For a second I couldn't move. I just stood there at Silas's desk with the ledger open in front of me, and Maren stood in the doorway in her yellow coat, holding a paper bag.
"Ada?" she said again. "What are you doing here?"
I closed the ledger. It wasn't a decision, exactly. My hand just did it, the way your hand slams a door when something is chasing you. The cover came down with a soft thud, and the dust on the desk puffed up around it, and Maren's eyes followed the movement.
"What are you doing here?" I said. It came out sharper than I meant it to. I tried again. "I mean — how did you know I was here?"
"You weren't at the shop," she said. "You said you'd come in at nine to help with the delivery. You didn't come. You didn't call. So I rang your flat, and there was no answer, and then I remembered this place." She lifted the paper bag a little. "I brought sandwiches. I thought you'd forgotten to eat."
She had remembered. Last night, at my kitchen table, after the ledger had turned its own page and written my name for today, I had told her about the greenhouse. Not everything. Just the shape of it. That Silas had left me something here, and that I had to come back in the morning.
And now she was here. In the morning. In the greenhouse. With my name in the ledger for today, and her name right underneath it.
"Maren," I said. "You need to leave."
She laughed a little. "That's a warm welcome."
"I'm serious. Please. Go back to the car. I'll explain everything tonight, I promise, but right now you need to get out of here."
She didn't move. She looked past me, at the desk, at the ledger sitting on it with the dust puffed up around the cover. Then she looked at the shelves, at the glass fruit hanging on the wires, at the golden light coming down through the fogged panes.
"Ada," she said slowly, "what is this place?"
"It's my grandfather's greenhouse," I said. "Silas. The one I told you about. He grew glass fruit here. It's — it's a collection. That's all it is."
"That's all it is," she repeated. She took a step inside. The door creaked on its broken hinge behind her. "Then why do you look like you've seen a ghost?"
I looked at the third shelf, near the door. The plum was still there, at the edge of the shelf, trembling. The crack had widened since I'd looked at it a minute ago. I could see it from where I stood now, a dark line splitting the pale glass, and at the widest point the two sides had started to pull apart, like something inside was pushing its way out.
"Maren, listen to me," I said. "I know this sounds mad. I know how it sounds. But you have to believe me, because I don't have time to make it sound sensible. This place — the orchard — it takes a life. Every time a name is written in that book, someone dies. Yesterday it was supposed to be you."
The paper bag slipped in her hand. She caught it before it fell. "What did you say?"
"Yesterday," I said. "Your name was in the ledger, with yesterday's date. I crossed it out. I wrote my name instead. I thought that would be enough. I thought I could take your place." My voice was shaking. "But it wasn't enough. It only bought you a day. Your name is in the book again. For today. And so is mine."
She stared at me. Then she looked down at the ledger on the desk, and then back at me, trying to decide whether I was joking, or ill, or whether something had actually happened to me in the night.
"Ada," she said, very carefully, the way you talk to someone standing too close to the edge of something. "Did you sleep at all last night?"
"That's not it," I said. "I know how it sounds. But look." I pointed at the third shelf. "Look at the plum."
She turned and looked. The plum sat at the edge of the shelf, trembling, the crack running down its middle like a wound. As we watched, a thin sliver of glass, no bigger than a fingernail, broke away from the edge of the crack and fell onto the wooden shelf with a sound like a dropped pin.
Maren went very still.
"That's the plum for me," I said. "Every piece of fruit in here is a person. A living person. The orchard holds their life in the glass, and when the date comes, the orchard lets go. That's the breaking you hear. That's the death." I swallowed. "My date is today. So is yours."
She set the paper bag down on the floor, slowly. "Ada. That's a piece of glass fruit. It's old. Old glass cracks. It happens."
"Then why is it trembling?" I said. "Old glass doesn't tremble, Maren."
She didn't answer that. She walked past me to the third shelf and stopped in front of the plum, looking at it the way she'd look at a book with a torn page.
"Which one is mine?" she said.
"What?"
"If every piece of fruit is a person, which one is mine? Show me."
I didn't want to. But there was nowhere the orchard couldn't reach. The ledger had written her name at my kitchen table, miles from here. Distance didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was the date, and the date was today.
I didn't know which fruit was Maren's. I'd never looked. The names were etched into the glass, so fine you could barely see them unless the light caught them right.
I picked up the magnifying glass from the desk and held it over the plum, tilting it toward the light.
The etching was there, on the curve of the glass, in letters so small they looked like a scratch. I read them, and my mouth went dry.
*Ada Lindqvist.*
I put the magnifying glass down. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped it.
"It's mine," I said. "The plum is mine."
Maren looked at me. "Then where's mine?"
"I don't know," I said. "But it's here. It has to be here. Every name in the ledger has a fruit."
She started looking. She walked along the shelves slowly, her yellow coat bright against the green glass. I followed her.
"Here," Maren said. She had stopped at the far end of the greenhouse, where the light was thinnest, where the wires hung lowest. "This one."
It was an apple, small and green, hanging from a wire near the back wall. It looked like a dozen other apples nearby. But Maren was staring at it the way you stare at something you recognize without knowing why.
"How do you know?" I said.
"I don't," she said. "I just — I feel it. Like it's looking back at me."
I held the magnifying glass up to the apple and tilted it toward the light. The etching was there, on the curve of the glass, in the same tiny letters.
*Maren Solberg.*
I lowered the magnifying glass. I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. Maren was watching my face.
"So it's true," she said quietly. "All of it."
"I think so," I said. "I wish it wasn't."
She reached out toward the apple. Her fingers stopped an inch from the glass.
"Don't touch it," I said, too fast, too loud.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know what happens if you do." Silas kept this book for sixty years. Sixty years, Maren. And his note says the keeper doesn't die on the date in the book. The keeper dies when the book is passed on, or when the book is returned. That's the price of the keeping. You don't get to die on your own day. You die when you give the book away."
She looked at me. "And you took the book."
"The ledger asked me to bring it here. It wrote my name and called me Keeper. It said the orchard accepts the keeping, and the debt is paid." I laughed. "But the debt isn't paid. My name is still there for today. So is yours. The keeping wasn't the payment. The keeping was just — the job. The payment is still owed. One of us, Maren. Today. The orchard doesn't care who. It only cares that someone dies."
She was quiet for a long time. The greenhouse was quiet too, except for the plum, trembling on its shelf at the other end.
"Then we find another way," Maren said. "Your grandfather kept this book for sixty years. He must have found a way to live with it."
"What happened to Miriam?" I said. "The woman in the photograph. Summer 1962. Dead a year later. Silas never talked about her. My mother said she died young, and that Silas never got over it, and that was all."
Maren looked at the green apple hanging in front of her, at her own name etched into the glass. "And Elias Thorne. Silas bought him a year, and the orchard took the year from Silas. So the keeping costs you time. Every trade, the orchard takes the time from you. A year for Elias. A day for me, yesterday." She looked at me. "And today the orchard wants a life. Not a year. Not a day. A life."
Maren reached out again toward the green apple. This time I didn't stop her. Her fingers closed around the glass, the way you'd hold something that might break.
The apple was warm. Cold glass, in a cold greenhouse, and the apple was warm, like something alive.
"Maren," I said. "Put it down."
"It's warm," she said. "Ada, it's warm. Like a hand."
"Put it down."
She didn't. She held it, and she looked at it, and then she looked at me, and her face had changed. Fear, yes. But underneath the fear, something else. Something like recognition.
"Ada," she said. "I remember this place."
"What?"
"I've been here before. My mother brought me here, when I was small. I remember the glass fruit, and the light, and — " She stopped, and her hand tightened around the apple. "I remember a man. An old man, sitting at a desk. He gave me an apple. A glass apple. He said, 'This one is yours. Look after it.'"
The plum, on the third shelf at the other end of the greenhouse, gave a sharp crack, like a knuckle popping. We both turned.
The crack had split wider. A piece of glass the size of a coin had fallen away from the plum's side, and through the gap, I could see something inside the plum. Not glass. Not hollow. Something dark, and moving, very slightly, like something breathing.
Maren's hand was still closed around the green apple. The apple was glowing now, faintly, from inside, a soft green light pulsing under her fingers, in time with something. In time with her heartbeat, maybe. In time with mine.
And then the ledger, on the desk behind us, opened itself.
I heard the cover lift. I heard the pages turn, fast, like someone rifling through a book looking for a name. And then the pages stopped, and the greenhouse went silent, and a new smell came into the air, sharp and metallic, like fresh ink.
Maren let go of the apple. It swung gently on its wire. The glow faded.
"Don't turn around," she whispered.
But I was already turning. I had to see. The ledger lay open on the desk, and the page it had turned to was blank except for a single line, written in red ink, still wet.
*One name, by nightfall. Or the keeper pays for both.*