A River of Stars

The black didn’t lift so much as thin, and then it was gone, as if it had only ever been a hand held over his eyes.

Andy was standing. He had been sitting a moment ago. He could still feel the chair in the backs of his legs, the high back against his shoulders, the edge of the twelve-sided table and the eleven faces around it, all of them talking without a sound, and now there was no chair and no table and no Heart. There was something hard and smooth under his shoes, and when he shifted his weight it gave back a sound so faint he felt it more than heard it, like a fingertip run around the rim of a glass.

There were no walls.

He turned his head, and then the rest of him, slowly, all the way around. No pillars. No stone. No stair. Nothing stood anywhere that a wall could have been, and nothing came after it either. The dark went out in every direction farther than looking could follow, and once his eyes let it be what it was, it was full.

In front of him a bridge rose out of the nothingness at his feet in one long arch.

It was a causeway made of gold and black glass. The gold ran through it in seams, like veins through a stone, and the glass between the seams was so black and so clean that he could see down into it a long way without finding anything at the bottom. It climbed. It went up and up in a slow curve, and somewhere high above him it went on climbing out of sight, and he could not see where it came down. Under it ran a river which was not water, but stars, thick as gravel in a streambed, all of them moving the same way, sliding past under the arch toward somewhere he couldn’t see. Above it all the sky was full of nebulae—blue and rose and a pale green like the inside of a wave, too large to take in at once. He had to take them a piece at a time.

His hand had found Caledfwlch’s hilt. He didn’t remember putting it there. The circlet was still on his brow, the blue rose cool against his forehead, and the mantle still hung from his shoulders, and when he turned the letter crackled in his breast pocket. His breath had gone out of him somewhere around the river, and it hadn’t come back.

He had sat down in her chair, at the bottom of everything she kept. This was what lay under that.

He went the last few steps to where the bridge came up out of the ground and crouched there, and put his palm flat on the glass. It was cool, cooler than the air, cool as river stone in March, and perfectly smooth. Under his hand, so faint he would have missed it if he hadn’t been holding still, it hummed. He kept his hand there longer than he needed to. Then he stood up again, and didn’t set a foot on it.

“Welcome to the First Gate, Andy Cooper.”

The voice came from his left, close enough to touch, and Andy had not heard anyone arrive.

Herman stood at his shoulder. He wore a chiton the color of night, and the small wings at his sandals stirred and settled as if there were a breeze down here that only they could feel. A thin golden circlet sat on his brow. He held a lantern up in his right hand, and the light inside it was the same strange, steady gold Andy remembered from the terrace, brighter than it had any right to be, and the caduceus rested in the crook of his left arm. It was exactly how he had looked last night, when he’d walked out to the edge of the whiskey tasting and told them all it was time for the katabasis. The light of the lantern fell across the glass at the foot of the bridge and stopped there.

“Herman.”

It came out of Andy hoarse, and too quiet. The place seemed to take some of it on the way. He had been alone at that table with eleven people who wouldn’t look up. He had said Horun’s name, and spoken to him again, and got nothing back. For a second all he could do was be glad of it, of a face that turned toward him when he spoke, so glad it hurt.

“Hey,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hey yourself.” The corner of Herman’s mouth went up, the old, easy start of a grin, though he didn’t let it all the way out. The lantern’s handle creaked once in his grip. “You look like a man who’s been walking a long while.”

“Something like that.” Andy breathed out. “How long have you been standing there?”

“About as long as you have. I’d have said something sooner, but you were having a moment with the glass.” Herman tipped his head at the foot of the bridge. “It does that to people.”

Andy looked back at the bridge, because he couldn’t not. The stars kept sliding under it. One of the nebulae had a dark seam down its middle, like a fold in a sheet, and he followed it up until it ran out over the top of the arch, and his eyes came down along the glass again, the gold veins curving away under his feet.

And he knew it.

It went down the back of his neck before it got anywhere near his thoughts. His hand closed tighter on the hilt. He was standing on a footbridge in Warrenville, in January, with the sky gone a gold too wild for Illinois and ice in the river below, and Laura in front of him with a ring still warm on her finger. Inanna had stood over them as the goddess she was. You are children of the crossing, she had said. At the word the old planks had seemed to hum under his feet, and for one heartbeat he had seen not wood and snow, but a causeway of gold and black glass, arching over a river that gleamed with stars instead of water. Laura had gasped. Then the planks were planks again, and the ice was ice, and there had been two gold rings on their hands and a goddess telling them her sister would be there soon, and too much else to hold that day to wonder what he had seen.

This was it. This exact arch.

“I’ve seen this,” he said. His voice wasn’t steady. “Before. On the footbridge, back home, when Anna married us. She called us children of the crossing, and for a second the bridge just—wasn’t there. This was.” He swallowed. “I never knew what it was.”

“You were nearer to it than you knew.” Herman lowered the lantern a little, and the gold slid across the glass with it. “You weren’t only on a footbridge that evening. Inanna married the two of you in a realm of the spirit. It opened around you the moment you started to play that guitar, and the pair of you stood in it until she let it close. The river remembered Arabella’s touch, and the First Gate was always bound to the Last. That is what you saw then. She wasn’t marrying your bodies, or not only those. You and Laura have always been soulmates, and she married your souls. Inanna doesn’t do anything by halves. That’s why your Laura was one body that evening, and not two.”

Andy stared at him, and the song came back whole. He had played the first full chord and let it ring, and the air around them had changed, and when he finished Laura had swayed in front of him, both of her, and then there had been one of her standing there with her hands still in his. Did you do that on purpose? he had asked her, grinning like an idiot. No. It just—happened. And she had looked down at her own hands and flexed her fingers once, as if she were checking the weight of herself.

A sound came out of him that was mostly breath.

“She didn’t know,” he said. “She told me she didn’t do it. We thought it was the song. We thought it was just—” He shook his head. “It was the song. It was just more than the song.”

Herman let him have it, and did not look away. The river slid by. Andy watched a knot of stars break apart against the foot of the arch and come together again on the far side of it, without a sound. Nothing down here made a sound except the two of them and the lantern. He found he was holding his breath again, and let it go.

“Is it real?” he asked. “This. Any of it.”

“As real as it can be.”

Andy almost laughed. He had said nearly the same thing on the footbridge, with the rings still warm on their fingers and Laura half crying, half laughing in front of him: It’s real. Or it’s as real as anything else that’s happened to us. And Herman had said it to Nick in the dark, the night of the katabasis, when Nick asked if they were somewhere real: It is as real as anything in here gets.

He turned and looked at Herman properly, the wings and the circlet and the steady gold in the lantern, and the face under it, which Andy had first known above a maintenance badge, with a new voting panel to put in.

“And you?” he said. “Are you real?”

Herman looked wounded. “I installed your voting panel with these two hands, Andy. You think a hallucination runs cable that neat? I labeled every wire.”

“You labeled them.”

“Color-coded. Ask Mildred.”

This time Andy did laugh, short and surprised, and the sound went out across all that open space and didn’t come back.

Herman let it go before he spoke again. When he did, the grin had left his face, not all at once, and what came instead was the voice from the fire after the katabasis, when he had stopped joking for a while.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m real. I’m here because this is mine to do. I’m a psychopomp. A guide of souls. When someone has to cross from one place to the next and can’t find the way on their own, I walk them over. Sometimes the crossing’s a river. Sometimes it’s a road, or a door in a wall nobody else can see. It’s one of the things I’m for.” He lifted the lantern a little toward the arch. “This was one of my crossings. I haven’t walked anyone over it since the twelfth of them was made and the Gate was used up. There was nothing left to cross, after that.”

The Heart came back to Andy, the twelve tall chairs and the ten figures talking without a sound, and Horun pulling out the nearer empty chair and sitting down in it and leaning in with the rest. Horun had stood at the start of all of this. Herman had come through it after him. Then the twelve had been made out of it, one after another, until there was none of it left—and Herman had stood at the foot of a bridge that wasn’t there for longer than Andy had any way to think about.

At the fire, after the katabasis, with the lantern set down between them, Herman had told him what that walk was. It’s my work. Been at it longer than anyone here’s been alive. Andy heard it differently now.

“That’s a long time between jobs,” he said.

“You have no idea.” Something moved in Herman’s face that might have been the grin trying to come back. “I’ve kept busy. Plumbing. Wiring. Weddings. The odd descent.”

Andy looked up the arch again. It climbed out of the lantern’s reach in a long, unbroken curve, the gold catching the light of the nebulae as it went, and the top of it was lost somewhere up among them. He tried to see past it. He couldn’t. There was the climb—and after it, nothing his eyes would give him.

He had been carrying the question since the beach, or longer than that, since a lunch three days before the wedding, since a table with every one of them around it. He hadn’t meant to ask it in the first minute. It was out before he could stop it.

“If I cross it,” he said, “does that—” He stopped. Started again. “Is that it? I go over, and I come out the other side, and I’m a god? It just makes me ascend?”

Herman took his time over that one. He watched the river for a while, as he had watched the fire.

“You will be the first one to cross it in this direction. When you do, it will seal the connection,” he said at last. “That’s what the crossing does. It fully connects you to it. It puts it in your hands. You and the Gate become one. But ascension completes when you believe in it, Andy. All the way. Not when you’ve crossed a bridge, or when somebody tells you you’ve crossed it. When you believe it, fully.” He glanced at the bridge, and back. “I can walk you to it. I can walk you over it. The believing was never mine to do.”

Andy let that sit. He had carried that question down through every one of her memories, and some part of him had pictured it as a step, a line on the ground, one side and then the other. He’d thought the bridge would decide it. He looked down at his own hands. One was still on the hilt. The other had come up, somewhere in the last minute, to rest flat over the letter in his pocket.

“Okay,” he said. And then, more quietly, because the first one hadn’t taken: “Okay.”

“So.” Herman shifted the caduceus in the crook of his arm. “Do you?”

Andy didn’t answer right away. He looked at the arch, at the place where it went up into the stars and didn’t come down anywhere he could see. Somewhere above all of this, above the Heart and the stair and every room she had ever kept, was Laura, at the top of her fear, where the bond had held her all night.

“I need to see Laura first,” he said.

Herman looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, as if that were an answer and a reasonable one.

“That’s honest,” he said. “You’d be amazed how few of those I get.”

That was all he said. He did not walk ahead. He lowered the lantern to his side, and the gold light settled at the foot of the bridge and stayed there, and he waited.

Andy stood at the bottom of the arch with his hand on the sword and his eyes on the place where the bridge went up out of sight, and the river of stars went on sliding by beneath it, and he did not move.

He found he had every one of the doubts back. On the long walk down they had come to him one at a time, and he could take each one out and look at it and put it away again. Now they came all at once, as if they had only been waiting for him to stop moving.

He had been too late for her once already. The river had taken her when they were thirteen, in November, and nothing anyone did had been in time. He had made his peace with what happened that day. He had never made any peace with the shape of it, with what it meant to arrive a little too late for the one person you would have done anything for. And down here time ran however it liked. He had no idea how long he had been walking, or how long he had already been standing at the bottom of this bridge.

In the last of his visions he had stood on the footbridge back home and waited. He had told every one of them about it at the lunch, his hands flat on the table: the boards old and thin and worn silver, the river running black and slow, the trees grown bigger than he had ever seen them, and himself not a day older, standing at the midpoint with the sense that he had been coming back there for decades. Waiting for Laura. Waiting so long he stopped believing anyone would come. Later that same day he had looked at Laura and said it to her: I don’t want to stand on that footbridge, decades from now, and miss you the way I missed you when you were gone the first time. He could see the boards now. He could see the silver in them.

At that same lunch he had told them what crossing would do. If you’re bonded, you cross too. Permanently. Whether or not you wanted to. Then he had made them a promise. If even one person here says no, I’ll walk away from it. He had said it to a table with every one of them around it, and looked at each of them in turn, and he had meant that too. Then Myra had said no, in a voice like a thread, her knuckles gone white. If I do, it moves the debt to my mother. I won’t buy my own safety with hers. And then Laura had opened her mouth, and for half a second it had looked like a yes, and then both her faces had gone still. My mom broke when I died. I’m not keeping myself alive just to hand her a death sentence in my place.

Herman had said the crossing only gave him the potential, and that it finished when he believed. He hadn’t said what it did to the women on the other end of the bond. Whether the first step onto that glass already broke his word, Herman hadn’t told him, and Andy hadn’t asked. He looked at the place where the bridge left the ground, a hand’s width from his shoe, and couldn’t make himself look away from it.

They had given him leave, afterward. Laura had said it to him at the wedding site, with the arbor already draped in ribbon and Myra beside her, and she had set the words down one at a time, like stones fitted into place. If you see the way through—if you know what to do to save us, to save everyone—you go. And Myra, with her tails curled around her ankles: If you see that door, don’t wait for us. Cross it.

He had seen the door. He was standing at the foot of it. He had not found the way to save everyone. He hadn’t found the beginning of one.

Claire had written it out for them at the lunch, and he had read it aloud to the table. If the target became divine, the debt could not reach her. But a debt could not be destroyed, only moved, and if Laura was out of its reach it would go down the line to the next of her blood. Her mother. Or Marie. Sarah Williams had sat in the same chair in a cottage in the Hollow Garden since the day her daughter died. She couldn’t say yes or no to anything. If it went to her, it would spend her life without her ever even knowing what was happening.

On the beach he had told Arabella the thing he was most afraid of. He could hear himself saying it, in full morning light, the tide coming in over the wet stones: I’m afraid that if the time comes, and it’s her life or Sarah’s, I’ll do the selfish thing. That I’ll go through and spend the cost, no matter who pays it. He had said it to her like you set something heavy down on a table, so someone else could see the size of it. She hadn’t told him he was wrong. You’re allowed to want her, she had said.

Now the time had come, and he was standing in front of the cost.

His hands were shaking. He looked at them, and they went on doing it.

Herman had not moved. The lantern hung at his side, and its light lay at the foot of the bridge where it had settled, and the wings at his sandals were still. He wasn’t looking at the bridge. He was looking at Andy, and his face was not telling him anything at all.

Andy reached for Laura.

He did it as he had a hundred thousand times since he was old enough to remember, without deciding to. The bond was there. It had carried only two things for days now, where she was and how afraid she was, and it carried them now. Her fear was at the top, where it had been all night—pinned there, as if something were holding it up.

Then, for a moment, under the fear, there was more.

Pain. Everywhere at once. Not in one place he could have put a hand on, but all through her, in every part of her at the same time, and then again, as if it were being done over and over by something that didn’t tire. And under the pain an exhaustion so deep it frightened him, the bottom of something, the place a person came to when she had held on longer than she had in her.

“No—” It was out of him before he knew he had a voice. “Laura. Laura, what is— No. No, no—”

And it was gone. The line went narrow again, as it had been for days, and there was only her fear at the top of it, the same as before. Nothing else came up it.

He stood with his hand pressed to his chest, over the letter, and breathed. Beside him the lantern’s handle creaked once. Herman had come half a step nearer, near enough that Andy could feel the lamp’s warmth along his arm, and that was all he did.

He had felt it. He couldn’t unfeel it. Whatever was being done to her up there was still being done, every second he stood here, and every second he stood here was a second he didn’t have. And none of the doubts had gone anywhere. They had only got heavier, because now every one of them had her pain under it.

On the beach Arabella had brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, and her whole body had closed down to a single axis. There is a single moment in every story where you have two options and nothing under either one. No evidence, no certainty, no proof—just the moment itself. She had lifted her hand flat and chopped the air with it. It’s the moment of stepping off the edge. Not a metaphor, Andy. The ones who step off do not have more evidence than the ones who walk away. They just have faith. That’s all.

And a little after, drawing a spiral in the sand: It’s not fair, but it’s true. When you get there, you will know.

He was there. He was standing at the bottom of it with the stars going by under his feet, and he didn’t know.

He tried anyway. He went at it the way he went at anything that wouldn’t give, from one side and then the other. If he crossed and believed, Laura went beyond the debt, and it went looking for Sarah, or Marie, or JJ, or someone from Harvey, or even his own parents. If he crossed and didn’t believe, he had walked over a bridge and changed nothing, and Laura was still up there with that pain all through her. If he went back without crossing, if there even was a way back from here, then nobody’s name went down that line but Laura’s.

He took a step toward the bridge without meaning to, and stopped with his shoe on the ground at the very edge of the glass, close enough that he could feel the hum of it coming up through the sole. He stood there with his weight on that foot. He could have leaned. He took the step back instead, and the hum went out of his foot, and his heart was going so hard he could hear it.

Every way across he could think of cost someone he loved.

So he reached for her again, because it was the only thing left in him that still knew what to do.

The line was the same. Narrow, as it had been for days. Her fear at the top of it, pinned. He held on to it anyway, as he had held on to it in the wasteland and in the corridor and at every sill in her memories, and he didn’t let go when there was nothing more to find, as if holding on were still something he could do for her.

He closed his eyes for it. It didn’t help, and he did it anyway, his palm flat over the letter, and he went down the line as far as it would let him, looking for the pain, for the exhaustion under the pain, for anything. The line didn’t give them back. There was the fear at the top of it, and the narrow way down, and nothing else it was willing to carry.

And this time something came that the bond wasn’t carrying.

It didn’t come up the line. It came from under the line, from the place in him that had been turned toward her since before he could talk, since before the bond, since before a blanket on a front-room floor, the place that had never once in his life needed to be told where she was. My other half, basically, he had told Erin once. Since birth, or nearly so. It had only ever been true.

He was one half of it, and he could feel what was happening to the other.

Laura was dying.

It was as plain as the ground under his shoes. It had no maybe in it anywhere. Up there, wherever there was, whatever was being done to her was going to finish her if it went on—and it was going on. Not someday. Not after the Gate. Now, while he stood here.

His knees went. He locked them. He put a hand out, and there was nothing to put it on. His breath came in short and stopped.

“Herman.”

It came out of him wrong, too high. He turned his head. Herman was already looking at him.

“She’s—” Andy tried again. “She’s dying. Laura. She’s dying, up there, she’s— I can feel it. Not the bond. I just— She’s dying, Herman.”

Herman held his eyes.

He did not tell Andy it would be all right. He did not tell him to go, or to wait, or that there was still time. His face was steady and grave in the gold of the lantern, and he kept whatever was behind it, and he went on looking at Andy as if he had all the time in the world to do it, and left the thing where it was. Between them. Andy’s to pick up.

And everything stopped.

He felt the doubts stop. All of them, at once, mid-sentence, and in the quiet where they had been there was nothing at all. Nothing but the one fact, standing by itself in the middle of him.

She was dying.

His hands had stopped shaking. He hadn’t noticed when. Nothing down here made a sound. He could hear the lantern’s handle when Herman’s grip shifted on it, and his own breath, and under his shoes the faint hum of the glass at the bridge’s foot, going on as it had when he laid his palm on it. The stars went by. None of it had changed.

He looked at the bridge. It was the same bridge. The same gold seams going up into the dark, the same black glass, the same river of stars sliding under it toward somewhere he couldn’t see. A minute ago it had been the unknown, the thing at the bottom of everything that he didn’t understand and couldn’t see the end of. It was not that now. It was the only way to her. Whatever was on the far side of it, it was the only chance he had left to reach her before the thing up there finished, and there wasn’t a second one coming.

So it was simple, in the end. It’s simpler than you want it to be, Arabella had told him.

Either he believed that he would find a way to keep Sarah and Marie out of it, believed it with no proof and no plan and nothing under it, and went. Or he turned around, and walked away, and let Laura die.

There’s no punishment for the ones who don’t, Arabella had said, almost gently, with the tide coming up the sand. The world simply stays as it was, and everything that was waiting on them stops waiting.

Everything that was waiting on him was Laura.

He made himself look at the walking away, because it deserved to be looked at. He could turn his back on the glass. He could stand here at the bottom of everything she kept, with no door behind him and no stair, and wait, as he had waited on the footbridge in his vision, until there was nothing left to wait for. Sarah would stay in her chair and never know that anything had been decided for her. Marie would go on. And somewhere over his head, while he stood with his back to the bridge, the thing that was being done to Laura would finish, and decades from now he would stand on an old footbridge and miss her. If you can’t jump, Arabella had said, then the world goes on as it always has. It’s not a condemnation. It’s just a fact.

He looked at it for as long as he could stand to. It wasn’t long.

Then he made himself look at the believing, and that was harder. He had nothing to put under it. No plan for Sarah. Nothing for Marie. Not the first step of a way through, only Arabella’s word that the ones who stepped off had never had more than that, and the long arch going up into the stars in front of him, and the place in his chest where Laura was.

Then he was remembering, without having asked to.

He was a kid on the footbridge, the summer before eighth grade. Laura had dared him to jump in, and when he wouldn’t, she had said she would do it for both of them, and then she had decided to look for frogs instead. He had carved their initials into the rail while she was searching, AC + LA, FOREVER, linked by a crooked heart. He had been too scared she would laugh to show her. Sixteen years later she had found it herself and traced it with her finger, the letters nearly worn away, and made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. You remember that? she had asked him. Of course I do, he had said, and run his thumb over the grooves. I remember everything.

He was a little over a month old, on a yellow blanket. He had watched it through a lit window from across a dark street, inside a memory that wasn’t his, and it was his all the same. His mother kneeling on the carpet, laying the two of them down side by side, one in a pale blanket and one in blue. There you go. Andy, this is Laura. Laura, this is Andy. You two are going to be neighbors. The two small heads turning on the blanket, wobbling. The hands coming up, uncertain, opening and closing on nothing. Reaching. Finding each other, and holding on. And later that same night, in two lit rooms at the two ends of his parents’ house, the two of them crying and crying and not stopping, until someone carried one of them through to the other, and both of them stopped at once. It is rare, exceedingly so, Horun had said, for someone to meet their soulmate at all. Rarer still, for them to meet that young. My sister gave you that chance.

He was on the beach, in the life he and Laura had been given for one day, with Bee running ahead of them toward the foam. Bee had built a tower in the wet sand at the high-tide line, a lump with ambition, and talked to it the whole time she built it—No, no, stay up—while Laura sat beside him with her knees drawn up, both of her, and said with both mouths at once, I keep thinking someone’s going to come ruin this. She hadn’t meant the tower. When the big wave came in he had braced for it to go. It had curled and broken short and barely touched the sand, and the tower had stood. Bee had put her hands on her hips and looked at him as if he had asked her something foolish. It because it mine, she had told him. It doesn’t fall.

He stood at the foot of the bridge and held all three of them. Beside him the lantern burned on, steady and gold, and Herman stood in its light and let him have them.

He couldn’t have said which was the most real. The blanket, maybe, because it had happened before either of them could choose anything, and they had chosen anyway. The footbridge, because it was hers and his and nobody else’s. Or the beach, which hadn’t happened at all and was the one he wanted most.

His fear went.

All of it, all at once, all the way down to nothing. There was the bridge in front of him, and Laura at the other end of everything, and the knowledge that he was going to her. He hadn't saved her the first time. He wouldn't fail her this one.

His hand opened on Caledfwlch’s hilt and closed again, and it was only a hand on a sword. His shoulders came down. He hadn’t known how far up they had been.

He let out a long breath, and it went steady the whole way.

With the fear gone he could see what it had been standing in front of.

He went back to the bond. He did not reach along it toward her this time. He held still inside it and looked. It was the narrow line he had been holding all night, and for days before that, the line that carried where she was and how afraid she was—and nothing else. For days he had wondered whether it was the bond that had thinned or her, whether she was pulling away from him, and he had never found a way to ask. Now, with nothing in him but quiet, he could see the whole length of it for the first time, as if someone had brought a lamp down to it, and what had been lying across it.

On the footbridge in January, with her hands trembling in his, she had told him. I was drowning long before I hit the river. And you were the only one who ever tried to reach me. It wasn’t only about that day. It was about all the days before it, in the house next door. She had been going under in that house since before he could remember. She had come out to the bridge with him all those summers and gone home every night to it. He had only ever seen the top of the water.

And the night before the wedding, at three in the morning, with tomorrow where it was, she had said it again without knowing that was what she was saying. We laughed. We never got to do that properly before, did you ever think about that? We were kids and yes, we laughed then, but everything was so serious and then I was dead. He understood now what serious had meant. He had seen that house now, from across the street, through other eyes than his. He had stood three feet from the man who ran it, across a desk—and not been able to move. Greg had been over everything she was from the first day, and she had grown up under him like a plant under a board, bent toward the one crack of light there was.

Andy’s hand had closed on Caledfwlch’s hilt. He made it open.

Then the footbridge again. The song, and one of her where there had been two, and a gold ring on her finger, and the place that had killed her made into something good. Making it something good, finally, he had said to her there. And later, with her hands in his: You don’t have to earn me. For a while after that the line had told him she believed it. It had been wide that month, so wide it was nearly too much, every color and every weather of her all day long, like a ping you couldn’t mute, and her laugh had changed, had turned into the kind that got out of her before she could decide whether to allow it.

Then the lunch.

She had said no to the Gate, both of her, in two small voices, for her mother’s sake. And he had sat at that table with his hand on the stem of a water glass he never drank from, circling the rim, as if it were the one thing there he could still do anything with, and started to be afraid that there was no way through it. Not a way for her. Not a way for Sarah. He had played the whole hour back afterward, line by line, and found no version of it left where she wasn’t the one at the center. He had told Erin so, on the night the letter came, before he had any idea what Laura was reading: Since the lunch, when the three of them gave me their answers about the Gate, it’s been thinning out. It had gone thin that day, and gone on thinning, and he had thought it was her pulling away. It hadn’t crossed his mind that it might be him.

The stars slid by under the arch. The lantern hung at Herman’s side and lit the glass, and nothing else moved.

And the night she read her mother’s letter. He had stood outside the bedroom door and reached, and there had been almost nothing there. Just where she was, clean and exact, like a compass needle knows north without knowing why. He had stood there working out how long it had been since the bond was that thin, and the answer had been simple. The night after her resurrection. And before that, the day she died, the day she had gone out to the footbridge believing that he had broken her trust and that nothing good was ever coming for her. I was so angry at you, she had told him on the footbridge, sixteen years later. I wanted to hate you for it.

And the beach, in a life that had only lasted a day, with Bee building her sandcastle and Laura’s fear sitting under the happiest hour of it. I keep thinking someone’s going to come ruin this.

And once, only once since that lunch, it had gone the other way. On the dance floor at the reception, with Nergal coming any minute and both of them pretending he wasn’t, she had finally said it, I’m scared, Andy, and he had said Me too, and held on to her while the music went on around them. And for the first time in days the reading had come back at nothing. Zero. The two of them had said it out loud to each other, and the line had let go.

He was standing still. He hadn’t moved since the fear went out of him.

He had it now, the whole length of the line.

It had been the two of them, the whole time. It had been her believing, every day of her life, that good things were for other people and would be taken back. It had been him, since that lunch, believing there was no way through. It had been both of them, thinking Laura, or someone she loved, would pay the price of the debt. Every time he had checked the line tonight, he had checked it afraid. In the corridor he had told himself there was nothing he could send back up it, and he had not once tried without being afraid first. Every time either of them was afraid for what they had, the line between them had narrowed by exactly that much. The bond was only ever as strong as the fear and the doubt over the two of them let it be.

“It was us,” Andy said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud, and he said it half to himself, half to the stars going by under the glass. “We were scared. That’s all it was. We were both just—scared.”

Beside him the lantern’s light lay steady on the glass.

And he wasn’t scared anymore. He looked for it, as he would have pressed on a bruise to see if it still hurt, and there was nothing there to find.

He felt it happen, in his chest first and then in his hands. The line he had been holding all night, narrow as a thread, began to open. Not all the way. It widened from his end, slowly at first, and then all at once, as far as it would go, and it stopped there, and narrowed again further down, toward her. She was still terrified. He could feel that much from here, and he could feel that the fear on the line was hers now, only hers, and that none of it was coming from him.

It was enough. It was more than he’d had since the lunch.

So he sent her everything. She would feel it all at once, wherever she was, in every one of her.

There weren’t any words for it, so he didn’t look for any. The footbridge went up the line, and the crooked heart in the rail, and a yellow blanket with his mother’s voice saying their names over it, and a tower of wet sand that didn’t fall. A meteor shower, and a fort, and a storm, and a raft on Willow Run, and a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie, and a cupcake with gray frosting, and a paper crown, and a crabapple tree. Eight chocolate cakes and a cornstarch volcano, a tree house and henna tattoos. Mario Kart and a wolf-shaped puzzle, eggs slid onto his plate for breakfast and chocolate with marshmallows, The Princess Bride and mint chocolate chip ice cream. The light he used to watch for across the yard at night, and cherry and blue raspberry at Sunny’s, and walkie-talkies from one room to another under the blanket. A Polaroid taken on the hood of a Chevy, and a house with photos of a life that had never been, and a promise on a footbridge before a goddess, and a baby reaching out and calling for them. Everything he felt for her went with them, the whole weight of it, all he had. He let her have that he wasn’t afraid, so that she would know what that felt like coming from him. And under all of it, so she couldn’t miss it: he was coming. He was at the bottom of everything, and he had found the way, and he was coming for her.

For a moment there was nothing. He waited. He didn’t push.

Then something came back up the line.

It was small, and it was faint, and it came from far away, from the other end of the narrowing, and it was hers. It was Laura, wherever she was, in whatever was being done to her, still hurting more than he could have thought possible, but choosing to believe him.

He stood very still and let it reach him. His eyes stung, and he let them. It lasted longer than he had any right to expect, and then it was the line again, wider than it had been in days, with her at the other end of it.

Then Andy let out his breath, slowly, all the way, and took his hand from the letter in his pocket.

There was still Sarah, in her chair in the Hollow Garden, who couldn’t say yes or no to any of it. There was still Marie, who had come up a few days before the wedding to meet them all. He had no more idea how to keep them out of it than he’d had an hour ago, or on the beach, or at that lunch. He didn’t need it yet. He would need it on the far side, and he believed he would find it there.

Beside him Herman was watching his face. Whatever he saw there, he only nodded, once.

Andy lifted his head, and looked at the bridge.