Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s almost noon, and Sanctuary is burbling with low chatter. Oli, crammed into a corner of the dining space with nothing but his keyboard and Sausage’s blessing, taps out a restless melody that doesn’t travel. At the next table over, a lone man sits. He’s got a laptop. He’s not from around here.

“Oli,” Sausage says, his tone rounded by that tenderness he’s picked up alongside a bit of ASL. He pushes his hip against the side of Oli’s table. “I’ve seen you perform before. This is not a performance.”

Oli snorts. “You’re the one who told me to sit here.” He yawns, like it’ll make him feel better or Sausage feel worse.

Sausage is careful these days about touch; his hand drifts toward Oli’s but he settles just for pointing. “And you used to know how to get everybody’s attention anyway! I thought you needed some moral support.”

“The keys aren’t working right anyway,” Oli groans. He hits a D-sharp, demonstrating, and it sticks, clicking haplessly. A harried father Oli vaguely recognizes hurries a tray of drinks after his yelping children. When Oli turns his head, the strange man at the next table catches his gaze, blinks.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” the stranger begins. His eyes dart to the stack of books on the seat next to Oli, then return to Oli’s face.

“That’s okay,” Sausage says. It’s incredible how he can make his customer-service voice sound so much like himself.

“It’s a bit late for that,” Oli adds. He plunks his elbow on the keys of his keyboard and puts his chin on his palm, startling a laugh out of the stranger. “Go on then, what’re you interrupting us for, strange man?”

“Do you take requests?” the stranger asks. He leans forward to be heard over the shriek of children, and Oli likes him immediately for how easy he makes it look, how willing he is to do it.

“Only if I know the chords,” Oli replies, tapping his temple. The regulars never ask, and the shier tourists just stare as if bleached blond hair makes him a Saint’s pet in this tiny mining town.

The stranger smiles like he can’t help himself, like his joy sneaks up on him and clicks into place without his awareness. “And if I asked you to choose your favourite?”

Sausage laughs. “He’s already played his favourite!”

Oli points, agreeing. “Six times, in fact.”

The man raises his eyebrows, sitting up slightly as children disperse, as someone Oli remembers from a grade below him glides past with a sketchbook tucked under their arm. “You’ve been here a while.” A considering pause, his gaze sliding back to the books. “Pixlriffs,” he adds.

“Gesundheit,” Oli says.

The stranger’s mouth flattens to a jagged line, but Oli knows how people look at him. Waggles his eyebrows until the man admits to the faint smile he tried to hold back.

“Oli,” he continues. “Nice to meet you, Pixlriffs. Hey, tell you what, I’ll see what music I’ve got left rattling around in here—” Oli taps his temple again “—if you can tell me the hot goss from out of town.”

Pixlriffs rolls with the punch like he was born for it. “Oh no, is it that obvious?”

Oli shrugs apologetically. “The regulars know the score. Welcome to Sanctuary Cafe, that’s Oli in the corner, don’t mind him playing All-Star for the seventh time.” He taps out the opening melody just to watch Pixlriffs make the tiny offering of his laughter.

“Maybe I’ll become a regular.” He glances at his screen, dark with blocks of text Oli can’t read from here, at this angle. Oli’s struck with something like a pang of homesickness.

“I’m looking forward to it, Pixlriffs,” Sausage says, and then he’s stepping away: someone’s waiting at the till.

“You seem like a busy man. Not a librarian, I presume?” Oli asks. This, watching this stranger watch him, is better than sitting around until Sausage throws him out by the scruff to shuffle down the streets, up the stairs, back home.

“No, I’m not,” agrees Pixlriffs, looking back at Oli. “I get that—” his laughter is warm like stained wood “—even more than you think.”

He’s pretty, is the thing. In the steady way of people who’ve learned how to be in the world a while, radiating self-sufficiency, though who knows as a cover for what. Oli puts that thought aside; he’s been back hardly four months and he’s already getting cynical. He can’t be going around letting these things get out of hand.

“I’m a hagiographer,” Pixlriffs says. “Are you familiar?”

“Familiar?” Oli says. “Nope, can’t say I am. Sounds like cartography. Or geological philosophy.”

Pixlriffs laughs again as if surprised. “Yeah!” he says. “That’s good. If you know about geological philosophy, you’ll get the gist of what I’m doing. It’s a lot of constructing metalloliturgical arguments, poking through old records. Sometimes you get lucky and find a journal from a pilgrimage. Not for this town, but I’ve seen them before. If things don’t work out, I’m following in Brother Fable’s footsteps and heading south.” He shoots Oli a brief, assessing look so abruptly piercing Oli almost feels like a physical prickling on his skin. “You’ve studied geological philosophy?”

“General geology,” Oli offers, startled into a straightforward answer. “Rocks. Took all the philosophy electives because they counted and it gave me time to do other things. You know how it is.”

Pixlriffs smiles like he actually does. “What a coincidence,” he says. “Me too.” He turns a little to face Oli properly. “I preferred history, though. The geology was sort of incidental. I really— I mean, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Saints that broke mountains over their knees, Saints that pulled fish from the sky and sea. I’ve been looking for them. That’s what this trip is about, actually.”

Oli whistles. “Didn’t anyone tell you the Saint that was born here is long gone? I hate to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Oh goodness, and no one warned me when I arrived!” Pixlriffs replies without missing a beat. “It’s only all over every brochure they give you about this place.”

Oli clicks his tongue, grinning. He can feel that his cheeks are hot; Sausage keeps Sanctuary warm and Oli is clumsy after so many months at home. “All right, touché.”

Pixlriffs, at least, looks pleased. Just for him, Oli fills the lull in conversation with the chorus of Yellow Submarine. Pixlriffs seems like the type of guy to like the Beatles. He applauds when Oli stops, cupping his hands around his mouth and pretending to cheer from a long ways off. “Woohoo! Yeah! Love this guy!”

“Thank you, thank you, everyone,” Oli says, leaning as if to speak into a microphone. “That was just a little original composition of mine, we’re still workshopping it in the studio—”

“You’re quite the lyricist,” Pixlriffs says. Oli snorts.

“That one’s free, by the way,” Oli says. “Since I’m feeling nice. But for the next one, you really do need to tell me what you’re doing ‘round these parts.”

“I was actually looking at your books,” Pixlriffs says, as guileless as if he’s never told a joke in his life. “That’s quite the stack you’ve got here. This one—” he reaches over and takes the one on top “—was written by a colleague of mine. I fell out of touch with her a few years ago, but she was the one put this town on the map for me, so to speak.”

“Hey now,” Oli says without bite. “Don’t let the locals hear you say that. We’re proud of this place. We’re world-famous!”

“Yeah?” Pixlriffs says. He holds the book strangely for a moment, close to his chest like he’s actually going to take it away. Then he flips it open, goes straight to the end, and pauses on a page overtaken by a dark blotch. “Can’t say I’m surprised. You have a lot of important history under your feet in this town.”

Oli shakes his head, which Pixlriffs doesn’t see because he’s flipping between the dark page and the rest of the book. “That’s what they say.”

“Here it is,” Pixlriffs says, half-standing and using his foot to drag his chair along with him. He sits before flashing a sheepish smile. “Do you mind if I—?”

Oli makes an expansive gesture. “Scoot away, mysterious stranger! Be warned, though. Seems like there’s a thief about. He has a strange interest in stealing books without permission.”

“I don’t think stealing generally involves asking permission first anyway,” Pixlriffs says distractedly, splaying the book’s map out on top of Oli’s keyboard. It’s a little forward of him, but Oli can take it in stride. It’s honestly kind of charming; he wasn’t wrong about this stranger’s ease.

“Last seen at the Sanctuary Cafe, complimenting Oli Orionsound’s stack,” Oli adds.

Pixlriffs taps a finger on the page. Oli knows logically it’s a map of the town, but it’s undefined, big splotches of greys and hatch marks. “The pianist Orionsound has interesting taste in academic literature,” he replies, easy-going. 

“The pianist! ” Oli exclaims. “Oh, Pixlriffs, you flatter me. What are you pointing at? This all looks the same to me.”

“Well, kind of.” Pix traces a long oval over— something. Listen, Oli wasn’t joking about the map all looking the same. “I have a hypothesis. People say the Saint Tanager-Core was born here. They say after the second ferric alluvion, It came here to die. I think Its body is here, in these woods.”

“Pixlriffs,” Oli says doubtfully.

“Oli Orionsound,” he replies mildly. “You don’t sound like you believe me.”

“I could do with some convincing.”

Pleasantly, Pixlriffs laughs. “You probably shouldn’t. But I intend to go looking. I’ve been hunting for a Saint’s body for a long time.”

Oli’s heard those stories too, of adventurers and academics uncovering burning cores and meteorite metals in remote locations; hard not to, when the local tourism board makes it half of all their marketing. “Here’s the thing, Pixlriffs. People have gone looking. Hell, I’ve been out there before, looking for It. If It’s out where you say It is, no one’s found It yet.”

Pixlriffs shrugs, shutting the book with a snap that doesn’t match the smooth gesture he makes, handing it back. Oli puts it on the pile. “They’re as much holy as they are physical. Finding this one will—” he chuckles, eyes drifting to somewhere over Oli’s shoulder. “It’ll take some doing. It has already taken some doing. There’s so much to know. Where does a Saint go, when It dies? What makes a Saint’s grave? Did anyone mourn this one?”

“I don’t think you actually needed to steal my book,” Oli says. “I think you were just doing that for the love of the game, Pixlriffs.”

Pixlriffs beams, which is dazzling and terrifying for a split second and then just goofy. “What is anything for, if not the love of the game, Oli?” 

His eyes are piercing and uncanny, grey-blue and paler than his hair. He blinks, as if registering where he is, and draws back.

“Speaking of which, I’m afraid I still have some places to be today.”

Oli waves his hand. “Don’t let me keep you, Pixlriffs.”

He shuts his laptop with the same brisk efficiency he closed the book. Smiles at Oli, expression too warm for the coolness of the day that sweeps in every time someone opens the door. 

The man who is not a stranger says, “If we’re going to be friends, you’d better start calling me Pix.” He pauses, one hand on the closed zipper of his extremely practical backpack. “Do you come here often?”

Oli grins. “For you, Pix? Any day you want me, I’m here.”

“Visiting,” Gem says briskly. Then she remembers herself and takes Oli’s mug, holding up a packet of sweetener as a question. Her tone gentles some. “I’ll be around for about a week, probably. Why?”

“A week!” Oli mimes a wolf whistle on his harmonica. He takes the sweetener from her — she almost drops it, really, it’s like she thinks he’ll burn her —  and dumps it in his coffee. He used to love getting Gem to do things for him like this: handing over snacks, taking his plate to the sink. “You have business in town or something?”

Gem puts her chin on her hand. “I can’t just visit my loved ones for a while, Oli? It has to be for something?”

Oli shrugs. He’s not enough of a sap for this and neither is Gem. “How’s Pearl these days?”

“Pearl, Pearl, Pearl…” Gem giggles. “Why is that all anyone wants to ask about? Yeah, she’s doing great. We’re doing fine.” She shakes her head, frizzy hair shivering. “I don’t know why you came back.”

Oli drinks from his mug. Slurps a little out of habit. Gem wrinkles her nose, parts her lips to speak, and Oli interrupts with a gratified sigh. “Nothing like a hot drink on a cold day! Maybe I left in too much of a rush last time, Gem. Did you think about that? Maybe I wanted to see my loved ones too.”

Gem narrows her eyes. They taught each other how to lie, which is why she can tell when Oli’s doing it and why she never calls him on it. “So you agree with everyone.”

Oli waves. Sips his coffee again to actually taste it. Regrets that, because he doesn’t like coffee.

“You think I should come home too?” Gem asks. “And stay?”

And somehow, still, Oli is too much of a bleeding-heart for this. He puts his mug down and pushes it away from himself. “Nah, you can get away with it ‘cause you’re—” he does jazz hands “—successful.”

Gem snorts, which is gratifying. “Did you actually want to come back here.”

“Maybe!” Oli chirps.

And Oli knows it would be humiliating to say, Does she ever talk about us? So he clatters through a quick little ditty on the harmonica and Gem sighs, stirring her own drink. Says, almost smiling, “Eh, I’ll give it seven out of ten.”

“There’s just no pleasing you, is there?” Oli sighs.

Gem says sweetly, “If you want to please me, you have to do something pleasant, Oli.”

Outside, a horn honks and Oli hops upright. “That’d be my ride.”

Gem takes an unimpressed sip of her drink. “Aren’t your parents working?”

“Yep,” Oli says brightly. “Bye, Gem!”

“You okay?” Sausage asks mildly. He’s doing that thing again, where he watches Oli out of the corner of his eye. “You usually—” He snickers and Oli is already rolling his eyes, laughing. “You usually go for longer.”

“What are you saying, Sausage?” Oli points an accusatory finger. “Are you having doubts about my stamina, my dear Mercutio?”

Sausage doesn’t take the bait with the same enthusiasm anymore. He nudges a chair back into place with his foot. “It just seemed strange, that’s all. You used to love music.”

It’s late, and the days are getting shorter. The skies beyond the Sanctuary’s windows wer gold just minutes ago, and now the colour hangs around like the eyes of a Saint. All the warmth is gone.

“It was a lark,” Oli says. “Who ever keeps up with their hobbies from high school?” He pauses and remembers that Sausage did. Still does. Each summer’s pilgrimage home, Oli would make his rounds, feeling like a returning star, and there was Sausage, working behind the counter at Sanctuary, murmuring something to his dad before turning to meet Oli properly, to say hello, to ask why no one else came to visit. One by one, those habits dropped away.

“Lots of people,” Sausage says, but he goes back to wiping down the counter, work-rough hands on worn cloth. The look of them is becoming more familiar than the feel; Oli passes through people’s fingers like a ghost these days and he doesn’t know whose fault that is. “What am I paying you for?”

It’s just the two of them here at the counter, the last customers reaching for the final dregs in their cups.

“Nothing,” Oli says. He plunks through the peppy notes of some song Shelby used to like. No one’s heard from her in a while. Gone walking into the Saints’ arms, says someone engrossed in an unrelated discussion a few tables over, trying to keep their voice low.

Of course it has to be the day that Pix is there that Oli walks straight into glass. “What is an antiques store doing being made entirely of glass?” Oli grumbles while Pix hides a laugh behind his hand. Oli shuts the door behind himself. “Honestly what was Lizzie thinking, putting in a glass divider! Who does that help? What happened to good old-fashioned brick and mortar?”

“We have plenty of that too,” Lizzie says dryly, from behind the counter.

“Oh my god you scared me,” Oli yelps, pressing a hand to his chest for effect. “Well! Hello, Lizzie. Lovely to see you as always. And Pix! What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Lizzie asks. Oli likes to think it is not an unfond tone of voice. “What do you want with my shop, Oli?”

Oli raises his hands. “Nothing, nothing! I was just going to ask if we could trade books again.”

“Backrooms book dealings,” Pix says, raising his eyebrows and looking between them.

Lizzie huffs. “Nothing of sort, I’ll have you know! All of my dealings in this shop are perfectly above board.”

Pix chuckles, ducking his head as if to smother the sound. He’s got one hand tapping lightly on the counter, his plain black bag open and falling over by his feet. “Lizzie here was telling me she has a friend a little further downhill who might be able to help me with some car troubles.”

“Oh no,” Oli says. “Now there’s a man you can’t trust with anything but your car keys.”

Pix lifts his backpack up onto the counter, then pauses. “That… seems like a lot to trust someone with already? Especially given…” Pix, Oli is discovering, has a laugh for every occasion. This one is more nervous than the ones he’s heard before. “I’d prefer my research not be tampered with. Or my only means of getting around.”

“You don’t even know that I was talking about fWhip,” Lizzie says. She’s back to being her usual prim self, hands folded neatly one over the other.

But she was, and they have a staredown until Lizzie wordlessly concedes that, yes, of course he knew. You don’t forget someone who leaves you locked in a closet for hours.

Pix, in the meantime, has pulled a hat out of his bag and set it securely on his head. He looks unfamiliar like this, which is odd because Oli definitely hasn’t seen enough to know any of Pix’s faces as familiar.

“You look like an archaeologist,” Oli blurts.

“I could be,” Pix says. “They do generally need to keep the sun out their eyes.”

“You told me you were a tourist,” Lizzie says.

Pix is flawlessly unperturbed by the suspicion in her tone. “I contain multitudes. Thank you for the advice, Lizzie, I knew I could trust a fellow historian.”

Lizzie smiles, and Pix smiles back as if he’s actually in on the joke. He zips up his backpack.

“Wait, hold on,” Oli says, catching himself before he does something ridiculous like grab Pix by the arm. “If you’re headed down to fWhip’s, could you take me with? I’ll be nice about your taste in old man music.”

“Oli,” Lizzie says. She lets him think it’s a reprimand for a moment before she nudges a book in his direction.

“I don’t have any music,” Pix says, a fugitive twitch in the corner of his mouth.

“Even better,” Oli declares, taking Lizzie’s book easily, all the motion habit, and handing over the one in his own bag. “I’ll play something for us.”

It’s a sunny day, the light dazzling when Oli steps out of the shop a handful of paces behind Pix. He slumps into Pix’s passenger seat, a nest of hurriedly straightened papers, and points out the windshield. “Onward!”

Pix laughs and says, “Where are you headed?”

It… becomes a thing. That’s the magic of cars, Oli’s always supposed. He can watch the rise and fall of the road ahead and imagine it stretching out and out, until it flattens, until the mountains collapse into the rearview mirror, until it’s screaming in his chest that he’s not going home, he’s getting away. Even within the limits of Tanager-Thread, it’s easy to dream of sinking into the too-soft cushions of Pix’s passenger seat and just let the words tumble out of his mouth.

“It’s down that street you just passed,” he says, pointing even though Pix doesn’t turn his head. He looks like classical art in the grey light of the cloudy day. Someone picked out the details of him using paints that won’t stand up to curious human fingers anymore. “It looks abandoned, but I don’t think the price of their apples has gone up since the ‘90s.”

Pix squints at whatever of the horizon the mountains offer, and Oli follows his gaze to nothing. The lights on strings all over this part of town hint at the light they could contain.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Pix says. He sips from his coffee absentmindedly, other hand lax on the steering wheel, which seems dangerous, but hey, maybe there’s other stuff you learn about road safety once you have your license. “Have you ever thought about becoming a tour guide?”

Oli groans. “I was a tour guide once. That’s not the life for me. Everyone has to be, I think that’s a town bylaw. Like having brown hair and memorizing Tanager-Core’s biography.”

“A rebel in every sense,” Pix chuckles, making the briefest eye contact as his attention flits over Oli’s hair. “You could check today. In the archives.” Pix manages to pause apologetically. Oli’s impressed. “Although you probably have plans to spend your day somewhere that isn’t a musty basement, I’m guessing?”

“Mm,” Oli says. “There are limits to my loyalty.”

“I thought there might be,” Pix says agreeably. “I can leave you to take the pilgrims’ way around.”

“You’re a quick learner,” Oli says, startled to find the approval in him is genuine. “Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me I should make amends with fWhip in Enters-Glowing’s honour.”

Pix’s grin pulls at the corner of his mouth like a hook. “So is that a yes or a no to taking the stairs?”

Oli raps his knuckles on the door. The metal of the car — what he can see of it — is dull and it makes him feel cold. “Have mercy on a poor, transport-less traveller, Pix! And after I promised to write you into my will, too.”

“You live here,” Pix says. He turns onto an awkwardly slanted side street. Oli puts his shoulder to the door just to feel it rumble through him. “You don’t want to die here?”

Oli swallows clumsily around his incredulity. “Who would want to die here?”

“It was good enough for Tanager-Core,” Pix says. He’s still grinning. “It’d be convenient. I’d get your things.”

“You promised me good conversation, Pixlriffs,” Oli says reproachfully. “This is just sad.”

“And you brought your keyboard anyway,” Pix replies, not managing nearly as much reproach. He nods at it, angled awkward across Oli’s lap. “Play something? Think of it as compensation.”

Honestly, he only brought it along because it’s been too long since he’s been without it, since he’s been used to his own silence. After some half-hearted fits and starts, he fills the car with music. It rattles in his ears and ends too soon. The closed metal carries it with them, down the mountains, to where the city archives wait.

“Reopening the mines?” Oli asks, sipping from a mug of hot chocolate. “Ouch.” It burns his tongue. It’s raining, a hard deluge crashing down the winding roads, slicking the steps all up and down the mountainside. He is briefly pleased: he has dry socks and four warm walls decorated with nothing but blue-green paint and thrifted art.

“It’ll be cheaper this time around,” Sausage says reasonably. He’s wiping down a tray, grabbing bread for sandwiches. “All the stuff is still there. All the holes people dug. All the graves.” 

“All right,” Oli says.

Sanctuary is noisy. The rain is a slammed gate, but that means no one wants to leave either. Oli interrupts Sausage’s sandwich-making with the opening notes of Yellow Submarine.

Sausage smiles. It’s hard to tell what exactly he’s laughing at Oli for. “You don’t like it when I talk about graves anymore.” 

“I just— You need to lighten up, man.” 

Sausage laughs properly at that. “I’m light! I’m so light, Oli, I could just float away into the big blue sky! And from up there, I’ll see them. The inspectors and things, you know. Digging up all the old infrastructure, getting ready to use it again.” A beat. “Jobs, right?” Then he grins, handing over Oli’s sandwich before getting started on the rest. “Would you ever go become a miner, Oli?” 

Oli groans. “You don’t want me as your local bard, Sausage? I can’t become a miner. I think I would die down there. Soot-covered. Emaciated. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me!” He looks out the window as he tugs his keyboard off the counter, leans it against his chair. “No one would be out in this weather, right? What would you even find out there?”

I’m headed to the mines today, Pix told him, obligingly rolling down his window when Oli knocked. He spoke softly, like there was something around them or in the words that needed reverence. Or like it was a coincidence that Oli could hear what he was saying.

Sausage hums. “He’s staying at Chromia, right?”

“Where else would he go?”

“I heard Katherine’s looking for new business opportunities,” Sausage says, in that plain, neutral tone he picked up not so long after he started working with kids. It is, it’s turned out, a very broadly applicable tone.

Oli sighs. “She was nice to me when I came back.” He takes a bite of his sandwich, deciding it would be mean to say, Bless her heart. He hasn’t been able to resist, lately. He’s been hanging out at Lizzie’s place, or at the library, drawing rough blobs in the shapes of Sainted metal. He’s not good at it. But sometimes there’s a line or two that he gets right. It sticks in him like a chant.

“Wasn’t everyone nice?” Sausage asks. He’s fast, laying out lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. “You don’t—” He giggles. “I don’t think anybody hates you as much as you hate this whole place.”

Sausage has a gift for needles stuck in places you don’t expect them. Oli chews. Sanctuary is a warm, glowing place. Tile, wood, paint, the whir of only mundane machinery. He’s smelled metal, felt the bright clear spark of it, only once. It was his fault; he wasn’t careful enough with the knife.

“What’s fWhip up to these days?” Oli asks.

“Cars,” Sausage says blandly. Then he laughs, patting the countertop instead of Oli’s hand. Still, it warms the space some.

“We still don’t know how Saints were made?” Oli asks. “Huh. That’s one of those things I thought we’d figured out by now. Like how many planets there are.” 

“Believe it or not,” Pix says wryly.

It’s not that Pix isn’t ever at Sanctuary. He’s just there less than Oli hopes. So he has to take advantage when Pix is around. You understand.

Oli’s pockets are full of leaves in fun colours, cushioning his trusty harmonica. The notebook in his bag has awful pencil lines spilling out of its pages. He reaches for Pix’s notebook and it’s snatched away.

“Why—?” Pix begins. He huffs, as if amused despite himself.

Sometimes Pix is at the library. Once, Pix was at the library at the same time Oli was. It should’ve been… fun. It should have been fun, if nothing else. A cheery little conversation before they’re both on their way. Instead, Oli brushed past Pix among the narrow aisles between the shelves once and felt cold. Pix, nose in a book, murmured an apology without looking up.

Oli holds his hands up. “Sorry, sorry. That was presumptuous of me.”

Pix looks down at his notebook. “We know they burn,” he says. They’re at one of the smaller tables. Pix’s attention is unsettling, and he’s not even looking right at Oli. “That’s the thing about holiness, right? You can’t come away from touching it unmarked.”

At least he sounds like himself again. 

“They left brands,” Pix continues. Oli puts his chin on his hand and settles in. Pix has a gift for this. “On their people, on their things. Crescent-Circuit was a Saint from the far north, found burning craters into the earth under Its feet. No matching craters were found anywhere nearby. We don’t—” Pix stops, complete, like that was the end of the sentence.

The gift is this: Pix starts talking, and Oli finds himself breathing slower. They’ll get wherever Pix is going in time. It’s strange that it works. It keeps working. Pix has a way of slowing him down, of insisting on taking every second of the time given to him and holding it like hard candy on the tongue. Oli’s always been inclined to bite down.

“We know so little about them,” Pix says. “I mean, that’s the story, right? People ask me what I could possibly be studying, when they’re half signal and half sacred. That’s the line everyone knows. But we have the stories. Crescent-Circuit in the craters in the Arctic, standing vigil for people who return to visit It, while It dies. Soul-Mockery the wandering apiarist. I’m fond of that one, myself. Tanager-Core.”

Pix tilts his head. It’s not apologetic, actually, is it? He just makes it look apologetic. Oli sighs. “Tanager-Core was a Saint who was born with the town of Tanager-Thread. Tanager-Core saw through the heart of the world. Tanager-Core pointed into the mountains and people went where It guided them and no one burned while It watched them. You knew that.”

“I only learned quite recently,” Pix says, slipping into sheepishness like putting on a second skin. “Ever since then, I’ve been wondering.” 

“Wondering?” Oli prompts.

“Why It only had two eyes,” Pix murmurs.

“Accusing a Saint of imperfect design? Heresy,” Oli whistles, but Pix just chuckles. “They’re like us,” Oli says. “Right? It’s all— They all look like that.”

But Oli’s wondered the same thing before. Two eyes, facing forward, gives you depth perception. They’re eyes for hunting; they’re eyes for detail. If no person burned while Tanager-Thread watched, why not watch more of them? 

Hagiography, Oli read at the library that day, is a literature of archetypes.

Pix draws idle circles in his notebook. Under his and Oli’s eyes, they bloom into patterns, stray ink lines rendering them familiar: hair or springs or coils of magnets going wrong. “Most people,” Pix murmurs. Someone yelps, in the back corner where Oli saw a board game starting earlier. Pix finishes another column of circles and restarts. “Most people think it’s all stories means the work is pointless. The point is that it’s stories. It’s archetypes. That’s why they look like us.”

It’s a beautiful day outside. Oli’s pockets are full of leaves and they’re falling onto the floor and Sausage will clean it all up if he doesn’t pick them up. Pix’s pen slows to a halt.

“What are you doing cooped up in here?”

“Scoping the place out,” Pix says with that small, willing smile. “You never know when you need a cozy cafe with a few criminal contacts.” He smiles so readily, and laughs obligingly at everything, which is great for the ego as long as Oli doesn’t think about. Oli’s great at that, so they make a good match.

“Good thing you have me for company, eh?”

Pix flips to another page of his notebook and Oli has to confess: his heart stutters. The page is wild with broken lines. They’re not Saints. Oli, despite his best efforts, has had the stories of Saints drilled into him. Saints are definite. They sleep ringed by mountains. They stand out against sky and settlement more sure than gravity or blade. But they are approximations. Sketches of Saints.

“Can I see?” Oli asks.

“They’re nothing special,” Pix says, turning the page again to a wall of his indecipherable handwriting. “I won’t see the Saint if I don’t attend to It, and sketching — representation, I mean — was the easiest.”

“What, sculpture’s not in the cards for you?” Oli asks. 

“Believe it or not,” Pix says again.

“A handsome fellow like you, doing all that by yourself on a Wednesday afternoon?”

Pix’s driving is jerky today; Oli has felt the bite of the seatbelt into his shoulder more than once. He halts again. “Hm?” 

Oli pushes more out of habit than anything. “That seems like a lot of work you’re doing, for just you.” They’re driving down the main street, where the sidewalks are dotted with big planters that will be filled with tulips come spring.

“I find not many people are interested in leaving their roots behind, even when there’s a promise of a grand adventure. Or they’re too interested in it, and think I’ll give them a free ride.”

Oli sits back, rocked by the car and unafraid. “Now, this is starting to feel pointed.”

“You still owe me gas money,” Pix says pleasantly.

Oli snickers. “I didn’t think you would mind giving one poor little soul a ride out of the kindness of your great heart! You seemed like a man with many assets.”

Pix nods sagely. “I do possess many items of significant value.”

Oli tries to stretch but his hands just hit the roof of the car and Pix hums at him. It’s the only thing Pix won’t stand for, as if this rickety old thing is holy. Given Oli’s tried sketching it, maybe it is. “I’d pay you back if I could find you! I keep thinking you’ve just up and left, man.”

“Here I am,” Pix says, amused.

Driven by the angular clarity of hurt, Oli talks and talks. Outside, he’s sure, the words would just evaporate into the blue day, or echo down the stairs until they reached the wrong side of someone’s door. Like banners behind them, the stairs go. Oli doesn’t know where Pix is going. Pix keeps answering him like nothing’s wrong.

Oli’s half-hearted research gives him an excuse to keep going back to the library, with the insistent tugging of a real project like a string through his ribs, which is better than the slim pickings back home in his room. It’s about fixed stories, or fixing stories. The wonder of the Saint is Its ability to resist death and to commit actions with perfect repeatability.

He’s not the note-taking type; most of what he reads falls out of his brain within the hour. But that line rattles around in his head. He keeps bringing books with him to Sanctuary. Feels them weight his bag when he visits Lizzie, Gem having long since moved on to better things. He drops in on Katherine once and that’s how he learns Scott’s back from his latest backpacking-whatever through hillside-wherever. Scott leaves him a copy of Saint’s biography. Oli doesn’t admit to reading it.

“It’s a hero’s journey,” he argues to Pix, the words literature of archetypes still rolling around somewhere under his tongue. Pix has been listless today. “You have to be— Augh, I don’t remember what it’s called. Down in the dumps? Surely it’s not down in the dumps.”

Pix huffs, a half-hearted laugh. “It would be accurate. I have been down in the dumps.” He takes a sip of coffee. “It’s a cyclical thing, I find. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is a hero’s journey.”

“See?” Oli says. “That’s the spirit!”

They lapse into silence for a while, the stillness of the library imposing itself on them. It’s a smaller place than Oli had let himself get used to, and the tables are usually full, unless Pix is there because Pix saves seats for company even when he’s not expecting it. Even when he seems startled that Oli has materialized before him.

Then: “What have you been doing?” Oli asks. “You look like— You look like someone stepped on your dog, if you know what I mean.”

Pix’s gaze flicks up from his laptop screen. It’s like a spotlight. Oli catches another person glancing sideways at it as they walk past. “I… don’t know what you mean, but I’ve been in the mines.”

Oli snorts. Pix blinks.

“Oh, you mean literally,” Oli says. “Seems dangerous.” He asks the kinder question: “Find anything?”

There’s nothing to find down there. They both know it. Pix says, “I had to check, Oli. For the sake of… completeness.”

Pix is dedicated. Oli shuts his book, then opens it again. He’s lost his page. “It really eats up all of your time, doesn’t it?”

Pix murmurs agreement and types something. A sentence, maybe, relentless and going on for longer than Oli expects, a breath and then another. Probably a few sentences.

Oli adjusts his tone some. Pix likes being asked questions. He is, for all his eccentricities, one of those teacherly types. “What are you doing, hunkering down in a library with little ol’ me, then?”

Pix relents, gaze flicking up from his laptop to meet Oli’s. There are strands of hair falling in Pix’s face. He hasn’t worn his hat today, so it’s fluffy. The light from the windows comes in dulled; they’ve done something to the glass. “You’re the one who sat down with me.”

“You wound me,” Oli says. “Pix! I’m here to help you on your grand quest. They’ll sing songs of us, you know. Maybe I’ll even compose one.”

“Very helpful.” Pix smiles for real. Oli takes the win. 

Oli blows him a kiss. “There. Bound forever. Like marriage. We’re married now.”

Pix raises both eyebrows.

Oli snickers and waves his hands. “No, no! I take it back!”

Pix murmurs, that smile curling warmly at the corners of his mouth, “There’s no need to sound so frantic. I thought I brought quite a lot to the table.”

Oli puts his chin in his hands. “You haven’t told me one word of what you’ve brought to the table today. Go on, spill the beans. What salacious secrets are you hiding on that screen of yours?”

“What do I get in exchange?” Pix asks. 

“I’ll be very, very quiet,” Oli offers. “It’s a generous deal. Normally I make people pay a pretty penny for my silence.”

Pix reads out loud: “My response to East-Ravine was such because it revealed to me the machine beneath my own skin.”

Oli focuses on Pix, on how he really does look like a professor as he reads more, how he probably taught for a while in some nameless college, getting chalk dust on his palms. The library’s chairs are hard. Oli’s back hurts. He applauds, gently, when Pix remembers himself and looks up again.

They’re at the park, not the one with the playground but the sad, little one with the pond and the placard with all the worn coppery letters about spears and lightspeed. The bench is too low for Oli to swing his feet, but he perches like he could.

“Oli,” Gem says.

“Gem,” Oli replies.

“Do you have a crush on that guy? The tourist or pilgrim or whatever he is.”

“Oh, god no,” Oli says. “Can you imagine?”

“I mean, yeah, that’s why I asked.” Gem, who is the same height as Oli, also can’t swing her feet back and forth, but she leans on her hands, copying him, and their hands are right next to each other. He remembers that as a teenager her hands were bony. “You are acting like a kid with a crush.”

Oli should laugh. Or be flagrantly offended. “Oh, I see,” he says instead. “This is one of your traps. Where I have to agree with you or something bad will happen.”

“Nothing bad will happen!” Gem cries.

“I might end up like you,” Oli says.

Gem shakes her head and gets to her feet. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“A walk!” Oli exclaims. “How adventurous.”

“It’s a park,” Gem says, guileless. “It’s for walking.”

“It’s not a very good park,” Oli says, because he knows they agree about this. Small pond, dirt paths, overgrown grass.

“Look,” Gem says. “The sun’s setting, the sky is all these pretty colours, let’s walk around and admire it! It’ll be perfect.”

There’s a habit she hasn’t dropped since childhood. It’ll be perfect. That’s just perfect. You’ll be perfect, Oli.

There’s a scratch on Pix’s cheek. He keeps touching it, absently, as he follows Oli down the winding steps leading downtown. When it really matters, when anyone really looks, it’s right there like a spotlight: Pix isn’t from Tanager-Core. He isn’t made of the trailing smoke of Its legacy, and he looks the part.

“This is just back the way I came,” Pix points out, halting on a brief reprieve of flatness. “Are you sure—?”

“We missed it,” Oli says easily. “There used to be a dirt path, but it got all overgrown. I keep forgetting.”

“Some local,” Pix murmurs.

“Hey now,” Oli replies just as little bite.

Pix’s laugh becomes a yawn, his hand drifting to cover his mouth and then back to his cheek. In fairness to him, it’s late. The sun is dipping, that colder kind of honeyed light that comes with the shortening autumn days. In a few minutes, it will dip behind the mountains, and the sky will be all the same colour but everything will have gone wrong.

That’s cynical. Oli’s trying not to be cynical.

“What happened, man?” Oli tugs Pix’s sleeve, just above the elbow, and Pix does that blink of his that’s almost a flinch. “You look like you got run over by your own car.” Oli lets go of his sleeve consideringly. “Is that what happened to your car?”

“fWhip’s promised me it’s nothing he can’t fix,” Pix says, which is a weird answer even for him. Oli doesn’t think he’s imagining it. There’s been something ghostly about Pix lately. The mines, the woods, the shadows of the buildings in the early afternoon. Oli tries to picture Pix in those places and just impressions: blinding light, a darkness with substance.

The steps end and the sidewalk goes level for a few paces. Oli stop, turns around, and looks behind them. “You like stories, Pix?” he asks, for the sake of time.

“I’ve been known to enjoy a story or two,” Pix replies. “You know. Back in my day.”

He puts the bait out so sweetly. He even sits on the steps with a sigh. Oli kind of loves him for it, energy bubbling in his bones. The dying clouds fill him with something reckless, so he just says, standing there over Pix, “Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”

Whatever Pix is staring at, whatever he’s thinking, Oli isn’t looking. The glow of the sun in right in his eye. He’s trying not to look directly at it, but he can’t quite bring himself to turn his face away.

“We’ll tell it to the Saints like this: when Tanager-Core was still young, It had the stories of machines fed into Its pipes. Mundane machines. Machines that could carry us. Machines that were our hands, our bodies, and not Its. And because of that, Tanager-Core broke the sides of the earth until even the things we buried under roots came churning up, so we could never leave each other alone. Tanager-Core made mirrors of water so we could never forget what we looked like. Tanager-Core loved Its cradle and everyone agreed even among Saints, Tanager-Core loved Its grave more than most.”

In the corner of Oli’s eye, he sees movement, a gesture that’s all shadow because the sun is still burning in his vision. It doesn’t matter, the words keep falling out of him.

“It took the light off the water and made shovels instead of spears. It asked the mountains for kindness on our behalf. Children thought they could touch It. Who knows how a Saint drives? But It left, dying.”

“Don’t tell me I came all the way here only to find out now I’ve got the wrong place,” Pix says, and he doesn’t even have the decency to sound solemn.

The sun falls into the teeth of the mountains. Nothing changes, except the light in Oli’s eye is gone, leaving an incandescent, implacable afterimage. “Everyone saw It when It came back,” Oli says. “And we all knew It was waiting, because as soon as the last one of us looked, It went. All signal.”

“You were there?” Pix asks. “When It died?”

“It’s a story,” Oli says.

Pix, in the way of someone who has no idea what they’re doing or knows exactly what they’re doing, lifts his hands, open palms up as if in some private supplication. Oli considers grabbing him, putting his own palm to Pix’s. In considering, he manages not to actually do it.

“I see,” Pix says.

Oli laughs, breathless for no reason. “Do you, Pix? I don’t— Look, it turns out, you spend enough time here—” He doesn’t have the air he needs to finish the sentence.

“Sure,” Pix says. “Saints die. Saints are—” another gesture, except this time Oli sees it, how it’s Pix running fingers through his hair like he’s trying to stop his own body from doing something it shouldn’t “—kind of definitionally dying things.”

Oli turns in a circle and realizes with a twinge of embarrassment at the end that he has nowhere to go. He feels— all hands and knees, like he’s fifteen again. The shadow of the sun is still searing his retina, and they might be on the wrong street entirely. He makes eye contact. “What I’m trying to say, Pix, is that it’s weird that you didn’t come here earlier. Tanager-Core’s story— Everyone knows that one. You knew that one. I was living a million miles away and trying as hard as I could to forget everything and I heard about it. Are you sure you’re not a pilgrim? Doing everything the long and slow way?”

“I suppose it’s a kind of pilgrimage,” Pix says, eyes on the stretch of steps unrolling further down the mountainside. The places where they bend, split, wind upwards again. Leaves rattle over sidewalk, the sound of them discontinuous and discomfiting.

“Does it— end?” Oli asks.

Pix says, as if it’s obvious, “All pilgrimages have to end, Oli.”

“Then what happens?”

Pix wavers as if to get up and then he doesn’t. “I’ll have to find out.”

“You’re really going to make me say it—” Oli mutters, putting a hand on his shoulder. Pix flinches for real at that and Oli drops it; he can be stung about that later. “Pix, sweet prince, you look tired.”

“Oh no.” Pix slumps back, mouth twitching with a smile. “I don’t think that one ends well for the Prince of Denmark.”

Oli hops up a step. Pix reaches for his ankle, and Oli yelps and hops back down.

“I don’t burn,” Pix says, too even for Oli to know what do with it.

I think you do, Oli does not say. And you definitely think I do. But the thought chimes in his throat, crawls up his tongue. Trying to speak around its weight, Oli says, “Your turn, then. Tell me a story.”

It’s getting to be night. That scratch on Pix’s cheek stands out, healing bleakly. 

“It’s been a while,” Pix says, which Oli is pretty sure isn’t any way to start a story. “I’ll tell you about… Oh, have you heard the one about Avenue-Saint?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I wrote a paper on It. My last one of undergrad. I was gone before I found out if it was any good.”

It’s not like Pix doesn’t do this. He talks about himself, his history and his projects, often more than Oli asks for and sometimes without prompting.

“Avenue-Saint’s cradle was… somewhere in what we’d call the French countryside, now. Our records of It aren’t the best, but from what people have gathered, It made rivers of Itself, attracting fish, replenishing wells. Or it made one river of Itself.” Pix leans forward, elbows on his knees, but he’s not looking at Oli. “The details aren’t very clear. The people of the surrounding villages say they could taste Its metal in the fish, but only for a generation or two after.”

Technically, Oli asked for a story and not a lecture. He means to say this and then he asks, “It died? Just from making one little river? I could do that.”

“Could you now?” Pix chuckles. “Not all Saints are as prolific as your Tanager-Core.”

“Well, It’s not mine,” Oli mutters. 

“Try as others might to convince you otherwise?”

“And they’ve tried,” Oli agrees.

“Who can say why a Saint dies?” Pix continues, tone shifting as if to pick up an earlier thread of conversation. “They went and went and went until they broke and that was all that could ever stop a Saint.” He pauses long enough that Oli glances at him, and Pix pats the space on the stair next to him. 

Oli sits. 

Pix says, “I hope I don’t give the impression that I’d like to copy them in that regard.”

Pix has been spending a lot of time in the woods. Less in the mines but more than most. Word of their new local cryptid has spread even to Oli’s dinner table. He’s been here a while. Winter is seeping into the darkening sky; it’s on its way.

“You know, I’ve been wondering about that,” Oli says. “Do you pray to the Saints?”

Pix hesitates. “My interest is largely philosophical.”

“But not entirely.” 

“Everyone promises each other that their loved ones walk with the Saints. Everyone, like it or not, has a Saint they’d call theirs.” Oli itches at the idea. Then Pix says, “It made it tricky, though, getting into Avenue-Seize’s grave. They’re protective of their Saint. Most towns are; it’s a common belief you have to pay back the blessing. I was kind of surprised Tanager-Thread takes pilgrims like…” He gestures. The wide sprawl of the town between the stone and dirt and jagged bone of the mountains.

Oli shrugs. “What else would we do with it? The Saint’s already dead.” That’s cynical. “You know, I think we’re on the wrong stairs. I was thinking about these ones because an old man once told me this staircase led up to the afterlife.”

“And you believed it?” Pix asks with a faint incredulity that makes Oli laugh.

It was someone Sausage called uncle. Someone who knew him, visiting from out of town. The day was gleaming and Oli didn’t have any reason to try believing in loss.

“You know what I said to him?”

Pix leans back, head canted as if trying to take in more of Oli, as if the full picture is painted somewhere on the mountainside behind him. “What did you say to him?” 

“I said, ‘Race you, old man.’” And Oli gets up and bolts, hoping or knowing his footsteps have an echo.

It’s a fine town. Sometimes it feels like it withers faster than it grows, but Oli left for four and a half whole years and when he came back, the bones of it were still hanging on, white nails dug into the mountains. There were the pale, grimy stairs like rough, unchanging fingers. Some of the stores were different, maybe. Some of them weren’t.

It’s night. Oli looks up to see if there are stars, and there are. He’d make a joke about not recognizing that scattering of them over there — haha, since when do stars move? — but it’s weak even in his head. He’s tired. Sue him for not being at the top of his game.

So he walks a while. He dodges Lizzie’s place, which isn’t hard. He avoids fWhip’s old street, even though fWhip’s moved and that street winds like a river, the threat of it splashing at his ankles. When a car pulls up next to him in the dark, Oli discovers that he feels more strongly about not dying than he thought.

Pix rolls down the window and Oli laughs too loud. “Pixlriffs!” he exclaims.

“Oli Orionsound,” Pix returns, grinning. “What are you doing all alone on a Thursday night?” He doesn’t trip over any single word, but he still manages to sound like a dork. It’s really impressive.

Oli shakes his head, stepping down from the curb to get closer. “Getting into your passenger seat, from the looks of it. Accosting innocent young men on the street now, are we?”

“Really,” Pix says with all that crooked earnestness. “You’re out for a walk at this hour?”

“Well.” Oli knocks on the car door. Pix unlocks it for him. He’s clumsy getting in. “Well, you’re out for a drive at this hour.”

Pix offers up his amusement willingly. “Let’s go somewhere, then. If you have a minute.”

“I have a lot more than a minute, Pix.” Oli stretches out, as much as he can, and shuts his eyes. It doesn’t matter what kind of expression Pix makes at him — he’s driving and Oli isn’t. The car, as if obliging, rumbles with movement around him.

“I’ve been meaning to ask about that, actually,” Pix says, casual. Oli blinks just one eye open, remembers he sucks at that, and shuts it again. “What do you… do? You perform at Sanctuary, but not often. You follow me around, but not always. You have somewhere to go at night, but—”

“Follow you around,” Oli huffs, feeling playful and stupid. “You’d think I’m a lost puppy or something.”

The sound of the turn signal. Pix hums, discordant and meaningless.

“Waiting for my lucky break, is what I’m doing,” Oli says. The inertia of the turn pushes him into the door. “A little show for the locals today, fame and fortune all over the world tomorrow.”

“Quite soon then,” Pix remarks. “Should I take you back home? So you’re well-rested for your grand adventures to come.”

Oli laughs, tasting it in his mouth. Yeah, Pix knows where he lives, doesn’t he? “No, don’t.” The car rumbles a little more, slowing and then picking up speed again for reasons he isn’t paying enough attention to know about. The words are easier in the dark, not looking, even though it’s not a very big car: metal and plastic and two bodies, flesh. “Really, don’t. I can’t— I can’t, Pix.”

“Can’t go home?” Pix asks.

Oli rubs his hands over his face, which is a performance for no one, and groans. “Don’t start about how it’s selfish, I know—”

“Oh.” Pix chuckles, vague. “I was going to say I’m not terribly surprised. It’s hard to make a home in a Saint’s grave, once you’ve seen it from the outside. It’s all sedimented history, right?”

“Geological philosophy,” Oli says, a bit hoarse. “Right.”

“You got out for a little while, I’m told,” Pix says. “And then you came back.”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it, Pix!” Oli means the exclamation to come out jovial. God, he’s clumsy tonight. He coughs into his hand. “It’s sedimented history but it’s gravity, too. You come back. You— Well, maybe not you. But people warned me. Gem tried to tell me, Shelby knew it even if she didn’t say. You have to be careful coming back. Or the gravity…” Oli claps his hands. Pix hits the turn signal again, even though every street has been deserted. “Gets you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Pix says, tone unreadable.

They lapse into silence for a bit. It’s not an unsympathetic silence. Oli tries not to listen for Pix’s breathing. He glances out the window, liking the town at night for its anonymity, its strange shadows. He squints past brick, through tin. Looks with unfocused eyes until everything shudders alone, without context.

“When I—” No, that’s not a storytelling voice at all. Try again. “When I came back, I couldn’t sleep properly for weeks. I had to put earbuds in and turn the volume up all the way just to knock myself out for a few hours.”

“Gravity,” Pix agrees softly. It’s luck that Oli glances over. Pix smiles sideways at Oli, almost furtive, as if just for him. “I can only imagine. I’d—” He shakes his head. “It’s hard to go back.” 

“Hard to come back,” Oli mutters. “I’m still here.”

“You’re out of the house,” Pix points out. 

“That I am,” Oli concedes, even though it’s not terribly far at all. Alarmingly, the longer he looks out the window, the more familiar the world outside is becoming. Does he remember when that didn’t make his throat close? He tries very hard not to imagine anything at all. Oli realizes, quite belatedly, that Pix has something playing, very very softly. Music. “That’s the secret, isn’t it, Pix? When it comes down to it, you can just leave whenever you want.”

“Well, yes, but— can’t you?” A flash of stark blue light over Pix’s face, as they pass the extra-bright lights at the corner of— Oli squeezes his eyes shut.

“I meant general ‘you,’ Pix.”

“That story you told me the other day,” Pix says, both hands on the wheel. He’s turning again. Even with his eyes closed, Oli knows. This isn’t Oli’s street but it’s close.

“The Tanager-Core one? Eighth grade teacher made me memorize it.” Taps on the glass before remembering Pix doesn’t approve of him doing that. “Dramatic voice and all.”

“I did think it seemed out of character for you,” Pix murmurs.

“You didn't seem to mind,” Oli says. “And I sure didn’t.” They’re passing Lizzie’s place. “Pix, are we driving in circles?”

“I didn’t mean to make a volunteer service of my car,” Pix says, mild.

Oli, in the privacy of his own chest, can be a little hurt by that. “You should’ve told me you were looking for compensation, Pix! I would’ve, gladly, tipped my kind driver for so improving my autumnal excursions.” He didn’t bring his bag but he does have his pockets, and he ruffles through them. It’s late. He’s tired. That’s why he’s so pathetically grateful for the sound of the car, the clicking of that turn signal again. “Ten,” Oli says, digging the bill out of a pocket in a pocket. “How far does that get me?”

Pix pulls over — Oli checks for a No Parking sign out of habit but there isn’t one — and the soothing rattle of his car halts. He doesn’t move to get out, though. “Ten dollars,” Pix says, “gets you to the edge of town and no farther.” He undermines his own ultimatum with a quiet laugh. “I’m not— Where are you going, Oli? Where were you going, before I showed up?”

Oli thumps the back of his head on the headrest. “People ask me that all the time, Pix. I thought I was coming with you into the woods. To touch a Saint.”

“Are you interested in holiness, Oli?”

Oli finds that, selfishly, he prefers this. Getting Pix to himself, bundled up together in the coffin-dark lines of his car. The night outside is silent and uninviting, the streetlamps beaming with a kind of scalpel-fresh glow. In here, at least the suffocation is a kind Oli doesn’t get much of lately. 

“Are you?” Oli replies. “You haven’t quoted a biography to me even once, Pixlriffs. I’m starting to wonder whether I should be disappointed.”

“I think—” Pix says, abrupt and uneasy. “You might be asking me for something I can’t give, Oli.”

Oli looks at Pix for real. Still the vaguely hollowed impression around his eyes, the way his hair is flat that Oli has learned means he wore his hat today. There’s— something about the corner of his mouth. Oli has nowhere left to look, but he still has to look away, doesn’t he? He doesn’t touch the car. He doesn’t gaze outside. It’s not nice, but Oli says, “Who said I’m asking for anything?”

Pix lets out a sigh that becomes a laugh. “You know, I really will take the ten.” And he gets out of the car. For a moment, Oli is stunned by the iced-burn aftermath of abandonment. Then it occurs to him there’s no way in a million years Pix would just leave his car to Oli.

Oli gets out and Pix is there, not close enough to touch but not gone either. He has a backpack weighing heavy on one shoulder, and Oli watches him shrug it all the way on, adjust. Having nothing else to do with his hands, Oli tugs the bill back out of his pocket and holds it out to Pix with two fingers.

“Thanks,” Pix says with a sincerity that is, somehow, still surprising. He takes it, and the gesture is meaningless. Then he says: “Shall we?”

It turns out a ten dollar bill gets Oli farther than just the edge of town. It turns out the overgrown shortcut Oli lost track of found its way into Pix’s path. It turns out whatever it is Pix has to offer, he has enough of it to make Oli follow, talking about stars and signal as they walk into the woods.

Pix is kneeling in the dirt; Oli can see him now that his eyes have adjusted to the dark. Shadows, he’s remembering, have depth. Oli breathes in, sharp air in his lungs, and everything has a velocity to it.

“Pix,” Oli says.

“Mm?” Pix hums, distracted, and it is such an unguarded sound it’s almost scary.

“If you’re going to kill me, can I grab a change of clothes first? I don’t want this to be what they find me in when they bring my body out of the woods and put it on the local news. And I’m cold.”

“Should’ve thought of that earlier, I think,” Pix says, amused. From the way he leans as he pulls something out of his bag, it’s heavy equipment. It lands in the dirt and doesn’t make much of a sound. Oli approaches, holds his hands out in offering, but Pix waves him off. He’s pale in what little light gets past the branches from the slim, fingernail slice of the moon.

“You can’t bring a man to a secondary location without accounting for whether he freezes to death before you finish whatever terrible machinations you’re plotting,” Oli complains. Pix hasn’t even had the decency to put the contents of his bag somewhere Oli could see it. “It’s careless, is what it is.” He starts looking around for something better to do then be led around in the dark.

Pix says, amused and distracted and without looking up, “Whatever you’re about to do, Oli, don’t.” He’s rifling through his bag.

Oli almost wishes he had been holding a rock to hit Pix over the head with. “I wouldn’t have gone far,” he says, feeling— chaperoned? “You wouldn’t lose track of me that easily, would you, Pixlriffs?”

“I might, Orionsound.” A quiet grunt as he pulls something else from his bag. “The mine rescue teams might be happy to finally see an actual rescue mission.”

“Mine rescue teams,” Oli says. 

“Best in the world,” Pix says, too chirpy for the circumstances. 

“Really?” Oli says. 

It’s like everything’s fine. It’s like Oli isn’t shivering, like he knew this was coming and dressed appropriately and isn’t wearing sweatpants and the funny little beret he grabbed blindly off the coatrack. Oli takes it off as he shuffles over to get a better look at what Pix is fiddling with.

“You live here,” Pix points out.

“Well, they’re not for me,” Oli says. There’s something about the dark and the cold like this; it makes him aware of his own breath in his ears, it shrinks his attention to this patch of woods, to the uneasy crackle when he shifts his weight on the dried grass and twigs and leaves. “They’re for the pilgrims.”

“The pilgrims you won’t set loose in your forests without several days’ worth of paperwork,” Pix says. “The pilgrims that I’m pretty sure you put a tail on. And here I was thinking Lizzie helped me out of the kindness of her heart.”

“There’s your first mistake,” Oli says automatically.

“Oh, only my first?”

“You’ve gotten snarky.” Oli gives up and wraps his arms around himself, pressing his fingers into his arms. Shivers loud enough that he can see Pix hesitate even in the darkness. “Now look what you’ve done,” Oli murmurs. “You’ve got me wanting to defend them. Lizzie gets very up in arms about it, you know. People coming and going, stomping around in a grave. I think she’s just mad it interferes with business.”

“Sorry,” Pix says.

The thing he’s fiddling with is— Maybe it had been holy once. But Oli looks at it is and feels a disorienting moment of freedom. Machinery, death-touched, signal-singing, the kind of wire and weight that could only be imitated palely in a textbook. Pix digs his nails into the edges of a panel and pries it open. He runs a thumb along the shining frame.

Oli whistles, then feels guilty for it. “Now that’s some good old-fashioned blasphemy right there. Shall I shield mine virgin eyes?”

“Not really and no,” Pix answers readily. “Signal may be the domain of priests, but—” he sounds like himself again when he chuckles “—it turns out some allowances can be made for research.” 

He’s pulling something out of the radio, because it is a radio. The thing caught between Pix’s fingers looks like a length of ribbon. The radio is all spirals and spines, and Oli catches himself longing for better light to see it by. Metal glints as if hungry.

“And anyway,” Pix says, “who’s to say this isn’t prayer?” He laughs quietly at himself or at a joke just barely heard under the chatter of the leaves and the wind. “It’s here, Oli. I figured you wouldn’t want to miss it. I didn’t think I would do it tonight, but when the Saints call…”

Pix clicks the open panel back into place. Oli misses when it starts, because he’s watching Pix’s hands, tracing their afterimage as the switch is flicked.

A Saint is a story is a bridge is a fractal screaming for Its self and Its other. Steel and bone, vessel and digit. Light and signal.

Before he came back to the gulping valley of Tanager-Thread, Oli lived in an apartment close to the trains, built to run on the rails of the country’s first tentative forays into manufacturing a divinity they could touch. The trains would rattle him late at night, a rumble that echoed up the walls of his building, getting louder when he closed his eyes. He slept among pillows, all stolen or thrifted, and knew home by the feeling of being cradled in their sound.

Oli thinks of that now, as the Saint comes shuddering into view. It’s too big, at first, for him to understand what he sees. He has to crane his neck and even then, it takes a moment to overcome the lurch in his chest: here is Tanager-Core, amber-eyed, face to the moon, Its cheek pierced by the trees growing clean through It. The image of It wavers like a singer unsure of their note. Half signal, half sacred.

“Wait, Pix—” Oli starts, turning. 

The mountainside hums. Something is waking. It is becoming more real.

“Pix—” Oli says, and discovers he has to shout to be heard. The world is so loud around them, preparing for a miracle. He’s standing too close to It; he backs up a few paces. “Pix, you can’t do this!”

Pix has lifted his head, and now there must be more light, because Oli can pick out the furrow of Pix’s brow, his expression cracked open like—

“Pix!” Oli shouts. Finally, Pix turns his head to look at him, holding his hands out to accept Oli’s reaching ones. “What are you doing?” Oli demands.

The story of the Saints is their deaths. The miracle of the Saints, however, is motion. The intention of the Saints is distance.

“It’s a ghost,” Pix says, clear and insistent. Oli understands perfectly in this moment that he isn’t going to move.

In middle school — the first time he learned the concept — Oli thought it was about narrative distance, even if he didn’t know the term yet. Every image was grandeur without context, burning metal without heat or steel to make firm its truth. But he’s standing here now, in front of a memory of a memory of a Saint, Its eyes big enough to vanish inside of, and he understands.

The distance is necessary. The ground shakes and they are all in danger, Oli knows it like a thread pulling taut. He squeezes Pix’s hands in his and yanks him upright. The distance is necessary, because a thing all story and image is a thing incandescent, a thing meant to be seen from the horizon.

“Can you make It stop?” Oli yells.

It’s not that they don’t get earthquakes. Katherine’s family is old-fashioned; he’s heard her call it the sound of their Saint rolling over in Its sleep.

“It isn’t real,” Pix replies with staggering calm, while Oli hauls them both back and away, away away away from those radiant eyes, that lambent ferocity. The earth snarls under them, Oli kicking dirt as the incline sharpens, and Pix bares his teeth catching his balance. “Life and death aren’t separated so easily. Things move even when they’re dead.”

Once, Oli said to Katherine, That doesn’t seem terribly dignified for a Saint. She said, Well, I don’t know. That’s the miracle, right? That It’s like us.

It isn’t, though. It isn’t at all; it’s a ghost called up by signal and mundane machinery and that alone is enough to set Oli’s hands shaking. “That’s very nice and all, Pix,” Oli says, hardly hearing himself. “And sorry about your philosophy papers, but I don’t want to die, Pix!”

There’s a smell in the air now, like gasoline and myrrh and bright stone. Oli registers that he’s holding Pix’s hands so tightly he can’t tell where his skin ends and Pix’s begins. Pix keeps twisting in Oli’s grip as Oli drags them back, Pix won’t stop looking over his shoulder at the wild, luminous planes of the Saint, of Tanager-Core, and Oli’s so mad he could dig his nails into Pix until he bleeds.

Pix wrenches himself out of Oli’s hold. For a moment Oli thinks he’s going to plummet or bolt, but he doesn’t do either. Oli, panting, can’t hear himself. Sound becomes physical, angelic in its solidity. Oli presses his hands over his ears, and nothing changes. 

“It’s not—” Oli chokes on fumes, clawing for Pix’s hands. Pix whirls, eyes wide, all of him coming alive with the sound and the shaking. His grip is bruising when he grabs Oli’s fingers. Oli screams inaudibly over the sound of grinding metal. “Pix, you can’t, I live here too!”

But Pix is the one dragging him along now, closer, yanking him into a bubble beyond word and sound. Tanager-Core’s face looms over them, and Oli’s vision blurs with tears. Oli, furious, brings his hands up toward It as if in supplication. The world fractures, holiness on holiness.

The park bench is cold. That’s what they don’t tell you about wood: it looks all nice and warm in its ruddy browns until you’re sitting on it, freezing your butt off. The night hovers, sallow and thin.

“You have to tell me now,” Oli says hoarsely. “Why, Pix? Why all that? For a ghost that didn’t even—?” He turns his palms up again, hasn’t managed to stop doing that yet. They’re empty, unmarked. 

Pix is silent for a long time. Oli counts heartbeats, badly, to give himself something to do. At last, Pix says, “I didn’t know It would— do that.”

“What did you think It would do?” Oli asks. “I would’ve told Lizzie or someone that it was your fault. If It had done something. Make you pay for the damages.”

“The limits of Oli Orionsound’s loyalty,” Pix says, dryly amused.

“I live here,” Oli says, though he knows it comes out petulant. He takes a slow breath, for Pix’s sake.

“You didn’t seem like you wanted to,” Pix says plainly. “I thought it might— Mm.”

It’s cold and Oli’s embarrassed, more than anything. He hurts, sure, a little, but mostly he’s just thinking. It didn’t even do anything. It just… turned Its signal-song head, lying there dead or dying. And the whole world shook hard enough that Oli can still taste where he bit the inside of his cheek, and there are more cars going by than there should be at this hour, and sometimes a voice, distant, shouts, but that’s it. It’s possible no one’s even looking for him. Maybe It was going to get up.

“What was It doing?” Oli asks, feeling the hollow place where he knows Pix won’t have a real answer. “Why… any of it, I guess?”

“Its home,” Pix says, nearly inaudible. It’s not dawn yet. Might not be for a while, but there’s a single bird chittering in the park. Two of them and a bird. Oli laughs miserably and looks straight up, as if anything towers over them. “Its home is here. If I had to guess… Even signal wants to come home. Or maybe— Maybe death doesn’t exist for It the same way. Maybe It didn’t know. That’s what Saints do, isn’t it? Miracles.”

Oli puts his head in his hands. “That doesn’t make any sense.” It didn’t stop for him. Just shone as he screamed and screamed until— Oli feels the raw places something wrenched itself out of his throat. “I touched It.” And those same hands are now on his face, all of him shivering with the wavering memory of that vision. One held note.

Pix’s hand appears in the corner of Oli’s vision. Oli offers himself, palm up. Pix’s hand is cool and dry as it cradles Oli’s. Oli’s fingers twitch involuntarily. Oli skipped dinner, bored by food, by warm light, by the mundanity of mealtimes. He’s feeling it now.

“What?” Oli says. “It didn’t actually— It’s just signal, right?”

“Just,” Pix replies, making wry eye contact. He relents easy, though. Lets Oli take his hand back. Oli regrets that quick and hopes, out of habit, that Pix does too. “It— probably would have killed you. If It had been real.”

Now there’s another thought to stick in Oli’s throat. “Charming.”

“Have I charmed you?” Pix asks quietly. Oli takes him in properly, and it’s unsettling to see that he looks tired. The curve of his spine, elbows on his knees. His shirt’s got a vague purple tinge to it and he has never looked less like he belongs in this place. Somewhere along the line, the collar of Pix’s shirt got flipped out of place. That bird continues, insistent. 

It’s hurting Oli’s ears actually. Sound throbs against his eardrums like a heartbeat. A half million awful things coat Oli’s tongue. “You say that like it would kill you if I said yes, Pix.”

“Like I said.” Pix chuckles weakly.

Oli tries putting his hands over his ears. Impossibly, that makes it worse. It’s not just his ears; he rings, full-body, with absence. Pix must feel it too. He went back to his equipment, fiddled with the settings, and swayed when Oli turned to look at him. I didn’t know it would do that, he said.

“We could go—” Oli remembers nowhere’s open. “When Sanctuary opens. We could go there.” He imagines seeing Sausage. Imagines one of them crying to the other, What the hell happened last night? Laughing like it’s a real joke. The lighting is always warm in Sanctuary. 

“For breakfast?” Pix asks, soft. He hums. Something in his posture changes, as if he’s returning to himself. “And then?”

“Nothing,” Oli says, dreaming of stealing Pix’s keys or setting fire to the woods or just— singing. “I guess. Nothing happened and nothing would continue to happen.”

“I— Yeah.” Pix stands. Oli finds himself on his feet without thought. “We could walk a while. Before anything opens.”

The offer douses everything else Oli was thinking of saying. “Yeah? Where would we be going, Pix?”

Pix gestures out at nothing in particular. The dark rise of the mountains. The gleaming streetlights, strewn along the winding streets. Somewhere, an alarm whoops. “Chromia. My car. The edge of town. Farther than that. The woods.” 

The thought swells in Oli’s chest. “Another town. The city. The ocean.” He pauses to consider. “A big strip mall for a change of clothes. I’m still cold. Then— breakfast?” He holds a hand out.

“Maybe,” Pix says. “You’re still cold?”

Oli shrugs and drops his hand. “Kind of. Aren’t you?”

Pix nudges him and Oli jolts with surprise. “Some exercise will warm you up.” 

“I think you’re just going to make me run up the stairs by myself again,” Oli says.

Pix doesn’t laugh, but he stays put. The thought fills Oli’s throat: everything’s singing.