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Quynh dies for the very first time in 2024. There isn’t a funeral.
The first weird thing about waking up after dying is that, well, she isn’t dead. The second, though, is far stranger. There is something nagging her – not just these strange dreams of people she has never met, but also the sense that she is missing something. Something vital. Something that she used to have, used to be. She cannot for the life of her think of what it is. She was an immigrant child living in South London during the Thatcher years, but they were never too poor for food or new clothes or the occasional visit to family still in Vietnam. In fact, her life has been mostly happy. She went to a good university, got a good job, and has a few good friends, a fiancée she quite likes. Nothing, at least before the crash, seemed terribly amiss. But, of course, then there is the matter of the crash.
The third weird thing about waking up after dying is that Quynh wakes up somewhere else. And not in a hospital or an ambulance or her own bed, either. She’s lying on her side on the floor of an old building, a bullet casing resting inches from her eyes. It’s covered in blood (hers?). A man stands over her, a mean-looking, awful man, with a gun in one hand and a shocked look on his face.
“How the hell,” he says, under his breath.
And then comes the fourth weird thing.
Quynh hauls herself off the ground, punches him in the throat, and slips his gun out of his hands and into hers, all in the matter of five seconds. This is new.
***
Dizzy, Quynh stumbles out of the apartment building. She’s in a city she does not recognize, and the people are speaking a language that she does not know. It sounds vaguely Eastern European, she thinks, but she can’t be sure. The gun is tucked into her waistband, a position that she really thinks should be uncomfortable, but she feels fully accustomed to it. It’s not with her own body that she makes her way down the sidewalk, breathing in the polluted midday air. The summer heat would be oppressive enough if Quynh wasn’t deeply disoriented, but it is practically suffocating now. Her clothes smell strange, too. Slightly sweet and bright, instead of the floral scent she’s used to from her detergent. The sun is too bright and people on the street are eyeing her strangely. She spots a Starbucks a ways up the street, on the other side, and sighs in relief. She despises Starbucks, but it’s the only familiar business, and she needs to get off the sidewalk.
Quynh makes it almost the whole half block and gets ready to cross the busy street before she hears a woman calling her name.
“Quynh! Quynh! Wait!”
She turns her head, and sees a tall woman, white, with short brown hair and a leather jacket, running after her through the crowds. She stops at the edge of the sidewalk, confused, allowing the woman to catch up with her and grab onto her forearms, as though they’re intimately familiar with one another. For a split-second, Quynh remembers something, remembers a whole life that she never had. But it leaves again, and Quynh stumbles backward into the street, pulling the woman with her.
They hear the bus before it hits them. They don’t see it until it’s too late.
***
Quynh wakes up with a pounding headache. She’s laying in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house. She sits up and pulls the blinds back from the window. Paris, for some godforsaken reason. When she was a child, she would beg her parents to take her to Paris for a weekend, and they would refuse. She didn’t understand why back then. Colonialism was a hard concept for her to grasp before the age of seven or eight; she didn’t grow up living in the shadow of it like her parents did. Her grandparents were fluent in French, having been educated in pre-war Vietnam before the fall of the French government. Quynh had the luxury of being born far from all of that. Her parents are probably so worried, God. They haven’t heard from her since the crash, which her fiancée must have called them about.
Quynh realizes, slowly, that she doesn’t know where her phone is. A quick pat down of the clothes she’s wearing doesn’t yield anything, nor does a search of the room. She’s ready to start pulling her hair out when there’s a knock at the door.
She inhales sharply. “Yes?”
“I’m coming in.”
She furrows her brow. The voice is so familiar – and then it hits her. It’s the same voice as the woman who was calling her name on the street. The woman who distracted her to the point where she got hit by a second bus –
And then comes a second realization.
Quynh doesn’t remember how, exactly, she wound up getting hit by a bus in the first place. She had been… traveling, maybe? Her fiancée was with her. They were visiting her family. Or looking for a wedding outfit? Quynh really cannot recall. She takes a deep breath, trying to steady herself as the door opens.
The woman pushes it open, wincing at the horrible creaking noise. She’s got a leather jacket on, a grey T-shirt, and black skinny jeans. Quynh thinks that she’s pretty hot, and then chastises herself. This woman is literally the reason she got hit by a bus for the second time in an hour. She lets out a sigh of relief when she sees Quynh, and a smile starts playing at her lips. There’s something deeply sad buried in it, though. Quynh can sense it.
“Who are you, and why the hell do you know my name?”
Quynh takes a step back, putting distance between the two of them.
The woman’s face falls. She sighs, heavily.
“You know, I never liked pomegranates before you.” It has the quality of a confession, falling from her lips seemingly unbidden. Her eyes are closed for a split-second too long to be considered blinking. But then, they’re open again and Quynh is staring straight into her clear blue eyes, and she has to steady herself at the sight of so much open affection. No one has ever looked at her the way this woman is looking at her. No one.
“No, I don’t know, actually. Answer the question.”
"You might want to sit down.”
Quynh eyes her suspiciously, but she obliges.
And then, she has what has to be the most bizarre interaction of her life.
“So, let’s pause for a minute. You lead a group of immortal warriors, and you used to be immortal, but you’re not anymore, and I’m also immortal now and not only that, but I always wake up a death prior to the one I just experienced and therefore move backwards through time? Really? You expect me to believe this?”
Andy sighs. She’s seated at the desk on the wall opposite to the bed, chair pulled out and facing toward Quynh. Quynh’s throat aches from holding back her laughter. This situation is not real. Sure, she keeps waking up after grievous injuries in unfamiliar places, but –
“Oh, shit,” Quynh mumbles. She rubs her temples with her thumb and her forefinger.
“I know it’s a lot to process,” Andy says. Her voice is quiet. She isn’t meeting Quynh’s eyes. “I know it’s a lot, and I know you have a lot of questions. It isn’t easy to understand – trust me, I’ve been trying to understand it for a very long time. I’m going to head back to the kitchen. If you want to ask me more questions, you’re welcome to come find me.”
Andy stands up and heads for the door. Quynh thinks about asking her to stop. She thinks about the bus running over the two of them, pressed chest to chest under the twenty ton machine, ribs breaking and puncturing their lungs, heads bleeding from impact with the ground, or, in Andy’s case, the metal undercarriage of the bus over her. It was more pain than Quynh had ever been in before. And Andy – Andy was there. And she died alongside Quynh. She must have. She died, and it occurs to her now that Andy just told her that she can die.
She doesn’t know what possesses her to do what she does next.
“Andy – wait.”
Andy stops, obligingly, and turns around in the doorway.
“I killed you. I – we – there was a bus, and we – I’m sorry.”
Andy smiles sadly. “I know, Quynh. Don’t worry about it. Water under the bridge, really.”
And with that, she leaves Quynh alone to chew on the dizzying amount of life-changing information she just received. Something is nagging her about Andy’s demeanor, like there’s something she isn’t telling Quynh. Something important. And what the hell was that comment about pomegranates? Quynh’s never even had a pomegranate (which is admittedly embarrassing for a woman in her early forties who has easy access to all sorts of fresh produce from around the world). None of this makes any sense.
Quynh lays back on the bed. The pounding in her head has subsided, she notes. Maybe she gets, like, super-healing from this. That would be kind of nice. Although it felt suspiciously like a hangover when she woke up, and Quynh would really rather not keep getting those. Actually, why was she waking up hungover? Did she overdose? Alcohol poisoning? She’s had alcohol poisoning before, and she can’t imagine having gotten much drunker than that. Certainly not drunk enough to die.
She can hear Andy’s voice drift down the hallway into her room. It sounds like she’s on the phone; if Quynh really listens, she can hear the unintelligible voice of someone else on the other end.
"Yeah, she’s okay. I mean, well. It’s, um. It’s time. It’s time now.”
A long pause.
"No, she’s still – still adjusting. I’m going to hang out here for a while longer, okay? I just – I need to make sure. I need to see this through.”
Quynh does not know this woman, but she can hear the grief in her throat. It’s unbearable to listen to. I never liked pomegranates before you. Were they in love? Quynh can’t even fathom it. She’s been with Her fiancée for five years, and before that, she never dated very much. She’s actually the first woman Quynh’s dated seriously; she can’t imagine getting with an ancient lesbian warrior who probably knows way more than she does about the female body. And she can’t imagine abandoning her fiancée. They’re getting married, for God’s sake. Except – they aren’t getting married, now. As far as she knows, Quynh is dead. God. Quynh is dead. Or, not dead. And she’s in Paris, instead of wherever she was. Her parents – who will take care of them? God. Fuck. They’re not getting married. Quynh will never see her parents again. She will never see anyone from her old life again. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She sits up and cradles her head between her knees. After a moment, she stands up and pads down the hallway to the kitchen. Andy is sitting at the counter, looking out the window, eyes glazed over. She startles when she hears Quynh’s footsteps.
“Are you all right?” Andy asks. Quynh ignores the tears in her eyes.
“What did you mean when you said you never liked pomegranates before me?”
Andy inhales sharply. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
Quynh looks out the window. She can see the lights on the back of the house across the alley from theirs. The kitchen looks lived in; there are dishes in the sink and the smell of shawarma is lingering in the air. There are books strewn on the table and a shelf of cookbooks off to one side. She wonders if this is Andy’s house, or if she’s borrowing from one of her other immortal friends. Housesitting, perhaps. Do immortals need housesitters? Quynh doesn’t know. Her headache is starting to come back thinking about it.
“I just, uh – I’ve never had a pomegranate.”
Andy closes her eyes for a long moment and laughs. “Yeah, you’re – you’re right. I forgot, completely forgot. Please, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Her face is a little brighter, now, and Quynh fights the urge to relax here.
“Why did I wake up hungover?”
Andy blinks a few times, surprised, and then laughs boisterously. It’s enough to make Quynh raise an eyebrow. “You sort of, uh, blacked out last night. And I think there were some drugs involved; Booker – ” Andy stops herself, clearly seeing the confusion on Quynh’s face – “he’s another one of us, he was around last night. Got his hands on some hardcore shit, and well. I guess you needed to let loose a little.”
“Huh.” Quynh tilts her head to the side. She’s definitely overindulged before – she was once nineteen and attending university in a big city; she’s no stranger to binge drinking. But she can count on one finger the number of nights she had blacked out before, and she has never touched anything harder than a weed gummy – and that was only once, after her college boyfriend died. God, he was an asshole. Not that he deserved to die. But he definitely deserved to get his ass dumped, and Quynh regrets not doing it before he got into that accident. Not that it matters, now. Quynh suspects that her old life is not going to matter very much anymore. Yeah, okay. She wants a drink. Maybe she can see how she ends up dead in a ditch with heroin in her system, or whatever happens.
Andy sort of shrugs and then gets up from her stool and goes rummaging in the cabinet. She pulls out gin and tonic water. Quynh tilts her head to one side. “How did you know that I –?”
Andy smiles. “I’m old. I know everything.”
The about you hangs in the air, unsaid. Quynh looks away. Andy sort of shifts her weight from foot-to-foot and then uncaps the gin. “Have a drink with me?”
Quynh weighs it. Nothing about Andy has rung any alarm bells so far, and as long as she watches her make the drink, it’s probably okay, right? Unless the bottles are mislabeled and they’re actually poison. But then, that might not actually matter for Quynh anymore. Fuck, man. She can’t do this. She works for an ad agency; she doesn’t know anything about fighting. She doesn’t know anything about war. She’s a middle-aged, middle class lesbian with aging immigrant parents and a loose grasp, at best, on current events. She thinks about it for another second, and then she says, “Okay.”
They spend a few more days in Paris, mostly sitting around the house. The dreams come again when she sleeps. Flashes of people she’s never met. She thinks, by the third day, that she can recognize specific figures. There are five of them – a man with pale brown skin and a jovial smile; two white men, one who looks miserable and one who looks kind; a young black woman with box braids piled into a bun on top of her head; a black man who wears ragged clothes and walks through the forest. He is the one that confuses her the most, but Andy doesn’t have an answer for her when she asks about him. She just looks away, then back, with a tight smile, and says he’s one of the others. It’ll be a while before you meet him.
Andy spends a lot of time on the phone, but she finds the time to make dinner. It’s not the best cooking Quynh has ever had, but it’s decent, and certainly better than anything she could do on her own. They don’t speak much. Quynh does not know what to make of this woman, and she does not know what to make of the things that she is hiding. Andy keeps sneaking glances at her, as though she’s afraid that if she looks at her head-on, Quynh might run away. She’s thought about it. But then, she got a paper cut while flipping through the mail and watched as it healed up on its own. There is no precedent. Three days ago, injuries didn’t just miraculously mend themselves in a matter of seconds or minutes. Three days ago, people could not just rise from the dead. Three days ago, time moved forward for Quynh, not backward. Maybe this Andy character is worth sticking with. Quynh doesn’t want to trust her; she really, really does not want to trust her. But everything she has said has turned out to be true so far, and if she has answers, well. Quynh can’t just let that go so easily, can she?
It’s the fourth day in Paris when Andy broaches the subject of leaving.
“It’s just, well. I have a team, and we do… important work. And I need to go see them, but I don’t want to leave you alone – unless that’s what you want, obviously.” Andy’s hands are clasped together on the kitchen table. Her thumbs slip past one another and then lock together and then slip past one another again like opposing tectonic plates. Quynh watches the movement, mesmerized, instead of trying to catch Andy’s eye. It’s still startling to look at her, to see the way that she looks at Quynh. There’s a softness in her face that Quynh cannot stomach.
“Where would we be going?”
“Not far. They’re heading to Poland right now, and then we’re supposed to regroup and debrief there. It’s been planned for a while. I have to go, but you can stay here if you want. Or go anywhere, really. Um, I don’t – do you have money? I guess I don’t –”
“Yeah, no, I’m – I’m all good. I found my wallet in the nightstand; I have all my cards. But, I, um, I could go with you.”
Quynh doesn’t have to see Andy’s face to know that her features light up at her words. Quynh almost wishes that she would just come out and say it. It isn’t as though Quynh can’t see it on her face. Choosing not to say it is just cowardly, right? Or maybe’s she’s trying to let Quynh make free choices, or thinking that that’s what she’s doing. It’s enough to make Quynh’s head hurt.
“Okay. Okay, yeah. We’ll… we’ll leave in the morning. There’s a train; we’ll probably be on it all day. It’s multiple trains, actually. No direct line.”
Quynh nods. She’s used to Eurostar; she can handle being on a train all day. Whether or not she can handle being on a train all day with Andy remains to be seen.
Andy keeps looking over their shoulder as they make their way to the hotel from the train station.
“We’re not in a spy movie,” Quynh mutters.
Andy turns her head and holds a finger to her lips. Quynh is startled enough that she shuts up for the rest of the walk. She’s had a couple scary moments with guys in London, but she has never been followed followed before. Her head is starting to spin bad.
She doesn’t have much time to question Andy when they get to the hotel, though. It’s a run-down joint, the sort of place that you’d go when you don’t want to attract much attention, but waiting in the lobby is a blond man she’s never seen before. He looks strangely familiar, though. As though she’s seen him in a – ah. Yes, she has seen him in a dream. He startles when he sees her. He sets his book down on a coffee table and stands to approach them after they’ve checked in.
"Quynh – it’s nice to see you.”
Quynh looks him up and down. He’s got a few days’ worth of stubble, and his hair is sort of mess. From his accent, she’d guess that he’s French, although she really can’t always be sure when it comes to people from the continent. His clothes are unremarkable, and his eyes are red-rimmed. He looks quite sad. Maybe all immortals do. Andy does. He looks at her curiously, and then has a visible realization. Maybe he’s the one who was on the phone with Andy so much.
“Shit – I’m so sorry. You haven’t met me yet, have you? Please, call me Booker.”
She tentatively offers him her hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
***
Three of the other four mysterious figures from her dream turn out to be in the hotel. The men’s names are Joe and Nicky. Joe is bright and warm. His laughter comes easily and he gestures broadly with both hands. Quynh likes Joe instantly. Nicky is quieter, harder to read, but he smiles at Quynh when he’s passing out their takeout orders the next night, even if it seems to be touched by some deep sadness. There’s something icy in his eyes. She isn’t entirely sure what to make of it. Nile, though, is her favorite. She’s witty and quick, and also the next youngest compared to Quynh. It’s strange, though. Nile gasped the first time she saw Quynh.
(“I’m so sorry,” she said, clutching a hand to her chest. “I just – shit, it’s been a week.” The woman looked as though she’d seen a ghost. Quynh supposes that it isn’t that far off from the truth.)
Joe and Nicky are easy to talk to, on their own and together. Joe, as it turns out, is also an artist, and the two of them bond over that. Quynh hasn’t gotten to feel excited about art in a long time; advertising is a soulless business. Nicky tells her lots of stories about their lives. Her name never appears in most of them, though. And the ones that she isn’t in, well. There’s a sort of look that the oldest three seem to share every time. As though they’re remembering a tragedy. Quynh has to imagine they’ve seen a lot of them.
It just gets to be kind of a lot, being stared at like you’ve come back from the dead. Well, Quynh has come back from the dead, but – still. You get it. So, two days after they arrive in Warsaw, she heads out for a little walk. It’s a beautiful day out, the streets and sidewalks still drying out from the previous night’s rain. There’s a light breeze that tickles the hair on her arms. Most people pay her little mind. The city is very white, mostly Polish and some Ukrainian refugees, but there’s just enough of a Vietnamese community here that most people don’t seem to notice her presence. It’s almost like being back home, she thinks, and then snorts. London is diverse, sure, but Christ if the English aren’t a bunch of racist bastards. Not that Eastern Europe isn’t also racist. Or, well, anywhere in the world.
She pops her earbuds in as she walks. Andy hadn’t bothered to take her phone; Nile was highly jealous. It doesn’t really work right anymore, anyway. She can’t get any data. But her iTunes library is mostly downloaded, so she can still have music. That should be enough to get her through this. She can get through this. She can do this. She can face this life, these people. She can face whatever tragedy is coming for her. She can read it on their faces. The way Nile watches her like she’s a miracle, like she’s Christ or Lazarus or something like that. The way Nicky won’t look her in the eye. The way Andy constantly seems to be holding back tears, or worse, memories.
It takes a few more blocks before she feels the hair on the back of her neck stand up. When she turns around, she notes a man in a long coat (an odd choice, given the balmy spring weather), who is staring straight at her. She swallows and picks up the pace. She crosses the street and turns down another street, this one even busier. Five minutes later, the man is still following, this time ten feet back instead of twenty. She scans her surroundings and ducks into the nearest building.
Inside, the scent of mildew and dust is strong. There’s a staircase heading up, or a hallway heading back. Quynh opts for the stairs. She takes them two at a time until she gets to the fourth floor. There’s several doors, most of which have business logos on them. She weighs her choices and then picks the empty suite. Distantly, the door to the building slams open. She hisses and ducks behind an empty desk in the room. It’s the only piece of furniture.
Holding her breath, Quynh presses her back against the desk, and she hopes. She can hear boots thudding on stairs, and, eventually, the whip of fabric against drywall. Footsteps on her floor. The sound of heavy breathing. She prays that it’s just from a neighboring suite. It’s a Saturday, so no one is really at work, but she can dream. That’s one a few things that remains unchanged. Even now, after only seven days, everything from before has started to feel hazy. There are strong moments – being held by her mother when she was very small, the feeling of another woman’s lips on hers, the sketchbook her aunt gifted her on her tenth birthday, the business ethics professor with that thick red hair that Quynh had been in love with, looking back on it. But it’s almost like it happened to someone else.
The door to the empty office opens.
Quynh remembers other things now, too. Fear at the sound of the ocean. The taste of pomegranate on her tongue. Andy’s breath on her neck. The feeling of a horse beneath her, of a bow and arrow in her hands, of a veil on her head, of worshippers at her feet.
The man stands in front of her.
Quynh thinks about all of the places she has never gotten a chance to see. She always really wanted to go to the Arctic. She loves the snow. But she can see now, Andy’s body bleeding out. Red against white. She swallows, hard. She can hear Andy’s voice in her ear now, and she’s not sure if it’s real or not. Calling her name distantly, as though through a closed window. Her life feels like it all happened behind a closed window, now.
The man pulls the trigger. The world goes dark. She forgets all of the things she is still too young to have remembered.
***
And so it goes, for a little while.
Quynh and Booker do get gloriously drunk together, and then, when that stops doing the trick with their rapidly-processing livers, Booker procures an indecent amount of cocaine for the two of them. Andy isn’t around for this; she’s off with Nile somewhere in Central Asia while Joe and Nicky are in – where was it? Africa? Latin America? Quynh isn’t really sure. All she knows is that Booker is good fun. He’s also miserable; her first assessment wasn’t wrong. He’s still mourning his dead wife, even two hundred years later. Losing your kids is a shit deal. Quynh can’t blame him for still being broken up about that. But two hundred years is a long time to mourn your dead wife. Then again, Quynh never had a wife to begin with. She almost did, but then – yeah, okay. She’s going to get another drink. After she passes out, high out of her mind (not to mention drunk off her ass), she dreams of the young black man again. When she wakes up, her head feels fine and she’s sleeping in yet another bed. This time, the date is six months earlier. Six months without dying won’t be too bad, she thinks.
Andy is here now; the rest of them are not. She heads out sometimes, joining them on whatever mission they’re on. But it’s clear that they hesitate to use her as much as she wants to be used, so Andy spends a lot of time with Quynh. She’s a decent cook, and her personal spaces are crowded with accumulated detritus from millennia of life, but they’re usually at least somewhat organized. Quynh likes her. She doesn’t want to, but she does. It gets easier to look her in the eyes, as time goes on.
After four months, they’re sitting in the kitchen when Quynh finally asks. “Were we in love?”
Andy looks away. “For a very long time.”
Quynh nods. She had already figured that much out for herself.
“What happened?”
Andy looks back at her, tears in her eyes. The words, when they finally come, are whispered.
“I failed you.”
It’s two weeks later when Quynh asks a different, equally important question. “Do you know where we could buy a pomegranate around here?”
They’re in Spain; the markets have plenty to offer. It’s really more of a rhetorical question. An olive branch, of sorts. Quynh can’t speak to how awfully she’ll feel towards Andy later, when she is older and Andy is younger. Andy still will not tell her what happened, exactly, but Quynh can tell that it’s bad. And she can tell, after a few more weeks of careful observation, that Andy has not told the others that she’s with Quynh. Whatever happened – well. It doesn’t matter yet. Andy’s not long for this world, and Quynh is too young, still, to understand the gravity of their lives. She will be for a long time.
Andy just smiles softly and leads her through the streets of the village where they’re staying to the local market. It’s a breezy June day, and Quynh feels somewhat settled, here. She burned her hand on the stove making soup the other night and watched as the blistering rapidly disappeared. All of this is still kind of a trip, but sometimes it’s a nice one. She thinks every night about calling her mom, or her fiancée. But she can’t. Her phone doesn’t work, and even if it did, what good would it do? What good could she do in their lives, now?
Andy exchanges rapid Spanish with a vendor, pointing at fruit and laughing at jokes and haggling over prices. Quynh doesn’t speak any Spanish. She supposes that she has a very long time to learn, though. With that thought troubling her, she slips her arm through Andy’s as they make the walk home. She thinks nothing of it; it’s a vestigial reflex from years of farmers’ markets with various friends and her now-ex (?) girlfriend. When she notices, she feels her cheeks get warm, but Andy doesn’t seem bothered. In fact, her face is more open than Quynh has seen it since she met her. It’s sort of startling, how unburdened she seems.
Quynh likes pomegranate an awful lot, as it turns out.
Booker comes to see them once or twice. He’s been pushed out of the group for some offense or other; Andy hasn’t told her what it is. Quynh hasn’t asked, either. It would likely only make her like Booker less, and she presently likes him quite a lot. She can always learn later. Andy sits next to her when they eat now, instead of across from her. She’ll leave for a week or so, here and there, but she always comes back. Quynh doesn’t die very frequently, so they spend long stretches of time together. Quynh asks her questions about their lives. Andy answers the ones about her alone, but she won’t answer any of Quynh’s questions about her own life. Maybe it’s meant to be a kindness. It drives her crazy, though. She goes for long swims in the lake a mile or so from their cottage. It’s a cozy kind of life, but Quynh can feel a twitch in her muscles sometimes, watching Andy walk out the door. She isn’t sure yet what it means, so she mostly spends her time reading.
One night, two years in, her dreams turn to nightmares.
She’s been watching the young man trawl through the forest for a while now and never seen much else. She thinks, distantly, that he is from a very long time ago. It’s hard to tell; her view of his clothing is always somewhat obscured. It’s as though she’s following him from behind bushes and undergrowth. This night, though – the scene changes. He is lying on his back, eyes wide with terror, a wound in his gut spilling blood all over his clothing, the ground, and Quynh’s hands where they are trying to hold it closed. She’s sputtering, screaming, begging for Andy to do something as they watch him bleed out, a trail of red falling from the corner of his mouth as he stammers out his last words. Quynh can’t quite catch them. A wave of grief like she has never known it sweeps through her entire body as she watches his eyes glaze over.
She jolts awake, drenched in sweat despite the chill in the air. Panting, she tosses her quilts to the floor and stumbles down the hall to Andy’s bedroom. When she throws open the door, Andy is already awake, rubbing her eyes, as though she had predicted this.
“What’s wrong?” Andy flinches as she flicks the lamp on.
Quynh takes a deep, gulping breath. “What was his name? The boy who – who – the boy who died in the valley, what was his name?”
Andy’s face crumples. She looks away. “Lykon,” she whispers, almost to herself. “His name was Lykon.”
Quynh, possessed by some unknown spirit, crosses the room and seals her fate. Andy’s lips are sweet and slightly too dry under her own. It’s only a startled second before Andy’s hands are tangled in Quynh’s hair and Quynh’s hands are tangled in Andy’s, and they’re kissing like they’ve been parted for a thousand years. It’s so familiar to her, as though she’s been here a hundred million times before, as though her life has revolved around this moment for an eternity. Before she fully knows what’s happening, it’s the two of them on the bed, the two of them under the covers, their hands and their mouths moving and stopping and moving. Quynh follows it in flashes only, sparks of grief and pleasure mixed together as she takes Andy’s body to be her own, for this moment, on this night. Suddenly, and unaccountably, as they lie there panting through the aftermath, Quynh’s mind supplies only I love you. She does not say it.
***
It’s 2020 (again) when Quynh dreams, very briefly, of Nile, on some mission or other. It strikes her, suddenly, that her two days with Nile in Warsaw, three years ago (or later?) were the only time they ever got together. And it’s not as though they knew each other well, but – well, Quynh had liked her. She was a good kid, if a little haunted.
She wakes up angry. But it’s a quick fury. It burns through her body and then dissipates like smoke, floating away on the air. Whatever happened, well – Andy and Joe and Nicky seemed so broken by it. And Quynh can’t imagine that her current state, with no real knowledge of them, none of the memories that they share, not yet, would not be painful them. Andy still walks with this immense pain in her chest. Quynh can read it on her face. She can read Andy’s face better than she’s able to read her own, by now. They spend early mornings together on the back porch, reading books. They drink green tea. They find each other in the night, awoken by nightmares that neither of them will speak of. It’s like a storybook that they’ve been trapped in. Quynh is starting to find a real fondness for the author.
It’s December, and Quynh is on a brief trip to Madrid to pick up some rare book that she thinks Booker will like, later. She’ll wrap it and leave with Andy to give to him. She’s sure that she will. The air is warm and she finds that she doesn’t miss London as much as she thought she would. She still misses her mom. She’ll never watch her grow old. But the sharp throb in her chest when she thinks of the wedding she never got to have has softened to a sort of dull ache, grapefruit cut with sugar. Andy helps. Quynh feels like a traitor sometimes, but she can deal with that. Her nights are warm and her days are long and languid. It feels like Andy is perpetually trying to make up for something, and Quynh doesn’t appreciate that, but their life is quiet in a way that hers never got to be before. And although she does not say it, she thinks sometimes that she loves Andy. It’s not something she can exactly explain, at least not yet. But it’s a comforting thought, and Quynh is only human. She cannot reject what comforts her.
She leaves the bookstore and heads toward a city park. Her phone is abandoned at the cottage, long since dead. That part of her life is over. There’s also a gun tucked into her waistband. Andy has taught her how to shoot, how to cut, how to fight with her bare hands. It’s a highly erotic experience, sparring. Quynh always laughed absentmindedly at those jokes about the homoeroticism of wrestling, but she didn’t understand it fully until she started fighting Andy. More often than not, it ends in one of their beds. Quynh isn’t complaining, exactly. But sometimes she remembers what her life was like at this time the first time she lived through it, and it catches her out. It feels quieter now, smaller, too. But Quynh doesn’t mind that too much, if she’s really being honest. Her life was so stressful, all the time, and now, well. She doesn’t have to worry too much about anything.
Maybe that attitude is what attracts the mugger to her, or maybe it was just the fact that she was seen leaving an antique bookshop. Either way, he’s behind her faster than she can react to, and when he pulls out his gun, she throws him into the alleyway they’re standing beside. It’s the wrong move. He shoots. He doesn’t miss.
***
It’s so cold when Quynh wakes up. She tries to open her eyes, but something is keeping them closed. Adrenaline slams through her veins as she starts thrashing, trying to make sense of where she is. It’s only then, after a long moment, that realizes that she’s underwater. It’s so cold. She tries again to open her eyes, this time successfully, and sucks in a mouthful of water at the stinging. There’s so little light. She tries to swim upward, only to find her movement restricted by corroded iron. She can’t help it – she screams. The water carries it away. Her lungs are burning, flooding –
And then there is a sharp upward motion, and she breaks the surface of the ocean.
The story comes out in pieces as she sits shivering on the deck, a slew of towels wrapped around her shoulders. A fishing vessel catching pieces of rusted chain and iron in its nets. A contact at Oxford, the marine archeology department. A woman asks how long she was in there, a hand resting gently on her shoulder. Quynh doesn’t answer. The sun is bright overhead. All she can smell is salt. It’s dizzying. She closes her eyes and tries to feel the sunlight on her face.
(The last time she saw Andy, it had been strange. She was slipping by the house in between two missions, and she gave Quynh this look, this awful, awful look. Quynh has never felt more like a ghost than she did then. Andy’s hands had been shaking so badly that she dropped her coffee mug on the tile floor, sending ceramic shards all over the floor. Quynh had smiled at her and cleaned up the glass and the liquid. Andy had not smiled back. Quynh had touched her shoulder and Andy had flinched. Quynh is still young, but she is old enough now to know what this means.)
She’s in something of a fugue state as she wanders through Oxford. She’ll have to go to London if she wants to find Andy, but the thought is hard not to choke on. She hasn’t been back since before she died the first time. It’s hard to imagine. Her muscles are still recovering from shock. She wants to curl up in a little ball and stay there forever, warm and safe. But the thought makes her feel slightly sick for reasons she can’t name. So, she finds what must be the last payphone in the city of her alma mater, and she dials the number Andy gave her a while ago. It’s late April, now. She thinks back to the last time she woke up, and she thinks it works out to be maybe two weeks, before she dies again. Quynh does not want to die again. She wants to go home. She calls Andy. Maybe the two things are more related than she wants them to be.
***
“Quynh,” Andy whispers, breath hot on Quynh’s cheek. It’s three in the morning, and Andy has just jolted awake. Quynh has not been able to sleep. Every time she closes her eyes, she fears that they will not open again, held closed by water pressure. They’re not in Spain anymore; Andy has a house out in Georgia, far away from Tbilisi, far away from the ocean, close to the mountains. It’s beautiful here. Quynh can’t understand why she remembers it. It’s a distant picture – sunlight crawling over the hilltops as the stars grow fainter and fainter, the sky painted in red and orange and yellow and purple, Andy next to her, so much younger in the eyes. She tries to put it out of her mind. It’s not important.
Andy has been looking at her strangely for the last five days. When Quynh called from Oxford, Andy had drawn a quick breath at the sound of her voice. Quynh still isn’t sure how many years it was. She isn’t sure if she wants to know anymore.
Quynh rests her palm on Andy’s cheek. “I’m here.”
Andy places her hand on top of Quynh’s and tangles their fingers together. “I’m so sorry, Quynh.”
Quynh turns so that she’s on her right side, facing Andy. “I wish I could understand the magnitude of what you’re apologizing for.”
Andy closes her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Quynh watches as Andy opens her eyes, which are wet with tears. She thinks, unbidden, I love you more than anything. She doesn’t say it. She should – this moment has the quality of an ending. Whispered confessions in the dark. Lovers separated by things they do not understand. Death looming not far off. She should have said it. She didn’t say it. For the rest of her life, Quynh will wish she had offered that last kindness to Andy.
***
This time, hundreds of years later, when the men come into the dungeon to drag her out, Quynh does not fight. Her heart races and she looks back at Andy, and she knows, all of a sudden, that she has never loved another person like this. She will never love someone else like this. She smiles at her captors when they push her off the boat. At the very least, she had known for all of those years under the sea that Andy would be waiting for her. At the very least, Andy will know for all of those years that Quynh will find her again.
***
Quynh wakes up on a pallet in a dim, cabin that smells faintly of sick. It’s dark above her head. Andy is asleep next to her, an arm thrown protectively over Quynh’s torso. She turns her head and finds Joe and Nicky off on the other side of the room. The moon is shining bright through the window, casting the corners of the room into deep shadow. It’s a relief, after so many years of water in her lungs, to breathe air. Her body is not weak, here. Not like it was. Her lungs expand and contract and fill only with air. Her skin is not soaked through and her bones are not cold. It’s almost enough to send her into shock again.
"Andy,” she whispers. Ordinarily, that would have done the trick. Andy always seemed to wake up at the slightest thing, back then. But this Andy does not stir, just keeps snoring softly. Maybe Quynh’s memory has been spoiled by saltwater Quynh shakes her shoulder gently. “Andy.”
Andy does not wake.
Quynh decides that it doesn’t matter much if Joe and Nicky are bothered. She says it louder. “Andy.”
Andy jolts upright, swiping at her mouth with the back of her wrist. With her face illuminated now by the moon, Quynh has to bite back a gasp. She looks emaciated. Her hair is long, in a braid thrown over her shoulder. Quynh has never seen it long before. It’s been a very long time, and Quynh’s memories are faint. She was underwater for far, far longer than she had lived before it. But she does remember. She cannot forget. “Quynh?”
Her accent is different in a way Quynh can’t quite place, and it occurs to her that she is very, very far from any language she knew. She ignores English and tries instead for Chinese. It’s not exact, but she had majored in linguistics in undergrad, with a focus in Austroasiatic languages. Suffice it to say, she learned a lot about Old Chinese (technically in a different family, but it was spoken and studied in the – never mind). Her pronunciation is certainly far too modern, but it’s likely going to be more intelligible to her than English at this stage.
“I have been gone for a very long time.”
Andy looks at her, sleep disappearing from her face. She can hear Joe and Nicky stir behind her. “What are you saying?”
“The ocean,” is all Quynh says. It is all she can bear to say
Andy’s mouth opens slowly, twisting around words that do not come. Her hand comes up to cradle Quynh’s cheek. “It is soon, then?”
“Yes.”
Andy closes her eyes for a moment too long. Quynh does what she could not do, before, and she pushes their heads together. “You will see me again.”
“Will you still love me?”
Quynh can feel tears threatening. “Yes. Yes, I will love you.”
Andy opens her eyes, and the two of them stay there, looking at each other. There is an entire universe of grief hanging in the six inches of space between their lips.
“Do you love me now?”
Quynh’s hand reaches out for Andy’s cheek.
“I have loved you for five hundred years.”
***
It is a slow sort of heat, now. The summer is low and heavy around them as they make their way through the lowlands in what Quynh used to think of as West Asia. The world is very different, now. The emperors and the generals are powerful, not American presidents. There is no America. There is no Russia. There is not even Vietnam, at least not in the way that Quynh remembers it as a little girl. The world is more and less divided, more and less loud, more and less painful. She’s adjusted to English and Latin, now. She’s even learned Greek, a very, very old form of Greek that no one seems to speak besides her and Andromache. Quynh is the only one who calls her Andy. Yusuf and Nicolò were good companions, when they had each other. Quynh misses them dearly, but it has been five hundred years, now, and they will not be born for a long time. Andromache does not know their names yet. Quynh tries her hardest not to tell the answers to questions she has not asked. It is a mercy that Andy extended to her, a very, very long time ago, and Quynh can only try to repay the favor.
It’s cold at night, though, and the two of them wrap around each other like housecats. Quynh misses them. They should go back to Constantinople soon. Cats run through the streets there like cars buzzing past on London’s streets when she was a very little girl. The stars are more plentiful than Quynh had known they could be, back then. It’s one of the things they whisper about in the dark, bodies pressed close, a vain attempt to lock out the freezing night air from their blankets. When they reached the Caspian Sea in a week ago, they sold their camels, which Quynh privately thought was a shame, although she knows they needed the money. They were good companions, if a little grumpy by the end of things. She understands them – her back is aching by sunset most days, too. She’ll never get old, but she sure feels like she has, sometimes. She’s older than anyone except Andromache has ever been, now, edging closer to two millennia with every passing year. And one day, still in the distant future, Quynh will be older than Andy. Quynh will be as much older than Andy as Andy was older than her, that first moment in the street, dead together beneath a city bus. And the further they travel here, the more she’s reminded of something she used to remember, a long time ago. The sun rising over the mountains that tower over them presently, Andy next to her. Something warmer than the ocean that she still dreams about. Something warm.
“Do you ever think about what your life would have been?” Quynh asks, fingers playing with the end of Andromache’s braid. She loves braiding Andy’s hair every night. Andy braids hers, too, when she wakes in the mornings. It’s funny, Quynh thinks – Andy likes it tied up at night and free in the day, and Quynh likes it free at night and tied up in the day. Maybe it means something. Quynh likes to think that it does.
“You’ve asked me that before,” Andy whispers in return, a hand resting comfortably on Quynh’s hip.
“Not in this life. Tell me again.”
***
Quynh has lived a very long time, now, and seen a number of deaths, some hers, some not. But this is different.
Sound is long since gone from the world as they carry Lykon’s body through the forest. She has known him for a decade now – she is lucky enough, sometimes, to go twenty or thirty years without dying. It’s a great gift to her and Andromache, and she is not sure from who it has come. Andromache has his feet resting on either side of her head. Quynh is carrying his head on her shoulder. She tries very hard not to look. She cannot bear it. The Red Sea is behind them now, and as they trudge on through Ethiopia, a beautiful and ancient place. They stay away from signs of settlement. Neither has managed to say anything in days. It’s all Quynh can do not to collapse under the weight of their lives, the weight of everything that they have lost.
Eventually, they come to a lake. They do not know where he was from, originally, what village proudly claimed him as their own, but that was nearly a thousand years ago, and Quynh chokes, thinking of all the time she has gotten that he will not. It’s all she can do to keep herself upright as they scrub his body, already starting to return to dust. They wrap him in the shroud that they carried through the Arabian desert, and they spend hours digging his grave. It is shallow, but Quynh does not think that he would mind. He always liked waking up to the sunlight on his face. They fill the ground back in, and then they sit there, neither saying a word. Quynh had forgotten, how horribly she had forgotten, the scene of his death. It used to haunt her. And then, she met the damn boy and she just – she did not want to hold onto it, she supposes. And now, she will have to remember again for the rest of her life, the feeling of his blood all over her hands, her thighs, stuck in her hair from where she had leaned across his body, trying somehow to hold his soul in his body. As they sit there, the day turns back to night, and they lay on their backs, looking at the stars.
“I should not tell you this,” Quynh starts, quiet, but much too loud against the silence of the darkness, “but the first time I ever kissed you, it was after I had dreamt of his death.”
"You knew,” Andromache whispers. “All this time, you carried that alone?”
Quynh is quiet for a long moment. They do not look at each other, but their shoulders are touching lightly, and Quynh roots herself in the sensation.
“It was not my grief. Not back then.”
Andromache makes soft noises into the night. Quynh reaches out against the soil for her hand, and she clasps it tightly.
“We will bear this together for as long as I am here with you, and then we will keep bearing it separately. But we will always be holding onto it together, yes? Always.”
“Oh, Quynh. I’m so damn tired of bearing things.”
These days, they are close to the same age. Andromache has only a little less than a thousand years on her. Christ has not yet been born, and Rome has not yet conquered. Quynh does not remember her mother’s name, but she still holds onto her eyes. Andromache can only just barely call up the outline of hers. Quynh remembers the morning that she lost hold of it for good. But that will not happen for many years, not yet. Not for Andy.
“But it is what we are here to do. Someone has to remember.”
Andy laughs. “Someone has to. It’s a filthy occupation, remembering. But then, so is dying.”
“I would rather remember here with you than die in my childhood bed.”
Andy turns to look at her, and Quynh turns, too. “You speak like a poet, sometimes.”
“I was in love with one, once, a very long time ago.”
“Tell me about her.” Andy is always too fond for her own good.
Quynh doesn’t remember her name anymore. It has been a long time since she’s needed to. But she was beautiful, and her way with words was something Quynh envied above all else. She could write heart-wrenching verse in four languages, where Quynh struggled to function in either of the mere two she spoke. It’s these small acts of memory that Quynh tells herself make up for the grief she caused her. For the grief she has caused to any number of mothers and fathers. For the grief she caused her own mother and father, all those years ago.
***
Quynh likes the Greeks. She has only just woken up here, on the shores of Troy, but she can already tell that these are her people. She does not know where Andromache is, though. The camp is exhausted and unhelpful. She must ask a half-dozen men if they have seen Andromache, and all of them laugh. We’re all looking for Andromache. The wife of a fallen king is not a prize to sneer at.
Quynh touches at her hair only to find it trimmed short. She thinks about the Odyssey – she has never much been one for literature, but she has read it in a few of its incarnations, and she recalls the days it was recited in Athens, nearly a thousand years ago (or rather, a thousand years from now) – and the way its women were treated. No, Andromache is not going by Andromache, here. Unless – no. Quynh rejects the thought out of hand. She is not the wife of Hector. It’s a ridiculous thought.
It takes a week, before they meet inside the city walls, the Greek gift tragically taken at face value. Andromache is dressed in armor befitting a king, spear and shield shining in the sunlight despite their tarnishes. Quynh sees her from a thousand yards away and sprints until they are standing before one another, both sweating and bloodstained.
“Andromache!” she cries, keeping hold of her weapons if only to maintain the illusion of battle for her colleagues. The two of them circle each other. It’s a calculated dance. Neither of them reaches further than the other can block; neither block with more force than the other can counter.
“Andromache is trapped in the king’s compound with the rest of her sisters, like she has been for ten years.”
Quynh nearly drops her spear. “No – that’s not possible. You are right here. It is only me; you needn’t take a new name here with me.”
Andromache furrows her brow. “I am not Andromache.”
“Oh,” Quynh whispers.
“But I could be.”
Quynh thinks about this for a long moment, and then makes a decision.
“Only the newly born take new names,” Quynh says. She waits for Andromache’s nod, and then they lodge their spears firmly in each other's hearts.
The wife of Hector died that day, but it didn’t matter much in the scheme of history. A new Andromache was born, and Quynh knew, even if she didn’t, the good that she would do.
***
Andromache is not called Andromache anymore, but Quynh cannot help but think of her by that name, still. The first woman to ever die by her hand.
It is still a new thing, the blistering stares Quynh receives from her. They have known each other for fifty years by now, if Andromache is to be believed, and Andromache has not fully thawed to her. They exchange blows and then fall into bed together. It’s startlingly similar to the life Quynh lived with her once, much, much later. It’s a kind of heartbreak that Quynh can barely bear. Six thousand years, and now, of course, Andromache is not Andromache, and she is the same, but she is also not.
There is a pomegranate tree not far from the cave in which they have been sleeping, and Quynh has a sudden memory. It is so old that she cannot be sure that it is real, but in her heart, she knows that it is.
You know, I never liked pomegranates before you.
She doesn’t know what possesses her to pluck one off the branch, but she does.
“I do not eat those,” Andromache says, not looking up from where she is sharpening her ax.
“You bought me the first one I ever ate,” Quynh says. She does not mean to. It comes out before she can think better of it.
Andromache swallows, and sets the ax down.
Her voice is softer when it comes again.
“I am willing to try them once more.”
***
Quynh wakes up beside Andromache, standing on the shore of the Gulf. The sound of the surf drowns out almost everything else. She knows what has happened; she has known this was coming for some time.
“You do not need to kill me. I will not hurt you.”
Not again, Quynh thinks. Never again.
“Did you do this to me?” Andromache does not cease looking at the ocean. “Did you curse me? Only the kings and the gods live forever, and I am neither. The only other answer is a curse.”
“No,” Quynh says, truthfully. “I did not curse you.”
“Then who did?”
Quynh pulls herself upright. “I do not know. Whoever cursed you, cursed me, too. Many years ago. Or, rather, many years from now.”
This pulls Andromache’s gaze away from the water, an eyebrow raised.
“I was born in a very distant time. I do not move through the world in the same way that you do.”
“Why do you keep gazing upon me that way?” Andromache’s voice has softened ever-so-slightly, and Quynh knows from thousands of years together that she is fighting her own heart.
“I do not know another way to gaze upon you.” I do not know a way to gaze that does not include your face.
“Were we in love?”
Quynh is struck, suddenly, by a memory.
I failed you.
She pushes it away. “For a very long time.”
“And so I will love you?”
Quynh considers saying more than she already has and decides it will all come out eventually. Andromache is the one who asked, anyway.
“For the rest of your life. But it will not be an easy thing.”
Andromache tilts her head to the side, waiting for Quynh to go on.
“You will get older, and I will get younger. And then, one day, I will not know you, the same way that you do not know me, now.”
Andromache shakes her head. “You are feeding me tales.”
But Quynh can see that she believes her. “If I was feeding you tales, then you would have killed me before I had even gotten two words out.”
Andromache turns back to the water. Quynh does, too.
***
Quynh wakes up in the desert. The heat is stifling. She knows what is coming next.
It is fast, and it is familiar, a memory she has had all her life – a figure in the distance, a sprint across the hard-packed sand, a blade, blood.
But as Quynh lays there, unbearable pain in her torso where Andy’s ax is lodged in her gut, she discovers that for all of their shared secrets, Andy did keep one last thing from her.
I failed you, she thinks. I failed you.
Andy’s eyes are very young, now, even though the lines by them are the same as they have always been. She is laying on top Quynh, bracing herself on her arms. Quynh thinks about the sensation of being crushed by a city bus, Andy’s body hard and lithe and dying in between the machine and her own fragile existence. They only seem to love each other after blood has been spilled, it seems.
“You were in my dreams,” she whispers. Quynh reaches out to brush the hair from her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I love you. Because you do not love me yet, but you will. Because I am going to bleed out right here and you will never know this exact version of me, and that is a tragedy. Because my body has finally given up on me, and yours is only starting to show you the things it will do for you. Because you have lived ungratefully by pomegranate trees for your entire life, and I want to show you how to love them. Because one day, you will buy me a pomegranate in Spain and I will try it and I will think that the world is not wide enough for all of the things we learn how to love. Because Spain does not exist yet and you really ought to visit Madrid if you ever get the chance. Because you are going to become a god and then a woman again, more times than anyone can count. Because you are ineffable, and you exist across every possible instance of time. Because I love you.
“Because we are not meant to be alone.”
And so for the first, and the last time, Quynh dies in Andromache's arms.
***
When Quynh wakes, this time, she is laying in her mother’s bed in the apartment she lived in as a child. There is sunlight coming in through the windows. Andy is in bed beside her. She can hear the voices of Lykon and Nile and Joe and Nicky and Booker drifting in from the hallway, and then, more distantly, the voice of a woman she loved once, a long time ago. Her mother opens the door and smiles broadly at Quynh.
Quynh feels the sunshine on her cheek, and she smiles.