Page 46 of 13 Nights

"Your family had this," I say. "For how long?"

"Since the 1840s. My father hid it after your mother's investigation," he says to Ashley. "He was afraid she'd use it."

The rage arrives exactly where it belongs, cold and deliberate and aimed at generations of Hadley caution that watched me suffer this anniversary every October rather than risk testing a single marginal note.

"Go home, Tom."

"I brought the⁠—"

"I heard you. You brought a document your family buried for 180 years while I relived my own decapitation every October. You found it this morning and drove to the place where it might have been useful at any point since the nineteenth century." My voice drops to the register Ashley has learned means the conversation has reached its terminus. "Thank you. Now go home before I say something neither of us will recover from."

Tom looks at Ashley. She nods once, and something passes between them that I can't read and don't attempt to.

Tom holds the page out to Ashley. "Keep it," he says. "My family has kept enough."

She takes it. Tom walks to his car and pulls onto the road without looking back.

Ashley watches him leave. Then she turns back to me.

"He didn't have to come."

"He didn't have to hide the document for generations."

"He didn't hide it, his father did. He didn't have to give it to me, but he did."

"I'm aware of the distinction. I will be more generous about it when I'm not at the place where I died, having just endured the 250th consecutive performance of my own execution."

My hands are still framing her face. I haven't let go. I should let go.

"How did you find the convergence point?"

"From the Hadley observation records. Every documented Ride follows the same compass bearing from the Old Dutch Church. On the anniversary, the route extends along the old military road. I overlaid the waypoints and the convergence point landed here, where Johann Brandt's unit took fire."

"You used two hundred years of hand-drawn maps to calculate where the Ride touches the place of my death."

"Yes."

"And then you drove to it alone in the dark on the night the Ride was guaranteed to pass through."

"Tom was with me."

"Tom arrived after you did."

She doesn't deny it. The beam has settled against her leg, pointing at the ground, and in the reflected glow I can see the adrenaline still burning behind her composure.

Her jaw is set. Her breathing is too even, the kind of deliberate rhythm a person imposes when the alternative is losing it entirely.

"We need to go," she says. Then she stops. Her gaze drops to the asphalt beneath my feet, lifts to the tree line. I watch her calculate the distance against data she already has.

Her hand finds my arm. Her grip tightens.

"Severin. You're outside the boundary."

The realization strikes with the same force of the cannon that took my life. She's right.

The Ride carried me past the geographic limit, and its destruction left me on the far side. The ordinary cage hasn't reasserted itself. This ground hasn't felt my weight since the morning I died, and the agony that normally accompanies a boundary crossing hasn't arrived.

"The Ride expanded it," I say. "On the anniversary, the route extends past the ordinary boundary. When the Ride collapsed, the expansion must have held long enough⁠—"