Chapter 165: The Woman Without a Pulse
She was wearing the coat, and it fit her.
That was the first thing Ryuji noticed. The real Selene’s coat hung off her shoulders and swallowed her hands. The woman on the stair wore the same coat as if it had been tailored for her. Her silver hair lay neatly across her collar. Her cheeks were flushed from a climb she had not made. When she smiled at him, her whole face lit in a way he had seen maybe four times in his life.
"Oh, thank the gods," she said. "I thought I had lost you."
Her voice cracked on the last word. Real tears stood in her violet eyes.
Beside him, the real Selene made a small sound, barely a breath.
[System Log: Day 171, continued]
[TWO OF THEM. ONE HEARTBEAT]
[I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO IT FOR THREE ChapterS OF HIS LIFE AND I KNOW WHICH IS WHICH]
[FIFTY-THREE. THE OTHER ONE HAS NOTHING TO COUNT]
"Boss," Tetsu whispered. "There’s two of her."
"That one does not breathe," Kuroda said, without turning from the crack.
Ryuji looked. The chest under the coat did not rise. It did not fall. It simply stood there, perfect and still, like a painting of a woman who happened to be walking.
The false Selene crossed the chamber in four quick steps and put her hands on his face.
They were warm. Of course they were. Whatever had made her had gotten the warmth right, the weight of the palms, the little callus below the thumb from years of holding a blade. She searched his eyes with an expression so tender it made his chest ache.
"I am not angry anymore," she said. "I thought about it all night. You did what you had to do. I understand. I should never have made you doubt it." Her thumbs moved over his cheekbones. "I love you. I only wanted you to know."
Behind him, the real Selene flinched.
He felt it through the air, a small, sharp withdrawal, as if someone had opened a window on a cold night. He did not turn around. He kept his eyes on the woman in front of him, and his hands stayed where they were, loose at his sides.
"She said it fast," Tetsu muttered. "That’s... Boss, she said it fast."
"I know."
"Real one took a month."
"I know."
The false Selene smiled and tipped her head, and the tears spilled over.
"I would say it every day," she said. "She cannot. She sits at the end of the pier and counts every way she might lose you. I do not. I only love you." Her voice dropped to a murmur, close and confiding. "And she asked you in the corridor, outside the hall at the palace. Was she a decision, or a choice. You told her home was where she stood. That is not an answer, Ryuji. I would have told you the answer."
Nobody breathed.
The corridor. The palace in Aldenmarch, three nights after Keiko arrived. It had been the two of them, alone, with the door shut. Not Tetsu. Not Kuroda. Not anyone.
Selene had gone white to the lips.
"That was mine," she said, very quietly, in the common tongue. Her hand had found Ryuji’s sleeve and was gripping hard enough to wrinkle the cloth. "That was a private thing. I said it to you, and only to you."
"I know."
"It has it. It has the part of me I do not say."
"It’s made from you," Ryuji said, low. "The thread. When it broke last night, it took a piece. A copy."
"Yes." Selene’s eyes did not leave her double. "I should have felt it leave. I thought I was only dying."
Kuroda coughed, a dry rasp. "Take it back, girl."
Selene did not seem to hear him.
Ryuji felt the thing that was happening between the two women the way he felt weather changing. The real Selene stood stiff, shoulders drawn up, chin lifted with a defiance that was mostly fear. The false one stood soft, open, easy. Everything Selene had spent four hundred years trying not to need, and everything she suspected he wanted.
He understood it, suddenly, with complete clarity. This was not a trap for him. This was a trap for her.
He took the false Selene’s wrists, gently, and lifted her hands off his face.
"No," he said.
Her smile did not move. "Ryuji?"
"I want the other one."
"She is angry with you."
"She is. She has a day left on it. She told me." He let go of the false wrists and stepped back, to the real Selene’s side, and found her hand without looking. "You don’t have a clock. You don’t get a clock. You say what I’d like to hear in under a second. It took her two days to be angry, and she’s going to take at least two more to stop, and I wouldn’t trade one hour of it for you."
"You said that to me, about her?" The false one’s voice sharpened. "You think you can have her prickly and impossible and call it love?"
"I said I’d take the angry one."
Silence. Somewhere above, the wind pushed against the mouth of the stair.
Selene made a strange noise, half laugh and half sob.
"That is," she said, and her voice shook, "the least romantic thing you have ever said."
"I know."
"It is also, I think, the best."
"I’ll tell Tetsu to keep it quiet."
"I heard that, Boss," said Tetsu, thickly.
The false Selene’s expression flickered. For the first time, something behind the sweetness cracked, and what showed through the crack was thin, and cold, and frightened.
"You are making a mistake," she whispered. "I am what she would be if she were never afraid."
"No," Selene said.
She stepped forward. She did it slowly, as if wading into water, one hand outstretched, the broken silver thread at her wrist glowing in a long jagged seam. Ryuji tightened his grip on her other hand and then, deliberately, loosened it. Beside, not in front. Not behind.
"You are what I would be if I had nothing to lose," Selene said, in the common tongue, steady now. "That is not a better woman. That is a woman who has never loved anyone enough to be afraid for them."
The thing in her coat said nothing.
"I am sorry," Selene went on, more quietly. "I think you are afraid too. I think that is why you came down the stairs."
She laid her palm flat against the false Selene’s breastbone.
The thread at her wrist flared. Silver light poured up her arm like water finding its level, pooling in her shoulder, her chest, her throat. The false Selene gasped. Her face softened, then blurred. Her coat lost its sharpness, her hair its shine, and the whole shape of her unwound into a cloud of silver motes that streamed toward the real woman’s hand and sank into her skin, one by one, like fireflies settling for the night.
The last thing to go was her voice.
"He is already here," it said, softly, in Selene’s cadence. "Count the pier, keeper."
Then there was only the chamber, and the crack, and Selene on one knee with her hand pressed flat to the floor, shaking.
"Selene."
"I am here." She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet, and they were violet, and they were suddenly, startlingly bright. In her open palm a small spark of void flickered into being, the size of a candle flame. It was the first magic she had made since the harbor. She stared at it as if she had forgotten what hands were for.
"It is mine," she said. "A piece of it came back."
"Pulse," Ryuji said, because he could not help it.
She laughed, wetly, and put her fingers against her own throat. "Sixty. It is climbing." She turned her face up to his. "I am still angry with you."
"I know."
"But I am taking you back to the house first. And you are going to eat something."
"I’ll eat anything."
"Do not drink anything," Kuroda said hoarsely. He had turned at last. His gray face had changed in some small way Ryuji could not name. He looked tired, and very old, and almost satisfied. "Do you hear me, boy? She said, count the pier."
"I heard."
"It is already here. You were told it comes tomorrow. It lied. Go. Go now."
Tetsu did not argue. He caught Selene under one arm, Ryuji took the other, and they ran for the stair, up through the sweating earth, three flights of silver light and dark. Behind them Kuroda’s voice followed, a little hoarse and a little strained.
"Hayato. Do not forget what I asked."
At the top the cemetery was gray and empty. The sky had gone the color of dishwater. The groundskeeper was gone. The taxi was gone. The road down to the harbor lay shrouded in a fog so thick it had a texture, and in the middle of the fog, at the far end of the gate, a figure stood waiting.
She wore a green cardigan. One slipper had been replaced by a sturdy shoe. She held a thermos in both hands, and she was smiling.
"Hayato," said Keiko. "You forgot your breakfast. I made soup."
She did not move. She did not walk toward them. She stood perfectly still at the end of the path, steam curling from the thermos, and Ryuji felt the key under his collarbone tighten like a fist.
Keiko had never stood still in her life.
"Boss," Tetsu breathed. "Her pocket."
Ryuji looked. The cardigan hung smooth against her hip. No spoon. No lump of worn wood sticking out of the fabric like the hilt of a sword.
Keiko always had a spoon.