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HERE IS THE REPEATED IMAGE OF THE LOVER DESTROYED.
(RICHARD SIKEN.)
The sword at your back is too heavy to hold by yourself, and the only thing you have ever had to help you was bone and construct, so this is where you stand—bowed over by metal you are not sure why you cannot let go of. The Mithraeum swallows up any darkness in the corners of the rooms and hallways, paints your reflection in gleaming white on the walls as you pass them with your eyes to the floor, the grey speckles of it, the red film over your eyes you cannot rid yourself of. Your hands have been covered in blood for two weeks. Your hands have been covered in blood for four months. Your hands have always been covered in blood, oh child of two hundred, oh genocide that you are.
You look down. Your hands are clean.
Unblemished. Brown—too pale, but brown. Bitten nails. You blink twice and they are bloodied and then they are skeletal and then they are clean again.
God is in his office and there are too many cushions on the couch, and when you look at him he is just a man in black and white robes too clean for him.
When you ask him his protection he calls you child, and when you ask him for answers he calls you Harrow, and it is all something you had learned before you were nine, that godhood is like girlhood in its begging to be believed.
“Please,” you say. It is somehow the only word you can muster up. There are biscuits on the desk, green and red packaging. They look like something you could break your teeth on, and then break the rest of your life by accepting.
Look at me .
You do.
God asks you who was your cavalier and your skull answers for you — parietal, occipital, temporal. Ortus Nigenad.
“Nope,” says Abigail Pent, and all the lights shatter.
The sword at your back is yours, so gloriously it is yours, and the Reverend Daughter stares pointedly at the chain in your hands instead, that of Samael and now that of yours. You may not have the place at your parents side or the blood that allows the girl who took your place to make bones sing and fight and break, but you have your weapons and you have your name.
You do not look at her, because even though her face is a blur you know that you must know it, that you must have known it, and you look out the window instead. The Ninth House is a puddle of fog and dank dirt and a broken spire of rock below you.
“The Tomb of the Ninth,” a woman says to you, and her hair falls over your shoulder, a clean fall of blonde where your robes are black and atavistic. “How did we get here?”
“She’s a narrative escape artist,” the woman’s husband says to her. “I’m quite enjoying this, though. Magnets, the two of them. They seem to always snap back together eventually. It’s very fun.”
“How is any of this fun?” you ask, motioning to the blackness out the window, behind you to the blur of the girl you are desperate to turn and look at—and that’s odd, the wanting. And it’s odder, because you got aboard this ship alone with the person you have hated your whole life, and Abigail Pent is not someone you knew long enough to hate. And you do not know Abigail Pent yet.
And Abigail Pent says: “This isn’t how it happened.”
The sword at your back is not a sword, it’s just a bag, and when it slips off the shimmery fabric over your shoulder there’s someone else's hands there to catch it—dark and strong and calloused, and your mouth opens on three syllables you should not know and your eyes catch on her shirt-sleeve rather than her eyes, no matter how you try to wrench them up to see.
“Cute, but unfortunately not this one either,” the Fifth say—
The sword at your back is no longer at your back, it is in your hands now, and you do not have the strength nor the will to hold it aloft. The River tangles around the handle of it, catching in the pockmarks that bone wears into metal, and you cling onto it because you know it is important.
You do not know why.
You do not know why you don’t know why.
You do not know why you don’t know why you don’t—
The River leaps down your throat, dank and harsh and so full of salt you wouldn't know where your tears ended, because you are crying. And you’ve only just realised, and there’s something inside of you that is so empty it aches, like starvation. And you have known starvation and this is so much worse. And you have known guilt, and horror, and death, and you have known what the River offers up to you anyway.
In the River, you are Harrow, you are Nonagesimus, you are two hundred murdered children. You are a war crime. You have known this since you were old enough to put thought to word and word to understanding, and yet when the body of a red headed toddler in skull paint brushes against your leg, you scream.
You are still screaming when the River spits you back out, curled in the hallway, blood in your eyes.
“Still not this one,” Abigail tells you, leaning over your pinned, bleeding body, and the floor falls away.
The sword at your back is not held by you — it is in someone else’s hands, someone who’s back is pressed to yours even as the rain whirls around you, so cold it makes your teeth chatter, incisor against incisor, molar against molar. Canines are animal teeth and for once you don’t feel like something feral.
There’s a hand at your forearm, fingers dug deep into the place between ulna and radius, the tendons and nerves that fill the space. Bone and bone and bone laid over each other like light over wood and water over stone and memory over memory over memory.
You’ve been here before , your bones say, and the Body looks at you across the salt-slick cobble of the atrium and says this is not how it goes, and when you look up to her, she’s a blur of red hair and muscle and blood, and the image slips away as soon as it had come, like the moment between it appearing and disappearing has been clipped away as brutal as under a surgeon's hands.
The sword that is not yours swings, and part of the construct shatters and the bone fragments lodge in your skin, between your teeth, catch in your hair and her hair and her teeth and her skin. And it aches, and it stings, and the emptiness doesn’t feel like emptiness,and you don’t have a word for the feeling eating up all the air in your chest and you might never have one, but right now you have her next to you and it doesn’t feel hopeless.
“Sorry, darling,” says Abigail Pent, eyes gentle, and that’s weird because the last time you saw her body she was in the morgue with a key dug out of her chest. “This still isn’t how it happens.”
The sword at your back is laid over with bone, and it feels like everyone is yelling a different name at the same time. None of them are yours, but all of them sound like they belong to you, and you’re waking up in a river full of brittle body parts—
“Here,” Abigail Pent of the Fifth house says. “Sit.”
You end up crouched on your heels, the muscles tugging uncomfortably where they’re stretched too far. The saltwater puddles over your feet, bare on the concrete. The rubble digs into the soles. The rubble digs into your hands.
The atrium of Canaan House is silent. Not in the way the Ninth house was always quiet, because the Ninth house was never quiet. This is quiet in the way you had made your own brain, something essential cut out of it, something that should be spoken missing instead.
There’s a name here you’re looking for. You know it. You have known it. You must.
“Have you found it yet?”
Cavalier. Soldier. Friend. A blur of hair and hands and broken teeth and broken bones and the body in front of you pinned on spikes. Ten steps and you’d reach her.
“Griddle,” you say unsteadily, and then: “Gideon.”
“There we go,” Abigail hums. “Took you a while.”
Your eyes are still caught on the crumpled, broken corpse of Gideon on the other side of the atrium, the walls crumbled and whatever construct this story had, gone.
“Are you dead?” you ask.
“Yes.”
“Am I dead?”
“You’re in a dead place,” Abigail says. “Your goal is to not let it stay that way.”
The saltwater laps over your bare feet, salty and metallic like the blood in your mouth, spilling red down your chin and into your hands.
Red stands in proximity to life itself. All flesh, all fluid, all warmth. The most primary of primary colours — the very blood in your veins is red. Capillaries, arteries, aorta. There is nothing of it in common with your bones apart from that they should stay inside of your body, and you wish they had stayed inside of Gideon.
“Why this one?”
“Why any of them?” Abigail smiles. “You know, when Magnus and I started dating, he once dragged me into this fanciful discussion about all the different lives we could have lived, if only something had just branched off alternately. A decision made differently, a question answered in the other direction, a single point of change. He got distracted by another topic, but I always wondered if we would have found each other then.”
Abigail kicks her feet out into the water, the answering spray of it warm and salinic.
“Who knows?” she tells you. “I liked that one, where we met. I knew there was no changing it anyway.”
You are a cavalier. You are a solider. You are a Lyctor, dying again and again. Story after story.
And there’s Gideon at the edges of it all — haunting everything, singing poorly, nails dug into the zest of an orange. Nothing but brief bodies and the twanging, dissonant wire of a constant that you follow along with your hand until it splits the skin and digs through to the bone. Spit, lips, and longing. All you have here is this skin and these bones, and when Abigail looks at you with those long-dead eyes, you realise you don’t even really have those here.
Gideon is here, in these dreams, these images. Of course it can’t be real. You’d seen her die.
“We can’t be here, Harrow.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“You have to.”
“You don’t understand,” you say. “I can’t .”
“I do,” Abigail retorts. “And you must.”
“How? How do I possibly do that?”
“You have to choose to live, Harrowhark,” Abigail says quietly. “The classics lie. There is no romance in death.”
You want to disagree. You want to drag her to that tomb that you had wandered into at ten and show her the corpse you had found, below freezing and holding half your heart and most of your mind.
Abigail must hear something in your silence, because she jabs at the back of your hand, her polished nails digging into the thin, starved skin, prodding at the tendons and the metacarpals through the translucence. You had been browner, once, even underground and undercover of smog, but the Mithraeum and whatever this is has stolen that.
“None,” she says. And: “You should know that.” And, looking at the body on spikes: “I think you know that.”
Speaking just feels like opening a wet wound full of teeth, so you press your lips together in a thin line until you can feel the dry skin of them tear uncomfortably. Abigail Pent is knowledgeable, but there has only ever been one person you have hoped to know you. Said person is dead. Said person is haunting even your hallucinations. Said person did know you, and you will not have that again.
“I think love is memory,” she says, eventually. “You think love means death. You’ve made yourself a mausoleum, sweetheart. You cut out your brain to forget her and your body still remembered.”
You want to scream.
Because no, no, no. You want people to stop acting like they know you and like they know what you want and who you are and saying that you aren’t insane. Because you are, and you seem to be the only person who knows that death is the last thing you ever wanted. You were made alive and two hundred children died. You asked Gideon to stay alive and she died. You tried to keep her soul alive and something else died.
You think it might have been you. And instead you’re still stuck here with the Body and that damn sword and the saltwater washing over your feet as the tide rises too fast for this to be real.
I don’t want to forget, you want to tell her. I am a mausoleum, but I have never done anything by accident.
“You’re too hollow here, Harrow,” Abigail continues in spite of you.”You want a better story. Who wouldn’t? I would change it, if it meant the two of us had stayed clear of those stairs. But I need you to wake up out of here.”
You ask her what she means by hollow and she says labyrinth is another word for no. Did you know?
You shake your head. You wave a hand at the rising water level, and you remember Gideon surging toward you through the weight of all that sea-water, eyes bright and alive and understanding. You wave a hand at her body.
A question. An answer. Another question.
“This is close enough,” Abigail says. “Are you settled?”
What do you say to a question like that? Are you settled as if your life has ever been built on stable ground. Your life is a rickety wooden chair you were too afraid to step off of. Your life is grit dirt full of bones you had planted yourself. You had a single bright point of clarity before Gideon Nav asked you to watch her die, and now you are back to scrambling for stories to justify that.
There is nothing here, you think, and: this will end, this will end, this will end, and: you have cost too much to die.
“This is how it happened,” says the Fifth, quietly, and the saltwater swallows you back into the River.