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They make it to their destination slowly.
Very slowly.
Part of the problem is that she’s travelling with the slowest people she’s ever met. Every single one of them is content with taking weeks to get from one place to the other, because they all remember a time it always did. It’s a feeling she remembers from when she was younger and her dad was away and her mom couldn’t quite handle two kids at home while she wasn’t, and Nile and Cass would be sent to Grandma’s. Grandma Freeman was actually her dad’s grandma, and she was the oldest woman Nile had ever met—old enough to give Andy a run for her money, she’d say—and Nile had spent all her summers there bewildered by how content she was to sit down and knit and wait for the water to boil.
Travelling with Andy, Nicky and Joe is a little bit like that experience of standing at the stove waiting for the water to boil while her great-grandmother keeps the flame on low and gives her words about patience.
Except it’s not that she’s bored. It’s that she’s on edge.
“Nile,” Joe says, the third time she asks about where they’re going and why they’re going so slowly. “I don’t blame you for the fact that your world is extremely fast-paced, but that is a product of a very recent period of time, and neither natural nor healthy.”
To which: Nile would like to call bullshit. Her introduction to the immortal lifestyle having been one solid weekend of unadulterated fuckery. You cannot give her a whole weekend of Kill Bill but shittier, and then say “actually, we spend most of our time doing 5000-piece jigsaw puzzles.” She saw somebody else’s insides and watched her own bones heal before her eyes and didn’t even realise how fucked that was until (much) later because of the immediacy and breakneck pace of it all—a pace that left her, or any of them, no time or space for thinking or questioning. All she did that day was act.
Now there’s no acting at all. She’d like to see the merit of that, but mostly it puts her on edge.
Too much time to think, she thinks, might help them with their thousands of years of figuring out what to do with themselves, but it just leaves her upset.
Even then.
They make it, eventually, to where they’re going. It’s not a particularly special day. They’re in the forest somewhere east of the Black Sea, trees and dirt stretching out around them broken up only by the occasional village. She’s woken up by Joe and Nicky arguing about the quality of different animal milk when used in cheese and when used in other cooking, which as far as she can tell is an old debate and one with no resolution. This wakes Andy up, too, but she only says “Yaks,” and nothing else, in a mood because she’s acclimating to the concept of sunburns lasting and has just discovered that her sunscreen doesn’t actually last longer than a couple of hours.
“It says ultra protection daily sunblock on the bottle!” she keeps repeating, betrayal in her tone.
Nicky takes a break from pontificating on Greek yoghurt to say, “Maybe you are putting it on wrong?”
When Andy looks like she’s ready to hit him, Joe says, “Give me that,” takes the bottle from her, holds it a foot from his face and squints at it, before concluding: “The font is too small.”
Fortunately, Nile is familiar enough with sunscreen to tell Andy how to do it—the right way this time, because Andy didn’t listen the last time she told her to put on more—as they pack away their tent (Nile’s discovery of the week is that she might not be able to die, but she can get a crick in her neck from sleeping in their car) and their food and don their backpacks and start driving further in.
The drive is punctuated by more cheese talk. Joe and Nicky devolve into a different language every hour or so, but only when talking to each other, remembering to revert to English when they turn to Nile. It’s Nicky’s turn to drive (which he does like a complete madman) so Joe gets shotgun, because of course he does.
Andy teaches Nile a card game, which is mostly about not letting your cards fly out of your hand when the wind picks up or when they go over a bump, which is often. Every once in a while, Joe breaks away from the conversation (which is stuck somewhere around ricotta) to remind Andy of a rule like “and if you get the queen of spades, you have to put away two of your cards until you find the jack,” or “right, but you skip your turn if you’ve got two clubs in your hand and that new song comes on.”
And then they’re there.
It’s eerie, the switch. One moment Nile’s convinced she’s finally got the hang of the game enough to actually win a round, and the next Andy’s looking up, eyes wide, and saying, “We’re here.”
She says it with the tone of voice she had that first day they met. “We’re here,” like pulling up to Copley’s house and being ready to walk into possible death. “We’re here,” like “Whatever it takes.” It immediately puts her on edge, something in her that recognised the danger in Andy even before she saw the inside of that church sitting upright, ready to pay attention.
This is it, she thinks, trying not to feel like she’s been falsely lulled into complacency. Time for Kill Bill: Vol. 2. For a second, she even wonders if all the rest of it—the cards, the cheese, the terrible driving and the jigsaw and the full three hours Andy and Joe spent in a single shop trying to buy a blanket that felt right—if all of those things are just to make Nile’s survival instinct forget who they are.
Who they can be.
But then Nile starts to get out of the car, and Joe says, “Wait,” and makes Andy slather more sunscreen on her face and arms while Nicky finishes his bit on ricotta and Joe himself counts every one of the fifty-two card set before he puts them away (“They’re very smooth, and I’d like to not have to replace one yet.”). So Nile decides that that cannot, possibly, be fake.
Intentional? Maybe. But not a lie. And the distinction matters, she thinks.
They go a little bit further on foot before they get to it. Stretching away around her is a huge cavernous structure of a pale bleached stone arcing at least twelve feet high. It’s buried halfway in the dirt with vines and creepers and mushrooms and flowers all over it, but the structures still go well over her head, almost of a height with the old trees that surround it.
“What is this place?” she asks.
Andy says, “This is where Lykon died.”
She can’t say what it is that connects the dots in her mind, only that the moment Andy says it, she knows—that the structures aren’t stone or ungodly amounts of ivory or a ritual site or a freak natural formation. They’re bones, large and disproportionate and cavernous ribs, holding them in right now like once they held someone's—Lykon’s—heart and lungs.
“I thought you said,” she starts, but the truth is she doesn’t know _what_ she thought. She cannot begin to comprehend this.
“He was just like us when he was alive,” Andy says. Joe and Nicky have fallen back, standing next to the smallest rib, Nicky with his hand hovering over the rib like he wants to touch it, like he has, like there is a familiarity there, though Nile knows Lykon predates him. It’s none of their first time here, though, she can tell. “He was shorter than me, actually. We used to…”
Nile doesn’t ask as Andy looks away. Her eyes aren’t wet, though, and though the pain radiates off her, she’s nothing more than steel eyes and locked spine. When she looks at the bones, she looks like she’s remembering—but maybe not his death.
Nile asks, “What happened?”
Andy grins at her. “No idea. We don’t really have any other examples. We buried him here and didn’t come back for… two hundred years? At least? And when we did, it was like this.”
This tracks: all her answers to the truly unbelievable parts of all of this have been, in the end, we don’t know. She turns instead to the one person who she thinks will have come to some kind of conclusion, not maybe out of a sense of science or logic, but because he needs something to believe in. Nile needs something to believe in, too—she always has. Sometimes that something has disappointed her more than it’s given her any value, but—
But she’s standing in a rib cage taller than she is, and every hair on her body is standing on end with it.
Nicky says, “Our lives are in some ways far greater than that of an ordinary person. I do not mean that they have more value, but perhaps… vastness of experience. It cannot reflect in us while we are alive, or as alive as we are, but after…” He shrugs.
Nile says, “So you think his bones expanded to reflect that?” except that even as she says it, she can feel something of the question in her settle. She’s not blind—she’s seen their age on them, on all of them. Not just in their exhaustion or the old people nonsense they’re always on or the way they speak or their technological ineptitude, but in their eyes. In the way they close their fists and the way they hold their weapons. So really, she means, in their bones. Settled in there with an ancientness that she can’t really comprehend, that she cannot even begin to imagine settling on her. When she was fifteen, sixteen had felt terribly far away, and when she was twenty-four, twenty-six felt like it was right there.
But one day—
She thinks of Copley’s charts, strings drawing to strings and making a flowchart of history that goes back maybe one hundred years and spreads so far. Exponential, she hears, in his voice. Where does that go, after an immortal dies? Where does that sit while they’re alive? If she looks at Andy now, she can almost imagine that she’s seeing a woman with branches emerging from her the way vines have crept over and around Lykon’s bones, entangling him permanently in this forest, making him just as much a part of the structure of this place as it—the world—is a part of him.
And Andy? Nile tries not to think of what she’ll be, twenty or forty years from now.
She pointedly does not think of Quynh in her watery non-grave.
“So,” Andy says, “don’t bury me in a fucking city,” and Joe barks out a surprised laugh. “Unless you want to fuck it up.”
Nile rolls her eyes. “We’re not burying you for a few decades yet, grandma,” she says, though they cannot possibly have any idea of that. Sometimes she’s convinced that being able to die at any moment now is a thousand times more frightening than being a normal person who, also, could die at any second. Maybe it’s the experience of having lived through it, having come out the other side and found—she doesn’t know. She doesn’t feel invincible like this. She’s never put too much thought into her own death before, but now that she’s died and come back, she’s terrified of it, and she wants it, and she wants to never look at it.
But at least, she thinks, looking at all the untold thousands of Andy’s years compressed into a ribcage just like anybody else's—at least somebody will be able to see it, after. The vastness of what it means to be one of them.
There are flowers on the vines that wrap around the rib closest to Nile. She picks one and puts it in her pocket.
On the way back, Andy tells them about yak cheese.