Chapter 69: Harder to Kill
Chapter 69: Harder to Kill
She got her arms round me again, and this time she was careful about it, which somehow made it worse.
She came in from my right side — the side without the stitches — and she moved my strapped leg out of the way first with her hand, and she did not put any weight anywhere it would hurt. It took her about two seconds to work all of that out and I only noticed because I was watching for it.
Then she held on.
"You terrified me," she said.
"I know."
"No. You don’t." Her voice had gone thick and she carried on anyway, which is the most Liora thing about the entire episode. "Fifteen days. I trained, and I argued with Nessa, and I went out with the caravan twice, and every single night I lay down and thought — he might already be dead. He might have been dead for a week. There is no message. There is no letter and no rider and no one I can ask, and if it happened I will never know, I will just keep waiting and getting older and nothing will ever come."
Her hand had closed on the back of my shirt.
"And then I arrive and you’re on the floor," she said. "You’re on the floor, Adrian, and you can’t stand up, and I got here four days after and if that call had rolled anything else I’d have—"
"I was scared too."
She stopped.
"Not in the stairwell," I said. "In the stairwell I was too busy. Afterwards. Lying up here with a fever going, doing the maths on the arm, working out how long I had if the antibiotics didn’t hold." My throat had gone tight and I pushed on through it. "I’ve been frightened of a lot of things since the Merge and none of them felt like that. It wasn’t the dying. It was that it would happen quietly and nobody would ever tell you."
"Don’t."
"I’m sorry," I said. "For that. Genuinely. Not for going — I’d go again, I didn’t have a choice about the arm — but for what the last fifteen days were on your end, and for the fact that I can’t fix it or send word or do a single thing to stop it happening again."
Liora pulled back and sat on her heels in front of me and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and did it briskly, as though she were dealing with rain.
"Promise me you’ll stop," she said.
"No."
"No?"
"I can’t." I made myself hold her eyes. "I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’ll never do anything dangerous again, because in about two weeks I’ll need water or food or medicine and there’ll be something in the way of it, and then I’d have lied to you. And I’d rather do nearly anything than lie to you."
Her ears twitched.
"But here’s what I will promise, and I mean this one." I got the words in order first, which for me is unusual. "I’m going to get harder to kill. Not braver. Not stronger in a way that makes me stupid — harder to kill. Every day, whatever it costs. Because I’d have to be an idiot to sit here and pretend that what happened four days ago was bad luck. It happened because I was weak, and slow, and I’d only planned one thing." I swallowed. "And because I don’t want you coming back to an empty room either."
She was very still.
"That’s the whole of it," I said. "It’s not much."
"It’s more than stop being dangerous," Liora said. "Which is what I actually asked for, and which would have been a lie, and I’d have known it was a lie, and I’d have accepted it anyway."
"I know."
"That’s the annoying part." She looked at the floor between us. "You never let me have the comfortable version."
Then she looked up.
Neither of us moved for a moment. The light through the boarded window had gone amber, her ears were still low, and there was nothing performative left in her face.
Then she kissed me.
It was not our first kiss. We had crossed that distance before, and considerably more than that, in a room in Fenwick where we had finally stopped treating two dimensions as an excuse to lie about what we were to each other.
This felt different anyway.
There was no discovery in it. No question being asked for the first time. Liora knew how I held her when I was trying not to pull at an injury, and I knew the small pause she made before leaning her weight into me. Her hand came up to the side of my neck. Mine settled at her waist. We moved carefully around stitches, strapping, and cracked ribs with the familiarity of people who had already learned each other and the new caution of people who had nearly lost the chance to do it again.
When we came apart, she kept her forehead against mine.
"I knew this already," she said.
"Which part?"
"That I cared enough for this to hurt." Her thumb moved once against my jaw. "I knew it in Fenwick. I knew it when you promised to look for a way to reach my world. I knew it every night I lay awake imagining an empty room."
Her voice tightened on the last words.
"Knowing did not make the fifteen days easier."
"No," I said. "I suppose it gave you more to lose."
"Exactly."
She kissed me again, shorter this time, then sat back far enough to look at the whole damaged arrangement of me.
Nothing between us had changed names. We still lived in different universes. I still reached her through a Call that worked half the time, and no promise could turn a few borrowed hours into an ordinary life.
But we had already decided not to pretend that uncertainty made what we had less real. This was not a first confession repeated because a new disaster required one. It was the same commitment surviving contact with its first truly ugly consequence.
Liora drew a slow breath and looked down at my strapped leg.
"Show me Feline Grace."
I blinked. "Now?"
"You said it helped in the hospital."
"It kept me on my feet a few times."
"That is not the same as using it correctly." Her eyes narrowed. "You’ve had part of my movement sitting inside you since the twenty-five-percent milestone, and you’ve been teaching yourself with no one here who understands where the instincts came from."
"I had other concerns."
"You always have other concerns. Most of them bite."
She stood and offered me both hands. Her expression was steadier now, though the skin beneath her eyes was still damp.
"A part of me stays with you when I’m gone," she said. "I already knew that. What I don’t know is what you’ve done with it."
"Mostly remained upright."
"An achievement, given the evidence." Her tail flicked toward my leg. "Get up."
"What?"
"You heard me. On your feet, carefully, both hands on the wall." She was already moving the crate out of the middle of the floor. "You’ve had a piece of me for two weeks and you’ve never once let me see what you’re doing with it. I want to watch."