"Don't close it!" Dahlia's voice cracked through the mahogany silence as her pale fingers clamped the coffin lid.
Screams cut the room into jagged pieces. Cameras pivoted. Fernanda Hayes shouted something about a prank and then about law. Gideon Schuster moved like a shadow between the crowd and the coffin.
"Stand back!" Gideon barked. His hand was on the family's carved banister; his face was calm and sharp like a blade made of glass. He didn't step forward to touch her coffin; he stepped forward to control the people who might thrash it.
A chorus of phones hummed. An older cousin shoved past, filmed with hands that shook. "Get security! Get the priest!" someone yelled. "Is she alive? Call the doctor!" another voice demanded.
Dahlia pushed. Her hand closed on wood and then on air, and then she felt sunlight for the first time since black soil. The light smelled like a city under rain. The crowd gasped and leaned in together.
"Good timing," a small voice chirped from the coffin edge.
Dahlia blinked. A pale dot of a thing hovered above her hand, eyes like pinpricks and a mouth that clicked like a hungry hinge.
"Who—" Dahlia started, but she tasted metal and dust and something sweet under the ribs of memory. Her throat worked. Her ribs remembered lungs.
"Shh," the dot said. "Whisp."
"You named yourself Whisp?" she asked, fingers curling around the lid. She pushed harder.
Whisp tugged at her sleeve—no, at
