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Chapter
Twenty-Four
BAZ
Ihave a dream that I’m standing in water.
Not the sea, for this water has no horizon, no far edge I can see, and the sky above it isn’t sky at all. It’s…the ground. Red ground, glowing faintly, as if lit from underneath, and above that a black that presses down. The water I’m standing in comes to my knees and it’s cold, and ancient, and under the surface there are shapes I don’t look at directly because some part of me knows that it’s an invitation for them to look at me.
There is a door ahead of me. Not a door in a wall, just a door, standing in the water, and through the glass of it there is gold light and the sound of something I can almost hear, laughter maybe, and I know with the certainty of dreams that if I open it I will not be coming back.
I have my hand on the handle.
Then something finds my other hand.
It’s impossibly warm in that cold place, and I look down and there are fingers around mine and I follow them up and there she is, hair dark and loose and wet, eyes white as bone. She pulls on me, hard, the way you pull someone back from a ledge, and I let go of the handle and I let her take me away from the gold light. It goes out behind us and the door closes and somewhere lurking in the dark water below us something vast and patient turns away.
I wake up with a racing heart and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. I turn over to see Saturna sleeping right beside me and something about the sight of her now makes my chest feel like it’s in a vise.
I let it ache as I study her face. The hollow under her cheekbone is less gaunt than it was yesterday. The violet under her eyes has faded. Her hand is between us on the quilt, slack, the sleeve of her nightgown pushed up to the elbow showcasing her soft skin.
This woman killed herself for me, I realize with a start.
Not literally, of course, as the two of us are both here and breathing, both alive. But I know she took the length of her own life and shortened it by some unknown measure. I will spend the rest of whatever I have paying her back for that, and I don’t yet know how.
She shifts in her sleep and her hand on the quilt finds mine. Her fingers lace through my fingers with some strange instinct, and she drifts out again, and I am now holding her hand with my eyes shut pretending I am still asleep.
She wakes properly a few minutes later.
Her fingers tighten once around mine, then she goes still in the way people do when they realize their body has done something while their mind was elsewhere and I open my eyes to meet her opening hers.
Her cheeks immediately go pink.
Might be the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Good morning, darling.”
The darling just slips out. I’m not sure if I’ve ever called her darling before. If I have, I can’t remember. It’s enough that she subtly pulls back her hand. I suppose I was coming on too strong. I have to remind myself that despite all that happened, we are still just professor and student.
“Good morning,” she eventually says, clearing her throat. She sits up and I catch a whiff of her hair that smells of lavender water. I let myself have one slow breath of it. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than yesterday,” I admit. “Not good, but better.”
“Did you sleep all the way through the night?”
“Feels like it,” I say, stretching my arms above my head.
She takes that as a cue to get out of bed, carefully climbing over me in her nightgown.
“I’m going to go down and get us breakfast from the refectory before the crowd shows up,” she says as she stands in the room. “Can you manage a quarter of an hour on your own or do I need to be back faster than that?”
“I’ll live. Bring forth food,” I tell her, my stomach suddenly grumbling. I haven’t eaten a thing since I was, well, resurrected and I think my body is finally figuring out what it’s missing.
“I’ll bring the bread no one eats on purpose and some of that stewed fruit and oats.”
“I like the bread no one eats on purpose.”
“You would.”
