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“Anything else I can do?” Garte’s voice is uncharacteristically quiet.
Kim shakes his head. He is too tired to force himself to smile, but even so he turns his head and says, “You’ve done a lot today. Thank you.”
Garte inclines his head. His eyes stray towards the bed for a moment before he looks away again. He clears his throat. “Call me if you need anything.”
Kim nods. He waits until Garte has left the room before he allows himself to collapse forward, his head resting on the bed.
The Whirling is silent. Outside, where hours ago gunshots echoed and mercenaries in armor faced down Hardy’s men, not a sound can be heard. Even the wind that whistled through the broken window of Harry’s room is quiet, now that Garte has taped a plastic sheet across it, quietly mumbling something about having it fixed tomorrow.
Kim sighs tiredly, then pulls the glasses off his face, wearily rubbing the bridge of his nose. His head aches. It feels like someone, somewhere, is still pointing a pale emitter at him—a constant background hum of a dull pain that keeps reverberating in his skull.
“Damn it, Harry,” he whispers. “Don’t you dare die on me.”
He’s sewn up Harry himself. Even if there was a doctor to be found in a place like Martinaise, he trusts his own skill more than whatever doctor he’d be able to afford.
And it isn’t like he doesn’t have experience with wounds like this. His stitches will leave a scar, but they’ll hold. He doesn’t think Harry will mind so much about the scar.
The room is clean. They have Garte to thank for that. Kim almost regrets now that Harry’s pile of bottles is gone. Right now, he’d really like a drink. Anything to make the throbbing headache go away.
Anything to make him forget that moment when Harry slumped in his arms, blood hot and red on Kim’s hands when he tried to stop the bleeding.
***
It’s dark in the room when Kim wakes up. At least he thinks he’s still in Harry’s room. There’s the bed in front of him. There’s the window, only a hint of light falling in.
But the bed is empty. And somewhere above… Somewhere above there’s a terrifying emptiness. A Nothing, only as large as a seed—but a seed is all it takes.
Kim shivers, suddenly feeling cold. He doesn’t want to look up, but when he does, he’s not surprised by what he sees.
It’s the church tower. It stretches high above him, trapping him in an inexplicable cone of silence. No—this is deeper than mere silence. It’s the utter absence of all sound, a horrifying sensation that makes his skin crawl.
And somewhere above him, there’s movement.
Kim makes him out a moment later—not the crab-man, skittering up and down the walls of the church, but Harry, dressed in his ridiculous mix of FALN clothes, white armor and the black mesh shirt, climbing up, up, up as if he doesn’t know there’s something terrible up there, something horrifying, something that will swallow the entire world one day—
Harry! Kim tries to call out, but although his mouth opens and his muscles work, not a single sound breaks the suffocating silence.
Kim knows it’s no use, but he can’t help it.
Harry! he tries again, with all his might, straining until his throat hurts—but there’s no sound, and Harry doesn’t turn. Harry keeps on climbing, higher and higher, and Kim feels a terror unlike anything he’s ever felt.
Harry, wait!
No sound. No reaction. Harry keeps climbing, and Kim can see no other way of stopping him than going after him.
By all rights, Harry should be slower than Kim. Harry’s spent the past week in a drunken stupor. Harry’s had to pull off his pants just to manage a small jump to fetch his discarded jacket.
But somehow—no matter how fast Kim forces himself to go, disregarding the ever increasing distance he’ll fall if his fingers were to slip—Harry keeps ahead of him.
They’re high up in the tower now. Kim’s fingers ache. There’s not a sound—not the wind outside the tower, not the sound of his fingers scrabbling against the wood, not the sound of his breathing.
He can’t even hear the sound of his own heart beating in his chest, and for a moment, Kim wonders if his heart is still beating.
Perhaps he’s dead. Perhaps they’re both dead.
This isn’t what happens to people walking in the near-pale, he tells himself. People have done so for thousands of years. People travel through it unscathed. That woman they met, Joyce Messier—she said she’d been cleared and trained for twenty-two days of pale travel per year.
This is nothing. Short exposure to the pale doesn’t kill.
Still. Just a short distance ahead of him, reality is ending. There is no thought, no theory, no religion that can deal with that.
Harry is close now—so close that when Kim reaches out for him at last, he can almost touch the slippery synthetic fabric of his FALN pants. Kim strains, on his tiptoes on a small wooden ledge, reaching and reaching as he shouts with no sound coming out of his throat—
Then Harry touches it, that tiny tear in reality, the seed of pale that has been germinating in this church for three-hundred and twenty years, and just like that, Harry is gone.
Kim can feel it. Even though the horrifying Nothingness of the pale is overwhelming all his senses, he can feel the sudden absence of Harry. There’s a wrongness in that just as terrifying as the absence of sound while his muscles and throat work.
It has swallowed him. That hole in reality, as small as the tip of a needle, has swallowed Harry. Kim is terrified and furious. His heart races in his chest as he abandons all sense to reach into it, fueled by an anger and a despair he can’t quite explain to himself—
***
There is a man standing before Kim in the swirling mist of gray. Kim knows him even before he turns around.
“Always too late, four-eyes,” he says, a scowl on his face.
His hair is gray. His eyes are the color of steel. He is wearing a uniform jacket. The holographic patches are strange areas of dullness, as if the pale has swallowed the reflective quality of light, although Kim can see him clearly.
On his chest, blood drips from the wound the knife has left. The blood is gray, too—a strange, colorless slush, as though a painter has forgotten the way blood glistens in the sunlight, has forgotten how liquid it is when it comes spurting from a vein.
“Getting another partner killed, I see.”
The words sting, even after the years Kim spent so many nights telling himself that terrible truth, over and over.
You should have been faster. You should have known. You should have stopped it.
“I wish I’d been faster,” he tells Eyes.
“You weren’t.” Even his eyes are dull. It stares out at Kim from them. The fathomless gray. The pale.
“You weren’t fast enough,” Eyes says again. “Took a knife meant for you, and where was my partner? You killed me, just like you killed your new partner.”
“He’s not my partner,” Kim says. The words come out wrong—flat, defensive, his tongue thick in his mouth as if it doesn’t belong there. “He’s not—”
Kim knows it’s not true. Harry’s not from his own precinct, but they’re still partners. Only for the duration of one investigation, perhaps, but they’re partners all the same.
Hell, Harry—alcoholic, amnesiac, fashion eyesore Harry Dubois—is more of a partner than any of the men and women from Kim’s own precinct. Kim has made it clear he doesn’t need a partner. Not after Eyes. And they’ve all accepted that. Perhaps a little too eagerly, he’s thought at times—but it was what he wanted, and it suits him just the way it is.
Until Harry. Harry, who didn’t take no for an answer. Harry, who’s a mess of a human being—but perhaps also the best damn cop Kim’s ever seen.
This is Revachol. Who cares how the case gets solved? It’s a miracle to see a case get solved at all.
“You don’t get rid of me that easily,” Eyes says. “It’s too late, anyway. Too late.”
Eyes reaches out and Kim shudders at the hand that grips his arm.
Eyes’s hand is cold. Not just cold the way a corpse feels cold to the touch. Kim knows that sensation, knows it too well to be spooked by it. But being touched by Eyes feels off—as if whoever created Eyes doesn’t know what human warmth is. It isn’t so much a sensation of coldness, but an utter absence of a phenomenon as elemental as temperature—as if that’s a concept that simply doesn’t exist.
Kim shivers again, then tries to pull his hand free.
Eyes—or the thing pretending to be Eyes, looking out at him from pale-dull eyes—keeps a tight grip on him. The fingers around Kim’s wrist clench as tightly as a pair of handcuffs.
Kim tries to bite back his panic, pulling harder, but Eyes—the thing—doesn’t let go of him. Instead, Kim finds himself getting pulled closer and closer.
The Nothing in Eyes’s eyes looms before him, a featureless gray that will swallow him, and Kim knows he is close to oblivion, as close as he’s never been before. If he allows it to take him, he’ll be lost; they’ll both be lost...
“Harry!”
This time, he can hear his shout ringing in his own ears. Kim is panting—he can hear the sound of that too, can hear the glorious sound of his pulse echoing in his throat as he struggles to break free—and then light breaks through the gray mist enveloping them, and a figure comes striding towards him.
The features are familiar, and yet out of place—the broad body, the bloated face of a late-stage alcoholic, the unkempt hair, the mesh shirt and the FALN pants all tell a different story. But Kim knows who this is.
This is the Innocence, come to save him.
With the appearance come old memories of light falling in through a church window. Light melts away the gray fog swirling before him. When the Innocence stops, the glow of lungs is so bright it drives tears to Kim’s eyes.
“Kim,” the Innocence says with the voice of Harry, touching Kim with Harry’s hand. The light shines brighter and brighter until looking at it hurts, but Kim is not afraid.
How could he be? The Innocence is here. The pale is retreating. Eyes—the thing pretending to be Eyes—is gone.
The Innocence is touching Kim with Harry’s hand, clasping his own. The light shining from the Innocence’s lungs is so bright that everything around him vanishes. Joyfully, ecstatically, Kim at last allows himself to melt into the light as well.
***
Harry isn’t awake when Kim opens his eyes. Harry is still asleep, his breathing labored, his skin clammy. Still, the stitches hold, as Kim knew they would. There’s no new blood on his skin.
And there, around Kim’s wrist, Harry’s hand has curled, holding onto him with what little strength Harry has left.
Kim stares at Harry’s hand. He thinks of the glowing lungs. It was only a dream, he tells himself. Only a dream.
But the awe that fills him is real. He remembers the Innocence’s presence. He remembers the light.
He remembers the touch that saved him.
“Thank you, Harry,” he says quietly. Then he covers Harry’s hand with his own, breathing, just breathing, listening to the sounds of Harry’s breathing and his own, glad that they’re both alive.