#evayna

She spent half of her time there dead, and the other half dying. And when, on her three-millionth kick, the iron chains finally corroded and fell away and the coffin hinged open, she drowned three more times trying to reach the surface. 

But there, floating face up beneath the stars with her own salt tears joining the sea, her first three thoughts were not words so much as roughly molded concepts, which flooded her mind as thoroughly as water to lungs: 

air 

free 

Andromache 

Andromache. Andromache. The name kept her afloat, towed her to shore, propelled her to stand and to walk and to fight and steal and bargain and bribe her way through an alien world, until--now. Sitting in a sedan outside a little house in Portugal. There’s only one light on, in the kitchen. 

“Wait here,” she tells Booker. 

His jaw works like he wants to argue, but he wisely does not. 

She closes the car door soundlessly behind her. Crosses the sparse front yard. The lock yields to her as all locks eventually do. 

Inside, it is very quiet. 

She passes through the darkened sitting room, avoiding the coffee table that waits to bark her shins. Five hundred years cannot dull her reflexes or senses, though they tried; she is nimble in the dark, and there is no one in this room. 

There is someone in the kitchen. 

And yet, the first face she sees when she steps into the light is her own. 

It’s in oil on canvas on an easel, eye level to herself. She is lit in gold and orange, eyes shut tight and mouth open to laugh, as a hand--not her own--lifts a lock of her hair to comb it. She remembers the heat of the fire that night, the scrape of the stone wall at her back, the sound of the comb in her hair, the softness in Andromache’s eyes--

Booker never dreamed this. Their new one, she never dreamed this. 

In her peripheral vision, someone stands up at the kitchen table. “Hello, Quynh.” 

Yusuf of the ready smile and the eloquent word. She tears her eyes away from the painting long enough to look at him. He is, of course, unchanged. This is no time for distraction, for reminiscence. No time for the five mismatched coffee mugs he has placed around the table. “Where is Andromache?” Quynh demands. 

“Very close.” He was never one to speak in riddles, so she does not look over her shoulder. 

There are other paintings, leaned against the cabinets, and paper on the counter. “What is this?” 

Yusuf takes a breath, weighing his answer. “Call it art therapy. It’s a new thi--”

“I know what art therapy is.” At her feet is a panel that anyone else would assume is an abstract, but she recognizes it at once, the many shades of aquamarine, the diagonal shafts of light. Her view from the bottom of the sea. Yusuf never dreamed that. 

The papers on the counter have charcoal and chalk pastel. Gestural studies, mainly, but here and there an eye. Studies of her necklace, several times larger on the page. One more canvas, recent and unfinished, of a Paris street scene and Quynh’s red coat disappearing around a corner. 

“I had nearly forgotten your face,” says Yusuf. “I’m sorry for that.” 

“You all forgot me,” Quynh bites. Yusuf does not flinch, nor does he protest or make excuses. “And where is the one who reminded you?” 

“You’ll meet her soon.” Quynh turns toward Andromache’s voice. She’s here--she’s here--in the doorway Quynh just came through. Nicolò is at her left and Booker, hangdog as ever, at her right. 

Oh, she has changed. 

Quynh refused to believe what Booker tried to tell her. Impossible. Not Andromache. Quynh was lost five hundred years; she floated under the stars gasping Andromache’s name and she let it fuel her these last two hundred days and she will not be denied the fulfillment of all her plans, she will make Andromache understand what it is to be forsaken. 

But her eyes. 

“Andromache,” Quynh breathes. How fortunate she is, to have made it back in time.