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Hamnet wakes and lies a moment with his eyes open on the canopy of vines above, trying to understand what has roused him. All is quiet, or as quiet as the jungle ever can be; the smells that fill his nose are only those of dirt and decaying plants. Then he realizes: he is alone.
He finds Cora at the edge of the spring, dangling her feet in the water. She startles as he approaches, turning her head quickly, her dark curls swinging—and then she smiles. Hamnet feels himself respond in kind, coming to sit beside her. There is a bundle of vines in her lap, he sees, half-stripped. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says, picking up the one on top and beginning to peel away the outer husk. “Figured I could at least get something done.”
Hamnet waits to hear more, but she is silent. He accepts the husked vine when she hands it to him, the supple inner flesh bending beneath his palm. “Did you dream?” he asks at length.
Cora sighs. “About my brother,” she says. “I dreamed he was out there”—she jerks her head to indicate the jungle at large—“calling out for me. Trying to find me. And I couldn’t go to him, ’cause I knew it wasn’t safe.” She glances over at Hamnet, who gives what he hopes is an encouraging nod. “He was so close at first, but he got farther and farther away. And then I couldn’t hear him at all anymore.”
As if in imitation of her dream-brother, Cora speaks more quietly as she goes on until her voice is halfway to a whisper. Her hands keep working at the vines, deftly stripping them, passing them to Hamnet. “And then you woke up,” he finishes softly.
She nods. They are both quiet then for some minutes, working: Cora peeling the fibers away, Hamnet twisting the cords together into something stronger. They need a new basket, it is true, but Cora cannot yet make them well enough, and it is slow when Hamnet prepares the vines on his own. They have grown used to working together.
He is not only accustomed to it, Hamnet realizes—their fingers brushing when she gives him the next vine—but he welcomes it, the companionship. After months of solitude, with only the occasional wary nibbler to speak to, he is glad to have someone with him; and yet it is not only that. Strange, to think that he could find someone to care for, when he had thought that joy beyond him.
Cora, beside him, is coming to a different realization. He only understands it when she says, as if there had been no pause, “I’m never going to see him again. Or any of them.”
She will not want him to lie to her—this, Hamnet knows. “No,” he agrees. He weighs the risks and leans over to touch his shoulder to hers. Their arms brush. “I know you miss them.”
She makes a scornful noise. “Yeah, I mean—my whole family? Everyone I ever knew?” Her voice wavers on the last word, and Hamnet sees that her eyes are bright. “You’ve gotta know what that’s like.”
“I—” Hamnet hesitates. What the hell is this place? she had demanded when first she fell, her face twisted in pain but no less fierce. You tell me the goddamn truth. He has tried to do so, all this time. Has told her enough that she understands his solitude, his determination never to return—but he has not been able to bring himself to tell her the whole of it. “I do not miss my family,” he tells her now, wondering if it is true.
“Liar,” Cora replies, but the word is more sad than angry. “You said you have a sister. I bet you miss her.”
Judith. The thought comes, unwelcome but not new, that she and Cora would be friends if they met—they both have the same iron will and spark-bright humor. Hamnet swallows down the lump in his throat, so there will be no lie in his voice, and says carefully, “It is better for her that I am gone.”
She digs her elbow into his side, even as she hands him another vine to add to the basket frame that is beginning to take shape. “I don’t think she’d agree with that. I don’t agree.”
She would, Hamnet thinks—if she knew about the Garden. “It is done,” he says simply. “I am gone. They will surely count me among the dead by now.”
He is looking down, so he sees it when her hands still, frozen in the act of tearing away a stubborn bit of husk. “You really don’t care?” she asks at last. “You don’t care that they miss you too?”
It is an awful realization, what his words must mean to Cora—who has, as she has said, lost everyone she knows. In this moment, Hamnet would bring her home, back up to wherever she fell from, if he were able—though it would leave him more alone than before. He would heal her pain and salve her grief if he could. But he will not lie to her in order to do it. “It is not the same,” he says, his own voice somewhat ragged. “What I did—I protect them, by staying away.”
She gazes at him, her eyes wide. Green eyes, like the living vines around them; the color is still a wonder to him. “But who’s gonna protect you?” she asks, and reaches up to place her hand against his cheek.
He closes his eyes, at the touch and at the memory that comes, unbidden, of Mareth, dragging him out of the water—shouting unintelligible words—holding him fast as Hamnet screamed his throat raw. The last person who ever protected him, and the one person who might have run with him, had he asked.
But he could not have asked. His voice was gone, stopped up somewhere deep inside, and he had left Regalia behind in silence. It had taken Cora’s bewildered cries to unlock his words again, and with speech had come a final and unyielding truth. There is no way back for him; not to the city, and not to Mareth, or to any of them, just as there is no way the fliers or killers or gnawers, not even the pups, will ever come walking up out of that water.
He opens his eyes and sees her watching him still. Waiting for an answer. “Who will protect me?” he repeats. “Why, you, of course.”