“Could I…” My throat is dry, and I swallow. “Could I have a drink?”
“Isoka?” Meroe looks up, and her face is like a punch in the gut. Her eyes are red from crying, and every line of her speaks of exhaustion. Nevertheless, she hurries over, the half-full waterskin glugging in her hand. “Here. Be careful.”
I drink, wincing with every swallow. I can feel the pressure of bandages, and the wet squelching when I move tells me I’m still bleeding. That seems … bad.
“You were supposed to stay out of it,” Meroe says, while I drink. “Sister Cadua warned you.”
“Nobody told the crabs.” I finish the skin. “No one else was close enough.”
“Isoka, please.” She closes her eyes. “I know you want to help. But if you do this again, you could die. And if you die, I…” She swallows, and continues in a more level voice. “If you die we won’t have any way to find the Garden.”
“I can’t just hide when a crab is eating people.” I pull myself up a little, grimacing at the pain. “They’re only here because I told them it would be safe.”
That’s the difference, I realize, even as I say the words. Back in Kahnzoka, if monsters had been tearing the Sixteenth Ward apart, I would have gotten as far away from it as possible. The ward boss didn’t have a responsibility to defend the ward, only to enforce the rules. The only promise I’d made was the promise of pain for those who’d stepped out of line. But here—
“I know,” Meroe says.
“You were the one who wanted to save everyone.” My throat feels thick.
“I know.”
There’s a long silence. Meroe’s hands are clenched tight in her lap, skin stretched across her knuckles.
I let my voice drop. “You have to heal me.”
She blinks. “I can’t.”
“You need me up and fighting. I’ve seen how much Zarun and Karakoa can do, but it’s not enough. Another Melos adept—”
“I can’t.” Meroe looks down at her clenched fists. “I tried healing people before we left, and I couldn’t do it. The power wasn’t there.”
“What happened to Berun wasn’t your fault,” I say. “You told me you couldn’t do it, and I pushed you into it. That’s why it went wrong.”
“You don’t know that,” Meroe says.
“You healed me once.” I touch the line of blue marks across my face.
“Maybe I just got lucky.”
“I’ll bet on that luck again.”
Meroe shakes her head. “If it … goes badly, then we won’t have any way to find the Garden.”
“At the rate we’re losing fighters we’re not going to make it to the Garden.” I’d seen the wounded stumbling back from the head of the column, and the bodies pushed to the sides of the bridge.
“I…” Meroe looks up at me. “You’d trust me to try? After … after everything?”
I nod, wordlessly.
She unclenches her fingers, one by one, and I can hear the joints pop.
* * *
Finding privacy in the midst of the tight-packed column isn’t easy, but fortunately Soliton’s twisted architecture provides. The camp sprawls out around a support pylon and its ring-shaped platform, and a spiral staircase wraps around it, leading to more ledges above and below. Meroe helps me negotiate the staircase down an agonizing couple of turns until we reach another, smaller platform, thickly overgrown with mushrooms and mold. Meroe tells Thora to wait at the top and not let anyone bother us.
“There could be crabs down here, you realize,” Meroe says, as we take the steps one at a time.
“I’ll handle them,” I manage, between gasps. It’s a joke, because I can barely support my own weight.
Finally, we reach the ledge. There are no crabs visible, just a thick carpet of spongy gray-green mushrooms broken by towering spires of larger growths. Meroe helps me sit, and the fungus makes for a surprisingly comfortable surface. The noise of the camp above us is a distant buzz, and a little bit of lantern light outlines the platform and the bridges leading off from it. In every other direction, there are only the distant motes of the Center’s colored lights.
“Okay.” I’m sitting across from Meroe, suddenly uncertain. The last time she did this, I was unconscious. “What should I do?”
“Lie down, I guess.” Meroe tugs nervously at her hair. “You might pass out.”
I lie down. “Do I need to undo these bandages?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t need to see the injury. I can … feel it, I guess? It’s hard to explain.” She takes a deep breath. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
I nod, quickly and decisively, trying not to betray the roil in my gut. Sitting by my side, ready to lay her hands on my skin, is a ghulwitch. Foul, unclean, the incarnation of filth.
And if she gets it wrong, I’ll end up like Berun, bloating and bursting and screaming the whole time.
But she won’t get it wrong.
“Meroe?”
She’s staring at her fingers, stretching them. “Hmm?”
“Can I kiss you?”
Silence. My heart stops.
“You said you needed some warning,” I say, desperately. “But I thought”—no, don’t say just in case, rot rot rot; think of something else—“if you’re not ready, that’s fine, I just wanted to check it’s—”
“Isoka.”
“Yes?”
“Please be quiet.”
She leans over me, supporting herself with one hand. Our lips meet, a dry brush at first, and then more, her mouth opening against mine, hot breath tickling my skin. I push against her, desperately, craning my neck when she starts to pull away. The wound in my chest gives a stab of pain, and I fall back to the deck.
Ow. Rot.
“You can do this,” I tell her.
In spite of her hollow eyes and gaunt cheeks, Meroe is smiling. “I can do this.”
She puts her hands on me, and does it.
If you ever have the chance to be awake while a ghulwitch heals you, I do not recommend you take it. A gentle heat throughout my body contracts to burning fever where I’m torn and bleeding. I feel something move inside me, as though there were rats under my skin, burrowing around and looking for an escape. The heat changes, becoming something else, raw energy that stimulates every nerve at once, simultaneously orgasm and agony, sensation too strong to touch, like staring directly at the sun. It lasts for roughly ten million years, and then stops. I slowly become aware that I am still breathing.
“Isoka?” Meroe’s voice is distant and timid.
“Am I…” My own voice sounds like a stranger’s. Blood roars like the ocean in my ears. “Am I about to explode?”
“I don’t think so,” Meroe says. “I think it worked.”
I open my eyes. Meroe is leaning over me, looking worried. I put one hand on my stomach, worm it down under the bandage, to where I would expect to find the ragged edge of the wound. There is only smooth skin, slicked with leftover blood.
“How do you feel?” Meroe says.
The answer is, as though I’d been struck by lightning, full to the brim with a strange, crackling energy. I sit up—too fast, my head spins—wrap my arms around her, and kiss her again. The energy seems to flow into her, too, lighting her up from the inside. She kisses me back with the same desperation I felt, moments or millennia before. My hands are sliding down her flanks, and hers are fumbling under my shirt, undoing first the bandages and then my chest wrap.
“Meroe.” I speak in fragments, between gasps. “I don’t. Exactly. Know what I’m doing.”
“I have. Mmm. An idea.” When I pull back for a moment and raise an eyebrow, she gives me an innocent look. “I had … instructional books.”
“Of course you did.” I grin, and kiss her again, and pull her close. “You’re a very strange princess.”
26
“Hagan?” I keep my voice soft. Meroe is lying beside me, snoring gently, one brown shoulder protruding from where my shirt serves as makeshift blanket. “Are you there?”
Eddica energy flows in a thick stream through the pillar behind us, stronger down here near the Deeps than it was back in the Upper Stations. I’m hoping that means it’ll be easier for Hagan to talk to me, but I’m still surprised when he actually appears, gray motes drifting out to form the approximate shape of a human and then slowly sharpening into detailed features. It apparently surprises him, too, because he looks down at his hands with exactly the goofy smile he used to wear. Something inside my chest clenches.
“Hi,” he says. His voice is clearer now, with only a touch of the strange distortion. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“So far.” I sit up a little, tugging the blanket. “I should have listened to you earlier.”
He gives an awkward shrug. “I’m not sure I would have listened to me, in your position.”
My heart is beating fast. This is the most coherent he’s been, by far, and I have to ask. “Hagan, how did you get here?” I hesitate. “Do you know that you’re…”
“Dead?” He nods. “Honestly I wish I could tell you. I don’t remember anything from before you came aboard, and even then not much until you found that node in the Deeps. How did you get here?”