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Gideon was the only one who noticed Harrow slip out of the room. Less than six hours ago, the lot of them had righted some great cosmic wrong that Gideon still didn’t fully understand, but now the River was—unclogged? And the devils were draining away like so much dirty bathwater, and her father with them. And that was fine, she guessed. She hadn’t really gotten used to having a father anyway. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t shut off the second he’d gone through the stoma; maybe she was on a timer and soon she’d be just meat again, without even Harrow’s twig-bone body for dubious refuge. Maybe that’s how all this was supposed to end. Whatever. She shouldn’t worry about it. They’d won, after all.
They’d won, and everyone else was celebrating, or processing, or getting catastrophically drunk, except for Harrow. Because she had to go running for her dream girl, her shiny new sword, the prize that had been waiting for her at the center of the Locked Tomb. Typical.
Gideon pushed off the wall, waving away Paul’s questioning gaze, and slunk off after her. Listen, last time Gideon had left Harrow and Alecto unattended, the bitch had bitten and then kidnapped her necromancer. Could you really blame her for being cautious?
Alecto was in a different room on their ship; too many people too close together upset her, and upsetting her could have dangerous consequences, which they’d all had front row seats to the past few days. The door to the room was open. Gideon slouched against the wall, listening for any sign of trouble.
“You are certain?” Alecto’s deep voice.
“I am,” Harrow replied, in hushed chapel tones.
“If I grant you this favor,” Alecto said, and she sounded almost gentle. As gentle as a thing like her could sound. “The vow rendered unto Anastasia will be fulfilled, and my service will be complete. You will be Tombkeeper no longer.”
Harrow took a shuddering breath. “Yes.”
“Child…is this all you ask of me? I am capable of much.”
“It is the only thing I want,” Harrow said.
A pause. Long enough that Gideon almost burst into the room to make sure nothing untoward was happening. Then—
“And what of the other child? What of her desires?”
Another pause, in which Gideon could only hear the faint sound of the ships engines, and Harrow’s halting breath. “She deserves—better than this. Please.”
Gideon stood straight up like someone had passed an electric current through her corpse. She abruptly did not want to hear Alecto’s response, or any of more of Harrow’s plaintive voice, or frankly any of what she had already heard. She spun and started back down the hallway, thinking she could slip into some other room where she wouldn’t have to look at anyone, and no one would look at her. A bathroom, maybe. A closet. She felt strange and distant, the way she did when her body probably should have been—doing something, something squishy and embarrassing, blood and heart and lungs. But of course, it couldn’t, it wasn’t, and so she just felt like an old knucklebone stretched to fill out one too many constructs.
She didn’t make it.
“Gideon!” Harrow’s voice rang down the hall, breathless and eager in a way that made Gideon unaccountably furious.
She stopped, but she didn’t turn. She made Harrow slide awkwardly around her, pressed flat to the corridor wall so she wouldn’t have to touch Gideon, until they were face to face. Harrow was soft and hesitant with her now, always, which made her feel a million miles away. It also made Gideon feel bad about all the shouting and kicking she’d fantasized about over the last six months, which made her even more angry, and then guilty, and then angry again, around and around until she wanted to just throw her own used-up corpse out the airlock.
As there was no airlock immediately available, she pasted on a smile instead. “What can I do for you, Reverend Daughter?”
“Could we speak? In private? There is something I’d like to discuss with you. Please.”
She should say no. She should tell Harrow to go fuck herself. She should say there had been plenty of time for discussion while Harrow was zonked out in the Tomb and Gideon was left cleaning up her mess, alone, but that Gideon had gotten tired of waiting, fuck you very much. But Harrow’s little face was so stupidly hopeful. And—well, she had said please.
“My schedule’s pretty packed, but I guess I can squeeze you in,” she said.
Harrow frowned. It only lasted a moment, a frustrated crease appearing between her brows, before she smoothed it back into saintly patience. There and gone, but Gideon saw it, and for an answering moment, Gideon’s smile was real.
She followed Harrow into a little bedchamber that could only have been her personal room, given the amount of black clothes strewn over the floor. She was about to make some comment about getting into a girl’s bedroom, but the moment the door closed behind her, Harrow whirled around and fixed her with a burning, excited expression she had never seen her necro direct at something alive.
Well, she guessed she still hadn’t.
“What’s going on?” Gideon asked.
“Gideon.” Harrow inflicted her with a genuine smile. “I can resurrect you.”
Gideon took a step back. She felt dizzy from the aching, non-reaction of her body. She reached for the wall at her back, because otherwise she thought she might slip sideways out of her meat, out of the world altogether and back into the gray emptiness of the River. Harrow stepped closer, reached for her, eyes lighting with concern, and Gideon flung up a warding hand, because that would be worse, somehow, if Harrow touched her dead flesh. If she had to see her face when she did it.
“No, thanks.” Her voice was surprisingly calm, considering. “I’m good.”
Harrow’s whole face puckered in confusion. “You’re…good?”
“Yep.”
“Gideon.” Harrow gestured vaguely at all of her. “You are a corpse.”
Tell her something she didn’t know. “Thought that’s how you liked them, Nonagesimus.” There it was, the swift clench of her jaw. Gideon pushed. “This is what peak performance looks like, right? Thought you’d be glad.”
Harrow’s eyes blazed. “How could you possibly—”
“Look, I know stiffs are your type, is all. Figured this is what you wanted.”
“I never wanted this!”
She knew that, too. Gideon launched herself off the wall, closing the distance between them. It felt good, the fighting, the yelling. She could work with that. “That’s too bad,” she snarled. She didn’t remember clenching her fists, but that felt good, too. “This is what we’ve got.”
And Harrow’s anger collapsed like a badly pinned skeleton. There was only ever sorrow underneath. “It doesn’t have to be,” she insisted. “We can fix this. Your body can be repaired. Alecto, she can—I can give you back your life, Gideon.”
Gideon wanted to throw up. An acute, animal need frustrated by her uncooperative body. “Didn’t ask for it back, thanks,” she said.
Harrow looked stricken. “I would never make you ask for that, Gideon. In fact, I ask you—I beg you—let me do this. Let me return what I’ve taken.”
Gideon was terrified that Harrow might actually go to her knees and beg; this scene didn’t exactly match up to how she’d imagined it. “Stop,” she said. “I don’t want this—this guilty thing you do. I don’t want to be your next girl in a tomb.”
A flash of pain on Harrow’s face, quickly swallowed. “Griddle, if you would stop acting like an idiot and just listen to me.”
“No, you listen to me,” Gideon cut her off. She was shaking now, muscles tense from some magic mix-up where her revenant tried to make her corpse do ten different things at once. She hated being lashed to her skeleton this way. Hated every place her soul and body didn’t match up anymore, the places they fought each other. Fuck, Gideon had practically gift wrapped her soul into Harrow’s safekeeping and now Harrow wanted to cram it back down her throat and tell her to choke on it. “I didn’t ask to come back.”
It was like Gideon slid a sword through Harrow’s chest. She froze, her eyes wide and shocked, hands falling limply to her sides. Gideon could feel every place Harrow’s eyes fell like a physical touch: her gray face, the bloodless tear in her throat, the blue tips of her fingers, the hole in her chest carefully concealed by shirt and jacket. Harrow met Gideon’s eyes—filmy, she knew, not the clear gold they used to be—and swallowed once, lips trembling.
After a long moment, she said, “I can release you into the River, if that is truly what you want.”
Gideon’s heart really should have done something then. That’s the only thing she could think in the silence that followed. They stared at each other, two Ninth House orphans, two people from the deepest, darkest hole in the universe, who had watched each other broken and remade, who had done the breaking, who knew every crack and crease and scar, and they had never felt more like strangers.
“Fuck,” Gideon choked. “Anything to get rid of me, huh, Nonagesimus?”
Harrow blinked. “What?”
“I mean, you made it pretty clear you weren’t interested after the whole ‘threw myself on a fence for you’ thing, but—”
“Gideon, you just said—”
“—shipping me off to the place beyond the River so you don’t have to look at me anymore is pretty extreme even for you—”
“I am trying to help!” Her face went blotchy with anger, her lips pale, the tips of her ears bright red.
“I didn’t ask for your help!” Gideon shouted.
“Tell me what you want and I will do it! I will do anything!’
“Why don’t you tell me what you want, Harrow? For once in your fucking life? Plain words. I’m an idiot, remember?”
Harrow’s mouth twisted in on itself. She froze up, except for the shaking, except for the slow, deliberate way she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to meet Gideon’s gaze. Gideon clenched her jaw. She wasn’t going to tell her. Of course not. Why would she? Why would she give Gideon that one fucking thing?
“I want you, Gideon.” It exploded out of Harrow, desperate, painful, and Gideon was shocked into silence. “I want you to the exclusion of all else. I have wanted you to the point of your destruction, and if there was anything in the world I could take back, if there was any injustice I could right in this whole miserable universe, it would be that. If that makes me cruel, then I am cruel. If that makes me selfish, then I am selfish. But I cannot choose not to want it, anymore than I can choose to stop my own heart, because—”
Harrow snapped her mouth shut. She panted through her nose, her dark eyes wide, like she hadn’t intended to say even half of that. Looking at her face without paint was still surreal. Gideon could read a entire tome of information from the twitch of her eyebrows and the depth of the lines around her mouth. She could see the pain and fear there plain as day, the self-recrimination, the ugly, annihilating guilt in the shadows under her eyes.
Gideon leaned down, bringing her face close to Harrow’s, so Harrow couldn’t look away from her. “Because what?” she growled.
Harrow drew her shoulders back and, like admitting to a crime, she said. “Because I love you, Gideon Nav.”
Gideon held herself very still.
“I love you,” Harrow continued, “and I have taken so much from you. I don’t know how not to hurt you, but I don’t want to take any more. Please.”
Harrow reached out one thin hand and wrapped it around Gideon’s wrist. Gideon tried to flinch away—she could see the dismay in Harrow’s face at the touch of her cool, dead flesh—but Harrow only tightened her grip, her ragged nails cutting in a way Gideon could almost feel.
Gideon looked at where Harrow held her, fingers making a bracelet around her wrist, a cuff. Slowly, she said, “What if I gave it to you instead?”
Harrow let her go. Instantly, like she’d been burned. She tried to step back, but before she could, there was Gideon’s hand around Harrow’s arm, keeping her in place. She was always faster than her necromancer.
“What if, Harrow?” she demanded, shaking her once, hard, like she could force the answer she wanted out of her.
Harrow looked at her with an expression that flooded Gideon with nostalgia, and the sudden desire to throw the little bone witch off the highest tier in Drearburh, because how dare she, how dare Nonagesimus of all people pity her?
“If all you have to offer me is your death,” Harrow started. She interrupted herself with a shuddering breath, then set her jaw. “I do not accept. I do not want that from you. If that is all you can offer me, I will walk away right now. I can not—I will not let you.”
Gideon’s fingers tightened on walk away, but Harrow’s expression didn’t change. “Oh, you won’t let me?” Gideon breathed, clinging to all the imperious nonchalance she’d learned from every stupid, arrogant necromancer she’d ever met in her life and death.
“Not for me,” Harrow said. “If you do this, Gideon, it won’t be for me.”
Gideon bared her teeth, dragged Harrow closer, watched her stumble over her own feet with satisfaction. Harrow, Harrow, Harrow; it was never-ending. The one thing Gideon tried to give her in both of their short, tragic lives and Harrow would rather turn around and leave her behind than accept it. She said she loved Gideon and then gave her an ultimatum. That was love, huh? And she just expected Gideon to roll over and do whatever she said, like always. She couldn’t even entertain the possibility that none of this was about her. That maybe Gideon could do things for herself, want things for herself, that maybe, just maybe she wanted—
Her grip slackened.
That she wanted—what? To die? To just finally fucking die?
They stayed like that, so close that they would be breathing each others breath if one of them wasn’t dead. Harrow looked at her in a way that made her feel horribly seen. She reached up to touch Gideon’s jaw, her throat, hovered over the ragged wound there.
“I don’t know how else to make you understand,” she whispered.
“Well,” Gideon said, and she couldn’t get her breath, her lungs didn’t even fucking work, “I’ve been told I’m a kinetic learner.”
And Harrow sighed, or maybe laughed. She rose up on her toes, and Gideon had one second to think oh shit, and then Harrow’s mouth was on hers, Harrow was kissing her, Harrow, not some monstrous child wearing her body, goggling at her with eyes the wrong color. It was Harrow, and Harrow kissed with teeth, Harrow kissed like she was trying to crawl inside Gideon through the hole in her chest, like she was a necromantic theorem that needed to be cracked, with precision and focus and hands in her hair and hot breath in her mouth.
Gideon’s hands were on her, too, on the jut of her hip, pressed flat between her shoulder blades. Harrow was so close that Gideon could feel her pulse pound under her skin, alive, she was alive, and for a second it was like her own heart was beating in her chest again. She thought that if she had working tear ducts she might have cried, which would have been embarrassing, except Harrow might also have been crying, and, God, Gideon didn’t want to make her cry again. She’d felt it from the inside, that last time, and that had been enough for her.
They broke apart. Harrow was gasping. Gideon still didn’t have to breathe, and felt cheated by it. She wanted to feel this. She wanted her racing heart and flushed face and the sick, twisted up feeling in her gut she’d always done her best to ignore. She wiped one of Harrow’s tears away with her thumb, and it was so good to just be able to touch her, Gideon’s flesh and Harrow’s flesh. Had she really been about to pass that up? To throw that away?
“So,” Gideon said. “Let me just make sure I have this straight.”
Harrow looked up at her warily.
“If I let your freezer meat girlfriend bring me back to life for realsies, we get to do more of this?”
Harrow dropped her head against the intact part of Gideon’s chest. “Griddle, you are a hog.”
Gideon’s hands went around Harrow’s waist. “You like it, though.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Yes or no, my lady.”
“Yes, obviously.” Harrow snapped. “If you think for even a second that I’m done with you—”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Gideon hoisted Harrow up into her arms, easy as anything, and laughed at the way Harrow squealed. She didn’t fight her off, like Gideon half-expected. Her necromancer abruptly settled into Gideon’s arms, and Gideon could feel the solid beat-beat-beat of her little black heart everywhere they touched. “Let’s go ask a murdered planet to give me back my heart, or something. Our lives are already so goddamned weird.”
“Gideon, wait,” Harrow said urgently, curling her fingers into the collar of Gideon’s jacket. “I need you to understand—this isn’t a favor. You owe me nothing. This is—I want this. If you want this.”
Harrow’s sad, pointy face, all weighed down with debt and guilt and blame. All laid out like weapons for the taking. It was a game Gideon was tired of playing. One neither of them could win. When had one-upping Harrow ever gotten Gideon something she really wanted?
“Nah, you owe me. I’ll get Alecto to witness if I have to. IOU one make out session, signed the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Right?”
Harrow laughed again, soft, disbelieving. “Right,” she said.
Gideon felt her breath against her cheek, felt her finally relax, dropping her dark head into the curve of Gideon’s neck. She was furnace-hot, like always; her warmth spread like a blush up Gideon’s chest and throat.
Holding Harrow, she didn’t feel cold anymore.