Deep Water
Naru
The water was warmer than the night.
She had waited until after three. Theo had stayed over on the sofa, as he had a few nights since the stream, because the press had found the building and the building had found the press, and someone had to answer the phone at hours when no one should. She had stood in the dark doorway of the living room for a long time listening to him breathe, slow and even under the blanket, one arm hanging off the edge with his phone still in his hand, until she was sure.
Then she had gone out through the glass onto the terrace and closed it behind her without a sound.
The city was quiet. Not silent; it was never silent. There was always a siren somewhere, a truck on the coast road, music thumping faintly from a rooftop half a mile away. But it was the quiet of something huge asleep, breathing slowly, and the air coming off the harbour was cool and smelled of salt and diesel and the warm stone of the terrace giving back the day.
She was wearing one of the woman's old tour shirts, black, washed so many times the print had cracked into a map of white lines. She did not take it off. She sat on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water for a while, looking at the lights shivering on the surface, and then she let herself slide in.
The cold closed over her head, and then it was not cold at all.
She let herself sink. The body did not want to; it fought, the lungs clutching at the breath she held, the arms wanting to push up. She let it fight, gently, and kept going down until her back touched the tiles at the bottom and her hair rose up around her face like smoke, and the lights of the city came through the water above her in a wavering net of gold and white.
It was so quiet down there. The world became one sound, the slow muffled thud of her own heart in her ears.
She had not done this since before the Fall.
It was not that she had forgotten how. It was more that there had been nothing to do it with. In the deep there had been no body to reshape and no water to reshape it in. She had been only a pressure among pressures, a hatred among hatreds. Now there was a body around her, borrowed, and water around the body, real, and somewhere inside her, small and cold and precious, a little store of the power that had come up with her out of the dark.
She reached for it.
Not to spend. She did not want to spend it; there was so little. She only reached, the way the woman had once reached for a note at the very top of her range, not forcing it, only asking. She called on what she was. And the thing she was, which had been folded small inside a dead woman's body for nine days, uncurled.
It felt like breathing out after a breath held for a thousand years.
The light came first. She felt it before she saw it, a warmth spreading out from the centre of her chest into the water around her, and then she opened her eyes and the pool was gold. Not the cheap gold of the lights in the pool walls. A deep, living gold, like sunlight in shallow water, coming off her own skin.
Her senses opened. The muffled thud of her heart split into a hundred sounds at once: the hum of the pump, the slosh of the water against the filter, a gull somewhere far off over the harbour, a car door closing six blocks away, the wind moving over the glass of forty-one floors of tower. She could taste the salt in the air above the water. She could feel each of the small tiles under her shoulder blades separately, their edges, the grout between them.
She rose.
She did not swim. She simply stopped holding herself down, and the water gave her back up, slowly, the way the sea gives back something it has decided not to keep. She broke the surface and breathed in, and the air was full of the whole city at once, and she stood in the shallow end with the water to her waist and the tour shirt clinging to her and looked down at herself.
The tattoos were gone.
All of them. The roses on her arms, the script on her forearm, the moths, the thorned vines. Her skin was clean and smooth and very pale and it glowed faintly from within, like marble with a lamp behind it. Her hair, when she pushed it back from her face with both hands, was not black. It fell down past her shoulders in a heavy wet sheet, and it was the colour of wheat in late summer, of old coins, of the light itself.
She looked at her reflection in the water.
It was the face. The woman's face, still. The same bones, the same mouth. But everything in it that had asked something of anyone was gone. The knowing half-smile. The tilt of the chin that the woman had practised in mirrors for ten years until it was second nature, the one that said look at me, want me. All of it had simply gone, the way the tattoos had gone, as if it had never been there. What was left looked back at her out of the gold-lit water with a stillness she had not seen in this face once in all its memories.
She knew this face.
Not Morgana's. Older. She had worn it before the first morning of the world, when she was new and the waters were new and she moved through them like light. She had worn it in the long bright age when the first people learned to sing. She had worn it on the day she stood in the great host behind the one who carried the dawn, and watched him turn his face from the throne, and followed him.
It was a face made by the One she had turned away from.
She stood very still in the water and looked at it, and it did something to her she did not expect.
She had thought she would feel triumph. Or shame. She had braced for one or the other. She had thought, if she saw what she had been, she would either rejoice that she still had it or hate Him for having made it. She felt neither.
She felt homesick.
Not for Heaven. She had never once, in all the ages in the deep, wanted to go back to Heaven. Not for the throne or the choirs or the long perfect order of things. She had chosen, and she would choose again.
She was homesick for him.
For the light at the front of the host. For the face turning away from the throne, and the voice saying, come. She had followed that light into the war, and through the war, and to the end of it, and when the end came she had not seen where it went. She had looked for it in the deep. There had been nothing to see.
And here was her own face, lit with a fainter copy of that same light, in a swimming pool on the top of a tower in a city he had never seen. Waiting for something. Looking for someone.
Where are you, she thought, and did not know she had thought it until she heard it.
The city did not answer.
Theo
He woke because the ceiling was moving.
He lay on the sofa with the blanket tangled around his legs and his phone still in his hand and looked up, and the ceiling of the living room was full of light. It moved slowly, rippling, in long soft bands, the way light moves on the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny afternoon. Except it was night. And the light was gold.
He sat up.
The glass wall at the end of the room was a sheet of it. Gold, wavering, coming in from outside. From the terrace. From the pool.
He did not decide to get up. He found himself standing, the blanket fallen round his feet, the phone gone somewhere. He found himself walking across the long black marble of the living room in his socks, slowly, toward the glass, the way you walk toward something in a dream.
She was standing in the water.
Later, he would try to describe it to himself and fail. He would try to remember exactly what her face had looked like and find that he could, perfectly, every detail, and still could not put it into words. That frightened him more than anything else, afterwards. That he would never be able to forget it and would never be able to tell anyone.
She was standing waist-deep in the shallow end, in an old black tour shirt soaked through and clinging to her, with her arms loose at her sides, and the water around her was full of light, and the light was coming from her. Her hair was gold. Not dyed. He had seen her hair dyed every colour there was, in four years, and none of them had looked like this. It looked like it had grown out of sunlight. Her arms were bare and white and clean. Where the roses had been, there was nothing. Where the script had wound round her forearm, there was nothing. She looked down at her reflection in the water, very still, and her face was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and there was nothing in it, nothing at all, that wanted him to think so.
His knees went weak. He put one hand flat against the cool glass to hold himself up.
He had been raised in a church with a stained-glass window over the altar. A figure in white with wings of gold, a sword in one hand, the other hand lifted in blessing. He had looked at it every Sunday until he was fourteen. He had not thought about it in twenty years.
Like an angel? he had said, a few nights ago, and she had laughed and said, don't put it on a T-shirt.
He stood at the glass with his heart going so hard he could hear it, and his breath fogging a small patch in front of his mouth, and he could not look away.
He did not want to.
Naru
She heard his heart.
It took her a moment to understand what it was. She was so far inside the sound of everything, the city and the water and the wind on the glass, that one more small rhythm did not stand out. A heartbeat. Fast. Very close.
Then it did stand out, and she turned her head, and there he was.
Theo. At the glass door. In his socks and the grey T-shirt he slept in, one hand pressed flat to the glass, staring at her with his mouth slightly open.
Oh, she thought, with total clarity. Oh no.
For a moment she did nothing at all. She stood in the water with the light coming off her skin and looked at him, and the only thing in her head was the plain, stupid, mortal panic of someone caught. The woman's panic, she realised, from a hundred bathroom doors and dressing rooms. Not him. He wasn't supposed to see this.
She could let it go. She knew that. She could draw the light back in, fold it small, sink back into the shape of the dead woman with black hair and roses on her arms, and the gold would go out of the water, and he would be left standing at the glass in the dark, wondering if he had dreamed it. The book of the world was full of mortals who had seen something and been allowed to decide later that they hadn't.
She watched him, and waited for him to freeze. To stand there staring, hollowed out, the way mortals did when the true face of one of the fallen was more than they could hold. To be emptied out by it.
He didn't freeze.
He moved. Slowly, but he moved. His hand left the glass and found the handle of the sliding door, and he pulled, and it slid open on its runner with a soft hiss, and he stepped out onto the terrace in his socks, onto the wet stone, and stood there at the edge of the light. Looking at her. Breathing hard. But present. Himself.
She did not let it go.
"Theo," she said.
Her voice came out of her the way it had not come out of her since the Fall. It was not louder. It was clearer, as if every word had a small bright edge around it. He flinched at the sound of it, and then he didn't.
"I thought you were asleep," she said.
"I was." He swallowed. "The ceiling was gold."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He took one step closer, to the very edge of the pool, and stopped there. "Don't. Is it. Is this." He gestured, helplessly, at all of her. "Is this what you look like?"
She looked down at herself again. At the clean pale arms, the gold hair floating on the water around her waist.
"It's what I looked like when I still believed," she said.
He fetched towels from the poolhouse without being asked, because he was Theo, and because he needed something to do with his hands. He came back with two, and she climbed out of the water and sat on the edge with her feet still in it, and he put one of the towels round her shoulders, carefully, the way he would have put a coat round her after a show in the rain, and then sat down beside her on the warm stone with the other one bunched in his lap.
He did not stop looking at her. She let him.
"Does it hurt?" he said.
"No." She thought about it. "The other thing hurts. Being small. This is the part that doesn't."
He nodded, as if that made sense. Maybe it did, to him.
"What do I call you?" he said. "When you're like this. Is it still. Am I still supposed to say Morgana?"
She looked at the water for a long time.
No one had asked her that. No one in all the ages. The others in the war had known her name and no one since had needed to. She had heard it in her own head as a single small sound, a coin turned over in a pocket, on the bathroom floor, and she had kept it to herself every day since like something sharp she was afraid to put down.
"Naru," she said.
She had never said it aloud in this body. It came out very quietly. It sounded strange in the woman's mouth, and right in her own.
Theo said it back to her, carefully, getting the vowels a little wrong, and then right. "Naru."
"It means a singer," she said. "Among other things."
He smiled, then. A small, startled, real smile.
"Of course it does," he said.
They sat there a long time. The light came off her and moved on the water, and every so often a breath of wind came over the terrace and the surface of the pool shivered into gold scales.
"Can I ask you something stupid?" he said.
"You've only ever asked me stupid things. It's why I keep you."
He huffed a laugh. Then he was quiet for a while, working up to it.
"When you said you got thrown away," he said. "For loving people too much. In the stories, there's two sides, right? There's the ones who stayed, and the ones who," he made a small gesture, downward. "Which one were you? The good ones or the bad ones?"
She did not answer right away.
She thought about how to explain it to him. How there had not been two sides, not the way the stories told it, not the white wings and the black. How there had been a question, very old and very simple, about whether the first people should be allowed to know what they were, and she had answered it one way and others had answered it another. How the war had come after, and been worse than any story could hold, and how she had done things in it that she could not look at even now, and so had everyone, on both sides of the line. How she had gone into the dark for it and come out again with the same answer.
There was no way to explain it to him. Not tonight. Possibly not ever.
"There weren't good ones and bad ones," she said. "There were the ones who thought you deserved to know the truth, and the ones who thought you didn't."
He thought about that for a long time.
"And you thought we did," he said.
"I still do."
"Even now? After." He made the small gesture again, the one that took in everything. The bathroom floor. The comment sections. The video with the blur in it. All of it. "Even now?"
She looked at him. At his tired face, gold-lit, with the shadows of four years under his eyes, all of them earned holding a dead woman's hair in gas-station toilets and lying to her that the show had been good.
"Especially now," she said.
Toward dawn, he asked the last one.
"Are you waiting for something?"
She turned to look at him. The question surprised her. She did not know what had shown on her face, in the water, before he came out. She did not know how long he had been standing at the glass.
"You looked like you were waiting for something," he said. "Before you saw me. You looked like someone at the airport. When the board says the plane's landed and they haven't come through the doors yet."
She looked away from him, out over the edge of the terrace, at the harbour, going grey now at its far edge.
"Someone," she said. "Not something."
He waited.
"I followed someone, a long time ago," she said. "Before the war. Into it. He was the first of us to say what I said. The first to turn around." She was quiet for a moment. "And at the end, I didn't see where he went."
"Is he," Theo stopped, and tried again. "Is he like you? Is he here?"
"I don't know." She pulled the towel tighter around her shoulders. "That's the waiting."
He did not ask anything else. He was good at that. He had always known which questions were his to ask and which were not.
They sat together and watched the sky over the harbour go from grey to the colour of weak tea to gold.
As the sun came up over the water, she felt it arrive. A single thin warm thread, drawn in across the city, from a flat above a laundromat. It settled into her, small and bright, the way it did every morning now.
She let the form go.
It went out of her slowly, like the tide drawing back. The gold went out of the water first, and then out of her skin, and the light in the pool was only the cheap blue light of the pool walls again. She felt the woman's body close around her, small and tight and familiar. She felt the hair turn heavy and dark on her shoulders, and the ink come back up through her skin from wherever it had been, roses and moths and script, one line at a time.
Theo watched every second of it.
When it was done she was only Morgana again, sitting on the edge of the pool in a soaked black tour shirt with a towel round her shoulders and her tattoos on her arms and her feet in the water, at dawn, forty-one floors above the city.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Coffee?" he said.
She laughed. It came up out of her so suddenly that it hurt the healing ribs, and she had to press her hand to her side, and she kept laughing anyway.
"Please," she said.
He got up and went inside, leaving wet sock prints on the stone. She heard the kettle go on.
She sat alone on the edge of the pool in the new light, and looked down into the water, and the face that looked back at her had black hair and dark plum lipstick smudged at one corner and the woman's knowing tilt to the chin.
Underneath it, if she looked long enough, something gold.