Liraz had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasnt lovenot that she had any experience of that oneand it wasnt hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.
It was shame. Shame never faded, and Liraz realized only now that this was the baseline of her emotionsher bitter,
curdled normaland that her soul was poisoned soil in which nothing good could grow.
I cant imagine you give apologies , Ten had said before, and shed been right, but Liraz thought that she would now. She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasnt reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and mightif she werent Liraz and it werent unthinkablehave been sobbing.
In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and heres where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.
30
NEARER AND TOUCHING
First there was no one.
Then the sense of her, nothing Akiva could pinpoint. He just knew he wasnt alone anymore.
Then the door creaked closed and the air gave her up. A glimmer and Karou stood before him like the fulfillment of a wish.
Dont hope , he warned himself. You dont know why shes come. But just being this near her, his skin felt alive, and his hands, his hands had their own memoriessilk and pulse and flutterand their own will. He clasped them behind his back to have something to do with them besides reach for her, which of course was out of the question. Just because shed looked at him back in the cavernit was the way shed looked, he argued with himself, like shed given up trying not todidnt mean that she wanted anything more from him than this temporary alliance.
Hello, she said. Her gaze dropped to the floor as a blush crept up her cheeks, and Akivas battle against hope was lost.
She was blushing. If she was blushing
Godstars, shes beautiful.
Hello, he said, low and raw, and now his hope exceeded itself. Say it again , he willed her. If she did, maybe she remembered the temple of Ellai, when theyd removed their festival masks and seen each others faces for the first time since the battlefield at Bullfinch.
Hello , theyd said then, like a whispered incantation. Hello , like a promise. Hello , breath to breath.
The last breath before their first kiss.
Um, she said now, darting a quick glance up to meet his eyes, then veering it wide again, flushing even deeper. Hi.
Close enough , Akiva thought, a buoyancy cautiously rising in him as he watched her take a step and then another into this room hed claimed for himself. They were alone, finally. They could talk, free of the watchful eyes of all their comrades. That she was here at all, it meant something. And with the blaze of the look theyd shared in the cavern, he couldnt help but hope that it meant everything.
Having hope was like dangling himself over a chasm and putting the rope in her hands. She could annihilate him if she wanted to.
She was looking around, though there wasnt much to see. It was a small chamber, bare but for a long stone slab in its center and a few ledges holding very old candles. The slab was, Akiva supposed, unusual. It was cut more precisely than the rest of the rock surfaces here. It was smooth, its hard corners rare in a world of curves.
I remember this room, Karou said in a remote voice. This is where the dead were prepared for burial.
That was vaguely unsettling. Hours Akiva had lain here in his dreaming, in the place inside his pain. He had lain here like a corpse, where how many corpses had lain before him? I didnt know, he answered, hoping it wasnt offensive, him being here.
She trailed her fingertips over the slab. She was faced away from him, and he watched her shoulders rise and fall with her breathing. Her hair hung in a braid, blue as the heart of a flame. It wasnt neat. The soft hairs at her nape had all come unbound and tufted out like down. Longer loose strands of blue were tucked behind her ears, all except one stray that lay curved against her cheek.
Akiva felt, in his fingers, the desire to brush it back for her. To brush it back and linger, and feel the warmth of her neck.
Wed dare one another to come in and lie here, Karou said. The kids, I mean. She made a slow circle around the table, stopping to face him from the far side of it so it made a kind of barrier between them. She looked up at the ceiling. It was high, rising to a peak and funneling to a shaft in the center, like a chimney. Thats for the souls, she told him. To release them to the sky so they wouldnt be trapped in the mountain. We used to say that if you fell asleep in here, your soul would think you were dead, and