Nigredo: Post Tenebras

Adrien had been on his back on top of the covers for a long while. The windows glowed red along the bottom and gold higher up, and the light moved on the ceiling so slowly that he could tell it had moved only by looking away and back. The glass held its thin high note. Beyond the garment, a hand’s width from his arm, two breaths went on, long and slow, a little out of step with each other. Far below the floor the caldera let out something like a long breath of its own, and the windows brightened and dimmed again.

The room smelled faintly of the Bath still, warm and mineral, and of the heavy weave of the garment beside him. His hands lay at his sides on the sheet, palms down, and the cool of the silver had gone out of it under them a long time ago. He had not moved them. He had not moved much of anything. Somewhere in the Axis something ticked as it cooled, and then was quiet. He was very good at lying still beside someone; it was perhaps the thing he was best at, after cooking.

He had said yes to everything tonight. He lay there and turned that over. Every term they had set him he had taken. Not one of them had cost him anything to take, and in his experience the things that cost him nothing were the ones he should have looked at twice.

He had told them he would lie still, and he had. He had also told them what he would do when he stopped. So he said it before he moved, low, pitched for the bed and no farther.

“I’m getting up. I’ll be at the glass in the Lounge.”

Then he sat up. He put his bare feet down on the stone, which was cool under its warmth, as if the rock remembered being rock, and he stood, and went around the foot of the bed with his eyes on the dark panel of the door. He didn’t look back at the bed. The twins were still asleep. He went through into the Lounge.

It was dimmer there, and larger, the long room lit only from its far end, and the air was a little cooler than the Bedroom’s and smelled of coffee gone cold and of onions from supper. The cups were still on the table where the three of them had left them. The low chairs stood around the dark hearth with nobody in them. He walked the length of the room, past the table and the empty chairs, and stopped at the glass, close enough to feel the warmth come off it, and looked down.

Across the caldera, high up on the far walls, a few of the Athanor’s lamps were still lit on the terraces, small and steady and very far away, and none of them were his business tonight. The magma moved below him in long slow folds, red going to gold where it turned. Every so often a fold broke open along its crest and showed a seam of yellow so bright it left a mark when he looked away, and then it closed and the red went over it. Here the note in the glass was louder. He put his palm flat on the glass. It was warm, warmer than skin, and the hum came up into his hand and along the bones of his wrist and stopped somewhere near the elbow. He took the hand away and the warmth stayed in the palm a moment, like a hand he had just let go of. In the glass, faint over the fire, a man in a dark shirt with the cuffs turned back stood with his arms at his sides, quite still.

He kept turning something in his head, like an itch he could not scratch. He forced himself to stand still, and study it. He went back over the evening from the door forward, as if he were checking a lock he already knew was shut.

Terms at the door: yes. Towels, because Summer asked whether there were any. This glass, because she asked him to wait out here until she said his name. The truth about Ashcombe Vale, because the sisters had asked him three times and they had a right to know who he was. The right side of the bed, on top of the covers, because Autumn told him where. Even the cake, which he had been a little proud of, had been an answer to Summer’s complaint in the Athenaeum about the wedding they had been pulled out of before dessert.

He could not find one thing in the whole evening that had started with something he wanted.

He stood with that for a while. It ought to have been a comfort, a whole evening of getting it right, and instead it sat in him like a meal eaten standing up. He noticed, then, that he had turned around. He didn’t remember doing it.

He was standing with his back to the glass and his face to the dim room, his hands empty at his sides, the whole length of the Lounge between him and the door he had come out of. It was how he had stood all evening, at a polite distance, out of everyone’s way. It left every choice to them, whether to come down the room or not, and it asked nothing, and he could have held it until the bells.

The stance was an old one. He had held it on Drosia’s night, on top of the covers until the light came, and in the morning he had turned his hands palm up on the cover and become furniture so that she could leave unwatched. He had told himself it was a courtesy and not a retreat, and even then he had not been sure.

And before that, for longer than anyone here could guess, the other habit, which the Corridor of Ages had shown him in one of its doors: a morning he had left before anyone woke. A man gone by morning was never asked what he wanted, and never had to find out whether he had an answer.

He had stopped walking out before the morning. He hadn’t, it seemed, stopped going. Standing still and taking whatever came, and waiting to be asked, was the same leaving done in place. Nobody had to watch him go, because he never went. Nobody found out what he wanted, because he made very sure there was nothing to find.

He had been told so, too, in this room.

The chair at the far end was pushed in square, as if nobody had ever sat in it. On the free night, before any of it began, the Curator had sat in it with a glass of whiskey he had been slow to touch, and asked, What do you want from them? From any of them? Adrien had answered for every woman but himself, and when he came to the twins he had said, I don’t know them yet. And the Curator had told him what he was doing: when I ask what you want, you give me reasons not to touch anything. He had answered, Maybe I don’t want anything. It had been the easiest thing in the world to believe.

He still didn’t know them. A wedding in another season, a dinner, the worst true thing he had ever told anyone—and what did he have? Summer poured for everyone before herself and filled the cook’s cup first. Autumn was always cold, and tested things with the back of her hand before she trusted them. A cup went on the side of the twin it was for, and they bowed their heads before they ate. He could have written down everything he knew about either of them as a person, and not as a pair of customs and a set of terms, on the back of one hand.

He stepped away from the glass.

He didn’t go far. He went to the end of the table where the evening’s cups still stood, three of them, and picked up the one by the right-hand side of the chair at the end. Autumn’s. There was still an inch of coffee in the bottom of it, gone cold, with a dull skin across the top the color of old pewter. The cup was heavy in his hand and cold right around. He turned it a little in his fingers, and thought of her holding it, and of how little it could have given her back. Then he set it down again where it had been, exactly, and put his hand flat on the dark wood beside it. The wood was cool and very smooth. Under all of that lay what Mildred had told him, and he wanted something under his hand for it.

The twins didn’t have it from him. On a garden bench in the other season, Mildred had sat down beside him and told him she had been the passenger inside the golems of this place, aware of everything and unable to speak, choose or refuse, and that she knew how his season ended and was forbidden to tell him. Amabilis, on the stair, had said that from where she stood nothing about it was decided yet. There was something terrifying in both statements, if he let himself think about it. And in Amabilis’s case, what would tilt the balance one way or the other? Towards Arabella, or towards the other one?

There was no golem in the Axis tonight. He found he was glad of it, and he didn’t like the reason.

He set that beside what he had told the twins himself in the Athenaeum—that elimination didn’t remove a woman, it reduced her, with the mind still there—and beside the rule that a Reactant was warned first. He had read of such fates in Harem Hotel. The pieces fit. Mildred had only shown him the join. He knew someone was in danger, and after last night, he knew who it had to be. He knew the twins were scared since they heard Amabilis’s pronouncement, and that all the women needed to know the risks.

He wanted to tell the twins. He could hear how he would say it, carefully, with the facts in order, and he could see what it would do. They would be frightened, and they would hold on to whoever seemed to know the most about what became of an eliminated woman, and tonight that would be him. Whatever he meant by telling them, it would work on them as a hold. He didn’t want to be handed that, or to take it.

So not yet. But not yet could easily become never, the way everything he carried alone eventually did. He would tell them himself. He would pick the time, when it could be handed over as a fact and not as a fear, and he would not wait for it to be pried out of him or for the season to do the telling first. That much he could decide tonight, standing here, with his hand on a table and a cold cup beside it, and he decided it. He breathed in, and let it out slowly, and felt the decision stay where he had put it.

He took his hand off the table. The rest of what he had brought back from the other season was lighter.

Art was alive, and so were his women. Adrien had never even suspected. They had met again, and he was not the only one anymore who had watched the centuries go. He still could not fully believe it. Amabilis was, he thought, an earlier Arabella. And he had sat among other so-called Masters, and seen for himself what it cost the women when the man at the middle of it only waited, and called it kindness.

And he had seen the twins at the bonfire.

He hadn’t meant to watch them. He had been on the far side of the fire with a glass of the old world’s whiskey, which Art had proclaimed tasted like coconut and rage, and he had looked up and there they were, on a log with a Summer and a Winter, sister and brother, all four of them with their hands sticky to the wrist and a marshmallow going up in flames on the end of somebody’s stick. Summer had been introducing them. He had heard Certified Cake Decorator, said with a perfectly straight face, and seen the other two lose it, and then seen Summer lose it herself, bent over the log with her hand over her mouth. And Autumn had been laughing. Not the corner of the mouth he had seen tonight; the whole thing, head back, eyes shut, laughing at something her sister had said as if it were the funniest thing anyone had ever said in any world. At the edge of the firelight Oudemia had been sitting a little way into the warmth instead of outside it, watching them.

Here, tonight, the same two had stood up at his door to say their terms. Some of that was his doing, and he would not take back one word of what he had told them; they had a right to it. But he had given them every true thing he had that would make them guarded, and not one reason to laugh.

He wanted to see that again.

He turned back to the glass, and the fire turned over under it, slow and bright, and the want was still there when he looked at it a second time.

He wanted to see Summer bent over with her hand over her mouth, and Autumn with her head back. He wanted to see it here, at his table, in his rooms, and not from the far side of a fire—and he wanted to be part of the reason, not someone they had to put up with in between. He wanted to know them: what Summer liked when nobody needed anything from her, and what she was like when she wasn’t holding a room together with jokes; what Autumn read when it wasn’t a register, and what she would spell with her finger if it were something she liked and not something she was checking. He wanted them to know him, too: something about him that was not the worst thing he had ever done.

He didn’t have a name for it yet, and he found he didn’t need one. He was allowed to want it. Nobody in this place had ever told him he wasn’t—he had told himself, for a long time, in a great many rooms, and called it manners.

He looked at their terms again, in that light.

He had been holding them like a fence around himself. They weren’t one. They were theirs, and they were about the night, and about touch, and about saying yes out loud. He would keep every one of them. Touch was theirs to start; that was what I don’t ask first meant, and he had meant it. But nothing in any of it said he couldn’t want something, or say so, or ask for their time. The whole point of saying yes out loud was that there had to be something to say it to.

So he would ask. Not a question they had to carry—a plan, said plainly, which they could take or leave.

He tried it in his head, the way he would say it at breakfast, and heard it come out the old way at once: If you were thinking of how to spend the day, I wondered whether you might like to— and there it went, the whole weight of it handed across the table for them to pick up, his want dressed as their choice. He stopped it and tried again. This is what I’m going to do tomorrow. It sounded strange in his head, and bare, and slightly rude, and it was true. He said it over again, silently, as if he were breaking in a pair of new boots, until it stopped sounding rude.

The day was free, for him and for every Reactant in the place. His days so far had gone to whatever the Athanor or the women put in front of him. Tomorrow he would spend it on purpose.

And he would not spend it on the twins. He had only ever had them as a pair across a table: at the door, at dinner, in the Study, with Summer speaking first and Autumn watching, and he had let that be all of them. It wasn’t. At the bonfire they had laughed at different things. One body, two people, and he didn’t know either one. They would come together, both times—there was no other way—but each hour would be one woman’s, hers to fill or not.

Summer’s at the glass, before the midday meal. She had asked him in the dark whether the light on the windows was the lava, and watched it turn. He looked down at it now and thought of her here, in the daytime, with her face close to the glass and her breath fogging it, finding the seams of yellow as they opened, and talking—about Wyoming, about cake, about anything at all that she liked and nobody had asked her about in days. He wanted to hear that. He wanted to stand here and be told things.

Autumn’s in the Study, after the meal. It was the room where he had told them the worst of it, and he didn’t want her to have that room only as he had left it. The shelves held things from centuries he had never spoken about to anyone. He wanted to take one down and tell her about it, because she was the kind of person who would want to know where a thing came from, and because he wanted to tell somebody.

He would be inside the Axis for both. Both visits would end before the evening bell. And he would be at the glass, and in the Study, at those hours, whether they came or not. He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked forward to a particular hour of a particular day.

He could start now.

He crossed the Lounge to the Study. His feet were cold now, properly cold, and he didn’t mind; it was the first thing he had noticed about himself all night that wasn’t a rule. He went in. It was dark and narrow and smelled of paper and pencil shavings, and the narrow slot of glass at the end of it let in a thread of the glow, enough to see by. The two chairs he had carried in from the Lounge still stood by the desk where they had sat, one turned to face the door. The composition book lay at the far end of the desk, face down, exactly where he had pushed it at the end of his reach.

He put his hand on the desk first, on the wood beside the book, where Autumn’s hand had gone flat earlier tonight, and felt nothing there but wood, a little cool. Then he picked the book up. He didn’t open it. He closed the cover over his thumb and put it up on a high shelf, spine out, between two books that had no titles, where it would be his to take down if she asked and not lying on the desk waiting for her. Then he stood in front of the shelves for a while with his hands in his pockets and looked at what was on them. Books with nothing on their spines. Papers rolled and tied with string. A clay lamp. A brass instrument. A child’s wooden horse with one leg mended. Every one of them had a story, and he had never told any of them to anyone in this place, and nobody had asked, because he had never once given anybody the opening.

He took his hands out of his pockets and reached up and touched one of them, just touched it, as lightly as he would have touched the shoulder of someone he hadn’t seen in a long while, and took his hand back.

He chose the one he would show her first, and left it where it was. The twins’ chair he left as it stood, facing the door; that one, at least, he had gotten right.

On his way back down the room he passed his coat on its hook by the entrance door, and the second hook beside it, empty now, and the table with the three cups, and the kitchen. He had promised Autumn her coffee hot, in a cup she could hold, and he would make it before dawn; that one needed no deciding.

He went back to the Bedroom door. The room beyond it was red and gold along the far wall and dark everywhere else, and he could hear the two breaths from the bed, long and slow. He stopped at the threshold and said it before he went in, low, the same as before.

“I’m back. I’m lying down, on top of the covers.”

He kept his eyes on the stone. He went around the foot of the bed to the right side and sat on the edge, and lay back, and put his arms down at his sides. The bed took his weight. The sheet under him was cool again where he had been.

He lay a hand’s width from the garment, on his back, awake, and kept his eyes on the windows, where the light went on turning. The morning was coming to him here. For once, he wanted it to.

---

The words came first, before anything else in the room had changed.

“I’m getting up. I’ll be at the glass in the Lounge.”

Autumn was awake on the second sentence. Wherever she had been before it, she wasn’t there anymore. She lay as she was, on her back, and kept her eyes on the windows. The glow sat in them with the rail of the balcony ruled across it in black, and the glass was humming its faint high note, and on the ceiling the light had moved while she slept.

Then the bed lifted along her right side.

It was a small thing. The sheet eased under her right arm and the length of her right leg, as if a held breath had gone out of it, and the mattress came back up to meet her by the width of a finger. That was all. She felt it the whole way down, shoulder to heel, on her side and nowhere else. She had told Summer in the Bath that if he moved in the night she wanted to be the one who felt it. She lay still and felt it.

She kept her eyes where they were. His bare feet went around the foot of the bed, not quickly—she could follow them by the small dry sound of skin on stone—and then she couldn’t.

The garment lay along her right side where she had put it, heavy and close-woven over the sheet, and beyond it the place where he had been was empty. The sheet there still held a long shallow dent, and the glow from the windows lay in it, and as she watched it began, very slowly, to fill back in. Her right hand still lay flat on top of the sheet, just inside the garment’s edge. Summer’s left hand was over it. Summer’s palm was warm and slack and asleep.

Autumn’s fingers curled, a little, against the sheet under Summer’s palm.

Summer’s hand knew before Summer did. It closed. Then the breathing on the left changed, caught, came back shorter, and Summer’s eyes opened, and the two of them turned their heads toward each other on the pillow until they were close enough to see each other’s faces by the light off the windows, red down one cheek and dark down the other.

“Was that him?” Summer whispered.

“He got up,” Autumn whispered. “He’s at the glass. He said.”

Summer blinked at her, slow, still mostly asleep. “He said so first?”

“He said so first.”

They whispered. They always had, at night, in any room that wasn’t theirs, two voices pitched to carry eight inches and stop. Summer moved her head on the pillow and looked past Autumn at the garment and the bare silver of the sheet beyond it, and then back.

For a while neither of them said anything. The glass hummed. Autumn could feel the cold starting in her right hand, where it lay outside the sheet, and left it where it was.

“Can I ask you something,” Summer whispered. “The thing I couldn’t ask in the Bath.” She didn’t wait to be told she could. “Is it true?” Her whisper went thin on it. “What he told us. That he started the Vale. The fertilizer, in the ground. All of it. Do you think it’s true?”

Autumn had known this was the question. She looked at the ceiling while she found the words. They didn’t have to be kind, but they had to be exactly the right size.

“He told us himself,” she whispered. “Twice. But he admitted he only had his belief and the timing.” She stopped. “An honest man does that.” Summer waited, and hardly breathed while she did it. “So does somebody who’s very good at this, or a coward,” Autumn said. “It fits all three. I can’t tell which.”

Summer let out a breath through her nose that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That is so not comforting.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be,” Autumn whispered. “It’s what I’ve got.”

“I know. I know it is.” Summer’s thumb moved once on the back of Autumn’s hand, and stopped. “I just wanted you to say yes.”

Autumn looked at the light on the ceiling instead, the slow red shape it made, and thought about the Study, the narrow room and the desk and the books on the shelves in no order at all, and his voice saying the same thing in the same tone as everything else. She thought about it the way she would have thought about two entries in two ledgers that ought to agree. “And an honest man can still be wrong,” she whispered.

Summer turned her head a little further on the pillow, toward her.

“The town says it was the founding families marrying each other, and the doctors wrote it up,” Autumn admitted. “He says it’s his fertilizer, in the ground.” She let a breath go by. “That’s two accounts. Nobody’s proved either one. He can believe his all he likes. Believing it doesn’t make it so.”

“People always said it was the soil,” Summer whispered.

“People said a lot of things,” Autumn whispered. “Hardly anybody wrote them down.”

“Dad said it was peculiar.” Summer’s whisper had a crook in it now, very small. “The dirt. He said nothing out of it tasted right unless you salted it twice.”

“Dad said a lot of things too,” Autumn said.

Summer made a sound into the pillow that would have been a laugh at any other hour, and Autumn felt the corner of her own mouth go, and let it. It went away again. The glow lay on the ceiling exactly where it had been.

“They tested the soil, though,” Autumn whispered. “Every time the Lamplighter got going about it, the state came out and took samples. It’s in the archive.” She had read every one of those reports, more than once. “They never found anything. Not in the ground, not in anybody’s blood.”

“So he’s wrong,” Summer whispered, fast.

“So nobody found it.” Autumn kept her eyes on the ceiling. “That isn’t the same thing.”

“But in the Study, he didn’t say anyone looked.” Summer’s whisper went up at the end. “What if he doesn’t know they did? He left, and he never went back. How would he even know there were tests?”

Autumn thought about it. It made sense. A man who had stayed away from a town for a century and more had no reason to learn there had been soil reports. “Maybe he doesn’t,” she whispered.

“Then somebody should tell him.” Summer’s thumb pressed once on the back of Autumn’s hand. “It was a hundred and fifty years ago. If he’s been walking around with it that whole time, and it isn’t even—”

“Since eighteen-eighty,” Autumn whispered. “The first batch.”

Summer breathed out through her nose. “Autumn.”

“If he’s wrong, he should know it,” Autumn whispered. “If he’s right, a report won’t help him.” She heard how that sounded, and let it stand.

When Summer whispered again it was smaller. “Do you think he’s sorry? Like, actually sorry. If he did it.”

It was a question about his face, and his face was what Autumn had watched all evening. She went back over the Study in order before she answered. “He didn’t say he was sorry,” she whispered. “Or ask us for anything back. He said he left when he understood what was happening in the houses, and that he couldn’t find a way to undo it. And he didn’t go back till he came for us.”

“When you said cranks,” Summer whispered, “his thumb went. Like this.” Her thumb moved once across the back of Autumn’s hand, a small brushing stroke, and stopped. “Like they got called that for being right.”

“I saw it,” Autumn whispered. “It looked old. Like he’s been sorry since before anybody we know was born.” She let a breath go by. “If that’s what it is.”

Summer turned her head on the pillow. “He’s Martin Ashcombe,” she whispered, trying the name out in this room. “We did him in fourth grade.”

“Founder,” Autumn whispered. “Doctor. Fixed the fields.” It came out in the order the worksheet had put it.

“Rumored alchemist,” Summer whispered. “Everybody thought that part was a joke.” She let a breath go. “He’s the only hero the town ever had. That’s the whole list. One man walks in with a bag, and there’s a town, and the fields come up, and sick people get better. Alchemist, scientist, doctor, whatever he was.”

“And then he was gone,” Autumn whispered.

“Nobody ever knew where. That was the best part, when you’re nine.” Summer’s whisper went thin. “He just wasn’t there one morning.”

Autumn didn’t say that he had told them why. Summer had been in the Study too.

“Did he have anybody?” Summer whispered. “At home, I mean. A wife. Kids. You had the books.”

Autumn had looked, once, years ago, because the founder ought to be in the books like anybody else. “Most of the records from the early years burned in the town hall fire,” she whispered.

“Of course they did.”

“We could ask him,” Summer whispered.

“We could.”

Summer’s whisper cracked up the middle. “He made us coffee. The founder of our whole town made us coffee and baked us a cake and asked if he could lie down.”

Autumn had nothing to say to that. There was no column for it in any register she had ever kept.

Summer was quiet for a moment. Her hand stayed where it was. When she spoke again her whisper had gone very low, lower than it needed to be in a room with nobody else in it. “If he’s right,” she said, “then we’re part of it. Us. We’re something it did.”

Autumn had been waiting for that one too. They had come near it in the bathhouse, when Summer said test case out loud. Now it had a man’s name on it, and a year, and a fertilizer he had made. “Yes,” she whispered. “If he’s right. We would be.”

Summer lay with it. Autumn watched her lie with it, the line between her eyebrows that came and went, her mouth pressed together and then not. Summer’s hand on hers had gone still. Autumn could feel the weight of it on her knuckles, warm, not moving at all.

“Okay, but here’s the thing,” Summer whispered at last. “I like us.” She said it to the ceiling first, and then she turned and said it to Autumn. “I like who we are. I can’t even picture being different. I try sometimes and I can’t do it. There’s nobody there.” She swallowed. “So if it did this, then—I don’t know. I’d almost want to say thank you. Is that terrible?”

“No,” Autumn whispered. “Me too.”

It was the plainest thing she had said all night, and it was easy to say. She liked who they were. She couldn’t imagine the other thing either—one head on one neck, one voice in the dark, nobody beside her on the pillow. She had tried, once or twice, as a girl, lying awake in the room at home with Summer asleep beside her. It was frightening.

“It’s the others,” Autumn whispered. “That’s the part I mind. The ones in the Vale who didn’t come out like us. Who were less lucky.” She thought of the hush that came over a street at home when somebody’s baby didn’t, and the candles, and the notices. “I’m sorry for them. That’s all. I’m just sorry for them.”

Summer’s hand tightened on hers, once, and let go of the tightness without letting go of the hand.

“Yeah,” Summer whispered. “Me too. God.”

They lay without talking. Summer’s thumb found the knuckle of Autumn’s first finger and rubbed it, back and forth, slowly, the way you would work warmth into something, and then stopped and only rested there. The glass went on. Somewhere under the bed the caldera turned over, too low to hear, a sound she felt in the frame through her right heel more than she heard. The cold had come up into Autumn’s right wrist. She didn’t take the hand back under the sheet. Summer’s palm was over it, and that was warm enough.

Summer moved her head on the pillow. Her breath changed first—a longer one in, held. “I still like him,” Summer whispered. “After all of it. After the Study. Even if it’s true.” She said it fast, all on one breath. “I thought it might go away in there, while he was talking. It didn’t. So. I still like him.”

“I know,” Autumn said.

Summer looked at her. Then she let out her breath and looked back at the ceiling, and the corner of her mouth moved.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Good. Just—I wanted to have said it. Out loud. So it’s not only in my head.”

Autumn let it be said. She knew what Summer felt. It had been in Summer’s face all evening, every time she looked down the length of the Lounge at him. Summer had only now put it into words. As for herself, Autumn had her own, and she kept it in her head. In the Study her right hand had gone flat on his desk, and he had looked at the hand, and then turned the book face down and pushed it away from himself until his arm was out straight.

After a while Summer turned her head back to the windows, and Autumn turned hers, and they lay side by side on the pillow and looked at the light coming up from below.

Autumn listened to the glass. It had a beat in it if she listened hard enough, too slow to be anything but the magma moving, a swell and a fall that took longer than a breath. Summer’s breathing slowed beside her, but not into sleep. Her hand didn’t loosen. Beyond the garment the dent in the sheet had filled in completely by now, and the silver there lay smooth again, catching the glow.

Then, from the doorway, low, the same voice, pitched for the bed and no farther:

“I’m back. I’m lying down, on top of the covers.”

Autumn lay as she was. Her right hand lay still on the sheet under Summer’s left, and Summer’s hand stayed over it. She heard Summer breathe in, and hold it. She heard him come around the foot of the bed, the bare feet on the stone, slower than before, and stop at the edge.

The bed took his weight on the right, beyond the garment, a hand’s width from its edge. She felt it settle down the whole length of her right arm and her right leg, the mattress going down by the width of a finger and staying there, as if someone had set something heavy on a scale and the needle had come to rest.

---

It was the smell that woke her.

Summer came up out of sleep one sense at a time, and the first one back was her nose, and her nose said coffee. Real coffee, hot, somewhere close: dark and a little burnt at the edge, the smell of the kitchen at home at six in the morning with the radio on low and somebody already arguing with the toaster. She lay with her eyes shut and breathed it in and didn’t believe it, and then breathed it in again and did.

She stretched her left foot down under the sheet until her toes found the cool far end of the bed, and opened her eyes. The windows glowed over the caldera exactly as they had when she fell asleep, with the balcony rail still crossing them, thin and black. The sheet was where she had left it, up at their collarbones. Beside her Autumn was asleep, her loose hair across the pillow between them, and along Autumn’s right side the heavy gray-brown garment lay on top of the sheet from the pillow down. Past it, on the far side of the bed, the silver was smooth and empty.

There had been a long whisper with Autumn in the night, and his voice at the end of it, low and level, pitched for the bed. It came back to her now as a shape more than anything, the words worn off it by sleep.

She listened for the bell. The evening ones had come up through the rock and into the sole of her foot, and she lay still and waited to feel the morning ones do the same. The rock stayed quiet. Too early, then. But somebody had made coffee anyway, and the smell of it had come all through the dark rooms between there and here to find her, as if it had been sent.

Coffee first. It was the rule at home and the rule anywhere they slept, motels and spare rooms and other people’s foldout couches: before anybody said anything that mattered, before the day was allowed to start, coffee. And here it was, before she had even asked for it twice. Summer lay on her back and smiled at the ceiling like an idiot.

Out there, past the Bedroom, was the long dim Lounge and the counter and the stove, and somewhere on it a pot, and somewhere near the pot a man who had said, in the dark, I’ll see to it, and then had apparently gotten up before the bells and done precisely that. She thought about the casserole too. She had asked for that. Heated. Second day. She wondered whether he had remembered the casserole, and then thought that of course he had, he was a person who remembered the casserole, and then wondered when she had started knowing what kind of person he was.

Beside her Autumn took a long breath in through her nose, and held it, and let it out. Her face eased. Summer watched it happen at the edge of her sight, Autumn’s forehead going smooth before her eyes were even open, as if somebody had run a thumb over it.

“That’s my coffee,” Autumn said. Her voice was rough from sleep. “The one I asked for. Hot. In a cup I can hold.”

“He got up in the dark and saw to it,” Summer said. “Like he said he would.”

Autumn opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling for a while. “He said a lot of things last night,” she said. “That’s the first one I can smell.”

Summer laughed, low, mostly breath. Then she started to get up for it.

She did what she did every morning without thinking: slid her left hand under the sheet and up to her shoulder to fix the strap of whatever she had slept in, because nothing they slept in ever stayed where it was put. The nightgown had behaved itself all evening, which should have been her first warning. Her fingers went to where the strap should have been.

Skin.

She moved her hand. Shoulder. Collarbone. Skin.

Beside her, under the sheet, Autumn’s right hand made the same trip on the other side, and stopped.

“It’s gone,” Summer said.

Autumn was quiet for a second. “It’s gone here too.”

Summer’s second thought arrived a full second behind her first one and hit a lot harder. The sheet was the only thing on them. The long pale dress was lying on the stone floor of the Bath with its seam split open, where she had stepped out of it and told herself she never wanted to see it again, which in hindsight had been hasty. Everything the Athanor gave them burst or hung wrong. She had said so herself, out loud, in front of everybody, like a genius.

“Oh, no,” Summer said. “Oh, no, no, no. You’re kidding me. Of course. Of course.”

Her left hand came out from under the sheet and took hold of it at their collarbones and held on.

They lay there. The coffee smell went on being wonderful, which felt personally unfair. Summer took stock. One sheet, theirs for the moment. One garment, heavy and good, which was not a dress but a coat, really, the kind of coat that covered the shoulders and stopped at the hip and had never once in its life been asked to do anything else. One dress, in the next room, in pieces. One nightgown, gone, she didn’t know where and didn’t want to go looking under the sheet to find out.

“Did he see?” Summer said. It came out smaller than she meant. “Us. Without it.”

Autumn’s eyes went to the empty side of the bed, past the garment, and stayed there. “He went across the room in the night,” she said. “Out to the Lounge, and back.” She said it the way she said things she had checked. “I don’t know when it went. I can guess. I don’t remember if we were wearing it when he came back. I can’t know if he looked.”

“Okay,” Summer said. “Okay. So that’s great. That’s a fun thing to not know.”

The heat came up her neck before she could do anything about it. It started somewhere under the sheet and climbed, and by the time it reached her face her ears were burning, and she knew she was red to the hairline and couldn’t stop it. She pressed the back of her left wrist against her cheek, which did nothing, and then against her neck, which did less. Her heart was going as if she had run the stairs. All night, with him a hand’s width past the garment, and nobody could tell her for how long, or if he had seen what—and the not knowing was the worst part, and also, somehow, not only the worst part. She left that alone.

At the edge of her sight, color was rising in Autumn’s cheek too.

Summer saw it, the pink coming up along Autumn’s cheekbone and down into her neck, and she heard Autumn’s breath catch, once, small, like a step into water colder than it looked. Autumn’s right hand came out from under the sheet and closed on the edge of the garment where it lay along their side, and held it.

Sulphur State (Desire and Self-Possession)! +2 Sulphur

Summer had a joke for it somewhere and couldn’t find it.

Somewhere beyond the Bedroom, a cup clinked against something.

Both heads turned toward the sound. It was a small, ordinary kitchen sound, china on stone, and it went through Summer like a fire alarm. They held still and listened. Nothing came after it, no footsteps, only the glass and the coffee and Summer’s own pulse in her ears. He was out there. He was up and out there and making coffee, and at some point in the next however-many minutes he was going to be finished making coffee.

“The Bath,” Summer said. “It’s the one room with a door that’s ours.”

“Bath,” Autumn said.

“On three?”

“Just go,” Autumn said, and for once Summer did exactly what she was told.

They sat up together, carefully, as if the bed were a canoe. Summer kept her left hand clamped on the sheet at their collarbones, and it came up with them. Autumn’s right hand lifted the garment off the bed—it was heavy, and it dragged across the silver with a sound like a broom—and swung it up and around behind them and over the shoulders they shared, the same move she had made last night by the entrance door, and it came down around them stiff and gray-brown and smelling faintly of the Alcove. When it was on, Summer let go of the sheet. Her left hand found the front edge of the garment and joined Autumn’s right there, and between them they held it shut over the shoulders and down as far as the hip, which was as far as it went.

It was not very far.

“Okay,” Summer said. “Okay. Go. Go go go.”

They got out of the bed together. The nightgown—or what was left of it—slid out slyly from underneath the blanket, pooling on the floor like the traitorous garment it had been. The stone floor was cool under her bare foot, and so was the air on her bare leg, and they went across the Bedroom fast, faster than they had moved since the Palaestra, the garment held shut in two fists and Summer’s whole attention on the door in the far wall and absolutely not on anything behind them. It was a big room. She hadn’t noticed last night how big. It was approximately the size of Wyoming. If he walked in now she would simply die, right here on the nice stone floor, and Autumn would have to do all the explaining, which she would do in four words and none of them would help. Her left hand was already cramping on the weave. Beside her Autumn was breathing through her nose, short and even, the way she breathed at the top of a hard climb, and Autumn’s loose hair swung at the edge of Summer’s sight with every step, still crimped from the braid, and the coffee smell came across the room with them, warm and patient and completely unbothered.

“The coffee’ll keep,” Summer said, mostly to herself.

“It had better,” Autumn said.

At the Bath door Summer let go of the garment with her left hand to open it, and Autumn’s right hand took up the slack and held the whole front shut by itself, knuckles white on the weave. It swung inward on steam and the smell of water and stone.

They went through. Summer’s left hand shut the door behind them.