Page 54 of Night Shift

For a moment, neither of us moves.

Then she pushes back the covers and comes toward me.

Calliope steps onto the balcony barefoot. The air is cold enough to bite at her skin, but she barely seems to notice. She stands before me with her chin lifted, anger and exhaustion warring with something softer that I no longer deserve to expect.

“You know what you did,” she says.

I nod.

“I did it for you.”

She folds her arms. “You could have just asked me to stay.”

“You would have left.”

“And I would have come back.”

I look away.

“That,” I admit, “is the part I did not know how to trust.”

Her expression softens, but she looks past me toward the smothered city.

“So you took the sun away.”

There is no defense left to offer her.

“I was wrong.”

I have spoken to Calliope as an immortal from the moment we met, as something for whom consequence has always been theoretical. Now I understand what mortals have always known: power has a cost, and too often the currency is someone else’s suffering.

She studies me for a moment before opening the balcony door wider.

“You should come inside.”

I follow.

Calliope crosses the small kitchen and leans against the counter. The edges of her mouth seem to want to be kind, but fatigue has flattened nearly everything else.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a teensy bit flattered by all this,” she says. “At first.”

“At first.”

“Forty-three minutes? Weirdly romantic. Three hours? Starting to get concerning. A week?” She gestures toward the window. “That’s where we crossed into supervillain territory.”

“I understand.”

“I know you do now.”

That is somehow worse.

I want to explain myself to her. I want to reach backward through eternity and show her every beautiful thing I have watched disappear, every person who existed for what seemed like an instant before time carried them beyond my reach.

Instead, the truth comes simply.

“I have always been the last to go.”

Calliope becomes still.