End of Shift
The Pact
She discharged herself at dawn on the fifth day, against advice, with three cracked ribs strapped under a black hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. The doctor had told her to rest for six weeks. The label had told her to have a statement ready by Friday. Her phone held four hundred and twelve unread messages. She did not open any of them.
The car waited at the curb with the engine running. She told the driver the address of the station and then told him to park across the street and wait, and he did not ask why, because he was paid not to.
It was 06:40. The sky over the rooftops had gone the colour of weak tea.
Station 14 was a low brick building with two roller doors and a strip of grass out front that nobody had cut in some time. One of the doors was up. An ambulance sat half out of it, back doors open, and on its rear bumper, with a paper cup of coffee held between both hands, sat the man who had put his hands on her heart.
She had not seen him properly that night. Morgana's eyes had only just opened, and they had been full of light and tears and the white of the bathroom ceiling, and after that the ceiling of the ambulance, and after that nothing. She saw him now. He was thinner than she remembered, and younger, though his hair had begun to go early at the temples. He sat hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, the way men sit when they have been on their feet for twelve hours and have forgotten there is a rest of the world. The uniform shirt was untucked on one side.
She stood on the far side of the street and let herself feel him before she crossed.
It took no effort. It had never taken effort, not even in the old days, when she had moved through the first people like light moves through water. The body made it smaller now. She could no longer feel a city's worth of wanting at once, only the few people nearest her, and only if she turned toward them. But she turned toward him, and there it was: the tiredness first, heavy and grey, laid over everything like wet sand. Beneath it the thing she remembered from the bathroom floor, the worn groove, the old riverbed. He wanted to matter to someone. He had wanted it so long he had stopped noticing he wanted it at all, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator.
And under that, new this week, something sharp and bright and frightened, that had her face on it.
She crossed the street.
He saw her when she was halfway across the grass. She watched it happen. First the vague irritation of a tired man at a stranger on his station's lawn. Then recognition, and the recognition went through him like a current, and the paper cup tipped in his hands and slopped coffee over his knuckles, and he did not notice.
He stood up. It was an automatic thing, she thought, something his mother had taught him. You stand when a woman comes to talk to you.
"Hi," he said.
"Hello, Calvin."
He flinched at his name. She took off the sunglasses.
He looked at her eyes for what felt like a long time. Something in his face settled, the way a man's face settles when he hears a diagnosis he had already guessed. He had looked at the photographs. She could feel that without trying. He had sat on the end of his bed until the window turned grey and looked at every photograph of her there was.
"You should be in the hospital," he said. "You've got at least two fractured ribs."
"Three." She lowered herself onto the bumper beside the place he had been sitting, slowly, favouring her left side. After a moment he sat too, leaving a careful space between them. "I wanted to thank you."
"You don't have to."
"I know. I wanted to anyway."
It was true, which surprised her a little. She had come for other reasons, colder ones. She needed him quiet, and she needed Faith, and a man who had sat on his bed all night looking at old pictures of her eyes was a problem that would only grow. But she had not expected, sitting next to him in the early grey light, that the woman's gratitude would rise in her so plainly. It came up warm from somewhere below her breastbone, where his hands had been, and she did not push it down.
He turned the coffee cup in his hands.
"The press have been calling the station," he said. "Deb told them to go to hell. Twice."
"And you?"
"I haven't said anything to anyone."
She knew he hadn't. She could feel how tightly he had been holding it, all four days, the way a man holds a hot pan because he is too afraid to put it down in the wrong place.
"Why not?" she asked.
He was quiet for a while. A bus went past on the main road. Somewhere behind them in the station someone was running water.
"Because nobody would believe me," he said at last. "And because I'm not sure I believe me." He looked at her, then away again, fast. "You weren't breathing. For almost seven minutes. That happens. People come back from that. I've seen it. But you didn't come back like people come back. You sat up like you'd been under water." He stopped. "And your eyes were brown."
"They were," she agreed.
He waited for her to say more. She let him wait.
"What are you?" he asked.
It came out quiet, almost polite, the way someone asks a doctor a question they already know the answer to.
The woman whose memories she wore had been a very good liar. She could feel the lies waiting in her, ready and easy and warm: contacts, the shock, trauma, you were tired, it was dark, you saw what you expected. Any one of them would have done. He wanted to be told he had imagined it. A part of him wanted it very badly.
"Someone who came back," she said. "That's all you need."
He laughed, once, without any humour in it, and rubbed his face with his hand.
She let the silence sit long enough that he would be the one to break it, and he did.
"Why are you really here?"
"To ask you for something," she said. "And to give you something back."
"I don't want anything."
It was the saddest lie she had heard in four days, and she had spent those four days reading the comment sections.
She turned toward him properly, and this time she did not only feel him, she looked. She let the old sight rise just a little, only as far as it would come through this narrow body, and she read him the way the woman had once read a crowd from a stage. There was a small flat above a laundromat, and a cat, and a dating app with forty unanswered messages that he had written and not sent. There was the knowledge, settled deep in him years ago like silt, that people's eyes slid over him and did not stop. There were the few times someone had stopped, and how he had not known what to do with his hands.
She could see the exact shape of the thing he wanted. It was not her. He had never once, sitting beside her, let himself want her, and she found that she liked him for it.
"You want to walk into a room," she said, "and have them look at you."
He went very still.
"You want to be the one people want to sit next to at the bar. You want someone to laugh at something you said and mean it. You want one night, just once, when you don't feel like you're watching yourself from the corner." She tilted her head. "I can give you that."
The fear came up in him then, bright and hard. She let it come. Good. He should be afraid. He was the only man alive who had seen what she was before she had learned to hide it.
"How?" he said, and his voice cracked on the word.
"You don't need the how. Only the terms." She held his eyes. "What happened in that bathroom stays in that bathroom. What was in me, how long I was gone, how I came back. My eyes. You never say a word about any of it. Not to the press. Not to your partner. Not to a priest, not to a therapist, not to a woman in your bed at three in the morning when you think it would impress her."
He almost smiled at that. Then he didn't.
"And in return," she said, "whenever you want it, you get to be someone nobody can look away from. For a night. As many nights as you like."
"That's not possible."
"You watched a dead woman open her eyes."
He looked down at his hands. They were good hands, she thought. Broad, steady, the nails bitten short. They had broken three of her ribs and she had forgiven them already.
"If I say no?"
"Then I finish my coffee," she said, though she had none, "and go home, and you never see me again. And you spend the rest of your life knowing what you saw, and knowing nobody will ever believe you." She shrugged, carefully, around the ribs. "I won't hurt you, Calvin. You kept going. That buys you a great deal from me."
He was quiet for a long time. She did not push. The thing about pacts, the old thing, older than this city and this language, was that they only held when the mortal walked into them on their own feet. She could open the door. He had to step through.
"Okay," he said.
"Give me your hand."
He did. She took it in both of hers and laid it flat against her own chest, just below the collarbone, just above where the tape was, on the place where he had pushed down on her heart over a hundred times a minute for six minutes and forty-eight seconds.
"Here," she said. "This is where you brought me back. So this is where I give you something."
She reached down inside herself, into the small cold store of power that had come up with her out of the deep, and spent a little of it.
It went out of her like breath on a cold morning. The air around them dropped. She saw him feel it: the same cold as the bathroom, the same sense of something standing too close behind him, and his fingers tightened against her sternum and his whole body wanted to pull away and did not. Then the cold went into him, through his palm, and she felt his belief open under it like a hand opening, not much, only as much as belief opens in a tired man who has never believed in anything, and she took hold of it and shaped it.
It was not difficult. His soul was small and plain and warm, and it had been waiting a long time for someone to touch it.
When she let go of his hand he pulled it back and held it against his own chest, the way people hold a hand they have burned. He was breathing hard. He looked exactly the same as he had a moment before. Only his eyes had changed, and not in their colour.
"It'll come when you call for it," she said. "Not always. You'll have to want it enough. You'll know."
"What did you do?"
"Kept my side." She slid the sunglasses back on and stood, one hand on the ambulance door, and waited for the ribs to stop shouting. "Keep yours."
She walked back across the grass. She did not look round. She did not need to. She could feel him behind her on the bumper, sitting very still with his hand pressed flat over his own heart, and she could feel, underneath the fear and the tiredness and the four sleepless nights, something new in him, small and bright and frightened, like the first match struck in a room that has been dark for years.
Home
The elevator went up forty-one floors without stopping and opened directly into the apartment.
The memory knew it the way it knew the face in the mirror. It knew the hall with the long black marble floor and the lights that came up by themselves as she stepped out. It knew the sofas and the purple cushions and the bar in the corner she had stocked for parties. It knew the glass wall at the far end of the living room, floor to ceiling, and the terrace beyond it, and the long pale glow of the pool. It knew what it had cost, down to the dollar, and the night she had signed for it, alone in an office, because there had been no one she wanted to call.
The memory was tired of all of it. It had lived here for three years. It no longer saw the room.
Naru stood at the end of the hall with her shoes in her hand and saw everything.
She walked slowly across the marble to the glass wall. The city lay below it, out to the edge of the sky, and beyond the city the water, black and enormous, with the lights of the harbour spilled across it in long broken lines, trembling. Ships moved on it, small as sparks.
In the old days the first people had built towers. They had piled up bricks and mud and stone on the flat plains between the rivers, higher and higher, and put a shrine at the very top, so that the ones they worshipped would have a place to come down to. She remembered standing on those high places. She remembered the wind, and the smell of burning cedar, and the long view out over the water and the fields, and the small bright fires of their cities below, all of them wanting something.
The woman had bought this place for the view. She had not known what she was building.
Naru stepped out onto the terrace. The night air was cool and damp and smelled of salt. She walked to the edge of the pool, and knelt there, slowly, one hand against her ribs, and put the other hand into the water.
It was cold. It closed around her fingers and her wrist, and moved, very slightly, in the wind, and the lights of the city shivered on its surface around her hand.
She had been an angel of the deep. She had been the one the waters knew. Before she was thrown down she had moved through the seas of the new world as light moves through them, and every current had known her name, and she had known the name of every current. She had not touched water in all the ages since. There was no water in the Abyss. There was nothing in the Abyss at all.
She knelt there in the dark with her hand in the pool, forty-one floors above the city, in a dead woman's body, with three cracked ribs and a stranger's tattoos on her skin, and she wept without a sound, the way the body had shown her how to, until her knees ached on the cold stone and the water had gone warm around her wrist.
Somewhere far below her, at the bottom of the well, the hate turned over in its sleep.
She let it. It could wait. It had waited long enough already, and so had she.
Tonight there was water, and she was going to stay beside it.
Dawn
The next morning she woke early in the penthouse, in the big bed with the purple sheets she had not yet decided whether she liked, and lay watching the window go from black to grey to gold.
As the sun came up over the harbour, she felt it arrive. It was very small, a single warm thread drawn in from somewhere across the city, from a flat above a laundromat where a man was sleeping, for once, all the way through till morning.
It was the first thing she had owned since the Fall.
She lay with her hand on her ribs and held it for a long time.