That evening, after search and argument and even pleading, Mischa headed toward the Palace with a capsule of sleep held firmly in her pocket. She hurried, thinking of Chris left alone the whole day. Few people used sleep, and it was difficult to find. The lights flickered in preparation for night.
“Mischa!”
Behind her, Jan Hikaru stepped from a hill path into the Circle. He was dressed in the same kind of clothes he always wore, but his boots were scuffed, his dark pants were dusty, and his jacket looked much older than it was. With his pale hair uncombed and his red-blond mustache bracketing his mouth, he had about him something of a brigandish air. Mischa thought Jan one of the gentlest people she had ever met, but had she just met him, she would choose to avoid crossing him. Waiting for him, stopping even for a moment, increased her concern for her brother.
Jan nodded a greeting and glanced up at the ceiling lights that alternately shadowed and illuminated his face. “That could induce epilepsy.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Since yesterday afternoon. Why?”
“You didn’t get my message.”
“No—have you been back?”
“Yes.” Her worry increased, and a feeling more definitely crept into her mind. “Let’s hurry.”
“What’s wrong?”
A threat of excitement drifted against her, bringing a tenuous link with Chris. “Subtwo wouldn’t let me tell him—”
Startled, Jan said, “He didn’t throw you out, did he?”
“No. Nothing like that.” Above them, from the edge of the cavern to the center in a rapid spiral, the lights dimmed to half their intensity. “Oh, damn. Damn.” She began to run.
She could hear Jan behind her, but her attention focused on Chris; when she reached the arc she realized he was not even in the Palace. She stopped and stood with her head down, eyes closed, listening, reaching out through a cacophonous blend of music.
Just ahead, light-curtains filled the open front of a bar. Mischa slipped between and through their insubstantial forms, following Chris’s faint aura. Among purple and green lights she saw him, standing against the wall, facing Subone who slapped him like a child playing snatch, with motions too quick to ward off. Mischa pushed the capsule of sleep far down in her pocket and buttoned the flap over it. Laughing, Subone spoke to Draco, who laughed in turn. His face set in anger, Chris pushed himself upright and moved away from the wall. He pulled his knife and snapped out the blade. Mischa hesitated, to watch him, feeling pride in the person he had been and might be again.
He said something to Subone. Mischa could not hear him, but she saw and felt Subone’s rage. He reached for Chris’s throat. Chris brought his knife up and slashed the pseudosib’s bare forearm. Taunted by blood, the blade flashed ruby-red. Subone shrieked. Mischa could see from where she stood that the wound was minor.
She knew what was going to happen before Subone reached inside his tunic. Chris could have fought on even terms. He was good; he had been good.
Mischa cried out and sprang toward them, but they did not hear her. Subone’s weapon was a laser lance. Her reflexes took over. She threw her knife.
Fire seared her from shoulder to hip. She heard Subone, still screaming, as she collapsed.
o0o
Through the obscuring mists of soft color, Jan saw the flash of Subone’s weapon beyond Mischa, and when she fell he cried out, believing she had been hit. He was vaguely aware that Subone had fallen as well, but the odor of seared flesh overwhelmed his senses. Clenching his teeth, he knelt beside Mischa and turned her over, afraid of what he would see. But somehow, aside from an abrasion on her cheek where she had fallen, she was unharmed. Her eyelids flickered; he felt her muscles tense as she collected herself. She stared up blankly, then intelligence leaked back into her green eyes. “Jan…” She struggled up, searching; she froze, and made an inarticulate, involuntary, keening sound of despair. Jan followed her gaze. He saw the young man lying sprawled in a scarlet and purple shroud of flowing lights. Jan could see the edge of a terrible burn rimmed by the charred and melted fabric of his shirt. Mischa stumbled to her feet, using Jan as a support. He helped her. “You’re not hurt?”
“Not… burned,” she said. “Get out of here, Jan. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
But he followed her toward Subone, who lay bleeding on the floor, groaning in pain and rage. Draco knelt over him, applying pressure to the wound high in Subone’s chest. Mischa fell to her knees beside the young man. Subone lunged for his weapon. Jan kicked Subone’s hand, hard enough to hurt and bruise, not hard enough to crack bones, and picked the lance up himself. He ripped out the power pack and crushed it under the heel of his boot.
“You are a fool,” Subone said.
“And you?” Jan calmed a slow surge of anger and adrenalin.
“You jeopardize your position.”
Jan said nothing.
“He’s alive, Jan,” Mischa whispered. “Gods, he’s alive.”
On one knee beside them, Jan took the young man’s wrist and felt for a pulse among narrow frail-feeling bones. It was light, rapid, irregular. A crystal knife, held loosely, slid from limp fingers. The fight had not been between Mischa and Subone but between Subone and this boy. The smell of burned flesh and vaporized plastic hung heavy around him. Jan saw he could do nothing himself. Blankly, Mischa reached out and picked up the knife.
“I’ll go for help,” Jan said.
Suddenly, harshly, Mischa laughed. “Subtwo won’t let you.”
“When he finds out, I’ll worry.” He wondered briefly if Subone’s actions might complete the pseudosibs’ estrangement.
Mischa stood up. “He already knows.” She gazed into the multicolored mists, the set of her shoulders, her face, her eyes showing no spirit, no hope, only defeat.
Agitated, the curtains swirled, and Subtwo burst through them, trailing wisps of their substance. He ignored all but his pseudosib. “What have they done?” Kneeling, he shouldered Draco away, and supported Subone in his arms. His eyes glistened with unshed tears of sympathy or actual pain. Subone sagged back, his expression set in suffering, weakened by loss of blood, or, Jan thought bitterly, arranged in a pose.
“I told you she’d do you no good.”
With pure human hatred, Subtwo glanced at Mischa. “Everything will be all right,” he said to Subone. His voice was a parody. His face became a mask of tender concern, the unfelt reaction of a man insufficiently experienced in tragedy or life. “I had hopes for you,” he said to Mischa. “You could have gone anywhere and done anything.”
“It’s finished, then,” Mischa said. “Because he’s committed murder, and he wronged us—but you can’t split yourself off from him.”
“Yes.”
Mischa looked down at the body by her feet. “I can’t split myself off from Chris, either. Let me take him out of here.”
Subone revived, grasping at Subtwo’s shoulder. “Don’t let them go.”
“How much more do you want to hurt him?” Mischa cried.
“He’s dead,” Subone growled. “I want you.”
The scene froze, like a dream going wrong and shading into nightmare. But dreams… dreams could be changed; Jan had stepped from the edges of his dreams to their centers, from the part of onlooker to that of director, and ordered the characters here and there, even characters like Subone, pure distillations of the self-centered unconscious. But he could not do that in reality; Jan understood that his own adventure was reality, or must become so. He could only direct himself, and he must: he must act rather than observe, make the decisions of his life rather than allow life to flow around him.
Jan spoke to Subtwo. “He’s not like you any longer. You don’t have to match him and he doesn’t deserve your loyalty.”
Subtwo said nothing, though the tiny lines in his forehead deepened. Subone, as if bored, said to Draco, “Take him out.”
Jan allowed Draco to shove him, once. Then he braced himself, and when Draco, encouraged, rushed him, Jan turned, grabbed his arm and the front of his shirt, bent into his path, and threw him over his shoulder to the floor. Not knowing how to land, Draco fell hard and lay stunned. Jan had not helped him land, as it was possible to do when performing the ippon sei o nagi. Now he waited, in case Draco revived and reached for a weapon.
Subtwo faced Mischa warily, for the knife glittered in her hand. “You understand, don’t you?” he said to her, as though asking forgiveness.
“I think so.” Her voice held equal regret. “I should have killed him.”
“No!” He cut his protest short. “No. That would have sealed our enmity.” He gestured to Chris. “Take him, and leave.” He looked sadly to Jan. “You align yourself against me. I can no longer keep my promise to your friend.”
Subtwo appeared sincerely regretful, but Jan did not believe he had progressed that far; Jan believed that this was another of Subtwo’s careful acts. Perhaps someday his feelings would match his words. “She would have understood what has happened,” Jan said coldly, and saw that Subtwo missed the implication: that understanding did not equal approval.
Mischa appeared drained, precariously balanced on her endurance, yet angry and despairing and grateful, all at the same time. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re just crazy.” Beyond them, Subone said, “Don’t let them go. Kill them now.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mischa said. “Before they change their mind.”
Subtwo spoke to Subone in a soothing tone almost inaudible to Jan. “I am not armed.”
“Against a youth and a child?”
Jan knelt beside Chris, steadying himself against the sight of the terrible burn. It was as bad as anything he had feared. Its presence shut him off from the surroundings, the arguing voices, the world. Ancient words spun uselessly at the back of Jan’s mind. He caught them and held on, closed his eyes for a moment, concentrated, set the phrases solidly; the nausea receded from the back of his throat. He touched the large vein at the corner of Chris’s jaw. “I can’t find a pulse.”
“He’s alive,” Mischa said.
“All right.” He picked Chris up. The mists flowed from the body, from Jan’s arms, and swirled around Jan’s feet.
“Will you let them go after what they’ve done to me?” Subone dug his fingers into his pseudosib’s arm, as though to transmit his hatred.
“Come on, Jan.” The urgency in Mischa’s voice startled him.
Subtwo spoke, purring like a cat, in a tone of hunger and expectation. “When you are recovered, we will hunt.”
The light-curtains slipped together and fused as Jan passed through them, following Mischa, and the voices became indecipherable.
o0o
Mischa led Jan to her niche as fast as Jan, burdened as he was, could go. Mischa was afraid Subtwo would be convinced by Subone’s anger, and begin to hunt them now. They were somewhat concealed by the darkness, and by the reluctance of Center people to talk to offworlders, but Mischa had no doubt that Subtwo could have the lights turned on, and that he could frighten or bribe information out of almost anyone.
“In here,” she said, and helped Jan bring Chris through the narrow fissure, a clumsy job. She was glad Chris had not regained consciousness. A flicker of life still glowed in him, deep down.
Her cave was exactly as she had left it; no one had tried to take it over. Jan stumbled and she remembered he could not see; she pulled the cover from the lightcells, which glowed faintly, their activity suspended by starvation.
Mischa straightened her rumpled blanket quickly; Jan laid Chris on the bed, stood back, and massaged the strain from his arms and shoulders. He could not quite stand upright, even in the middle of the chamber. Mischa opened her wooden chest and found cloth to use for bandages, and a mildly anesthetic salve that she did not think would help.
She knelt beside Chris and gently pulled the charred and melted edges of his scarlet shirt away from the burn. Skin and flesh came with it, and the wound began to weep. She choked. Jan knelt near her, moved her hands away, and sealed the air from the burn himself. The muscles along the side of his face were tight and strained; Mischa did not think he had seen much death or violence. She reached for him, to touch his arm, to thank him, somehow. He finished, wrapped the blanket around Chris, pushed himself back on his heels, remained head down and motionless. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, and tried again. “Sometimes the nerves are cauterized, and there isn’t any pain.” He looked up blankly. “I read that somewhere.” Mischa could see that he too knew Chris was going to die, and that he did not know anything to say to her.
“I’m sorry,” Mischa said. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
He grasped her hand, half-lowered from its hesitant gesture. “You didn’t,” he said. “Whatever happens, believe one thing: people are responsible for their own decisions, and no one else’s.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“It’s true.”
Perhaps it was, in the Utopia she thought the Sphere to be, but not in Center. “It’s my fault he’s here like this,” she said. “It’s my fault you’re stranded.”
“Who is he?”
“My brother.”
Jan nodded slowly. “But you told me once that you weren’t leaving anyone.”
“That’s why I brought him to the Palace… I thought they might be able to help him.”
Jan asked the question with his silence, with his expression.
She reached into her pocket and closed her hand around the yielding capsule, drew it out, and showed it to him. His pale eyebrow arched; he recognized the writhing white filaments of the drug.
“I had to leave him alone to get it. And…” Mischa doubted she would ever know if Chris had left the Palace in one last show of defiance, or if he simply had not known what he was doing.
Jan ran his hand across his tangled hair, a nervous gesture. “There isn’t any way…” But he did not finish. “Then… what now?”
Her hands clenched like crabs. “I don’t want him to die,” she said. Broken glass, the words hurt, but they were said. “If he dies…” She felt the shape of the phrase.
“What about you?”
Mischa shrugged. The question had to be asked, and answered, but she could not make herself think about it now. “I don’t know how close we are.”
“Is there anything to do?”
“Only wait.”
o0o
Kirillin hobbled through the sand, feeling clumsy and conspicuous, grateful for the night. There’s no grace, she thought, for a cripple. The sand fell away from the path as she climbed a hill, searching. She could only look, and wait. Her leg hurt; she had no cane and saw nothing to pick up as a support. Her lower right eyelid began its tic, revealing her agitation despite her ruined and half-paralyzed face. Accelerating, time flowed past her. She had forced her angers to burn silently for so long that they were covered by an ashy gray layer of time. She limped onto a rooftop to stand among the dim voices of Center’s lights. She did not understand people who left their windows unblocked and uncurtained; there was nothing to see beyond them, and the openings allowed others to peer in. She wished she had a cloak.
“Where are you, damn you?” She received no answer. Ashes flaked away. “I need your help.” Her voice carried. Someone below shouted for her to shut up. She imagined vandalism to his house, but did nothing. Leaning down, she massaged her leg above the knee, feeling ridges of scar tissue move across muscle. She left the rooftop, and climbed.
The summits of the hills were not coveted locations, for they were difficult to reach and the view was a panorama of monotony. Alleys lay deep between buildings. Kiri’s knee began to flash messages of pain that included ankle and hip. “Please,” she whispered more calmly. “It isn’t the time to punish me.”
“My friend, the young skeptic.”
Kiri spun, wrenching her leg; it collapsed and she fell forward. On her knees, she raised her head. Perspiration slid from her forehead down her cheek, from her armpits down her sides. Above her, gazing down with careless amusement, sat the person for whom Kiri had been searching. The healer was very old, stately, distinguished; she always seemed quite mysterious, and often quite mad. “Get off your knees,” she said. “You look ridiculous. You could have been whole, and your weaknesses offend me.”
Flushing, Kiri pushed herself to her feet and stood awkwardly with most of her weight on her good leg. The old woman’s expression softened. “At least take something for the pain. I can give you something that would make you believe in me.”
“I earned these scars,” Kiri said. “I deserve them all. If I didn’t believe in you, would I be here now?”
“Perhaps not. You’re prouder than most of the rest of them. Despair does not give you faith. You should have lived when I was young. People were prouder and steadier then.”
“I think you’re badly needed now,” Kiri said. “Will you come with me?”
The old woman shook her head very slowly, so for a moment Kiri thought she was observing the tremors of old age; then she realized her request was being denied. “Don’t punish me through them!” Kiri cried. “You’ll destroy Chris, and Mischa with him. They’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
“I’m hardly that petty,” the healer said archly.
“Then come!”
“No.”
“But he may be dying.”
“The boy has been dying for a long time. I would be helpless.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My dear,” the healer said, “my dear, do you really suppose my sources of information are no better than yours?”
Kiri glared sullenly at the path, and shifted her weight painfully. “Then you won’t help them.”
“I will not come with you.”
“That’s your final decision?”
“That is my only decision.”
Kiri thought of things to say, and knew they would change nothing. She turned, head down, shoulder sagging, to make her way to the Circle again.
“Come back, you foolish child.”
Kiri swung around like a challenged animal. “Don’t play with me.”
The healer stood on the ledge overhead, her dark robe shimmering about her. “Children never listen. Did you listen? I said I would not come, but I did not say I would not help.” She flung a glittering bauble; Kiri snatched and caught it clumsily. “Take that and go.”
The sphere was so black it appeared empty, a hole. It warmed Kiri’s palm. “This is all you can offer them?”
“That is a life,” the old woman said. “And a painless death.”
“I know,” Kiri said softly. “One life. I had hoped for two.” She looked up, but the healer was gone.
o0o
Chris had no middle ground of drowsiness or sleep; Mischa felt him awaken abruptly from complete unconsciousness. His eyelids flickered; he peered out as from a tunnel, frightened. Mischa felt his confusion, his disorientation, and touched his uninjured shoulder to give him some contact with reality. “You’re in my niche, Chris.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but began to cough, and then could not stop. The foam on his lips turned pink, and pain shot through him in uncontrollable spasms. Mischa hunched her shoulders against it, and felt Jan’s hands on her shoulders, steady. The coughing eased, slowed, stopped. Chris lay exhausted, his green eyes wide open. “I might have known,” he said. His voice had become harsh and ugly. He began to laugh, but cut himself off abruptly. “Your niche. I might have known.”
“Chris—”
“Do you think you’re my owner?” He shoved himself up on his elbow, and fell back with a shriek of agony. Mischa caught her breath at his reflections. “Let me help,” she said. “Please… let me help.” Her voice shook.
“Leave me alone.” He turned away, moving only his head, very slowly.
“Mischa—”
She shook her head, breathing hard, not looking at Jan.
“This is going to tear you to pieces.” He touched the sweat already filming her forehead.
“I can’t leave him. I owe him too much.”
Jan gripped her arm, as though to convey to her some of his own strength.
“Mischa… ?” Chris flickered back to awareness, clear and innocent and forgetful, and Mischa’s hurt dissolved.
“I’m here.”
“Have you got any sleep?”
She brought it out of her pocket. His anxiety and his need increased, and Mischa could feel his disappointment that she had only one capsule. “It was all I could get,” she said, “They didn’t want to give it to me.” She put it in his mouth. He sucked it greedily, and as the capsule dissolved the feel of writhing filaments against Chris’s tongue nauseated her. As they dissolved, he changed again. Becoming more aware, he looked at Mischa with her own eyes. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
He retreated. So little of the drug could not let him sleep; it pushed him slowly back through stages of exhaustion. The pain crept toward him from another direction.
“When are we leaving, Mischa?”
For a moment, she could not even think what he meant. She clamped her hands against her temples. The pulse throbbed beneath her palms. She concentrated on the patterns of scratches on the stone floor. “Soon,” she said, and hoped he would not hear the lie.
“When?”
“In the spring. As soon as the storms are over. Maybe even before.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s good...
The silence stretched out like a taut wire. Once they had talked, when the balance between their giving and taking was almost even, after Mischa was old enough to take care of herself and steal for both of them, before Chris had forced himself, or felt himself forced, down this endless path.
Mischa heard him move, and braced herself, but that did not help. She looked up, and he was lying with his head thrown back, the tendons in his neck quivering. Beneath the blanket that covered him, his hand clutched the bedding; he seemed to be searching for any sensation but the pain. “Oh, gods, Mischa, it hurts…” A tear squeezed out, beneath his long, fine eyelashes, slid down, back, into his hair.
Mischa choked on a sob but could not stop it.
“Mischa…”
When she realized Jan had spoken to her, she turned. He sat against the wall, looking down at his hands, flexing his strong fingers very carefully. Watching him, she shuddered.
“It wasn’t enough,” he said.
“… No. I couldn’t get any more.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” Her mind felt dulled and slow, distracted by Chris’s visions, and though she realized she must begin thinking again in terms of Center rather than in terms of escaping it, the backward transition was very difficult.
“I’m offering my help, Mischa, for gods’ sake, will you accept it? There must be someone or something in this city that will ease him.”
“Will you go?”
He hesitated. Mischa hunched in on herself, preparing for an argument.
“All right,” Jan said sadly. “I’ll go.”
o0o
Jan left the cave, disturbed that Mischa would be linked to Chris, yet alone. But she was so little afraid of what might happen to her that he could do nothing more than she asked. He could have argued, but he would have lost.
The lights had not yet begun to brighten. Jan had no idea what time it was, but he thought at least half the darkness must remain. He had never seen anyone claiming medical knowledge in Center, and he wondered if Mischa, in her remaining unsophistication, had sent him hunting a faith healer, a fraud, a charlatan.
He stopped at the junction of radius and helix where the main cave opened out before him. The dim canyon of the Circle below held no movement, but in front of Stone Palace, along the arc, a crowd of people was gathered.
Jan started down the helix, running, letting gravity pull him along, beside the precipice. Below and before him, a figure toiled up the slope, head down with the effort of movement. In the dark, Jan could tell nothing about the person, past the lameness. He slowed as he approached so they could pass safely on the narrow path. The figure was a young woman dressed in black, who raised her head as he approached. He nodded to her and looked away, not because the birthmark and scars revolted him; they did not, but he thought she might be sensitized to stares.
As he tried to pass, she grabbed him, clamping her fingers around his arm with great strength. Startled, he stopped, and this time did not avert his gaze when she looked at him. Her face was grim and strong beneath the scars.
“You’re Mischa’s friend,” she said. “From the Palace.” She spoke with an undercurrent of urgency.
Jan did not feel a need for evasion. “Yes.”
“Is Chris still alive?” Her voice was steady, but her hand tightened on his arm.
“I’m going for help for him.”
She released him and extended her other hand, in which lay a small opaque black bauble. “This is what you’re looking for.”
“Mischa asked me to find someone—”
“I’ve seen her. She won’t come. She sent this.”
Jan glanced out at the hills, where he had been sent. The woman took his arm again, shaking him. “You won’t find her.”
“But—”
She pointed at the crowd. “Do you see them? When they come this way, they’ll be looking for you.”
Jan still hesitated, seeking the truth in her face, finding that, and desperation.
“If I could run,” she said, “I’d gladly let you go on and get caught. But there isn’t time to waste. Mischa needs this.”
“All right,” Jan said. She tipped the dark sphere into his hand. It was vaguely soft, warm, reflective, spreading shapes across its surface.
“She’ll know what it is.”
“Thank you,” he said. Holding the bauble as gently as he would a winged insect, Jan began to climb the hill again, leaving the crippled woman behind. He glanced back once. Half-obscured in dim light, she followed slowly.
o0o
Mischa sat with her face buried against her knees, as though shielding her eyes from the claws of dark demons. In the dull blue light, they could easily be fluttering unseen above her. Jan laid his hand on her shoulder and was surprised when she started.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you’d heard me.”
“Chris was hallucinating. It—I hoped you’d get back, but—where is she? How did you get back so soon?”
Jan held out the black bauble. “She gave this to a woman with a birthmark and scars on her face. It’s for you.”
Mischa stared at it silently. The hope ran out of her face with the blood, leaving pallor.
“She’s not coming?” Her voice was totally emotionless.
“This seemed important. To get it to you. But I can—”
Mischa was shaking her head, staring at the black sphere as though she and it were alone and Jan was speaking to them from a great distance. Worried, he closed his fingers around it. Mischa grabbed for it, but Jan drew back. “What is it, Mischa? What will it do?”
“Give it to me, Jan.”
He simply looked at her.
“It will help him die,” Mischa finally said.
Shaken, he let her take it from his hand.
Mischa pulled back the blankets. Chris murmured a quiet, unconscious imprecation. She was glad he was not awake and could not see what she was doing. She did not want him to know he was dying. She could feel his dreams fading and dissolving as he weakened; the drug had pushed him back to the state he had sought, but still would not let him rest. She pulled the charred and fused edge of his shirt away from the bandage, cutting the material with Chris’s knife until his chest was bare. The black sphere she placed in the hollow of his breastbone, next to the edge of the wound. It shivered as it touched him, and suddenly shattered with a sharp high sound. Even expecting it, Mischa flinched, throwing up her hand, but nothing touched her; whatever the sphere had done, it had not exploded. The black fluid spread slowly across Chris’s chest, flowing first over the wound and then beneath the bandages, which curled away and disintegrated.
“Good gods,” Jan whispered. The spreading shell reached Chris’s throat and paused, crept across his stomach, beneath his pants to his groin. The material flaked away into ashes, and finally his shirt crumbled.
“What is it?”
“It… drains away the pain,” Mischa said. “I’ve never seen it before, I’ve only heard about it.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Mischa reached out and touched the slowly expanding layer of shiny plastic. It was very cold, and her fingers came away damp with condensation. The black shell closed around Chris’s chest, and rippled slowly with his breathing. “In the Sphere,” she said, “in the Sphere, could they have saved him?”
She could not tell why he hesitated. He might not know if they could have helped her brother; he might not want to tell her that anywhere else, he need not have died.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe, if someone had been right there.”
“I can feel him getting numb. It hurt him before, but he doesn’t feel it now…” Her voice trailed off as she felt Chris begin a slow searching-out of consciousness, and she became resonant to his echoes, as though she were hollow. She put her hand to his face, to shield his eyes, to comfort him.
“Mischa?”
“Yes, Chris.”
He started to reach for her with his right hand, but the muscles were deadened. He relaxed and lay still, spending all his energy for breath. Then he reached up left-handed and drew Mischa’s hand away, holding her gently, not letting go. Raising his head, he looked down at himself and saw the blackness. The pinpoint pupils of his brilliant eyes dilated slightly, then closed back down. “Oh, gods.” Pink foam was collecting on his lips. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Mischa said. “I was never close enough before.”
“It scares Gemmi.”
“… Yes.”
Chris did not respond, and Mischa searched for some way to reassure him. “Everything different scares her. She can’t tell good from bad.”
Chris tried to smile, but his smile was gone; Mischa saw both their fronts of bravery crumbling. “That’s right,” Chris said. “I… I know that…”
“Try to sleep,” Mischa said, a rote line to dam up the thousand things she would rather have said.
“Mischa—” His hand clenched around hers with some of his old strength. “I wanted to go with you.” He closed his eyes, exhausted again. “Nothing worked the way it was supposed to.” He looked at her again. “I’m sor—”
“Don’t.” They had had arguments, but never recriminations; disagreements, but never blame. That was the honor between them, that they were, finally, responsible only for themselves.
Chris nodded, lay back, and let himself rest.
Mischa felt tears slipping down her cheeks and realized Jan was still there, still quiet, still watching. “Damn,” she said. “I never cry.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened.
“No one can use it to hurt you.”
She did not believe that. She had kept herself to herself for so long, in self-defense, that she could not believe it. And she had thought that she trusted Jan, but the trust was not quite strong enough. She felt her control slipping away as Chris’s visions whirled around her. His exhaustion wrapped her; she wanted to sleep for him, to enter his dreams. His mind opened to her more deeply than it ever had before; she glimpsed his torments and his pride, his hopes, his weaknesses, his shames, his love, slipping through the synapses of his brain, slowing with the cold and the cessation of his pain. The black shell grew, sucking warmth from him, from the air, from Mischa. She shuddered, and Jan pressed her shoulders, looking down at her, frowning.
“He took me when I was born,” she said. “He raised me. He even named me. He used to be beautiful.”
She had never before lost anything, so irrevocably, that she cared about. Whatever she had lost before, she had told herself it never really mattered. Now that was impossible.
She put her fists against Jan’s chest, and cried.