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Instead, I clung to the Other as she pushed me away.
Death can wait. This isn’t your tomorrow,said the voice I’d thought lost forever as my Spirit squeezed into my corpse, my eyes bursting open and chest inflating.
Faces swirled against the light of the setting sun as they bent over me.
“Heal her again,” someone demanded, his energy in turmoil.
Instinctively, I reached out to calm it, cooing as you do to a newborn. The exertion left my recovering senses blank.
“Are you using your powers on me?”
His resentment overrode what I had done, and I pulled back into myself, unwilling to touch the burning emotions so like the invisible Spirits around us. Anger filled Tal. Seemed the dead and the living had a lot in common.
Something was tied to me, Spirit to Spirit, and it sought to attack, whispering we had to defend ourselves.
An ally.
A sister.
Another version of myself.
A hand squeezed mine.Gennady. His mind held the bitter taste of grief. “I risked the Goddess’s ire and done everything I can. She must do the rest herself. Choose to return. She died, after that many might no longer fight for life.”
Died.
Was this what the Spirits felt? His gnarled hand moored my thoughts.
This was notdeath.
Lumi—Lumi was dead, and she was here.
It all came rushing back before I could return to the emptiness.
We just wanted to live, not for the day, not to steal enough to carry us through to the next, butreallylive, and somehow, this world had killed us both, no matter who had dealt the final blow. She did not blame me. I knew because the bond was, impossibly, still there. Maybe I was anchoring her to this life, or the rules were different for death keepers. Maybe she lived as part of me. Or maybe I’d returned mad.
I noticed the familiar black ceiling and imaginary constellations. The world we had dreamt of. A world that kicked us while we were down and continued after our death.
Something always brought me back to Mandible Street. Here, Lumi and I had slept under the sloped roof, where rain fell like spears and the sun cooked the air in summer.
“Princess—Ms. Komarova, talk to me. Do you know who I am?” Gennady asked as his concerned face and giant beard blocked the painted on night sky.
I shuffled up in my old bed until I was sitting against the sloping ceiling. The room was torn apart, possessions strewn across the floor.
“What are you doing here?”
They did not belong here, in my other life. Gennady, Koshka, and Mariska, and two guards I did not recognize.
Koshka stepped forward, hands behind her back as if to appear nonthreatening despite having killed me.
“You were sentenced to hang until dead by the court and no one should be above the law, so you died, and we brought you back. You are officially dead. There is money in a bag. Leave Tal.”
“Did Dimi order you to do this?” I asked, my tangled mind jumping from death to all my dreams fulfilled. I could go and live well. No one would come after me. There was no one left who cared.
Lumi had been right. She would never leave. But now I had the means to.
Koshka grunted. “I’m still not sure you didn’t set us up in the tunnels—then again on the bridge. But you saved him when we could not. Consider this a life for a life.”
She said the last words as if they hurt her.
