Page 102 of Graceless

The rider. You explain after. Every time. He'd run without a word and defaulted on the whole covenant, and both of us knew the word RUN was dead in his mouth until the debt cleared — and here he was, clearing it, into a slab of steel, at whatever volume the truth required.

"There is a field," he said, quieter now, so that I had to lean my ear near the wood. "I am going to tell you what was done in it. And what came after it, by water. And then you will know why I lied to you on the most honest night of my life, and why a heartbeat the size of a spark has the attention of the entire sky."

I stood with my back against my door and my hand flat on my stomach, and behind me the man who never asks was asking, and the whole truth of everything was standing out in the cold in an open coat.

I threw the bolt and opened the door.

"Not on my stoop," I said. "Inside. Sit at the table. And Raq — all of it."

"All of it," he agreed, and came into the house.

He ducked under the lintel — too big for the room, the kitchen instantly smaller — and stopped just inside the door, waiting to be told where he was allowed.

I pointed at the table. He sat. I stayed standing, arms crossed, my hip against the counter, because somebody in this kitchen was going to have the high ground and it was going to be me.

"Where the hell did you go."

"Queens." He said it to the table. "A warehouse roof on the creek. I stood it every night."

"A roof." Three weeks. Three weeks of the procedure and the floor and the little jars, and he'd been standing on a roof. "Doing what."

"Watching. It is what I am." His jaw moved. "And once — the seventeenth night — I came back. Four rooftops down the block. Your windows were lit and Nina's car was outside and I watched the shapes on the shade and I told myself you were healing." He looked up then, and made himself hold my eyes while he said the rest of it. "I stood on a roof and watched my own — watched you being held by somebody else, and I entered it as a victory, and I went back over the bridge. That is where I went, Caterina. Twenty minutes away. The whole time."

I had to put my hand on the counter.

Three weeks of dialing a dead number in my head, of you cannot canvass the sky — and the sky had been standing on a roof in Queens the whole time, twenty minutes away, calling my worst night a win.

"Why," I said, when I could. "All of it, tonight. Why did you go?"

"To take the eyes with me."

"What eyes."

"Everything that watches me watches whatever I love. I thought if I removed myself, the watching would follow, and you would be — ordinary again. Invisible again. Safe." His hands went flat on the wood. "I was wrong about what there was to see. And the whole answer is old. It starts before the water. There was a time we did not hide," he said. "We worked. We loved. And there were children, Caterina — half of us, half of you. They ran. They grew. They were—" His jaw set. "They were not monsters. Whatever was written afterward, whoever wrote it. They were children."

"What happened to them."

"Heaven happened to them." Flat. All the way flat. "It was ordered. It was carried out by things I had stood watches with. There is a field where a part of it was done. They made the fathers dig the graves, Caterina. And they made the mothers watch."

My hand went to my stomach. I didn't tell it to.

"And the mothers?" I said, because somebody had to say it, and it was going to have to be me.

He didn't answer for a moment. His hand closed on the edge of the table, and the wood made a small sound.

"The water," he said, "was for whatever the swords had missed."

I crossed the kitchen and put my hand over his fist and left it there, and neither of us said anything for a while.

"The rainbow," he said finally, to the table. "Everyone's nursery has it wrong. It is not a promise that it's over. It is a promise about method. It does not say never, Caterina. It says never again by water."

I stood there with my hand on his fist and the nuns' whole curriculum reorganizing itself in my chest.

"So the beach," I said. "The lie."

"The lie was the truest thing I could build." He looked up at me. "You were already mine by then, and I was already yours, and the one thing I could still control was whether the thing they kill for could ever begin. I can never have a child — I needed it true. I said it to make it true. And tonight my brother stood on a roof in Queens and told me that I had already—" He stopped. Started over, quieter. "The night I said it. That night. The stars, the blankets. It was already done, Caterina. I lied to you about the one thing that was already growing while I lied."

The kitchen was very quiet.