Penny paced the small room with the too-large bed, turning so many times that her foot threatened to wear a hole in the rug. It was a nice rug, too, an antique settled with dust in its corners, who had barely been disturbed in years. The rug saved the floor from the indignity of feet, and that was important, too, as it was an old floor, which whined at the slightest kind of aggravation. The bed, above them, used to shut them up, but fifteen years ago its boards had begun giving out, too. Now, its load was significantly lighter, but it was still silent, and any time Ms. Whittaker turned on it, it grieved.

There were many old rooms in the house. Most of them were filled with old furniture, where they were not filled with old thoughts, old books, or old air. Nothing got out of the house, and nothing entered. The people inside were living in amber, but some places moved slower than others. Ms. Whittaker's room had been moving just behind schedule for ten years, and Penny's, just ahead of it. Ms. Pendragon, senior, had a room just down the hall, and it was completely silent right now. It was waiting like a dog, its shadows pacing at its own edge, but no one would see them, because no one would enter it.

"Did I do it?"

Ms. Whittaker was silent.

"Is she going to be okay?"

They had been here before. Ms. Whittaker sagged on the edge of her bed, her head lowered in parallel with where the bed bent beneath her. It was a slight movement. She was small, and smaller these days.

"Why aren't they keeping her at the Acedias' house, still?" Penny demanded.

"It's better for her to be here. It's still a world-class hospital, Penelope."

"It's so far," Penny said. "It's so far."

It was.

Her mother opened up her arms. Penny leaned into them, but she was beginning to feel cold even when someone was holding her. She felt, as she did as a muse, that she might not entirely be there, but this time it was because someone else was taking her place, just underneath her skin. "We'll go tomorrow to see her," her mother said, while holding her as tightly as possible.

"Okay," Penny said. She couldn't think of anything else to fill the hole in the air.

---

Penny sprung out of the van with a vengeance. It smelled like roadside food and vegan food alike, indicating a deep schism in the culinary habits of the supposedly monolithic Covenant of the Cousinhood. Penny had opted for the roadside food, but she had regretted it, because nothing stuck with her like the taste of that roadside hot dog. Its mediocrity might never leave her mouth again.

The hospital was a gleaming obelisk in the center of the town, a flowered oasis surrounded by ugly, cruel buildings in the surrounding blocks. Guinevere Pendragon was on the top floor. There were people from the news all holed up in their trucks, and Kay, from amongst the pack of uncles, went out and began arguing with one of them. "You shouldn't be here," he yelled. "We will talk to the police about this. Get off the property and tell your buddies to get off the property, you goddamn greedy vultures, leave my mother alone."

A startled newscaster slunk back into her van. Surrounded by the remaining five uncles and several aunts, the kids were escorted into the building and up floors, by means of a glass elevator, until the lobby fell away and the glass revealed only the elevator shaft. They removed themselves at the eleventh floor. The elevator seemed nervous, to Penny. They had to be approaching its weight limit. Given the sheer bulk of her family, this was unsurprising. If they wanted, they could bring down a lot more than elevators. If she was afraid of them, she couldn't imagine how the rest of the world felt.

A doctor met them outside. She had the kind look to her that healers should have, archetypally, as decided by Penny. "You're the Pendragons," she said. "Guinevere is right this way."

There wasn't much to the eleventh floor, apparently. They could barely stream through it and leave room for anyone else. Paintings adorned the otherwise sparse walls, quite a few of them expensive. Some were mere facsimiles of muse paintings, and these occasionally had a rose or two beneath them. The art muses were occasionally affiliated with the art of healing. Her family had been associated with everything. She'd seen offerings before.

We are the bridge between them and the thing past them, in the air, Guinevere had once said. The thing that they could not reach. Like their faith, we have declined in recent times. It is easy to believe in us, but you should never get used to it, nor should you incentivize it.

But once we did, Penny had responded, smartly referring to a history Guinevere had only begun to teach her. When she was well again, Penny would ask for everything. She would take out the books Guinevere had told her not to touch yet. She would lay them bare on the table, and she would see the people who lay past her, the people reaching back, and back, and back, to a place Penny could not reach, either.

Penny had been looking at a painting for too long. "Are you coming?" asked Salinger.

"Course," Penny said. "I'm not just going to dawdle out here."

"You're prone to dawdling," Jackson said, in reproach. She had cookies again.

Lance stood behind the door. He had flowers. Gwen, beside him, had a number of books. Bors was holding Bradbury in his arms. The baby didn't even understand why they were there. Penny didn't understand why they had even bothered bringing him. Penny didn't understand why they all had to come together, either. None of them ever got to say what they wanted if they travelled in a group.

Ms. Whittaker opened it, for her husband. Guinevere smiled as they came in, but only slightly. There were a lot more pipes now. She was very quiet, and very still, like the room. Someone had tried to decorate it, but they hadn't had much time to work on it. Everything was comfortable, but it also smelled sterile. Penny wanted to knock the flower vase over. Penny wanted to rip open the stuffed bear someone had put on the wall, and break the window, so that all the air in the room would leave. She was too afraid to even imagine touching the tubes, but she hated the machine, and the fearful nurse in the corner made her sad, so sad she was even angrier. She put a hand up to her mouth and breathed into it, loudly, then breathed out.

Walker kicked her from behind. "Be a little more respectful," he hissed.

Penny imagined him as a snake. She imagined the room as a forest. She imagined her grandmother's poems, trying to conjure up the version of her who said things, who did not not and say, "It's alright, dears," in a voice that wasn't entirely hers. Her grandmother still looked across the room at her, and her eyes were her, almost detached from her own skull. Penny could feel them, and she thought she might die inside of those watery pools, dragged down by every red vein.

I love you, thought Penny.

"Granma, we love you," said Jackson, throwing her arms around her grandmother. Their touch was gentle, but all of them hugged her, one by one. Penny was somewhere in the middle. There was no reason to acknowledge her, and her grandmother didn't.

Penny stepped back. Her arms were cold. They kept the room at a bleak temperature. It felt like the scrublands, out in Julia's book. Her mother put a hand over her shoulder and rubbed the thumb back and forth. Penny thought about Percival Pendragon. She wondered what his hand would feel like on her shoulder, and wondered what he would say to Guinevere. She imagined him out of the air, free from a book, and she imagined him laughing with his brothers and his mother. The room spilled over with light.

"She does need her rest," a nurse said.

Penny did not know how long they'd been there. They had been talking the whole time, but mainly to each other, in a way that only circumstantially involved her grandmother. Lance nodded. Ms. Whittaker looked up to him, sideways. Her hand eased on her daughter's shoulder.

"We won't impose," Lance said. "Love you, mom."

"Please impose again soon," Ms. Pendragon said. "I could not ask for better company."

Yes you could, thought Penny.

Think of something better to say, Penny said. Something stronger than I love you.

Penelope Pendragon, writing muse, could not find her words. She hoped she had said something at some point, but she couldn't remember saying it. Her tongue felt like a snake in her mouth. As they left, Penny looked back into the room at her grandmother, who was lying, silent, beneath the sheets. Her grandmother did not look up at her.

"I'll see you soon, Gwen," promised Penny. "Thank you for the box."

It was the last thing that echoed through the room.

Wolfe stiffened beside her, and his eyes, her own brown, looked back full of hardly concealed envy, which was a restraint on a much stronger hate. His teeth grit, grinding themselves down into the nubs they'd be when they were both old, and Penny pretended that she was ignoring him. She trailed in front of her cousins, near her uncles, who were angry at her, too, but in a quiet way. They were a generation more used to being the second-favorite, but they'd been passed over again.

Penny dared them to ask about the box. She could sense the electricity in the air, sense the storm about to come down on her, and she put herself at the back of the elevator. Her mother was on the opposite side, looking out. They were in silence until the van. People knew their faces well enough to leave them alone. None of them were wearing clothes that were that nice, so it wasn't obvious that they were royalty, but they had the kind of aura about them, a sternness, a gravity, that made the sun press heavier on their heads. Penny could feel her hair burning, even this far into fall.

"Stop calling her Gwen," said Wolfe, his voice almost drowned out by the bus, quite possibly intentionally.

Penny's brown eyes watched his, a flash of light burning through them before they entered a tunnel and went below the earth. "Why?"

"You bother her. She overexerts herself for you all the time."

He was on the far side of an empty row, his feet up on the two chairs next to his. There was enough room for Bors's children, there, when they grew up, but Penny and Wolfe might be gone by then. "She didn't," Penny insisted.

"Had to get in the last word. Had to visit her alone. Had to take her out of care so she could go to your friend's stupid book thing," Walker said, over the back of the chair. His face was beet red.

Penny stared up at him. It was no harder to fix him with the same look. Her body was stone. "Sure did. I have responsibilities. Gwen," she paused. She could see all of them striving to get at her, but well, they couldn't. "wants to be a part of my life."

"You're just a big show-off," snapped Jackson.

"Stop being such an attention hog," added Walker.

"You make her sick. You make her do dumb things!" yelled Saunders, in chorus.

"You're just angry that I'm a muse," Penny said, candidly as she could manage. "Mad that I was firstborn of the firstborn, that I carry the family on. I will continue to. Someday, I'll be the Gwen of this family, and maybe my kids, who will live in our house, will love each other more."

"Not if your idiot firstborn son abandons the family," said Lance, so far in the front that Penny had never even suspected he might be listening. "Tell us, Penelope, if you ever pull him out of the library. Ask him if he had anything to say to the people who depended on him, and tell him that he can't say them anymore. Tell me if his expression changes in the slightest, or if he keeps smiling, because it was never more than a game, and because this world was no more real, no more tragic, than any he ever inhabited."

"Don't take it out on her," Ms. Whittaker said. "She is a child."

"Not for long," Tristan said. Penny could not see him from amongst the brown-brushed heads in the front, the multiple imperfect approximations of what her father could be, could have been, but she could hear his voice.

Penny did not know how to defend herself, so she did not. She just let the cold feeling settle over her, like an ocean, and thought of what she'd say when she called Gwen, next, maybe as soon as she got home, and when the two of them laughed about this.