitting. But I’m so tired that I feel like I might fall over every time the train lurches on the track, and I sink into a seat with gratitude, resting my backpack on my knees. Laura sits more reluctantly, watching Pippa out of the corner of her eye.
The people around us don’t pay any attention to the little drama playing out right next to them. Pippa is invisible, despite her gothic attire, while Laura and I are just two more tourists in a city full of them, bland and easy to overlook. Invisibility takes many forms. Sometimes it’s supernatural and literal, and other times it’s scruffy clothing and rumpled hair, the vague, jet-lagged stare of a traveler and a bag with the luggage tags still attached. We are irrelevant to their lives, and so they let us go with a glance.
They’ll never know what they shared this train with. That’s probably for the best. Some things are better off overlooked and unconsidered, at least in the daylight. Some of these people will have dark dreams tonight, filled with ghosts and monsters, and they’ll never know why, and it won’t really matter.
We ride for what feels like forever, the names of stations flickering by like a playground jump rope game. Northfields, Hammersmith, Knightsbridge. Hyde Park, Green Park, Covent Garden. There are so many of them that I couldn’t list them all if I tried, and only a few stick in my memory, like thorns reaching out and taking hold. This is a whole world of things I don’t know, places I’ve never been and won’t ever be, and it burns a little, the reminder that I’m limited. It doesn’t matter if I spend the next hundred years on the road, looking and learning and figuring out how to finally be free of Bobby Cross. I won’t ever leave North America again. I won’t ever get to know these places.
As a hitcher, I can grab a ride with anyone who’ll let me. I can borrow flesh by borrowing a jacket, wrap myself in skin and voluntary mortality, which fades as soon as the sun rises or I take the jacket off, whichever one comes first. I can’t be killed by mortal means—I’ve been shot, I’ve been in more accidents than I can count, I was even set on fire once—but I can’t buy a plane ticket, and I can’t cross an ocean. This world, this whole world, is denied to me.
Suddenly, the fact that I’m heading straight for the museum and not even taking a walk around London seems a little shortsighted. Only a little, though. I want to put the world back the way it should be more than I want to see forbidden things. I want to be myself again.
The train pulls into another stop. Pippa stands. People shy away from her without even seeming to realize they’re doing it.
“This is us,” she says, and steps through the opening doors.
Laura and I follow her, out into the hot air of the station, out into London.
London is a city built upon its own bones, and as such, a city made almost entirely of stairs. At least that’s how it feels as we climb our way out of the bowels of the earth and up into the light, which is the misty gray of late morning, and smells of oil and gasoline and cleaning solutions, the same as any other city, but faintly different at the same time. My feet ache. I wonder what it’s like to be a routewitch here, in a place where the width of the roads was set before we knew what black tar asphalt was, in a place where cobblestones are as common as pavement. What would these streets tell me if I knew how to talk to them, if they cared enough to notice I was here?
Much as it aches to know that I won’t ever have the chance to learn this country the way I’ve learned my own, it aches more to know that Apple—a routewitch born, a queen ascended, who should have had the freedom to go where she wanted, do what she wanted, forever—will never even know America the way I do, much less see England, or Europe, or anything beyond the bounds of the Ocean Lady. She traded her birthright for a crown. I can trade a few places I’ve never seen for the twilight, and the ghostroads, and my friends. I can.
Laura looks around us with unabashed curiosity, gawking like a tourist. It makes me feel better about doing the same. The similarities I saw from the plane are still here, but there are so many differences. I want to see them all. I want to remember them all. I’m never going to see them again, and if this is my only chance, I’m not going to let it go to waste.
Pippa shoots me an amused glance. “Americans,” she says. There’s no malice in her tone. That’s a nice change. “You’d think you’d never seen a curb before.”
“We build ours differently,” I say. “How much farther to the museum?” I want it to be miles. I want to see as much of this city as I possibly can. I want—
“We’re here,” she says.
Oh.
The British Museum is huge, impressive enough that I took it for a cathedral or a seat of government. It looks like a temple. It looks like a testing ground. Once we enter, we’re not going to leave—at least not by the same route. The only way out is through.
“Where do we go,” I say, and it’s not a question, because I don’t have the strength for questions. I’m tired and I’m scared and I’m mortal and it’s finally time for this to end. It’s time to close the door on the possibilities I never asked for and can’t bear the idea of clinging to, and go back to the cold and the neon and the endless road.
“You follow me,” says Pippa, and she turns away from the entrance, making her way toward the side of the building.
Apple told me to follow and so I follow, Laura at my back, London passing by around us. Emma told me to trust and so I trust, letting this Dullahan I barely know lead me into the shadows at the side of the museum, letting her be the one who sets the speed of our journey. I don’t know if this counts as the road to the Underworld, but I don’t want to take any chances, and so I don’t let myself look back.
Maybe that rule is only for Orpheus. Maybe Laura is the one who shouldn’t be looking back, maybe Laura is the one who needs to be careful. But if I look back to tell her that, will I be condemning myself to a mortal lifespan and a roll of the dice when I finally die, shooting for the snake eyes that give me back the ghostroads, knowing that all the world’s odds are against me? I can’t risk it. I won’t risk it.
We reach a stretch of smooth stone wall. The look Pippa gives me is unreadable, too many things all jumbled together in an impossible swirling soup.
“Do you know what comes now?” she asks.
“I will go to the location of the gate,” I say. “I will descend into the Underworld.”
“You will,” Pippa agrees. She touches the wall. The stone ripples.
“The girls like you always do,” she says, voice soft, and steps through the stone, into the darkness on the other side, and is gone.
Laura and I follow her. The wall yields for us like mist, and we, too, are gone.
What else is there?