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A little pep in my step, you know? We’d saved like a billion people’s lives, which is what I told myself I was happy about. I mean, I was, but if I say it like that wasn’t a contributing factor to my mood I sound like an asshole.

I was happy for other reasons.

We weren’t avoiding each other. 

You stood in the hallway then, talking to Paul. I walked by and you acknowledged me. Nodded, but not like I was a stranger.

I wanted to scream at you. In a good way. In a way that felt like a homecoming.

You should have been so familiar to me—all those unfriendly angles and points like points on a white picket fence.

But I saw you over and over in those days, and I saw you different, like you’d been inverted. Like I was looking in a mirror, you standing behind me.

It didn’t feel done, like we’d gotten past the yawning crevasse we’d created. It felt more like a sickly yellow bruise, halfway healed.

I saw you for what you were—a lyctor, yeah, but also: just Harrow.

You were talking to Ianthe, both wearing those dumbass robes. Just Harrow.

You were struggling a box onto a high shelf. Just Harrow.

You were fusing and unfusing a metacarpal you’d probably had in your pocket, you freak. And you were just Harrow.

I didn’t know how to take the change, but I didn’t feel so much like shit anymore.

I found myself whistling a lot, which annoyed Ianthe to no end. It was a gift to me. 

“What’s that song?” Corona asked, one of the times I’d been doing it absently, when Ianthe hadn’t been around to bother.

The name of the song eluded me, like one of those eye floaters: always on the corner of my vision, darting away when I tried to see it straight-on.

“Huh,” I said, “Something old, I guess.”

“I like it.” She tilted the gold chain she had in her hands, examining it in the light. She’d been trying to fix it for days, and me with my fat fingers? No help. So I just sat there.  “Sounds creepy.”

I laughed, and for the first time in a long time: I meant it. It reminded me of how I’d watched Corona laugh on that backwater mud planet, and then—

“Hey, uh. I’ve got bad news about your crystal.”

“My crystal?” Corona asked. I watched her understand the question. “Oh, the mud man. Not mine. I gave it to Harrow.”

She set her chain down, looked at me in a way that would have probably killed me if I wasn’t dead.

“Oh.”

“Oh,” she echoed. “You should probably deliver your news to her, then, hm?”

I knew you’d given it to me. I knew that. I’d just danced around it. I’d been dancing around anything that wasn’t hard lines and cold facts.

I wouldn’t have been able to go to you before, wouldn’t have thanked you for the thing I’d shattered on my floor. Now, I let myself wander around until I found you as you were. As you’d maybe always been: just Harrow.

“I broke your crystal. Weird present.”

You were reading and you looked pissed that I’d interrupted you.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gr—” If you didn’t have all that paint on, I knew you would have looked a little green around the gills. “What crystal?”

“The one you left on my bed. The apple, the visor—what are you, like a flightless bird or something?”

You slammed your book shut. I’d always known you to be half-there. Like the weakest impulse would have sent you flying out of that room. But you didn’t go anywhere, just looked at me. Full-on for the first time in a lifetime.

Are we talking now? I wanted to ask. Are we normal?

I wanted a hug so fucking bad I thought I was going to puke.

“What do you want, Nav?”

The name felt like you’d slapped a hot towel on the back of my neck. I tasted salt and iron and rust.

“Say sorry.”

You didn’t ask: For what? Which, I think, would have been the sane response. Asking for a stupid little apology like I was a soccer coach felt like the craziest thing I had ever done. But that’s what the tchotchkes were, right? Little apologies you were too scared to admit out loud.

Your face twisted, and I watched your lips contort into something pretending to be a frown. I could see the words trapped behind your teeth, could see your brain backpedaling as it tried to fuse your jaw shut. Like maybe it could squeeze out one more pathetic act of self-preservation.

You wheezed like I’d kicked you in the gut.

“I don’t know how,” you said. You were so quiet, the admission sounded like there was no air behind it. “Nothing feels big enough.”

I didn’t owe you this, but I wanted it more than anything, so I just held my arms out.

You looked at me like I’d scared you to death. You looked at me like I was the last drop of water on that shitty mud planet.

You almost tripped on your way over, and I almost laughed, and then there wasn’t any room for almost.

Your bony fingers dug into my back, I could feel the front of my shirt getting hot and wet and I pressed my face into your hair and it wasn’t close enough.

I felt your lips, mouthing words into my chest.

A nearby planet was imploding on itself. It had millions of people on it.

I decided, quite possibly more miserable than I’d ever been in my entire life or death, that I would help this time. I think it was because I was just wrung-out. I had hit rock bottom so many times I’d broken through and was somewhere new and worse.

When we landed, it was pretty much what we had expected.

People were screaming, I remember that most of all. I ended up following Ianthe through the din, grabbing her shitty arm when we almost got separated. Wondering if I could rip the bones apart.

“Come here, idiot.” She yanked me over as hard as she could, where she’d crouched in a clear patch of dirt. 

People were pushing us, scrambling in all different directions as the sky lit up. Beautiful colors, I thought. End-of-the-world-type colors.

And then, in that chaos, there you were.

At the end of all things (for this planet, at least,) I saw you in a different way. You were focused on the task at hand, and I didn’t want to fuck with you. I think it would have been particularly shitty of me, but I don’t think I was incapable of it.

I shoved my hands in the dirt and I saw the soul of the planet.

It was a tiny, flickering thing. It was struggling to keep the lights on.

You were there, too. Incorporeal.

Ianthe was there, I guess. I don’t know where the fuck she was, I wasn’t paying attention to her.

You reached out in that space, that freaky darkness, that in-between that in some ways felt just like the River. In others it felt like any other place. Maybe a tomb, maybe a coffee shop.

I saw you touch the soul of that planet, I saw it illuminate your face. Your bare face. You frowned, and it was so familiar. Like the threadbare blanket in my cell back home. It made the back of my neck itch.

Then you looked at me. You reached out, offered me your hand.

I took it, and the soul flared, like it was injected with lightning. I was just looking at you, though. And you were looking at me. You squeezed my hand.

God, if only you knew, Harrow. If you knew what it did to me you would have recoiled in horror.

-

I did know. I’ve always known. I wanted to do it again, but I was terrified.

-

Then we were back.

We were still holding hands. Ianthe was face-down in the dirt next to me. It was the best I’d felt in ages.

The red sun was bright and the quakes had disappeared and all of the panicked people were just kind of milling around like they’d been slapped.

“I guess that worked,” I said, and it felt so stupid.

But I saw it—the corner of your mouth. Tight, usually, now just a little looser. You let go of my hand and I felt you hesitate.

“Of course it worked,” you grumbled, and there was no bite to it.

“How did you know what to do?”

“It’s a large planet. I needed your help.”

You weren’t quite looking at me, but I could tell you wanted to.

“Well… it was pretty cool.” And then, like I was being puppeteered by the ghost of someone long-dead: “...Night boss.”

Everyone had made separate, “executive” decisions to stay on the paradise planet for a little while longer. Which, duh. We’d been floating around in a hunk of metal for weeks, barely interacting with each other. By the time the residents gave us the fruit with the sweet, juicy insides and the spicy powder to put on top, I think we all had made our decisions.

I must have eaten five of those fucking fruits. 

I sat on the sand in the blue firelight, licking juice off my knuckles like a neanderthal. The woman that had offered me the fruits hung around even though I must have looked like a lunatic.

“You’ve never had them before?” She asked.

I paused, finger halfway in my mouth. She was looking at it. That made me feel something other than crushing grief, which was nice.

I hummed. “Nope. Grew up with a lot of gray half-solids. Oatmeal, porridge, grits. Different kinds of lumpy shit.”

She smiled, and the firelight creased her face in unfamiliar ways. She was pretty, this I noticed with my detective skills.

“Our planet must seem alien to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve offered so far.”

She said this—and here I go again with my detectiving—in a very sexy way.

And I—I don’t know. I really don’t know what I thought. She was laying it on thick, and I was lonely. I’d been lonely for a long time. I had no reason not to, I told myself. We kept talking and she kept getting closer and eventually there was no more room.

At eighteen, alone in my cell on the Ninth, I would have fucking wet myself at the opportunity. If I’d had time to prepare, I would have reread every skin mag I owned and done pushups and forearm curls until my eyes bled.

There was nothing to prepare, really. I went through the motions just like I’d seen in Sluts of the Seventh and that was that.

She left, after. I have no idea what she thought and I didn’t want to ask.

I sat on the edge of the bed, butt-ass naked with my face in my hands. I ran my hands through my hair. I missed my stupid head massager. I was pitiful again. I’d never stopped in the first place.

“It didn’t feel good,” I whispered. “Why didn’t it feel good?”

But I knew.

So I didn’t sleep that night.

I didn’t need to sleep ever, but I tried to keep it up for my sanity. I think we all did. I was feeling pretty insane, I have to admit.

I paced the beach like I was looking for something in the sand, like if I walked for long enough I would receive a cosmic revelation like a sledgehammer to the head.

But that didn’t happen, obviously. I would have liked a regular sledgehammer to the head. It would have stopped me thinking for a few minutes. 

I just worked myself up, made myself hot and feverish. So much so that I walked right into the water, up to my collarbones. I almost wished we hadn’t sewn my chest up. I wanted the water to rush in, to fill the space between my ribs. Like if something other than my mind was churning I could focus on it instead. Like I could scrub myself clean from the inside.

The waves lapped at me, and I felt tremendously stupid.

The water was piss-warm, and I was still hot and prickly, and then some of it got in my mouth.

The reflex was to sputter like an idiot, but I didn’t do that. The water was all salt, all nasty, gritty salt. I swallowed it. So fucking stupid. It made me want to puke immediately, but I wanted more. I dove in, mouth open.

I washed up on the beach, later. I’d probably drank enough seawater to kill a couple people by that point. I felt sick and raw and thirsty. Nothing about the saltwater had made me feel what I so desperately wanted it to. I just felt like an idiot.

I lay there until the sun came up, and then I wished I’d had my visor.