78
(BREATHE)
Karou combed her hair. Calmly. Well, the calm was an exercise. (Breathe.) She laid down the comb. It was a Kirin relic that she’d found: carved bone with a crude silhouette of a stormhunter etched into the handle. She was going to keep it.
(Breathe.)
By the light of a flickering skohl torch, she looked down at herself. She was still in her Esther clothes. They were in a decent enough state, though she didn’t like knowing there was Razgut drool on her sleeve. She’d left a few things here in the caves when she went away, but they were dirtier still. She wondered if she would ever again know the simplicity of a closet full of clothes, and the pleasure of choosing an outfit—a clean outfit—in which to go and meet her… what? What could she call Akiva?
Boyfriend sounded too Earth. Lover was affectation, intended to shock. “Have you met my lover? Isn’t he divine?” Nope. That is, yep, he was divine. Nope, she wasn’t go to call him that, even if she was dizzy with the urgency to make him that.
(Breathe.)
Partner? Too dry.
Soul mate?
A warmth spread through her. When had it ever been truer than it was for her and Akiva? And yet, as a word, it, too, rang with wan associations. “You like the Pixies? I swear, it’s like we’re soul mates!”
Well, she didn’t have to call him anything right now. She just had to go to him, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t care what she was wearing.
One last breath. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch, getting wind that it was time, really and truly time, at last.
Akiva had helped her conjure Ziri’s body. He’d tithed, at his insistence, and he didn’t need vises, which was good, because she didn’t think she could have touched his bare skin to clamp them on without dissolving back into the state of tremulous hunger that had possessed her in the grand cavern. She’d sunk into her trance state knowing he was there, and then, when it was done—the new body wrought and stretched out on the floor, as yet inanimate—she had come back out of herself to the sight of Akiva watching her. He’d looked kind of dazed with happiness, and immediately the same feeling had bloomed in her.
“That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to look at you,” he’d said.
“I thought you were going to watch the resurrection.” She gestured to the new body, glorying in the sight of it. It looked almost exactly like Ziri’s true flesh had, and she thought that he could pass as his natural self. She’d even left off hamsas, in part because the true Ziri hadn’t had them, and in part because she wanted them to become obsolete.
“I meant to watch,” Akiva said, abashed, and scratched his fingers through his short, thick hair in that way he had. “I got distracted.”
“Well, no fair. I didn’t get to look at you back.”
“I promise to hold still for you later.” Later? After, he meant. After they’d had their fill of not holding still.
(Breathe.)
“I accept.”
And then, and then, oh holy, at last: the smile.
The smile that she had never yet seen with these eyes, but only remembered through Madrigal’s. Warm with wonderment, a smile so beautiful it ached. It crinkled his eyes, and shaped his beauty into another kind of astonishing, a better kind, because it was the astonishment of happiness, and that reshapes everything. It makes hearts whole and lives worth living. Karou felt it fill her, dizzy and delirious, and she fell a little deeper in love.
He’d offered to leave her to finish the resurrection alone, and she’d accepted, because she wanted to have a moment with Ziri, as he’d guessed she must. And seeing Ziri’s new eyes open—brown, and not ice-blue, and with none of Thiago’s arrogance to overcome in letting himself shine through—had been the sweetest moment yet in her career as a resurrectionist. She’d hugged him, and held him, and told him it was all over, he didn’t have to hide anymore, and his relief had been so profound it had deepened her already very deep appreciation of what he’d put himself through for all their sakes.
Between them they’d come up with the simplest explanation they could for his absence and return, and then he’d gone. Karou thought that he’d been so happy to be in Kirin form again that he’d just wanted to fly, though maybe he’d sensed her own distraction. Or it could have been the news of who’d been carrying his soul around in a canteen, and was out there in the caverns somewhere, waiting.
Whatever the reason, he’d gone off quickly enough, and here she was, her last duty fulfilled, her time her own. She paused, took a breath. From the pocket of her bag she collected one small thing that she’d been been carrying since the sultan’s picnic on the floor of the desert hotel in Morocco, a couple of days past. A whim.
A wishbone. Smiling, she closed it in her hand. From the first night, it had been their parting ritual at the temple of Ellai: to make a wish. She was ready for ritual again, but not the parting part. They’d had enough of that to last them lifetimes.
She went. She walked, holding the wishbone to her heart. Or she started out walking but was soon enough gliding, skimming along, not touching the floor. One could get lazy, she thought, but she wasn’t especially worried about it. The passages twisted. Her torch flickered green, trailing long and threatening to go out when she went too fast. It was almost used up, but she wouldn’t need it, as soon as she was with Akiva.
And she came to the entrance to the bath cavern. There was a laugh in her throat as she rounded the bend, ready to murmur, laughing, Finally, finally, I thought I might die, against his mouth, against his throat, hungry and laughing and eager and—
She stopped short.
Akiva wasn’t here.
Of course, murmured a tiny, cold voice in her heart.
She smothered it. Yet. Akiva wasn’t here yet. Which was odd, because he’d said he was coming directly. Well, okay. No reason for concern. Maybe he’d gotten lost. No. Karou had more respect for Akiva’s resourcefulness than to believe that. Maybe he’d gone to do something, thinking he could still make it back before she did. She had gotten here fast; Ziri hadn’t lingered.
The water was pale green and steaming, the crystal growths glittered, and the curtains of darkmoss swayed where their longest tendrils trailed in the current. Karou considered slipping out of her clothes and into the water, but only briefly, and not seriously. A feeling of foreboding was working its knuckles into her shoulders. It was a more advanced feeling of foreboding than she was prepared for, and she realized when it hit that she’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since they flew back through the Veskal portal. What other shoe? She didn’t know. That cold little of course voice didn’t know, either. It just knew—she just knew, on some level—that it had all been too easy.
It was a sensation in the spine, like she’d gotten just before the Dominion ambush. There was something she was missing.
Yes. Akiva. That’s what she was missing.
He should be here.
She tried to be reasonable. She’d only been here five seconds; he would come around the corner any second.
But he didn’t.
Of course, of course. Did you really think you could have happiness?
Karou’s pulse hammered faster and her breathing shallowed, but it was panic barely contained, this time, not desire.
Akiva didn’t come.
Karou’s torch sputtered and died, and she had no seraph fire to light her passage back. She had to feel her way in darkness, clutching her unbroken wishbone to her heart.