Nigredo: Nondum Exstinctus

The Lounge was warmer than the Study, and Autumn was cold anyway.

It had started in her hand at the desk and gone up her arm to the shoulder, and now it was in the back of her neck, the old kind of cold that came from inside and didn’t care how warm the room was. Her right hand still had the desk in it. She could feel the grain of the wood in her palm where she had pressed it flat, as if the desk had left its mark on her and not the other way around, and she closed the hand and opened it again, and the feeling stayed. Adrien came out of the Study behind them and went the other way, down the length of the room to the wall of glass at the far end, and stopped there with his back to the glow and his hands behind him. Autumn had seen the right one on the way down the room, before he put it there. It wasn’t steady. He stood where the whole room was between him and them, and he let it be.

Autumn turned them toward the entrance door. Summer let her. Summer’s cheek was still wet, the near one, the only one Autumn could see, and she hadn’t wiped it.

The bundle hung where she had left it, on the second hook beside his coat, the pale strap still hanging loose out of the fold. She lifted the heavy garment out with her right hand and let the soft one stay folded on the hook. It was as heavy as it had been in the Alcove, close-woven and stiff and gray-brown, the color of a field in March. Drosia had pulled its seam taut between her fists and said Protection first. Autumn shook it out once and swung it up over the shoulders they shared, over the long pale dress, and it came down around the two of them like a door closing. Across the room the coffee cups were still on the table where they had left them, and the parcel sat on the counter by the stove in its knotted cloth.

Summer’s left hand found the front edge and drew it closed across their chest, and held it there.

It was better. Not warm. Better.

From the far end of the room Adrien watched them do it, and stayed where he was.

Autumn stood in the garment with her back to the door and looked down the length of the Lounge at him. She was angry. In the Study she had been too busy watching to feel it, and now it had caught up with her and had nowhere to go while she was this cold. An hour at his counter, the two of them explaining the Vale to the man it was named for, and him asking whether the skins went on or off. Then she turned her head a little, toward Summer, without taking her eyes off him.

“On the stairs,” she said, “you asked me to watch his face and tell you what I saw.”

Summer went very still beside her, as if she had heard a step on the stairs. “Yeah.”

“So I’m telling you.” Autumn kept her voice level and low, and didn’t lower it any further for his sake. He could hear every word from where he stood. She meant him to. “At the door, when he said the reason might be himself, his eyes stayed on yours. The whole sentence. He didn’t look at me, or at the floor, or at the door. At you.”

She let that sit for one breath, and then she went on.

“And in the Study, when he told us what he believes and said he can’t prove it, his face kept still. Nothing moved in it. Not his mouth, not his eyes. He said it the way he said everything else.” She stopped. “Just now, coming out of there, his right hand shook. He put it behind his back. That’s what I saw. That’s all of it. I’m not telling you what it means. Just what it was.”

At the far end of the room he didn’t bring his hands out from behind him. Summer let a breath go by. Her hand stayed on the edge of the garment.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. Thank you.” She breathed out through her nose. “I don’t know what to do with that.” Her voice had gone flat. It did that when she meant to carry something heavy the whole way herself.

“You don’t have to do anything with it yet.”

Summer was quiet again. Then, smaller: “So what is this? Tonight.” She tipped her head toward the room, the glass, him. “On the stairs I called it a second date. Is it still that? Or is it, like, a get-to-know session? A deposition? Because I genuinely don’t know anymore, and I feel like somebody should.” Her voice went on the last word.

Autumn thought about it. She looked at him at the far end of the room, standing at the glass with nothing in his hands, and thought about the door, and the kitchen, and the bread, and the book face down at the end of his reach.

“I’ll name it,” she said, “after I’ve seen what he does with what he told us.”

“That could take a while.”

“Then it takes a while.”

Summer let out something that wasn’t a laugh but lived next door to one. “God,” she said. “Okay. That’s so you.”

At the far end of the room, Adrien said, “That’s fair.” His voice carried down the length of the Lounge without his raising it, lower than it had been at the door. “It should take a while.” He stayed at the glass.

Summer’s fingers moved on the edge of the garment, gathering it a little tighter, and Autumn felt the cloth draw in across her own shoulder. Then Summer lifted her chin.

“We brought you something,” Summer said. “A story. We decided on it on the way down, before—” Her fingers tightened on the garment’s edge and stayed tight. “It was a good one. It was for—” She stopped. Autumn felt the breath go into the body under her own ribs and stay there. “No. I’m not going to. I changed my mind. It was for before, and it isn’t before.”

“Then keep it,” Adrien said. “It’s yours.” He didn’t ask what it had been.

“Okay.” Summer swallowed. In the Study she had nearly been sick, and Autumn had felt it come up the middle of the body and go down again; it was still there, waiting. “Is there an outside? I need—I need some air. Can we go out there?”

He looked over his shoulder at the glass, and then at the door set into the wall beside it, a narrow panel of the same glass with a dark metal frame and a lock.

“There’s the balcony,” he said. “It’s cold.”

“We have a coat,” Summer said.

He looked at the gray-brown weave as though he were placing it, and didn’t ask where it had come from.

He went to the door and turned the lock, and the bolt went back with a small, solid sound. He opened the door outward onto the dark and held it there, and then he stepped back from it, two steps, into the room, so that the way out was empty.

They went past him. He stayed where he had stepped back to until they were through.

The air outside was cool and clean and smelled of hot stone a long way down. The balcony ran out from the side of the Axis over nothing, a flat floor of the same dark rock with a low barrier around its edge, stone at the bottom and a rail of dark metal on top, and below the barrier the caldera fell away into its own light. The magma moved down there in long slow folds, red going to gold where it turned. The walls of the volcano went up on every side, and on them, far off, were the terraces and the bridges of the Athanor, with here and there a lamp in a window. Somewhere up there was the Circulation Room, and Magda, and the bed they wouldn’t be sleeping in tonight. From here it all looked very small and very far, as if someone had built it to scale and forgotten to come back for it.

Adrien came out after them and went to the far end of the barrier and stopped there.

Autumn crossed to the barrier and laid the back of her right hand on the stone of it before she trusted it with anything else. It was cold through and through, the kind of cold a headstone kept in October long after the sun had gone off it, and it didn’t shift under her knuckles at all.

“Cold,” she said. “Solid.”

She rested her forearm on it. Summer put her left hand on the rail. They stood side by side at the barrier with the garment around them and the drop in front of them, and Adrien stood at the other end of it, with the length of the balcony between.

Autumn turned her head and looked at his face, and kept looking at it.

Summer held on to the rail and breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth, slow. Mom had taught them that for a sick stomach when they were small. Autumn kept her own breath slow beside it and didn’t say anything. At the far end of the barrier Adrien took one step along it toward them, and stopped, and went back to where he had been, and put both hands on the rail.

It took a while. Then Summer lifted her head, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and nodded at the caldera as if it had asked her something.

A warm draft came up from below, past the barrier, and lifted the loose hair at Autumn’s temple and set it down again. Under the garment the cold in her had stopped climbing. It hadn’t gone. It had only stopped, the way a tide stops before it turns, and she stood at the barrier with her forearm on the cold stone and waited to see which way it would go.

Summer let go of the rail and put her hand back on the edge of the garment, and held it there a moment. Autumn could feel her deciding whether to say the next thing. Then Summer lifted her head to say it down the length of the barrier at him.

“So here’s the thing,” Summer said. “What I just did, with the story. That’s how we want to do tonight. Anybody can change their mind, about anything, and say so. Any of us. You too. And that’s just—allowed. Nobody has to explain it. Nobody has to make a speech.”

Adrien nodded once and stayed where he was, at the far end of the barrier. His hands were still on the rail, a long way apart.

Autumn took her forearm off the stone. The cold of it stayed in her sleeve a moment after.

“And there are terms,” she said. “For tonight, and for any other night we’re here. You should have all of them, not just the one.” She kept her eyes on his face and said them one at a time, with a space after each, as if she were reading them off a page. “Both of us say yes. Out loud. Not a nod. Not one of us saying it for the other. Both. If either of us refuses, whatever is happening ends. Right then. And you stop on the word, from whichever of us says it. You already have that one.”

Adrien was quiet while she said it, and for a breath after. She watched him take each piece. Some people nodded along to a list to make it go faster. He waited for the end of it, and then he looked down at the stone under his hands, and then back up at her.

“I’m listening,” he said. “Go on, if there’s more.”

There was more, and it was Summer’s. Autumn felt her gather it, and watched her let go of the garment’s edge long enough to wipe her palm on it and take hold again.

“Okay. So.” Summer went into the careful reading-aloud voice she used for things she meant to keep. “With us, a night is—it’s one body. You know that. Everybody knows that, it’s kind of the first thing anybody knows about us. So the way we do it is, we settle it between the two of us first. In words. Out loud, between us, before anybody asks you for anything, or you ask us. And each of us gets her own say. It isn’t one of us deciding and the other one going along with it.” She swallowed. “Nobody’s ever just along for the ride. Not with us. Not ever.”

The air came up warm from below and went over them and on up into the dark. Far off, on one of the terraces, a lamp went out. Somebody up there going to bed, Autumn thought, behind a door that would open in the morning like any other.

Adrien took his time, as if each term were something to be lifted with both hands. Then he said it back to them, not word for word, but in his own words, one term at a time, so that they could hear him take each one.

“Yes from both of you, out loud, or nothing happens,” he said. “A refusal from either of you, and whatever it is ends. I stop on the word, from whichever of you says it, and I don’t look to the other one. And you settle it between yourselves before I’m asked anything—and I don’t ask first.” He paused. “I’ll keep all of it.”

Autumn went down it in her head like a column in the register, his line against hers. Yes from both. A refusal from either. The word, from either mouth. Theirs first, and him after. He hadn’t dropped anything, and he hadn’t added anything she would have had to take back out.

Summer let out a long breath. It went white for a second in the cooler air at the edge of the balcony and was gone.

“Tonight’s for talking,” Autumn said. “And sleeping. That’s all tonight is.” She glanced back through the glass, toward the far side of the Lounge and the door and the two hooks beside it. “The pale thing in the bundle. That’s what we’re sleeping in.”

“It has straps,” Summer said quickly. “It was—okay, it was the only thing in that place that looked like it might actually survive a night on us. Drosia was standing right there. It was a whole situation.”

“That’s all right,” Adrien said.

Summer heard herself then, explaining a nightgown to him, tonight, and made a noise into the garment’s collar that might have been a laugh, the first one since the Study. It came apart halfway. Autumn felt it go through the body and let it. At the far end of the barrier Adrien looked down at his hands on the rail, and kept them there.

Then Autumn turned her head to him again. “How long until the two bells?” she asked.

He didn’t have to look at anything. “A quarter of an hour,” he said.

Summer’s eyebrows went up. “How do you even know that? There’s no clock. There’s not a clock anywhere in this place, I’ve looked.”

“I always know,” he said.

“Okay,” Summer said slowly. “Okay. Fifteen minutes.” And then, to nobody in particular, with her eyes on the caldera: “That’s not very long.”

“No,” Adrien said. He took his hands off the rail. “I’ll go in ahead of you. I’ll be at the glass.”

A quarter of an hour. Autumn held it the way she held any number she was given: turned it over, put it away where she could find it again. After the two bells the door would stay shut from the inside until morning, and nobody could open it. Drosia had stood at it for three hundred breaths. Until the bells, it opened for anyone.

Adrien came back along the barrier, but not toward them; he went past the far end of it to the balcony door, and through it, and into the Lounge, and stopped at the wall of glass where he had stood before, his back to the glow, his hands at his sides. He left it to them whether to follow.

They followed. The balcony door stood open behind them, and the warmth of the room came over them as they stepped in, and Autumn felt the cold in her hesitate and not leave. They crossed the Lounge together, past the table with the coffee cups still on it, past the counter with the parcel in its knotted cloth, past the low chairs and the dark hearth, to the entrance door. Adrien stayed at the glass on the far side of the room and let the whole of it lie between him and them. Autumn noticed that, and kept it.

The door was the same square of brushed metal they had stood in front of at the bell, with the mark cut into the middle of it, clean and deep. Their shape was in it again, blurred, as if the door had kept it from the bell: one body, two heads, the dark garment over the long pale dress. On the hook beside it the bundle hung with the nightgown still folded inside, and his coat hung on the other.

Amabilis had told them what the night was for at the start. One thing. Sleep beside him. In the Athenaeum, when Summer said tonight was supposed to be theirs, she had called it what the order requires. Autumn hadn’t forgotten it. But the door didn’t know what Amabilis had said, and for a quarter of an hour it would open for anyone who put a hand to it, and the door was what stood in front of her now.

Autumn laid the back of her right hand against the metal.

It was cold—not the cold of the room, but the cold of the other side of the door, coming through. The metal stayed where it was under her knuckles. She kept her weight off it.

“It’s cold,” she said. “It’ll open until the two bells.”

She left it closed.

“Autumn,” Summer said, very quietly. Only the name. It wasn’t a question, and Autumn didn’t take it for one; it was Summer putting her hand out in the dark to find where the wall was.

She stood there with her hand against it, and she could feel Summer beside her holding her breath, and the whole room behind them, and him at the far end of it. A quarter of an hour, less now. Summer’s left hand moved on the garment’s edge, and stopped, and waited. Autumn kept her eyes on the metal.

She could open it. Up the Path and up the stairs, to the Circulation Room and the bed up there, and the question going with them, unanswered, for as long as they were in this place. He had done that. He had understood what was happening in the houses and walked out of the Vale and stayed gone, and everybody in it had carried what came after without knowing there was anyone to ask. She wasn’t going to answer that by leaving too. And she hadn’t seen yet what he did with what he had told them. She had said she would wait for that, and it couldn’t be seen from the other side of a door.

Then Autumn turned her head over her shoulder, toward the glass, toward him.

“We’re staying,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“Staying is one thing,” she said. “Forgiving is a different thing. I want you to know which one this is.”

The room was very quiet. “We’re staying,” Summer said, low, beside her. “That’s—yeah. That’s where we are. That’s all of where we are.”

From the far side of the room Adrien looked at them across all of it. He looked at Autumn’s hand on the door, and at Summer’s on the garment, and at the two of their faces, one and then the other, and he nodded, once, slowly.

“I understand,” he said. “I won’t ask you for the other one.”

His voice didn’t come out level on it. It was the first thing he had said all night that hadn’t, and Autumn put it beside the hand. He turned his head a little toward the glass, toward the long slow light, so that they had the room to themselves without him looking at them in it. Beside her Summer breathed out, long and slow, for what felt like the first time since the balcony.

Autumn took her hand from the metal. She brought it up across their front and took the edge of the garment from Summer’s fingers, and drew it closed, and held it there with her own hand, and Summer let her. The weave was rough under her fingers and heavy on their shoulders, and it was the warmest thing in the room.

Then the two of them turned around together, away from the door, and stood with it shut at their backs, facing the room.

---

The Lounge was so quiet that Summer could hear the glass wall. It made a sound she had never noticed in any room before, a faint high ringing, like a wineglass somebody had touched once and walked away from, and under it the slow deep nothing of the caldera. Adrien stood against it at the far end with his hands at his sides. The door was shut at their backs. There were twelve minutes left, or eleven, and nobody was going to count them out loud.

They had never done sleepovers, not with anyone but family, but Summer knew the part before bed anyway, from every borrowed spare room in the Vale: the toothbrush in your hand, the bathroom you didn’t know, the grown-up in the hall who said make yourselves at home and meant please don’t touch anything. She had a whole system for it. You found the bathroom first. You found out where you were sleeping. You put your stuff down somewhere so it looked like you lived there.

Their stuff was on a hook.

She reached back with her left hand, behind the twins’ shoulders and the heavy garment, and felt along the wall until her fingers found the bundle on the second hook, and lifted it off. The pale thing hung folded on its own now, with the heavy half of the bundle around their shoulders instead of around it, and one strap still hung out of the fold. Summer tucked it in.

“Um,” she said, down the length of the room. “Where’s the bathroom? The bath. Is there—are there towels?” She heard herself and pushed on. “And could you—when we go in there, could you stay out here? In the Lounge. Until I say your name. Just until then.”

Adrien turned his head from the glass. “The Bath opens off the Bedroom,” he said. “Only from there. There’s no other door into it.” He nodded toward a door in the wall on their side of the room, a dark panel she would have taken for more rock. “It’s kept warm. It always is.” He paused. “There’s nobody else in the Axis tonight. No golem. Only the three of us. So I’ll set the towels out myself, now, before you go in, and then I’ll come back here.” He looked at her. “And I’ll stay here until you say my name.”

“Okay,” Summer said. “Okay. Thank you. That’s—thank you.”

He went. He went along the far wall, not across the middle of the room, and opened a cupboard set into the rock near the kitchen that Summer would never have found on her own, and took out two towels, white and folded square. He carried them through the dark panel door, which turned out to open on a room she couldn’t see from where they stood, and was gone a little while. When he came back his hands were empty. He went straight back to the glass and stood there as he had before.

“One on each side,” he said. “By the step.”

He said it to the room, not to either of them in particular, and Summer understood a second later that he meant one by her side and one by Autumn’s.

“Thank you,” she said again, because she didn’t have anything better. “Really.”

Then the bell rang.

It came through the rock the way it had come through the glass on the Path, from everywhere at once, out of the walls and the floor and the sole of her foot. One long note. Summer felt it go up through her and settle in her teeth. Then, after a space, the second.

Then nothing, and the ringing of the glass wall coming back up underneath, as if it had been waiting politely for the bells to finish.

The twins turned around to the entrance door. Autumn put the back of her right hand on it, the same way she had a quarter of an hour ago, and held it there.

“It’s holding,” Autumn said. “It’s shut.” She lifted her hand off the metal.

“It is,” Adrien said from the glass. “Until morning.” His voice was quiet. “The morning bells open it again.”

So that was that. Summer waited for the feeling to arrive—a door locking, a trap closing, something from a movie—and it didn’t come. It was only a door, and it was shut, and they had chosen to be on this side of it.

They crossed to the dark panel door together. Summer opened it with her left hand, and the twins went through, and she shut it behind them with the same hand, and the Lounge was gone.

The Bedroom was bigger than she had pictured, and darker. The walls were the same smooth black rock as everywhere, but one whole side of the room was glass, floor to ceiling, and through it the caldera glowed red and gold, and out past the glass a rail ran along the edge of a balcony with nothing beyond it but the drop and the light. The bed stood in the middle of the floor, facing the windows: a low, broad platform with a side of dark wood and one huge sheet over it that caught the glow and gave it back silver, as if somebody had poured a thin layer of water over the whole bed and let it set. There was another door in the far wall, standing a little open, with warm air coming out of it.

Autumn looked at all of it. Summer watched her do it: the door they had come in by, the door to the Bath, the windows, the rail, back to the door they had come in by.

Then Autumn went to the bed—they went to the bed—and Autumn laid the back of her right hand against the wooden side of it, and then, lightly, on the sheet.

“The wood’s solid,” Autumn said. “And the sheet’s cool. It gives.” She pressed once with her knuckles and let it come back. “It gives a lot.”

“That’s a fancy bed,” Summer said. “That is a rich-person bed. That is a bed somebody paid a designer for.”

Autumn let that go by. She took her hand off the sheet, and the two of them stood looking at the bed, at the whole wide silver width of it, and Summer found herself looking at the right-hand edge in particular, and then made herself stop.

The Bath was through the far door, and it was the kind of warm a kitchen got in winter, all at once and from everywhere. The floor and the walls were dark stone, and there were basins cut down into the rock of the floor, deep ones, with steam lying low over the water in them. On the stone lip by the nearest one, two towels sat folded, one a little to the left and one a little to the right. Summer looked at them for a second longer than towels deserved.

Summer shut the door behind them with her left hand, and leaned against it, and breathed.

Nobody was looking. Nobody was going to come in. She felt her shoulder start to come down, and everything she had kept since the Study came up behind it all at once, and she was crying. Not the way she had in the Study, with her eyes running and her face held still for him, but all of it, her mouth open and her breath going in hitches, loud off the stone, and she couldn’t stop it and didn’t try.

Autumn’s right hand came across the front of the body and found her left and took it. Autumn didn’t cry. Her hand held on, hard, and it was cold, colder than it had been in the Lounge, colder than the door at Summer’s back, and it was shaking.

“I know,” Autumn said, low, close by her ear. She said it again when Summer’s breath went, and again after that, and nothing else.

It took a long time. When it was done Summer’s face was hot and stiff and her nose was running, and she wiped it on the back of her wrist like she was nine, and Autumn let go of her hand only when she had to, to get the garment off.

They took the garment off together, Summer’s left hand and Autumn’s right lifting it up off the shoulders they shared, and laid it on the stone beside the basin. Then Summer found the open seam at the hip of the long pale dress with her left hand and worked at it, and the seam, which had been falling all evening, gave up the rest of the way, and the dress came down. Summer stepped them out of it and left it lying there. She didn’t care where it went. She hoped never to see it again.

Autumn held the back of her right hand over the water, and then touched it to the surface.

“Warm,” she said.

They stepped down into it. The water came up over their knees and their hips and their waist, and Summer let out a sound that was embarrassing and didn’t care, and they sat on the ledge cut into the side of the basin with the warm up to their shoulders. For a minute they only sat. Steam came off the water and hung in front of their faces and beaded on Autumn’s lashes. Autumn bent her head until the water touched her chin, and her mouth stayed pale anyway.

Since the Study Summer had been carrying one question, whether any of it was true, and in here, with the door shut and nobody looking, it came right up to the back of her teeth. She opened her mouth for it, and what came out was the bed.

“Okay,” Summer said finally. Her voice came back off the stone smaller than she meant it. “So. The bed. What do you want? Like—how.”

Autumn took her time. Summer watched the steam move.

“The right side is his,” Autumn said. “Whatever we do. That’s where he goes.” She was looking at the water. “So I’m nearest him. I want to be the one nearest him.” A pause. “If he moves, in the night, I’d rather be the one who feels it. Not you.”

Summer turned that over. She could argue with it. She could say it should be me, I’m the one who likes him more, even now, which was true, maybe, and was the exact reason Autumn wouldn’t let her.

“Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay. That’s fair.” The water lapped once against the side of the basin and went still. “I want one thing,” Summer said. “Tonight. One thing in the whole night that’s just—kind. That isn’t anything else. Not a test, not a question, not a term. Just kind.” She swallowed.

Autumn was quiet for a long moment. “That part isn’t up to us,” she said then. She lifted her right hand out of the water and let it drip. “But if it comes, I won’t make it into anything else.”

“Okay,” Summer said. “Okay. I can live with that.”

They sat a little longer, until the water started to feel like the only real thing in the Athanor, and then they stepped out, and the air was warm on their wet skin, and they took the two towels from the two sides of the step and dried off, Summer the left and Autumn the right. Summer shook the pale thing out of its fold and they pulled it on over their heads, one strap and then the other, and it settled on them and hung more or less where it was supposed to.

They bent, and Autumn took up the heavy garment from the stone in her right hand, and held it against them.

They went back through the Bedroom in the pale thing, barefoot on the smooth black floor, the garment bunched in Autumn’s arm and the glow from the windows laying long red shapes across the bed as they passed it. The nightgown sat on them the way nothing had sat on them in days, the straps a little wide on the shoulders and the hem brushing their knees. Summer kept looking down at it, waiting for a seam to go. None did.

Halfway to the door Autumn stopped them, and Summer understood why without being told. They sat down on the edge of the bed, on the very end of it, and Autumn reached up with her right hand to the braid over her shoulder, and Summer reached across with her left, and between them they took it down. It was the morning job done backward. Neither of them said anything while they did it; they never did. Autumn’s hair came loose a section at a time, crimped from the plait, and when it was all out Autumn shook her head once, and they got up again.

At the door to the Lounge Summer put her left hand on the panel, and stopped. It was a stupid thing to be nervous about. It was a name. She had said it a hundred times. She opened the door, and they leaned out into the dim. “Adrien,” she said.

He was at the glass, where he had said he would be. He turned at his name and came across the Lounge, not fast, and stopped in the open doorway with the dim room behind him and the red one in front. He was still in the dark shirt and trousers from the wedding, the cuffs turned back, his feet bare now on the stone. Summer hadn’t noticed him take his shoes off. She found she liked that she hadn’t, and then didn’t know what to do with liking anything about him tonight.

“Summer,” he said, and then, turning his face a little, “Autumn.”

Autumn went to the bed—they went to the bed—and shook the heavy garment out with her right hand and laid it flat on the sheet along her own side, from the pillow down as far as it would reach, gray-brown against the silver. She smoothed it once with the flat of her hand. Then she straightened and looked at him in the doorway.

“You’re on the right,” Autumn said. “On top of the covers. In your shirt and your trousers.”

“All right,” Adrien said. He looked at the garment on the sheet, and then at the right-hand side of the bed beyond it, and then at the two of them. “May I lie down there?”

“Yes,” Summer said.

“Yes,” Autumn said.

He waited one more moment after Autumn’s yes, as if to be sure it had finished arriving. “Thank you,” he said.

The twins got into the bed. The sheet was as cool as Autumn had said and gave the way she had said it would, and Summer pulled it up over the two of them with her left hand, up to their collarbones, and lay back. Summer’s head on the left, Autumn’s on the right. In front of them the whole wall of windows glowed, and past the glass the rail of the balcony was a thin black line across the light, as if someone had ruled it there in ink. Autumn’s side of the sheet lay over her side of the body, and on top of it, the gray-brown garment.

Adrien crossed the room. He came around the foot of the bed to Autumn’s side, beyond the garment, and sat down on the very edge of the bed, on top of the sheet, and then lay down on his back. He left a hand’s width of silver between himself and the edge of the garment. He put his arms down at his sides, straight, and lay still. He lay so neatly that Summer thought of a kid at somebody else’s house trying very hard not to take up any room, and then thought what a strange thing that was to think about the man who had founded their town. Then she remembered the fertilizer, and stopped thinking anything.

The bed didn’t move much. It was a broad bed. Summer had been braced for it to tip, or dip, or do something, and it didn’t. She could hear him breathe, though. She hadn’t expected that, somehow, that there would be a third breath in the room, slower than either of theirs, coming from the dark at the edge of the bed. The bath was still on their skin, warm and faintly mineral, and the sheet over them was cool, and the garment along Autumn’s side was heavy enough that Summer could see the sheet sink under it, a long line of it.

Under the sheet Summer’s left hand went looking across the body for Autumn’s right, and found it, and held on. Autumn’s fingers closed on hers. They stayed like that for a few breaths, the two hands together under the cover in the middle of them. They had held hands like this under the water in the bathhouse, with nobody watching.

Then Autumn let go, gently, and brought her right hand out from under the sheet and laid it flat on top of it, at their right side, palm down, just inside the edge of the garment. Between them and him.

Summer looked at the hand, and then up at the windows.

For a while the room was quiet. The glass hummed its high faint note. Somewhere below the floor the caldera made a sound too low to hear—not a noise, but a feeling in the bed frame.

“I should tell you what I do,” Adrien said. His voice was low and plain in the dark, pitched for the room and not past it. “At night. I don’t sleep much. I may not sleep at all. If I’m awake, I’ll lie still, here. If I get up, I’ll go out to the glass in the Lounge. And I’ll say so first, before I move, so it won’t be a surprise.”

Summer turned her head on the pillow and looked across Autumn, across the garment, at the side of his face in the red light.

“We sit up with people,” she said. “That’s a thing we do. If somebody’s awake by themselves at night, you don’t leave them by themselves. So.” She swallowed. “So we’ll keep you company. For a while. Until we can’t.”

He let it sit before he answered. “I’d like that,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Do you ever?” Summer asked. “Sleep?”

“Sometimes. Not because I have to. Out of habit, mostly, when I let the habit win.” He was quiet a moment. “I don’t expect to tonight.”

“Okay,” Summer said. “Well. We’re not great at it either.”

The glow moved on the ceiling, very slowly. Summer watched it. She couldn’t think what to talk about, so for a while they lay and listened to the glass.

Then, after a while, Adrien said, “What would you like, in the morning?”

“Coffee,” Summer said immediately. “Coffee first. Always coffee first, that’s non-negotiable. And then—” she thought about it “—the rest of the mercy. The one in the cloth, on the counter.”

She heard the word after it was out. Beside her Autumn had gone still. Summer could have said casserole instead, and she lay there and didn’t.

“Heated up,” she said. “It’s better the second day.” Her voice didn’t do what she wanted on it.

“Then that’s what we’ll have,” he said.

Across Autumn, across the garment, Summer saw him turn his face to the windows, away from them, and shut his eyes. He kept them shut a while. When he opened them he didn’t turn back.

Beside her Autumn stirred. When she spoke her voice had gone slow at the edges, every word set down a little after the one before it. “Hot,” Autumn said. “My coffee. Hot. In a cup I can… hold.”

“Hot,” Adrien said. “In a cup you can hold. I’ll see to it.”

Autumn said something else, or started to. It didn’t become a word. Summer waited for the rest of it, and it didn’t come, and after a while she understood it wasn’t going to.

She listened. Autumn’s breathing had changed beside her—longer, and slower, and further apart, each breath going out to the end before the next one came. On top of the sheet Autumn’s right hand had gone loose. The fingers had uncurled. It still lay where she had put it, at the border of the gray-brown weave, but there was no weight in it anymore, nothing holding it there but the sheet.

Summer turned her head toward Adrien. “She’s asleep,” she said, low.

“Good,” he said, as low. “Let her.”

Autumn hardly ever fell asleep first, not anywhere new. Summer lay very still, so as not to undo it. Summer lay and looked at the windows. The glow came up through them from below, red at the bottom and gold higher up, and it moved, very slowly, the whole time, like something breathing in its sleep.

“Is that the lava?” she whispered. “The light on the windows. Is that it, down there?”

“It is,” Adrien said. “The magma. It turns over in the caldera, very slowly. All night. It never stops.”

“Huh,” Summer said softly. She watched it turn. It was easier to watch than she had expected. She thought she might be able to watch it for a long time.

In the morning the bells would ring, and the door would open again, and there would be coffee, and the casserole, and Autumn’s cup, and whatever came after the casserole. Summer didn’t try to think past that. Her eyes were heavy, and the light kept turning, and the glass kept up its thin high note, so faint now that she couldn’t tell anymore whether she was hearing it or remembering it.

“Good night, Adrien,” she said.

When he answered, he said her name first. “Good night, Summer.” And then, more quietly, to the sleeping head beside her: “Good night, Autumn.”

Autumn slept on. Her breathing went on, long and slow, exactly as it had, and her loose hair lay across the pillow between them, still crimped from the braid. Summer reached across with her left hand, over the body they shared, and laid it over Autumn’s right where it lay flat on the sheet, and left it there. Autumn’s fingers were warm now. That was new.

The last thing Summer saw before her eyes closed was Adrien, on his back on the far side of the garment, on top of the covers with his arms at his sides, wide awake, his eyes on the windows and the slow light turning in them.