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I don’t know that “was” is correct.

Yes, you do. You are afraid of failing her, but you cannot fail her, for she is gone. You know it must be so. I can feel that certainty in you. You struggle to embrace it, this ending without an ending. But you know. You know what is.

Please, Colibri, I can’t—

She was foolish. She was a calf. She sought the stars as you did but could not choose discipline. She, too, was pain and heavy mass, yet she let herself be guided by false corridors, and now she has wounded you in a way that may close but will never heal. This is not right. This is not what you do to someone who is of your love—

Don’t blame her. Please. Don’t. Don’t blame her for what is in me right now.

Why? She did this. Her choices did this.

She didn’t want this. And whatever I am feeling, it is nothing compared to—whatever she felt when—the poison air that dissolves flesh and lung condensing like silt on the ground she knew we should not touch, the misread map, the unfilled belly. Or perhaps the roar of burning fuel—burning, I say, even though we live on a world with no fire outside of our homes, for you cannot have fire in Fortune’s air, but you can melt, you can rend, you can fling a body apart. This, plus the realization that she chose wrong, and now there is no choosing anything else, and did she call for me, Colibri? Was she afraid and was I not there, or did she forget me altogether—

Cora, Cora, oh, Cora. I am sorry. Stop. Come away from this. I am sorry. Hush and steady, find your core.

Do not blame her. She suffered. Do not blame her.

Are you angry with me?

I am merely angry, Colibri. I am charred. I am sobbing spit onto the cold metal floor that I cannot find the will to stand up from despite the stab of it pressing into my paper skin. I am angry at everything.

You are not angry with Signy.

No. And I’m not angry with you.

Her plants, Signy’s plants. She killed the plants that were of her love? She killed them herself?

She had to. She wanted to do it alone. They would have been killed either way. This killing kept Signy safe.

I am glad for her safety, but what about your sickness? The sickness I shaped in you? What of that?

One last batch of medicine. Thirty precious pills, hidden in my pocket. Thirty pills, in a bottle tucked alongside two memory sticks—one filled with the instructions for nourishment, the other with sister-made scraps I keep trying to find answers in. A strange trio zippered away against my hip, as though these talismans might keep even more of me from disintegrating. I should have left them at home, but I couldn’t bear to.

Thirty pills, and then?

I don’t know. Signy and I haven’t had space to think that far ahead.

I shake and I roil, I thrash and I spin. Cora, none of this is right.

It doesn’t have to be right for it to be true. Colibri, please be calm. Hush and steady. Hush and center. Colibri, please, I am breaking. I cannot bear your anger, too.

Oh, I would bear yours, Cora. I would fill my bell with it and purge it into the sun.

I wish that you could. I do not wish to feel anything, right now.

Despite all of this, we still must go to the Quarries? We still must complete our tasks?

Yes. I cannot sit still any longer. I must work, I must fly. So must you. And the Berth doesn’t stop needing water just because I hurt.

Perhaps it should.

I am not the only person in the world. My importance to you does not erase everyone else.

Signy. Signy is here?

Yes.

Behind this wall? With you? As before?