They stayed on the floor for a while.
Not because no one was capable of standing. Because the floor was the right place for what the room was holding and everyone understood this without it being said. The particular human instinct that when something is too large for the upright position you find the ground and you let the ground hold some of it.
Kris came down from his chair eventually.
He sat on the floor beside his sister, on the other side of her from Katherine, and the three of them sat in the center of the group in the winter morning light and said nothing for a long time, and the saying of nothing was the right thing.
It was Samantha who spoke first.
She had been sitting near the window with her knees drawn up and her blue eyes very still, the wind element in her quiet in the particular way it went quiet when she was processing something large — not absent, but gathered, turned inward rather than outward. When she spoke it was with the careful directness she always brought to things that mattered.
"Eli," she said. "What happened to him."
KaSandra looked at the window.
"He was raised by the church," she said. "They were good people. I watched, at a distance, for the first years. Long enough to be certain he was safe. Long enough to see that he was—" She paused. "Happy. In the way children are happy who do not know what they came from. Who have no reason to be anything other than what their ordinary life has made them."
"You stopped watching," Samantha said.
"I had to," KaSandra said. "Watching was its own kind of not letting go. And he deserved to be let go. He deserved to be entirely his own life, not a thing I watched from a distance to manage my own grief with."
The room held this.
Thomas, sitting near the doorframe with his back against the wall and his legs stretched in front of him — a position Katherine had never seen him in, the full horizontal surrender of someone who had decided the floor was appropriate — looked at KaSandra with the green eyes and the expression he had when he was understanding something that changed the shape of something else.
"He's still out there," Thomas said. "Somewhere. His line."
"Yes," KaSandra said. "Somewhere."
"You've never looked."
"No," KaSandra said. "That was the decision. That was the line."
Thomas looked at the ceiling.
He accepted this the way he accepted things that were final — completely, without pressing for more, the acknowledgment that some decisions are the person's to make and the making of them is not something the room is entitled to revisit.
The floor held its quiet.
Then Niall looked at KaSandra and said, in the particular tone he used when he was going to say something direct and had decided the directness was more respectful than the alternative: "The forbidden magic. You told us in the kitchen. You die if you use it alone."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"But you have the vial now," Niall said. "The one the girl gave you. So the dying part is different."
"The dying part is distributed," KaSandra said. "Which is not the same as gone. Each person present takes a fraction of the cost. The fraction is survivable. The whole was not."
"So if you use it in Miralba," Kristen said, "all of us feel it."
"Yes."
"All of us."
"Yes."
Kristen looked around the floor at the group assembled in it. At Niall. At Courtney. At the full seventeen sitting in the morning light having just come back from watching a seventeen-year-old girl walk away from a church in the dark with nothing left.
"Okay," Kristen said.
She said it the way it had been said in this house before, the word carrying its full weight, and around the room the same word moved through the group in the way it moved — not always spoken, sometimes just settled into, but present in each of them, the decision made.
KaSandra looked at Kristen.
"You understand what you are agreeing to," she said.
"Yes," Kristen said. "We all do."
KaSandra looked at the room.
At the seventeen of them on the floor in the morning light, having seen what they had seen, having come to this from opposite ends of three hundred years, and choosing this anyway.
Something in her expression was the expression from the kitchen. The one adjacent to warmth that was the most warmth KaSandra's face knew how to hold. The one that had appeared when she drank her coffee and was here again now, fuller than it had been then, because the room was fuller than it had been then and she was more in it.
She looked at Kris.
He looked at her.
"You heard them," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Together," he said. "Or not at all."
"Together," she said. "Or not at all."
Kris looked at the vial that Katherine was still holding, the dark glass with the old dark liquid in it, the grandmother's gift across three hundred years.
"Then we go prepared," he said.
Thomas pushed himself up from the floor with the particular effort of a man who had been sitting on hard ground long enough to feel it in every joint and was not going to complain about it. He stood and looked at the room and the room looked back at him.
"Tonight," he said.
The word landed the way it had landed when he said it in Chapter 18 — with the specific weight of a word that means the deciding is over and the doing begins.
"Tonight," the room said.
Not all at once. Not in unison. But one by one, in the particular way agreement moved through this group, each person arriving at the word in their own time, and the word accumulating as it went, heavier with each person who added their voice to it, until it was the full weight of seventeen people having decided the same thing.
KaSandra stood up.
She stood the way she always stood — straight, certain, the long dark coat settling around her, the golden eyes steady.
But she was standing in the center of the room.
Not at the edge.
In the center.
Among them.
And that, Katherine thought, was the version of KaSandra that had always been there under the three hundred years and the armor and the wound that didn't close. The version that had been sitting on a hillside at seventeen looking at the dark sky. The version that had handed Eli to a woman at a church door and walked back into the dark. The version that had run toward the field rather than away from it, not because she had nothing left to lose, but because she had understood, in the running, that this was what she was for.
This.
This specific thing.
This room, and the people in it, and the thing they were about to do together.
Katherine looked at her.
KaSandra looked at her.
"Alright," Katherine said.
She looked at the group — at every face, each one, the full seventeen assembled in the living room of the house that had held them through all of it and was about to release them again.
She thought about everything they had been given.
The vial. The understanding of how the hunters were stopped. The map and the address. The full version of KaSandra. The knowledge of the book and Alyssa and what taking the book would do. William in position. Ashton in the field.
Everything they had come to this moment carrying.
"Let's finish this," she said.