Four Days
Day One
The first thing she learned was that a body hurts all the time.
Not in the way the deep had hurt. The deep had been one pain, whole and everywhere, so complete that it had stopped being pain and become the shape of existence. This was different. This body hurt in pieces. It hurt in the ribs, a bright hot line down the left side that flared every time she breathed. It hurt in the throat, raw and scraped, and at the back of the right hand, where a thin plastic tube went into a vein under a square of tape. It hurt in the lower back from the bed, and behind the eyes from the light, and in a small bruise on the inside of the left elbow where someone had missed a vein.
Each of them was separate. Each one had edges. She lay in the white room with her eyes half closed and moved her attention from one to the next the way a hand moves along a shelf, and she could hardly believe that pain could be so small. That it could stop somewhere. That there could be a place, a hand's width from the ribs, where it simply did not reach.
Morgana's memory told her the name of each thing. Cracked ribs. IV line. Hospital bed. The words came up easily, flat and familiar, like the labels on jars in a kitchen. They told her what everything was. They did not tell her what to make of it.
She breathed in, carefully, and the ribs flared, and she breathed out.
A woman came in at some hour when the window was dark. She wore pale blue, and her shoes squeaked on the floor, and she smelled of soap and something sharp and clean. Morgana's memory supplied nurse, and after a moment, from the badge, Adaeze.
"Hey," the nurse said softly. "You're awake. How's your pain, one to ten?"
Naru looked at her and could not answer. It was not the question. It was the voice. Nobody had spoken to her in that tone since before the war. Gently. As if she were something that could be broken further and ought not to be.
"Seven," Morgana's mouth said for her, hoarse. The body knew how to answer this. It had done it before.
The nurse nodded and did something to the tube and wrote on a board. Then she put two fingers on the inside of Naru's wrist and stood there, looking at her watch, counting.
The fingers were warm.
Naru held entirely still. She had been touched before, long ago, in the time before time, by the others of her House, and by the first people, who had reached for her light. She had been touched in the war by things that meant to tear her apart. She had not been touched by anything in all the ages since. Not once. There had been nothing in the deep to touch.
Two warm fingers on the inside of a wrist.
"Your heart's going pretty fast," the nurse said, and frowned a little. "You okay?"
"Yes," Naru said, and did not know what she was saying yes to.
The nurse patted her arm, twice, the way you pat a nervous animal, and squeaked away, and turned the light down on the way out. Naru lay in the dimness with her wrist turned upward on the blanket, where the fingers had been, and did not move it for a long time.
She slept, or the body did. It fell away from her without asking, the way a stone falls through water, and took her with it.
She had not expected that. She had forgotten sleep. It was one of the things that had been done to the first people after the Fall of Man, when they were made to die: they were given the small death every night, so that they would not forget the large one. She had pitied them for it once.
She went down into the dark and, at the bottom of it, she found the deep waiting.
It was still there. Of course it was still there. She had known it would be. The woman's life had been poured over it like earth over a grave, and she could feel it under the earth, patient, turning over and over like something enormous in its sleep. The hate was down there too. She could hear it, faintly, far below: the old, smooth, polished stone of it, knocking against the bottom of the well.
You think this will last? it said, without words. You think this little life will hold you? Twenty-nine years. A match struck in the wind.
She woke with her heart pounding and the sheet twisted in her hands and the window going grey, and for a long moment she did not know where she was. Then Morgana's memory told her: hospital. And then, underneath it, a second thought that belonged to no one but her.
Morning.
She turned her head on the pillow and watched the light come.
She had seen the first morning of the world. She had been there when it was new. She did not remember it well; the deep had worn most of that away. But she remembered that it had been beautiful, and that she had not known, then, that there could be an end to such a thing.
This one came in thin and grey over a parking lot and a row of air-conditioning units, and a single pigeon walked along the edge of the roof opposite, and the sky went slowly from grey to a pale, washed blue.
She cried. She did not decide to. The body did it, the way it had done the sleeping, and she let it, silently, until the pillow under her cheek was wet.
Day Two
There was a mirror in the bathroom.
She had managed to get there on her own, dragging the IV stand with her, one hand pressed flat against her ribs. The body had known the way. It had known to lift the lid, to hold the rail, to run the tap. She had watched all of it happening from a small distance, like a guest.
Then she looked up, and there was a woman in the glass.
Morgana's memory knew that face instantly. It knew it the way you know the sound of your own name. The sharp cheekbones. The mouth. The tattoo that ran up the left side of the throat and vanished behind the ear. It knew which side the face looked better from, and how it looked on a stage under purple light, and how many thousand strangers had looked at it on screens. It knew that face better than it had ever known anything.
Naru did not know it at all.
She lifted a hand and the woman in the glass lifted a hand. She touched her cheek and felt the cheek under her fingertips and saw the fingertips touch it in the mirror, and the two things did not quite join. She was looking at a stranger, and the stranger was looking back, and it was her.
Then she looked at the eyes.
They were not the eyes in the memories. The memories were full of this face, and every time, the eyes were a deep, soft brown. The eyes in the mirror were pale, clear, unmistakable. Sunlight on water. And far down in them, if she looked long enough, something much older than twenty-nine, turning over in its sleep.
"There you are," she said to it, quietly.
The woman in the glass said it at the same time.
In the afternoon they brought her phone. Someone from the label had left it at the desk with a charger and a note, and the nurse put it on the tray table and said, in a careful, neutral voice, "It's been going off a lot," and left.
It went off while she was looking at it. It lit up and buzzed against the plastic tray and went dark, and lit up again.
Morgana's memory flinched. She felt it clearly: a cold drop in the stomach, a tightening at the back of the neck. The body was afraid of this small, flat, glowing thing. It had been afraid of it for a long time. It had lain awake beside it at three in the morning waiting for it to light up with the next thing.
She picked it up. The body's thumb knew the pattern to open it. The screen filled with numbers in red circles.
She began to read.
are you ok??
babe call me
whore
I'm praying for you, I don't care what they say
hope you choke on it next time
your music got me through my divorce, please be ok
we need a statement by friday, call me
saw you in the cemetery scene in 2019 and I've never forgotten it
you're disgusting
please don't die, I don't know what I'd do
There were hundreds of them. They went on and on, down and down, and Morgana's memory kept flinching, and Naru did not flinch at all.
She knew what this was. It had taken her a moment, because the words were so small and so badly spelled, and they came through a piece of glass instead of through smoke from an altar. But she knew. She had stood in the high places and heard it in the old days, when the first people climbed up to the tops of the ziggurats and lifted their hands and called out to whatever was listening. Some of them had begged. Some had cursed. Some had offered themselves. It had been exactly like this.
These people were praying to her.
They did not know they were doing it. None of them believed in anything. They would have laughed if she had told them. But they thought about her every day. They said her name into the dark. They wanted things from her, and cursed her, and loved her, and hated her, from all over the world, without ever having met her, and every one of those small voices had a thread of real feeling in it, thin and weak and scattered.
In the old days that had had a name.
She put the phone face down on the tray very slowly, and lay back on the pillow, and looked at the ceiling. Her heart was beating hard. Morgana had built herself a temple and filled it with worshippers, and had died without once realising what it was.
Naru felt something she had not felt since the Fall, and it took her a long moment to know it.
It was hope.
Day Three
A man came to visit in the morning. Morgana's memory knew him before he reached the door: tall, careful, late thirties, a grey coat always a size too warm for the weather, and the same black notebook he had carried for four years. Her assistant. The memory put a word on him that was not a job title, and she felt it land in her chest with a warmth that surprised her. Safe.
He stood at the end of the bed and looked at her for a long time without speaking. There was nothing in his face she could not read. She did not even need to reach for it. It was all there on the surface: the fear, still raw from three nights ago; the relief under it, heavy as water; and, under that, the thing he would never say out loud, which was that he had half expected to be arranging a funeral this week.
"You look terrible," he said finally.
"Thank you."
"I brought you a real coffee. The stuff in the machine downstairs is a crime against God." He put a paper cup on the tray table and sat down in the chair beside the bed. "The label's losing their minds. Your lawyer is losing his mind. Your mother called."
The memory lurched at that. A yellow kitchen. Smoke at the window.
"What did she want?"
"To know if you were alive." He paused. "She didn't ask anything else."
Naru nodded. She felt the woman's old hurt come up, familiar as a scar, and felt it pass through her and out again, and did not keep it. It was not hers to keep.
He talked for a while, in a low, even voice, about schedules and statements and a list of people who were not allowed through the front desk. She did not listen to most of it. She was holding the coffee.
She knew what it was. Of course she knew. The memory had drunk thousands of cups of it, on tour buses and in hotel rooms and at the edge of stages at four in the morning. It knew the brand. It knew that this one had oat milk in it and one sugar, because that was how she had always taken it, and that he had remembered.
She lifted it and drank.
It was hot. That was the first thing. Hot, and bitter, and then sweet at the back, and the warmth went down her raw throat and spread out into her chest, under the ribs, and stayed there. She sat with the cup against her lips and did not move.
The memory knew how coffee tasted. The memory had never once, in twenty-nine years, noticed it.
"Morgana?" the assistant said. "Are you okay?"
She had closed her eyes. She opened them. There were tears in them again, and she let him see, because she had no idea how to stop them, and because they did not matter.
"It's very good," she said. "The coffee. Thank you."
He looked at her strangely for a moment. Then he looked away, out of courtesy, and cleared his throat, and went back to his list. But she felt him file it away, somewhere careful in that black notebook of a mind. She thanked me for the coffee. In four years, the woman in the memories had never once done that.
Later, alone, she found the music.
It was on the phone, in a folder the memory knew was there. Her own songs. She put one on with the sound turned low and lay back and listened to a woman with her voice sing about wanting something she could not name.
The memory knew every word. It knew the studio, the take, the argument with the producer about the bridge. It knew this song had been played to forty thousand people in a field in the rain.
Naru listened to it the way she had once listened to the first people when they learned to sing. They had not known how, at the beginning. They had had nothing but breath and longing. Her House had taught them that the two could be joined, and that when they were, they could move something in the one who heard.
This woman had never known that she was doing exactly what the Lammasu had once taught mortals to do. She had thought she was only singing.
Naru hummed along, very quietly, under her breath, so as not to hurt the ribs. It hurt anyway. She did not stop.
Day Four
The lawyer came at eight, before visiting hours, because he was the kind of man who did not recognise visiting hours. He brought a folder and a face like a closed door, and he talked for twenty minutes about the statement, and the label's position, and the question of who had supplied what at the party, and how certain lines of enquiry would be very expensive for certain people.
She let him talk. The body knew how to nod at the right places.
At the end he took a document out of the folder and put it on the tray table. "The run report from the ambulance crew. Standard. I requested it for the file."
She picked it up. Three pages, a form, boxes ticked, times written in. Near the bottom of the second page, in a neat square hand, pressed hard into the paper: ROSC at 6 min 48 sec.
She read it three times.
The first time she read it as Morgana, and it made her feel sick, a small, cold, ordinary human sickness. Six minutes and forty-eight seconds. The woman had been dead for six minutes and forty-eight seconds on the floor of a hotel bathroom while people with drinks stood outside the door, and the woman was still dead, and would always be dead. Naru was wearing her life like a coat. Someone had died in this bed, and it was not her.
The second time she read it as the thing underneath, and that time she looked at the handwriting.
The third time, she only read the name.
"I'm discharging myself in the morning," she said.
The lawyer began to object, and she looked at him, and he stopped.