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He couldn’t find her. He couldn’t bring her out. He couldn’t. But he tried, tithing his own pain, to soothe her chaos, at least.
When he came back out and opened his eyes, it was with a feeling of reclaiming himself, and he saw that Karou was present, and Zuzana and Mik. Virko, too, though the chimaera had been here all along. And right before him, Eliza. Her ma
He let out a deep breath. His disappointment felt like loss. Karou came to him. She had a decanter of water, and poured out a glass. While he drank, she laid a cool hand to his brow and leaned on the arm of his chair, her hip to his shoulder. And this was an astonishing new threshold of normal—Karou leaning against him—and it lifted his spirits. She’d spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened— apartfrom everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won—some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it—but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.
With hope that the weapons could in time vanish from the picture.
A new way of living.
“She seems more peaceful,” Karou said, studying Eliza. “That’s something.”
“Not enough.”
She didn’t say, You can try again later, because they both knew there would be no later. Night was falling. They would leave—he and Karou and Virko—very soon, and they wouldn’t be coming back here. Eliza Jones, then, must remain lost, and, with her, the “Cataclysm” and all her secrets. The problem was, Akiva sensed a peril in letting it go. “I want to understand what she’s saying,” he said. “What’s happened to her.”
“Could you tell anything?”
“Chaos. Fear.” He shook his head. “I know nothing of magic, Karou. Not even basic principles. I have a sense that we have, each of us, a…” He groped for words. “A scheme of energies. I don’t know what to call it. It’s more than mind, and more than soul. Dimensions.” Still groping. “Geographies. But I don’t know the lay of it, or how to navigate it, or even how to see. It’s like feeling forward in darkness.”
She smiled a little, and there was effortful lightness in her voice when she asked, “And how would you know what darkness is like?” Her hand brushed his feathers and they sparked to her touch. “You are your own light.”
And Akiva almost said, I know what darkness is, because he did, in all the worst senses of the word, but he didn’t want Karou to think he was retreating to the bleak state she’d drawn him out of in Morocco. So he held his tongue and was glad he had when she added, so softly he nearly didn’t hear, “And mine.”
And he looked at her and was filled with the sight of her, and felt, as he had so many times before in her presence—Madrigal and Karou—new life, new growth. Tendrils of sensation and emotion that he had never known before her and never would have without her, and they were something real. Roots branching and reaching, past every trapdoor and through any number of dark levels, and the “scheme of energies” that he had described so inadequately—the unknowable dimensions and geographies of self—was changed by it, like a dark quarter of space when a new star bursts into being. Akiva was made brighter. Fuller.
Only love could do that. He caught Karou’s hand, small and cool, within his own, and held on to it as he held on to the sight of her. The happiness was there, ordinary equipment, stowed right alongside the worry and sorrow and resolve, and it didn’t solve anything, but it lightened it.
“Ready?” he asked.
It was time to go see his uncle.
They said their good-byes without saying “good-bye,” because Akiva told them it was bad luck to do so, like tempting fate. Whatever words they used, there was a shadow over the lot of them, because it was to be no brief parting. Virko, in what would be his last language lesson for a while, taught Zuzana how to say, “I kiss your eyes and leave my heart in your hands,” which was an old chimaera farewell and of course led to Zuzana pantomiming a reaction to having a beating heart thrust into her hands.
Esther fussed over them, grandmotherly again and something close to contrite. She made sure they had the map, and knew the way. She asked, concerned, what they intended to do against so many enemies, but Karou didn’t tell her. “Not much,” was her reply. “Just persuade them to go home.”
Esther looked troubled, but didn’t press. “I’ll order champagne,” she said, “to celebrate your victory. I only wish you could be here to drink it with us.”
Eliza, all the while, sat staring.
“You’ll see to it she gets some help?” Karou asked Zuzana and Mik. “After we’re gone?”
Zuzana’s face immediately took on a hard set and she wouldn’t meet Karou’s eyes, but Mik nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have enough to worry about.”
He understood, if Zuzana didn’t, why things had to be this way. He had reminded her himself, several times, on the way here. “Remember how we’re not samurai in even the smallest way?” he’d asked. “We can’t help with this. We’d only weigh Virko down and get in the way. And if there’s more fighting…”
He hadn’t elaborated.
“Thank you,” Karou said, with one last, helpless look at Eliza. “I know it’s a lot to leave you with, but I showed you how to access money. Please, use it. For her, for you. Anything you need.”
“Money,” Zuzana muttered, as though it were worse than useless, an insult.
Karou turned to her. “If there’s anything for you to come back to,” she promised, hating the ifas though the word itself were her enemy, “I’ll find a way to come get you.”
“How? You’re going to close the portal.”
“We have to, but there are more portals. I’ll find them.”
“What, you’ll have time to be hunting for portals?”
“I don’t know.” It was a refrain. I don’t know what we’ll find when we get back. I don’t know if there will be any hope left to work with in all the world. I don’t know how I’ll find another portal. I don’t know if I’ll be alive. I don’t know.
Zuzana, her hard expression unchanged, tipped her head forward in a kind of slow-motion collision that Karou didn’t recognize for a hug until, at the last minute, her friend’s arms went around her. “Be safe,” Zuzana whispered. “No heroics. If you have to save yourself, do it, and come back here. Both of you. All three of you. We can make Virko a human body or something. Just promise me, if you get there and everyone’s…” She didn’t say it. Dead.“You’ll just keep out of sight and come back here and live.”
Karou couldn’t promise that, as Zuzana must have known, because she didn’t give her a chance to answer, but plowed ahead with, “Good. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to hear,” as though a promise had been given. Karou returned her hug, hating good-byes like she’d hated the if, and then there was nothing left to do but go.
56
MY SWEET BARBARIAN
Cleanliness, at last. Mik and Zuzana took turns in the bathroom, so that one of them could sit with Eliza, while also keeping a vigil for breaking angel news. The TV was on low, and Esther’s laptop was open with several feeds constantly refreshing, but nothing had happened yet, and wouldn’t be likely to for a while