My father once told me our brains are wired to remember the effects of pain. Burn your hand once on a hot stove, and your brain will never let you forget it. Burn = pain. Pain = bad.
But the interesting thing about pain, and our brains, is that we never can remember the exact sensation. You can remember how it feels to fall in love. You can remember what a silky flower petal feels like, or the softness of your baby blanket, or the prickliness of a cat’s tongue across the back of your hand. But you can never remember specifically what pain feels like.
You only know it hurts, and that it’s bad.
I remember falling that day, and hitting the ground. I broke an arm and an ankle, and I remember it hurting so much that I never wanted, or even dreamed, about flying again. I can’t remember what it felt like specifically, but I know it hurt like hell, because I bawled the entire way to a nearby Shaman’s house. And then I refused to go to the greenhouse for well over a year, terrified it might happen again.
Even to this day, I’m fearful of heights.
I think about this now, this first memory of mine. And I realize ... I don’t know Jonah’s first memory. Or Kellan’s. We’ve known each other for years, shared so much, but I never thought to ask either of them this question. And now, I’m to never have the chance to ask, and it makes me so angry and so unbelievably desolate I can barely stand it.
The truth is, I’m living through the pain of losing not only my husband, but my other Connection as well and I am having a hard time conceptualizing that someday, I’ll come to accept I’ve gone through it, but won’t remember the specifics of just how it tears me apart. Because I’m drowning in it right now. It’s all I can see.
It consumes me.
When it comes to Connections, everyone always talks about how great they are. Soul mates, they say. Love. Acceptance. Friendship. Loyalty. There are a million great reasons why Connections are great. But no one tells you what’ll happen if the other person dies. Not really, anyway. No one tells you how your chest hollows and doesn’t fill back up. No one tells you how your will to function, or hell, even live, evaporates in less than a blink of an eye. No one tells you that your whole body feels like your funny bone has been hit, and that someone’s kicked you in the gut at the same time. No one tells you your brain short circuits, so that anything pleasurable is lost to you and that the pain is all you can feel.
“You feel different,” Cicely tells me.
Kellan feels so cold. I don’t know how long we’ve been up here, me holding him, unwilling to let go.
“You should help your friend,” she says again. “Before it’s too late.”
I open my mouth to answer, but tears come before words. It’s already too late, I want to tell her. Doesn’t she see the hole in his chest, where his heart used to rest?
“You were so brave outside. I was not scared as much when I saw how brave you were.”
I wish I could be brave right now.
She takes my hand and slides it down to the hole that used to house the muscle that kept him alive. “This is where you should fix him. He’s missing his heart. You’re a Creator. Can’t you make him a new heart?”
I cry even harder. But I do as she asks. I made Bios a body, didn’t I? I didn’t love him like I do Kellan, so I make this man a new heart, so his body is at least whole.
She smiles at me, clapping her hands together like I’ve just done a wonderful thing. “Now, make it work!”
If only it was that easy ...
Except, maybe it can be?
Enlilkian and his kind took life essences from Magicals to replace what they’d lost. I’ve ... I’ve just taken every last drop from the most powerful Creator ever to exist. He ... he had the power of reanimation, Bios said. Could it really be that easy? Just ... take what I’ve stolen and put it in Kellan?
I have nothing left to lose. So, I curl my fingers around the new heart I’ve just created in Kellan’s chest. I think, please gods, please let this work. And then, for good or bad, I force every last bit of life force I stole from Enlilkian right into that muscle.
Cicely tells me, “Quick! Take your hand out!”
The moment I do, her small hands cover the hole I’ve left behind. Her smile is so sunny in the hazy, smoking wreck we’re sitting in. “Mama was right about you.”
Wh-what?
She lifts up her hands like a magician, all voilà and flourish; shiny, pink new skin has formed over the hole. I ... I ...
Am I hallucinating? Is this real?
I touch the skin. It’s warm. Beneath my pads of my fingertips, I feel ... a heartbeat.
Oh my gods. His heart is beating.
My hand moves slowly up and then down.
He’s breathing. Kellan is breathing.
I can finally breathe, too.