The last thing Reika heard was a child's voice saying Mommy. Then the dark took her, and whatever held the six of them turned its attention elsewhere.
Rose opened her eyes in a glasshouse.
Not the cold stone of the Kagu courtyard. Not a ring of worried faces. A long conservatory of flawless glass, the light coming through it white and even, as if it had been filtered and measured. Row after row of roses ran away from her down raised beds.
Blue roses.
Not hers. Hers were a little wild at the edges, always leaning toward the nearest person, always smelling faintly of rain on a page. These were too deep a blue, their petals set in rings so even they looked machined. The air was warm and damp and smelled of nothing at all, no soil, no green, only a thin sweetness like perfume sprayed in an empty room. It was a beautiful garden, and nothing in it was alive.
