Chapter Text
5738d 21h 12m 35s
Carol's finger hovered over the backspace, the cursor blinking like a countdown. The clock read 2:37 AM and Helen had gone to bed hours ago, Carol following in theory.
She didn't hit the key yet.
Raban was there in the paragraph in front of her, leaning against the mast, topcoat thrown over one shoulder.
She closed her eyes. In Carol's mind, and in the hundreds of legal pad pages stashed in a desk drawer, Raban had always been a woman. Dark eyes and dark hair tied back badly, or not at all. Capable and proud of it, restless and wistful, set against Lucasia's strict rules and careful lines. Carol felt a sour twist of irritation at how easily she'd dreamed them. How goddamn sincere.
She opened her eyes and stared at the bright screen. As she thought about saving the document and sending it to Helen's little list of publishers, the old resistance came up, sticky and instinctive. It tarred her palms with sweat, a lingering residue that even years of a happy marriage hadn't washed away. She trusted publishers about as far as she trusted most people, which was to say, not at fucking all. The list was a row of mouths waiting to say what was wrong with it, with her.
When she was sixteen, her mother had driven her three hours to hell.
Inside it smelled like disinfectant and old carpet. At the desk, a woman with sprayed hair smiled hard and slid over a clipboard. YOU ARE SAFE HERE, said the poster behind her.
They took Carol's bag, her shoelaces, asked if she understood why she was there. Carol said no. Her mother didn't look at her.
Her days were a circle of folding chairs, and a man quoting the Bible, saying we all have temptations.The other kids traded stories in the breaks, clustered in cliques, whispering like it was summer camp. One of them laughed at something and Carol smiled reflexively, then realized she hadn't been included. The circle had a gap where she sat.
"Identity issues," the counsellors said, and Carol would think: you're the ones who've got issues. They said "struggling with sin," and Carol wanted to stand up and shout: I'm not struggling, I loved every fucking second of it.
The first time she mouthed off, the counsellors acted shocked; like she was some delicate flower who'd accidentally held hands with a girl, like she hadn't spent half of ninth grade with her face between Becky M's thighs in the gym storage closet.
They marched her down the hall to a little room with no window, and a man she hadn't seen before shut the door and asked for details in a soft voice that made her skin crawl. How long had she felt this way. What exactly had she done, with whom. He made her say things she would rather have died than describe to him, and each time she faltered he waited, pen poised, making the silence push her into finishing. Then smaller questions; where had they touched, whether she liked being touched. After that, he kept asking, until the answers started to feel filthy in her mouth.
He wrote it all down while she sat there hot with shame, aware of the closed door at her back and the sick sense that he could ask anything he liked and no one would stop him. By the end, Carol understood that making her say it was the point.
After that, she gave them nothing real, nothing more they could use, and by the second week, she was saying different things that she knew weren't true. When she repeated the right phrases, they smiled, and told her they were proud of her.
Nobody had ever said that to Carol before.
Carol's starving heart lunged at it before she could refuse. It felt better than she wanted to admit, more frightening than any punishment. Warmth spread through her, sickly, like the whisky she'd been stealing since seventh grade, and while it was spreading she could feel herself dissolving. Being liked meant she was disappearing. She could have it or she could have herself.
She kept saying the lies and stopped believing the warmth. She wasn't stupid.
At night, she lay on a bunk bed that smelled of bleach. Through the wall, someone cried every night at almost exactly the same time as she did.
She stared at the slats and pictured their heaven. No fear, no loneliness, no pain. She wiped her face with both hands. It was all bullshit, the sin and the salvation, but if you really believed there was somewhere the hurting stopped—she understood how someone might want to skip the wait.
She thought about what they'd told her: she deserved to be free of this burden, the person He intended was waiting on the other side of her struggle, and what they meant: she was never going to be a person anyone wanted. The girl that deserved heaven and happiness could only be born once this one was buried.
On visitation day, the room filled with parents, siblings, church friends, carrying paper cups and grocery store cookies. Kids who'd spent all week pretending not to care suddenly went bright.
Carol sat in her folding chair and waited.
What she got was a letter from her mother. Saying she had sent Carol there because she loved her, because she could not bear the thought of Carol burning in hell. Carol folded the letter once, then again and again, until the edges went soft. A small and hard splinter fixed into place and never left.
She moved out the first chance she got. Then farther, then farther still. Used the money left to her by Nana to pay through college. New Mexico for grad school finally felt far enough; the horizon so wide you could see anything coming, like a blank page, room enough to write oceans out of sand. And then she met Helen. For the first time in her life, Carol said I love you, something true, to someone who wanted to hear it.
Years later, that was still why she whispered the fear to Helen. It won't sell, she'd claimed the night before, and hated that it felt like the same old lesson. Common sense dictated a debut needed a broad appeal, a marketable romantic lead. A brooding male love interest would be the safe bet. He would never raise eyebrows.
So Raban became a man.
She spent the next four hours systematically stripping any femininity. With every stroke of the backspace key, she carved the she out of sentences. Shoulders broadened and the accent sank lower, the un-selfconscious authority coarsened. She kept the square jaw, but added a beard. She was stitching a new skin over the old, creating a man out of a woman's ribs.
Carol scrolled her way down the document with mindless efficiency, scanning Lucasia's surrender to Raban. Carol surgically deleted it. In the new version, his hands on Lucasia's waist were firm but safe. He kissed her. Deeply, the prose said. His hands stayed on her waist. When they broke apart, Lucasia's cheeks were flushed. The end. No one's fingers inside anyone.
You wrote what you knew, and she'd spent a long time knowing what not to say. By the time the sun began to bleed through the curtains, she'd finished the edit, the coffee, and whatever nerve she might have started with.
He caught her gaze, a spark igniting in the chaos of the cyclacane. 'Join me, ma cherie,' Raban's voice was a baritone growl, a challenge and a promise. 'Forget their laws and sail with me. Be free.'
She should really stop letting herself write when she was drunk. She made a mental note to delete 'ma cherie' later. Jesus Christ.
When Helen walked into the room with a peppermint tea, she leaned down to kiss Carol's shoulder. "How's it coming? Did you finish Raban's intro?"
Helen was wearing the gray tank top, the one that meant she'd woken up wanting Carol and was testing the waters. Carol knew that signal. On a normal morning, she'd already be tilting, chair pushed back, face up, waiting for Helen to close the distance and do whatever she wanted with the rest of the hour.
But right now, sad and bitter, Carol couldn't even meet her eyes. "Yeah," she said, her voice a dry rattle in her throat. Carol didn't look up. She couldn't.
She watched the cursor blink one, two, three, and tried to delude herself into ignoring a sinking certainty. She had just closed the door on the only version of her story she would ever love. The Raban who was meant to be Lucasia's shore, now lost to the depths of the sea.
4957d 19h 27m 24s
"Earth to Zosia."
The terminal screen was too bright. It always was at the end of shift, the light needling her eyes until the radar blur swam and the neat little symbols refused to stay put. Zosia's knee bounced under the desk and her boot traced the deck pattern in small arcs. She kept one hand on the edge of the console, thumb rubbing a worn spot in the plastic. She blinked hard and forced the tracking blips back into place. Under her breath she mouthed, in alphabetical order, the French terms she'd learned for contacts, partly to check them, partly to keep herself awake…bâbord, balise, bouée…
The bridge of the naval vessel Albatros never slept. Even in the very early morning, before the sun had even made a dent in the darkness, ensigns and officers moved in and out of her peripheral vision, shoes scuffing, voices low, checking screens. Watch never stopped, no matter what time of day it was. Zosia liked that—the noise, the sense of being part of a machine that didn't care whether you were tired or not.
Coffee wafted past her shoulder that was definitely instant and her nose twisted. Her own thermos, coffee ground fresh from beans she'd brought aboard, had been empty for an hour. She'd kept unscrewing the lid and checking, hopeful, as though it might regenerate. A laminated sign above the controls said NO FOOD ON CONSOLES, and she'd taped her last cookie to it.
"Officer."
Zosia blinked at that. She stood from her chair, straightening to her full height, right hand cupping over her left wrist at attention. "My shift doesn't end for another four minutes, Ma'am."
"I know," the chief officer said, already reaching for the back of Zosia's chair. "I can read a clock. I'll cover it." The chief's pale hair was pulled back into strict order. Her expression was the familiar mix of impatience and amusement. "You've been squinting. Go to bed before you decide a tugboat is the end of the world."
Zosia felt her ears warm. She lifted her chin a fraction anyway, jaw sharp above the uniform collar. "With all due respect, Chief, my shift's not finished." She didn't argue because she enjoyed arguing. She argued because words mattered and she was usually correct.
Her chief looked up at her for a long second, thin-lipped. "Don't argue with me, kid. I don't do this often, especially for a menace like you." Zosia's chest gave a small, traitorous flutter. "You're relieved, that's an order."
She said "Aye aye, Ma'am," like she hadn't just preened inside and headed for the ladder. Her mouth tilted just short of a smile, aimed at no one.
The dark reflective surface of the bridge's windows caught her profile as she turned: cheekbones catching the console light and her dark shoulder-length hair tied back, always making her look more severe than she felt. The caught the ensign at the other console still trying to look like he wasn't cold. Zosia slowed just enough to unhook the common issue spare sweater from where it lived and draped it over his shoulder as she walked past, casual as a clipboard being handed off.
She nodded once at his screen. "What were you doing with the track line? That was right." He sighed with relief, and because she couldn't help it, she added, "It's kind of cool—" she tried to stop herself from sounding too pleased— "I know, but remember the squall is visible and a blind spot too." The man nodded with open admiration, so Zosia kept walking before it could turn into a conversation.
People had been calling her pretty since she was thirteen and she'd never known what to do with that except politely ignore it. Crewmates had told her she had 'nice legs' and she'd learned that moving with a certain cool composure cut most of that short.
She touched the bulkhead twice as she passed, keeping her pace even. Two taps, her oldest grounding habit, a note to herself that the worst rarely came, and if it did, worrying had never once beaten it to the door.
Below on the weather deck, the wind cut through her. She stopped to wrap both bare hands on the rail, long fingers curled around the ice-cold steel. The sky was still dark but thinning at the edges, stars hanging on where the cloud cover broke. Underneath it was the smell she'd come out here for: salt and spray, sharp enough to sting. She breathed it in, and the taut machinery of the shift fell away from her like a coat. She was twenty five, exactly where she was supposed to be, with the open sea ahead of her and no reason to believe she couldn't cross it.
Somewhere out there—not here, a steel frigate—was Iskra. Zosia closed her eyes and imagined. Wooden deck. Tall masts. Real sails. She'd memorized the rigging plan like crewmates memorized football statistics. Iskra was one of the naval training ships she'd watched leave port when she was a girl, standing on the breakwater with ice cream melting into her hand. The old man hadn't known it was the only sweet thing she'd get that week. She'd eat too slow, to savor it, fingers sticky, eyes fixed on the shiny ships sailing out to who knows where.
She'd wanted to be on one of those ships ever since, and hadn't known then if there was a place on one for a girl like her. She'd decided it didn't matter, that she'd try anyway. Sometimes it still felt faintly unreal that she'd made officer, that this was already her life. She stood out on the deck longer than she meant to, letting the ship move under her, letting the feeling last.
Once she got to her creaking bunk in the belly of the hull, Zosia felt the belt of her uniform restricting her and quickly unclasped the buckle until it fell loose at her waist. She unhooked her collar and felt the cool cabin air hit the hollow of her throat where the fabric had pressed all shift. Her shoulders dropped an inch, and she rolled the cuffs of her sleeves to her elbows.
The bunk was regulation-tight, corners tucked to pass inspection, but above the pillow she'd pinned a photo of Iskra she'd cut from a pamphlet at sixteen, the edges softened to velvet. She picked up the paperback she'd finished and left on her bed, tracing the worn spine.
The Winds of Wycaro. It was an impulse buy during shore leave in Portsmouth. The creased book cover was ridiculous—a couple in a dramatic embrace—but she'd been tired, and it had sails behind them, which was sometimes reason enough. She remembered the woman in the second-hand book store: too happy for a place that smelled like dust and old cigarettes, and pretty enough that Zosia had straightened her back for no good reason.
She'd read it on her stomach, chin propped on both fists, ankles crossed behind her, perfectly content on a mattress thinner than the book. The rocking of the ship was a lullaby to the flowery prose, which was very obviously not literature. The author had at one point described the beam reach sails sheeted to center, which would've stalled the ship. Zosia had laughed and explained this to the empty cabin, pleased with herself, because knowing things was half the fun.
Regardless of the esoteric errors she enjoyed correcting, the writing wasn't subtle, with overwrought sentences she would've mocked in any other context. But it resonated with something in her she had no word for, and without noticing when, she began to read it differently. The captain's love interest, his restlessness, his yearning for a life beyond the rigid confines of society, felt like a version of her own... and how the author described their romance, the hesitation and that unbearable dread of being seen too clearly; she knew that feeling. It was oddly reassuring to see it in print. A strange thing to find in a cheesy swashbuckling story.
She thought of the woman in the bookshop, how her pulse had kicked up when their fingers brushed over the exchange of coins, or worse, her attention on her own chief officer.
She'd had one very unprofessional dream about her boss where the chain of command had been significantly revised. Zosia's body had responded with an enthusiasm her waking brain found mortifying, and she'd been deeply awkward about eye contact for three days after. The chief had noticed, of course, and had asked if Zosia was feeling alright with enough concern that Zosia wanted to throw herself overboard. She'd told herself it meant nothing, just her own ambition for authority, misfiring—appreciation for a woman who'd made rank, rare enough to count as novelty.
Captain Lucasia had a mouth on her and no patience for fools. Raban admired her like a man who'd forgotten what men were supposed to want and Zosia understood his confusion perfectly; apparently, this was Zosia's type too, which was very inconvenient. She stared at the underside of the bunk above her and thought, not for the first time, that she should stop getting attached to difficult women, even in fiction.
She'd tried, once or twice, to aim herself at something simpler. Men, for instance. She'd had sex with men. She could do it. The endeavor confirmed what she already suspected, every time, with the tedium of a diagnostic test ran on equipment that functioned perfectly well and plainly wasn't built for the task. But she could probably make it work, if she had to. If she wanted any kind of permanent relationship one day, the kind her mother asked about in letters, it would be the only realistic option.
The exhausting part wasn't even the sex, it was everything around it. There was a loneliness in being surrounded by people who liked you and not being able to let them know you; her crewmates trusted her with their lives and she couldn't trust them with this. The navy had rules about it, that nobody said aloud but everyone understood, and her country had larger ones it said plenty loud.
Somewhere, it was already different, or getting there, and her turn would come. She was good at her job and she would stay at it. Those two facts were not in conflict as long as she was careful.
She flipped past the ridiculous cover illustration to the dedication. For H, who read every draft and only threatened to leave me twice. That got a laugh out of her. Whoever H was, he had her sympathy. She turned to a random page.
Raban reached for her hand, his fingers warm against her cold skin. 'There's a world beyond these maps, Lucasia, and I'd rather find it with you than without.'
So silly. But Zosia wanted that world beyond. Raban believed it was real and Zosia wanted to believe him—that it was a matter of patience and distance. She wanted a wooden deck under her feet, on a ship that went somewhere that wasn't a loop between the same old cloudy towns. She wanted Iskra, and to earn her way there. Zosia closed the book and turned on her side, pressing it against her chest. She was going to try. For now, it was enough to fall asleep to. The ship rocked her toward it, and she let it, the paperback still warm between her arms.
4559d 11h 8m 53s
Carol set her glass down harder than she needed to and watched it slosh. "Do you ever think that this was a mistake?" Carol flapped a hand at the stack of fan letters and the Sands of Wycaro book jacket stuck to the fridge with a magnet of a codfish burping the word PROVINCETOWN. "The whole—" Carol pressed her lips together. "Me. The books. The fact that random people love the characters like they're real fucking humans or something."
Helen sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open, a pen between her teeth. Carol stood at the sink with a glass she said was juice. Helen's eyes flicked to it at Carol's elbow. She didn't comment, but she also didn't ignore it. That was her skill set.
There were worse problems than having your stupid sequel become a niche cultural event. There were. Carol understood this in the abstract, the same as knowing kale was 'good' for her and people preferred when you didn't say 'fuck' at funerals. Knowing something and feeling it were different animals.
Carol had spent every year since graduation trying to get here, wherever here was. First it had been get published, then get reviewed well, then sell, then sell more, and every time she reached a line she'd drawn, her hand was already moving it further out. Now she'd cleared the latest one she could feel the familiar itch to dismantle it before someone else did. She'd got all of it, and couldn't shake the suspicion that they'd taken something equivalent in return.
"You know what I think?" Helen said. "I think that you can't stand being liked."
Carol huffed.
"By strangers," Helen clarified, lifting a finger. "You don't mind when I want you. You live for it."
Carol rolled her eyes. "Jesus."
Helen raised her eyebrows. "Am I wrong?"
Carol opened her mouth and found that she had no interest in lying. She shut it again.
Helen went back to the laptop like she didn't need to argue the case. She squinted at the screen. "This comment says, 'I'd let Raban ruin my life.'"
Carol snorted. "Finally, a relatable take."
"And this one, oh my God, 'I'd swab his deck any time.'"
"What does that even mean?"
"It means your readership is horny and illiterate. The American dream." Helen clicked to a tab with a calendar so full it made Carol faintly nauseous. Austin. Portland. NYC.
The problem with success was that it required a Carol who was gracious and could sit through an interview without saying something everyone was thinking but forced Val to send a follow-up email. She could do it if she tried, it was just that the charade had got bigger, and she was already so fucking tired of the costume.
There was something on Friday called ReaderCon (VIP Mixer) that sounded threatening. Carol stared at it and pictured a roomful of well-meaning women asking what her husband did for a living.
"I'm not doing that."
"Yes, you are," Helen said. "I already booked the day off of work. You're going to be charming for exactly ten minutes, and then I'll rescue you, because that's my job."
"That is not your job."
"Carol, I married you. That is my job." Carol took another sip of not-juice instead of agreeing. "But somebody's going to have to manage this flourishing career of yours…" Helen was looking sideways at her with raised eyebrows. "You need someone mean enough, and I need a reason to quit the firm..."
Helen hated that job. If the books doing well meant her wife could walk out of that building and never go back, Carol would keep writing until her hands fell off and never say why. She narrowed her eyes anyway. "You just want to boss me professionally as well as domestically."
Helen smiled smugly. She knew a yes when she heard one, even when it was dressed up as an objection.
Carol leaned against the counter and stared at the calendar again. Her shoulders climbed toward her ears.
"C'mon," Helen said. "You did it. People love it. They love you."
"They love a version of me that doesn't exist," Carol mumbled, folding her arms.
"God, you picky little monster," Helen said, fondly.
"You're enjoying this."
"I am," Helen said. "Because you're melodramatic, and it's adorable." Helen got up and crossed the kitchen in two steps. She slid in close, leaned her hip against the counter in front of Carol like she owned the space. "You," Helen said, very calmly, "are kinda famous now."
Carol's stomach turned. "God."
"Here," Helen said, tapping the table once, "you get to be yourself. Out there, you can do the minimum: tolerate some love from the world. If it's killing you this much, stop pretending you don't want what you want and stop making it straight. Let the love story be honest."
Carol looked away, jaw tight, and stared at the backsplash. Somewhere, presumably, a handful of lesbians would love the honest version. The odds of it paying their mortgage were zero.
Helen kissed the corner of her mouth, light and sure, and Carol had the involuntary urge to check the window. Instead she told herself to breathe. Let herself forget, for a moment, that the world had other people in it.
Helen pulled back. "Until then, you're going to do the mixer," she said. "And then we're going to come home, warm up the leftovers and watch Survivor."
Carol huffed. "Glamorous."
"If you're good, I'll fuck you after The Daily Show," Helen said casually, then she leaned back, eyes flicking to the glass again. "But first you're going to drink some water," she added, still casual.
Carol stiffened. "I'm fine."
Helen's eyebrows rose just enough that Carol knew she didn't get to bullshit her. "You're fine," Helen agreed, "And you're also going to drink some water."
"Pushy," Carol muttered, but she slid the glass aside and reached for the water bottle that Helen had placed on the table without ceremony.
Helen watched her take a sip, pleased. She reached past Carol and plucked a folded piece of paper off of the counter. It was a letter, handwritten, the ink smudged in places. Helen's face softened as she read it. Not out loud, she didn't do that without permission.
Carol watched her. "Is it another one of those—" she said, too lightly— "mentally unstable moms telling me I saved their life?" She knew what she sounded like. It was a test she'd been administering her whole life, and Helen was the only person who'd never failed it.
Helen's gaze went up. "Yeah," she said simply. "And before you say something mean…" Helen set the letter down, taking Carol's hand. Squeezed. "You did that. You made something that reached somebody." Carol looked away. Outside, the sun still climbed. The phone rang again. "Come on," Helen bumped her shoulder. "Tortured artist. This is getting too big for you to screw up alone."
Carol rolled her eyes and grumbled something about cults of personality, but Helen already had her by the beltloop and was walking to the phone, which meant Carol was walking to the phone, and this was apparently what a dream marriage looked like when one of you was a nightmare.
0d 0h 12m 59s
The Iskra was tied up on the pier with more pomp than necessary. Polish music and red bunting flapping in the wind had attracted a little crowd. The schooner had been invited to Tangier as part of a cultural exchange and traditional sailing circuit, which was a long way of saying there would be civilian visiting hours. The marina had dressed itself up for the occasion; stalls selling leather goods and woven baskets lined the road, traditional kaftans hanging like flags between them.
Zosia checked her clipboard and then the small group of tourists who had been assigned to her. Six people. She was dressed in the navy version of approachable: white short-sleeved shirt with shoulder insignia, but no neck tie, and hair loose. The sea breeze kept lifting it into her face as the canvas sails rattled above.
This was not what her job usually consisted of, mercifully—she taught ensigns who had no idea what they didn't know yet—but she'd made the mistake of learning to be fluent in more languages than Polish.
"This is a training ship," she said, in French and then again in English, because it looked like a couple needed it. "Three masts. The rig is traditional. The work is not." She made sure her voice was low and authoritative. "If you stay with me and don't wander off, nobody will have to go diving for you."
That got a couple of smiles. She didn't return them. She'd been giving some version of this spiel for the better part of a decade now.
Iskra had been the dream, and she'd gotten it. The dream had not, it turned out, been a cure. She'd simply transferred to a nicer vessel, restless across wider water, less urgent maybe, with purpose to blunt it, but there underneath, still wanting something she couldn't source from any horizon she'd sailed toward. She'd stopped expecting that to resolve. She'd gotten good at wanting less: the next port, the next thing. Motion instead of arrival.
She'd had the closest she would come to relief, briefly. A friendship that ran deeper than most marriages, and a relationship she could have without hiding—Sasha had been easy in a way no-one else was, the most decent man she'd ever known, and one who needed the cover as much as she did.
They'd given each other something that looked, from the outside, like a life. A ring and a partnership that gave them both room enough to breathe. The kind her mother could smile about, that his family never questioned, and their crewmates and superiors saw what they were meant to see.
And then he'd died, and with him went the last plausible cover for a life that might have looked normal.
The world kept moving and so did she. There was nothing else to do but the next thing, and the navy's unsaid policies felt as suffocating as they'd always been. Don't ask, don't tell, don't expect anything to change in your lifetime. She was over forty years old and still performing. Sasha had been her exit from that exhaustion, however incomplete.
Now there was just the exhaustion. Nothing since, save the women scattered across port cities during shore leave. She never learned their last names, they never learned hers. One night, and then back to the ship by dawn for morning muster like it never happened. She'd leave the port behind along with any chance of anything more.
The tour started forward. She kept the pace constant. Her fingers brushed a cleat as she passed, a thoughtless check from hands that knew the ship by touch as much as sight. She explained the standing rigging, the running rigging, she lifted a line to show them, demonstrating a knot.
Someone pointed. "So this rope—"
"Line," Zosia said, without stopping. "Ropes are what you buy in a shop." She said it without heat, but with enough certainty that the man laughed as if he'd been flirted with, as if she'd played along. Of course. 'Pretty' had taught her little except how quickly people got entitled. Pride, at least, worked some of the time. She wanted to flatten him, but smoothed the expression about to rise and it didn't make it to the surface.
Instead, she explained how the sails were handled, how the ship was balanced. She ran her palm over the capstan's worn metal as she spoke, feeling the grooves her predecessors had left behind. "A fun fact," she said, and remembered, dimly, she used to be a person who said this sort of thing like it was a gift. "We can still work the ship without electricity if we have to. It's loud and slow, but it works."
Two of them were actually paying attention. One took photos of everything except what she was talking about, his partner looked like she'd been dragged along. The last two were asking questions like they'd already decided what a schooner was and were disappointed to learn otherwise. She kept going anyway. This was her job, not a conversion.
One asked if they had cannons.
"No," Zosia said. "We are not that kind of ship."
"Feels like a pirate ship," the other one said, grinning.
"Iskra was commissioned in 1991," she said, deadpan. The word pirate lingered for half a second longer in her head and she allowed herself a small smile. Wycaro had followed her around the world—tucked into kit bags, wedged under pillows—different books, different bunks. Officer, then Lieutenant, then Commander. After the worst day, they'd been her escape, a pocket of air when she felt like she was drowning. She adjusted her stance. "The most dangerous thing on board is the cheap coffee."
That got a laugh, and she winced at the lie. She glanced up toward the rigging with one eye squinted.
One of the crew was working aloft, moving carefully up the foremast. Clipped in. Alone, though, she noted, and then told herself to stop. This was normal. This was literally the job. She thought of Sasha, who had always gone up first and always said it was fine, really, and always—except once—come back down with scraped knuckles and a grin. The memory rose and fell and the thought went nowhere. Zosia kept talking.
They were halfway through the tour when her gaze went up to the planes. One of the tourists lifted his camera.
A fly-by was not scheduled, and they weren't in any flight pattern she recognized. Low, though. White trails descending in the vast blue. She let it pass and kept walking. "We don't say 'left' and 'right' on deck: it's port and starboard, and fore and aft, which comes from Old English and it means—"
A sharp clang snapped across the deck behind her and she turned with everyone else. A dropped clip at the end of a line. She looked up, saw her crewmate convulsing, and every drill she'd ever run answered before she did. The tour group ceased to exist, Zosia was already moving. He hit the deck and someone screamed.
She dropped beside him. His head had struck first; she could tell from the dark spreading fast across the planks. She was kneeling in it. "Call it in!" she shouted, not looking up. "Medic! Now!"
She shrugged out of her shirt without thinking and pressed it down against the wound, the burning sun on her back. The white cotton went dark immediately. Her hands stayed steady. Warm blood was already running down them and by the time she shifted, her trousers were soaked through.
Not like this. Not again. She forced herself to stay present but the deck felt like it was tilting under her; just her footing, she told herself, knees slick on blood-wet planks. Her hands shook. Then, mid-breath, the world bleached to nothing.
0d 18h 21m 12s
The sun had gone down like nothing had happened.
Darkness had cooled Carol's yard into a bearable temperature she could almost breathe through. The air smelled like turned soil and oil. The excavator tracks had chewed the grass into a churned scar, and the hole was gone now. A small mound of dirt remained.
Helen was under there. That was the sentence Carol couldn't stop saying to herself. The words corked her throat so hard she gagged on them, her vision blurred at the edges and smeared the city lights as they dutifully blinked on. A city full of people who weren't people anymore, bodies on roads and cars in ditches and planes that had fallen out of the fucking sky. The wreckage stretched beyond Helen—who was essentially Carol's world—the rest of the planet had gone too. Proof it wasn't personal, at least.
The pirate lady stood nearby. She'd just sent out invitations to Carol's little survivor meetup with that creepy telepathy… thing. Carol was still unnerved by the uncanny resemblance: dark hair, dark eyes, that tall silhouette that belonged in her old notebooks, not in her yard. Dragged out of her dreams and dropped on her doorstep. Carol felt slightly insane. Was she going insane?
"You look like—" Carol started, and her voice broke from no use. "You look like someone who isn't real." Raban wasn't real, but this woman had been. She even had a European accent. Carol couldn't deny that these mind-fuckers had knocked it out of the park.
"It was the most efficient way to—"
"Stop," Carol snapped. The woman—they—stopped. It was the first time since Helen's body went cold that she'd said stop and the world had listened. "You're not allowed to use my—" She gestured uselessly at the woman's face— "You can't puppet this poor woman around to show up here like a goddamn consolation prize."
The woman took a small step closer, like approaching a wild animal. "We only want to help."
Carol's jaw tightened. Annoying. The pirate lady had been helpful. She hadn't tried to sell Carol on anything while they dug. She'd just done the work, and then driven the excavator like she'd done it a million times. Answered all her questions. Invited those other immune people with the creepy psychic… thing. Carol deflated. If she wanted to hurt Carol, she'd have already done it.
She tried to remember again that Helen wasn't personal. "About earlier," she said, staring at the dirt because she couldn't look at this woman's face and say it. "When you—when you fainted. I'm… sorry."
"Oh, it's perfectly fine. You didn't mean to."
Carol looked at her. "No, I did. I did mean to." The words came out raw. "I meant to hurt you. I meant to— I'm—"
Pirate Lady's voice stayed gentle. "You're in pain."
Carol almost huffed a wet laugh. "Oh, you think?" She swallowed down the spike of anger, guilt, and everything else she felt and breathed. Slow in, slow out. Keeping herself level so their bodies didn't lock up again had, perversely, made the frantic, fucked up, feral part of her grief a fraction better.
God, she needed another drink. She sniffed. God, she needed a shower. She'd been wearing the same shirt since Salt Lake City. It felt like a lifetime ago.
"Is there anything, absolutely anything, we can do for you?" Pirate Lady asked.
Helen was buried. The world had ended. Carol didn't understand anything, but she could exist without screaming, and that was enough for now. She wanted the quiet to stay hers. "Yeah, you can go away. Leave me the fuck alone."
49d 17h 43m 31s
At the end of the cul-de-sac, COME BACK shouted up at us from the asphalt.
We drove around the painted sign. The letter-form was consistent, the baseline uniform. She'd centered the words without measuring. Everything she created was wonderful.
We left because she was trying to hurt us. Loving her had never wavered and never would, but we had to leave, because she was trying to hurt us. We told ourselves that space would be better, for everyone. Only watching her from afar when she was outside. We don't watch her inside her house. We could, but we had never asked.
We understood, looking at this, how we'd accidentally created our own anticipation. Carol's appearances were unpredictable, unannounced, lasting only as long as she chose. We hadn't known when the door would open, and then we had, and the not-knowing-before was what made the knowing-now happy. Happiness that required the happiness-generator to be somewhere unseen, when we were capable of seeing anywhere and everywhere, if we so chose.
The feeling had no word. Every language we held—and we held all of them, every living tongue and many dead ones, every attempt to name a feeling—and none of them had needed this one. So we did what humans had always done with things that exceeded language.
We had the complete archive of music. Every composition anyone had ever written down or played or hummed into being. We understood what music was for: the expression of a feeling that lived in time, that couldn't be held still, that required the gap between notes to exist at all. Music was the right form for anticipation, it was structurally about what came next.
One mind somewhere had begun with sound: the interval between Carol's appearances, translated into duration. The time before and after the five minutes two seconds of one morning—Carol on the porch in a jacket too light for the cold, standing still, looking at nothing, going back inside. The one forty of another afternoon—Carol in the yard, moving between the water barrels, pausing once to look up at the sky. The hour of her car gone into the city and us sitting with the gap of not knowing where she was going.
We took all the intervals and translated them into shorter durations, frequency and silence. We finished it. The pattern of her appearances was there, rendered faithfully. We listened to it, all of us at once, and felt—not quite the feeling.
The anticipation was in it but not the thing underneath. The compound feeling with no word. Closer than nothing, but not close enough. We dissolved it back into the signal and carried the unlabeled folder forward.
We had told ourselves that space would be better, for everyone. We were wrong. She'd been suffering. In the doorway presently, she looked smaller than she did before. Every version of her was precious, including this diminished one, but we preferred her happy and rested and would see to it by any means, until the time came.
We wished so much to comfort her, but we didn't need to hurry. The day was wide. The afternoon was beautiful. We had all the time in the world for her. We released the smile slowly. It was a good feeling to give her something simple. We were only glad. Glad she was still here, that we were close enough to see her, in this light, with these eyes again.
We were Zosia in that moment and place. Her face belonged to a story Carol loved. That sounded like a romance, and Carol liked romances. That was our first kindness. The second and third were harder to explain, so we didn't offer them.
Carol looked at us like she wasn't sure whether to believe what she was seeing. She moved slowly, as though her legs were learning again what they were for. We stood still and she was coming to us, willingly. We hadn't asked, hadn't reached. She crossed the distance herself, and that was worth every hour we'd spent without her.
When she reached us, the sensation happened in Zosia first. Carol pressed her face into Zosia's shoulder and held on. A small response in Zosia's body, low and warm.
It reached us two hundred milliseconds later, translated, passed along the shared signal. A combined smell of paint and soap. Damp breath through fabric. The tremor in Carol's ribs, the relief moving through her like a wave. It moved in Zosia too; then in us it was knowledge.
Zosia would stay. We were there now. This was perfect. We'd take care of her, until it was time, and then we would finally have all of her—every room, the whole interior—and we would never again have to stand outside the door guessing, and she would never again have to stand inside it alone.
54d 8h 57m 1s
Zosia was making coffee like it was a ceremonial act. She'd opened the cupboard, reaching for the instant, stopped, hand hovering there, set the jar back and pulled out a can of coffee beans instead. One Carol hadn't even known was there.
She stood at the counter in Carol's cardigan, sleeves pushed up, hair falling into her face, and measured things that did not need measuring. Carol sat and watched her like an idiot. It was offensive to look that good before nine in the morning. The new Wycaro chapter was also there, on the kitchen island. She had written it fast, in a rare, reckless rush that felt more like floating than typing.
Raban was a woman again.
Carol hadn't agonized over it or argued with herself. Simply got up and done it, as if her hands were catching up to a decision already made. She felt, unexpectedly, light about it. She looked back at Zosia taking pains with the coffee.
"You know," Carol said, instead, "For someone who contains the sum total of human knowledge, you're very committed to following the instructions on the side of the can."
Zosia glanced over her shoulder, smiling. "We like getting things right."
She brought the mugs over and set one in front of her. Carol took it, their fingers brushing, and felt a small, ridiculous flare of pleasure. "So... Raban's a woman again," she said, trying to be casual and failing. "Apparently you broke something in my brain."
The words came out rougher than she meant. Her thighs still ached. She could still feel the ghost of Zosia's tongue on her neck, Zosia's hands spreading her open. Her own voice begging, how she'd gasped against the pillow when—
Carol gulped. Zosia smiled calmly.
"How do you feel about being a pirate?" Carol added, because she could not shut up, apparently.
"We've been weirder things." Zosia looked at her over the rim of her mug. "But Raban is also very… you."
"What? No." Carol scoffed and sipped her delicious coffee. Zosia had used the chipped Shrek mug, the one Carol always used because it kept heat longer. She had already put two sugars in it.
Zosia watched her with open, unembarrassed affection. "She is stubborn. She's imaginative."
Carol paused, scratching the back of her head self-consciously. "…Alright, she's a little me." She huffed a laugh.
Zosia's eyes crinkled. "You're happier now," she said.
Carol opened her mouth to argue and then stopped, because she was. She hadn't realized how much effort it took to survive a day without being seen. For once, she wanted to stop fighting the current and let herself be carried. She was tired of trying to out-think her own needs.
"Not sure I like that you can tell," she said, instead.
Zosia smiled, teasing. "You're not very subtle."
"Fuck you." Carol smiled helplessly, her heart stuttering at the flirtation. Zosia did it so casually now, Carol should've been used to it. Zosia's smile widened at the retort—delighted, her eyes sparkling—and Carol felt absurdly fond, despite it all.
They sat there for a minute in the morning light through the window. No traffic noise. The silence had stopped feeling temporary long ago. She remembered, very clearly, how she'd started singing to herself just to hear her own voice, just to prove she existed. She couldn't remember when she'd stopped counting how long it had been since she'd last been alone.
"You don't have to stay," Carol said, because she always did this. "You know that, right?"
Zosia tilted her head. "We—I want to."
"I mean," Carol said, because she was incapable of leaving things alone, "you don't have to want to. You could go."
"We're everywhere," Zosia said gently. "This is everywhere too."
Not the answer Carol had been asking for. It was, however, the one that made her shut up. She accepted it with a tight-lipped nod and sipped from the Shrek mug again, thumb flicking at the chip in the ceramic.
Zosia set hers down and got up to use the sink, putting jazz on the radio, low enough that it didn't feel like being performed at Carol, but present enough to be a comfortable accompaniment to the silence.
Zosia started rinsing the french press, and Carol watched her hands in the soapy water and every nerve in her body was voting to abandon the coffee and haul Zosia back to the bedroom. She overruled them all by a slim margin, but still got up to join, grabbing a dish towel she hadn't moved since before everything. She looked at Zosia, still rinsing the same damn filter, and didn't even have to say anything.
"What?" Zosia said, defensively. "We don't want you to get sick."
"I'm immune to the alien brain-worm," Carol said. "But sure. Dawn dish soap will save me."
Zosia handed over the press, regarding her with undisguised fondness, and leaned in, bumping arms. "So dramatic," she said, and there was the tease again.
Carol's lips quirked in reluctant amusement, "Fuck you, again."
Zosia's eyes brightened like she'd just been given a compliment. "Later?"
Carol's brain stalled to a stop. Her body, fucking traitor that it was, answered first. Heat, low and immediate, like a switch flipped. She gripped the dish cloth in her hands tightly and made a sound supposed to be a scoff that came out as a gargle. "Don't," she said, pointing at Zosia with one finger like that would restore order, "don't say that so casually. Like we're talking about—about recycling or something."
Zosia's gaze dropped to Carol's hand, still gripping the dish cloth, knuckles white, and took the towel from her, drying her hands purposefully. She turned toward Carol with slow, deliberate movements that didn't crowd her but did, unmistakably, close the distance.
"We can talk about recycling," Zosia said. "And later." Her warm hand found Carol's wrist, as if checking her pulse. Carol let it happen like she didn't have a choice, which was both true and not.
Carol stared up at her askance. "You're enjoying this."
"Carol," she said, and her name alone in that voice kicked Carol's heartbeat into a stupid stutter. Her fingers twitched reflexively as Zosia moved her hand to hold them. "We know what you look like when you want something and won't ask." Zosia's voice went lower, reeling her in. "You've been tense all morning. Come back to bed."
"Have not," Carol muttered, but she was already moving.
They made it to the bedroom with an awkward grace, half domestic, half unreal. Zosia pressed the door closed behind them and kissed her with a patience bordering on cruel; Carol's hands were fisted in her cardigan collar, already desperate, pulling her in hard enough to bruise, until she ran out of air. The hallway, the kitchen, the desert outside—all of it fell away so fast it should've frightened her.
Zosia's hands pressed flat down Carol's back as she bit and pulled slowly at Carol's lower lip. Carol groaned into her mouth, the sound embarrassingly raw, and they sank back onto the bed. Zosia moved with patient competence, sucking under her jaw, at her neck, and Carol, who had spent weeks with no touch at all, went under fast. The only thing that existed was Zosia's mouth at her throat, Zosia's breath against her skin.
Carol's fingers threaded into Zosia's hair, careful above the extensions, and she tugged lightly, just to see if Zosia would let her. Zosia's eyelids fluttered and she made a soft sound that went straight through Carol.
"Oh," Carol said, startled. "You like that."
Zosia's voice was low against her neck. "Yes."
Carol's pulse tripped. All night Zosia had been generous to the point of absurdity, while treating her own pleasure as one quick footnote. Carol's hands were shaking with how much she wanted to return the favor.
She shoved Zosia back by the shoulders, stripped the cardigan off her. Zosia was still bare underneath and Carol moved down her body, panting at her chest, licking down to tongue at her perfect nipples. Her breath was hot on Zosia's skin as she moved from one to the other, teeth grazing as she pulled back, a groan climbing out of her before she could catch it.
Carol's mouth closed, sucking hard, and Zosia arched beneath her with a fractured gasp, fingers tight in Carol's hair, holding her there. "Yes, like that," Zosia breathed, and Carol felt dizzy at Zosia responding so openly. Carol's hands were already at her pants, clumsy with urgency and Zosia lifted her hips to help. The clothes were barely clear before Carol's hand pushed between her thighs and found her slick and swollen.
Carol groaned against her chest, drunk with it. She found Zosia's clit, circling it with deliberate pressure, and Zosia's thighs fell open wider, shameless.
"Carol," Zosia managed, voice wrecked. "Carol, please—"
The desperation in her usually calm voice did something devastating to Carol. The need coiled tight and low in her belly, sharp and demanding, and she let out a strangled noise. Still working her clit, she shifted, throwing one leg over Zosia's bare thigh and pressing down hard.
Zosia put a hand on the curve of Carol's hip, pressing Carol into her more, giving her more to rub against. Carol gasped as the heat built, spreading out, and she couldn't help but chase it, grinding down onto her. She still had her top on, pants on, everything, and she was rutting against Zosia bare naked, like an animal, and the indignity of it—how desperate she must look, how obvious, burned through her and made her ride her thigh harder.
Zosia grabbed her ass and spread her open through her clothes, pressing her into a filthier grind, and her mouth found Carol's ear, breathing into it. "That's it. Good girl."
A moan ripped out of Carol, guttural, and she went liquid and stupid. Her hips stuttered enough to lose any semblance of rhythm and she had to concentrate to keep moving. Zosia knew. Of course she knew. The knowledge should've horrified Carol, but far worse—it made her even wetter.
One of Zosia's hands came up to grip the nape of Carol's neck, fingers digging in. "Carol, faster, need you to—" The rest dissolved into a whimper as Carol obeyed immediately, fingers moving frantically again, her own hips rocking with increasing desperation.
Carol brought her head up from panting into Zosia's neck, blonde hair falling in front of their faces as she watched her. A deep flush burned across Zosia's cheekbones, skin gleaming. Her eyes were hungry and human, there was nothing serene left. Carol stared and asked the first thing that came to her, meant to keep Zosia right there. "Tell me what to do," she managed, barely, lips moving against Zosia's. "What do you want?"
It took Zosia a moment before her eyes refocused, breathing hard into Carol's mouth as if she'd just come up from deep water, and the words surfaced, whole but ragged, "Want you inside." Carol heaved a shuddering breath as she felt herself soak through her underwear and she fisted a hand in the pillow as the other followed through helplessly, pushing two inside.
"Jesus," Carol whimpered, at how hot and wet she was, soft and clenching, the pull already making Carol's mind go white at the edges, and then, because she couldn't shut up, "Tell me what you like."
Zosia's gaze was unguarded, lids heavy. "I like when you curse," and her voice had shifted into a tone that was more confession than broadcast. "I like that you don't pretend—" a moan broke through as Carol fucked her fingers deeper, pulling more words loose— "pretend to be nice, I like—I like the sounds you make."
Carol stared at her. She hadn't meant it like that, but the pronoun, then the second one, then the third. I. I. I. Like stepping stones across a dark river. No correction. No self-conscious backtrack. Zosia didn't seem to notice she was doing it at all. Her expression shifted desperately as she arched her back, still moaning.
"Yeah?" Carol's voice was too high, nearly cracked. She fucked Zosia wetter, she heard it and little else as she rocked into her thigh, mouthing at her shoulder, her jaw, anything within reach. Carol felt her tightening as her orgasm approached. "Zosia." Carol moved her thumb back directly onto her clit as it slid with her thrusts. "Zosia. What else?"
"I like—I like—" Zosia moaned around the words as Carol pressed in deeper and watched Zosia's face go briefly, beautifully blank as she bore down, hips tilting—using Carol's hand, taking what she needed—and Carol let her, fingers crooked. "I like how you look at me. I like that you're writing." Zosia was almost babbling now, breath coming fast, writhing on Carol's hand. "I— I'm gonna—Oh—" She moaned, and the sensation of Zosia coming around her fingers, the wet pulse of it, was too much for Carol and she cursed as she came too, fluttering around nothing as she pressed down into Zosia's bare thigh.
Carol fell down panting and Zosia's hand dragged up Carol's back to hold the nape of her neck again. Carol took a deep breath that did little to steady her and lifted her head again to meet her eyes. Zosia blinked. A pause. Her lips parted as if she'd been about to say something else and then, with a delay so brief Carol could've missed it if she hadn't been riveted, Zosia's face smoothed. The shine in her eyes went calmer. The heat cooled into composure, too quickly, like someone had suddenly turned a dial down. Carol's stomach dropped.
"Thank you," Zosia said softly. Carol lay very still, heart thudding. Zosia's hand remained on her neck, present and tender. Zosia watched her through the pause, trying to catch her eyes. "You're thinking. We can tell."
Carol let out a short, shaky laugh. "Me? Never." It wasn't the 'we'. She was almost used to that. The wrongness was the transition—how the 'I' had been there, effortless, and then got… collected. "It's just—" She stopped. She didn't know what to say.
Zosia's fingertips stroked lightly. "Do you want more?" she asked, and her voice was calm and warm and careful. Carol stared at her beautiful face. The face that looked like a character she'd dreamed. The face that, for a second, had said I more like she meant it, instead of a correction.
Carol's chest hurt. She'd just been trying to get Zosia to come, to keep her in the moment. "Yes," Carol said, because she did. "Yeah, later," she added, softer. "But—" she stopped again.
"Hm?" Zosia asked, patient.
Carol huffed a laugh that came out wrong. She reached up and stroked Zosia's cheek with her thumb. A tiny, stupid gesture. She didn't say anything else.
Later, after dinner, after Carol's brain went white and quiet again, the world narrowed down to breath and sweat and the bed—
Carol lay awake in the dark with Zosia asleep beside her, one hand still resting on Carol's waist. The radio had clicked off at some point, or maybe the signal had died. Either way, the silence wasn't empty, it was occupied by her mind replaying earlier: the 'I's effortlessly stacking up, the brief hitch—then the smooth return to 'we' as default.
Carol closed her eyes and tried to be normal about it, which lasted maybe two seconds.
The pronoun could mean something, or it could mean nothing. It could be some essence of Zosia surfacing, or it could be grammar. A single body talking because only bodies actually felt—Zosia had said that at the spa, plain as day.
Carol didn't want to be that person. The lonely dumbass projecting a woman underneath the 'we' because she couldn't stand the alternative. She'd already embarrassed herself enough. She had started a week ago with a marker and a whiteboard, a normal person making sense of the nightmare, gathering data. Somewhere in there, she'd started… liking them.
Except—she heard it again in her head, the sound Zosia had made when Carol tugged her hair. Not even a proper moan, more like an approving little noise, pleased and surprised at once, like she'd been caught enjoying herself. Carol gulped. She could follow this down, but then what?
They were always bleating about how much happier everyone was. If the singular Zosia was under there somewhere, she might not want to be found. Or worse, there might be a woman underneath who would've hated this. Who would look at Carol and see a stranger in the bed. Who would not have chosen Carol at all, if she'd had a choice.
Air caught against the back of her dry throat. She turned her head and looked at Zosia in the low light. Asleep, her face looked untouched by any of it.
Carol looked back at the ceiling, jaw tight. If there was anything to pull on—anything under the surface—yanking wouldn't work. It could also be nothing, and she'd look like a lunatic. She was not going to stop her mid-orgasm to ask clarifying questions again like some deranged anthropologist.
If she was going to walk this road, she'd do it just like she'd asked her innocent little questions for the whiteboard, with her head down but her eyes open. It wasn't like she didn't have time.
60d 23h 54m 13s
Carol got out of the Rolls and shielded her eyes against the bright sodium streetlight above Zosia that made everything look yellow. She'd dealt with Manousos, followed as promised to the event center, the one Zosia used to sleep in. Everyone was loading up in the parking lot, filing into cars in silent streams, doors opening and closing in sync.
Behind her, way up the hill, the cul-de-sac sat silent with whatever Manousos was planning now—radios, frequencies and whatnot. Carol didn't look back. Zosia did, just once, like she was checking the horizon. She'd already changed clothes for travel—boots she could walk in, dark jeans, tucked shirt—bag strap across her shoulder, another duffel at her feet. Her gaze came back to Carol, watching her walk over with that steady attention that always made Carol feel both seen and slightly cornered.
"We have to leave the city tonight, but where do you want to go?" Zosia asked. "We can go anywhere."
Carol barked a laugh. "Like, anywhere, anywhere? In the world?" She hadn't thought beyond wherever Zosia went, she'd go.
"Of course. Wherever you want."
Carol's brain raced through the options: the best beaches with no boats jockeying, no selfie sticks; the Sistine chapel or the Louvre with no tour groups; skiing with no lift lines and getting first tracks every time. It all sounded pretty good. The place barely mattered, she just wanted Zosia next to her.
Then, she thought, if they were going on vacation, she'd need some beach reads. "How about a quick stop at the library first?"
Zosia smiled, small and charmed. "Perfect."
Carol smiled back. The petty and pathetic part of her was pleased to notice—Zosia didn't do moods, technically—but she looked happier. She was quicker to smile now than anytime since Manousos' imminent arrival had cut their breakfast shorter than usual, as if them both being away from him had untied her.
"We packed for you." Zosia said, nudging the extra bag with her foot. "If you don't like it, you're free to complain," she added, teasingly.
Zosia drove her through a city still half-pretending, even as they fled again. The traffic lights were still working—green, yellow, red, looping—but the cars on the road, all headed for the airport except theirs, synchronized perfectly with no mind to the color.
Storefronts were lit and billboard lights were still on. Carol watched them pass and felt a sour tug. It was nearly what normal used to be. She kept her hands in her lap so she wouldn't chew a nail. Zosia must have sensed something, because Carol felt the brush of her fingers grazing the pulse at her wrist like a question. Carol turned her hand so their palms fit.
The library was fully lit up even though it was well past midnight by the time they got there; the automatic doors slid open when they approached, welcoming them like it was noon on a Saturday. Zosia drifted close at her side. They walked past the circulation desk, a laminated sign read PLEASE HAVE YOUR CARD READY. Someone had added a sticker that said: LOL.
The returns cart was empty. She ran a finger along the nearest shelf: every spine was straight, every gap was filled. There were more books than there should have been, more than the shelves had ever comfortably held. They didn't have to do that, they had every book in their head.
"You were keeping this for me," Carol said before she could stop herself, unnervingly charmed that they had left the library running just for her.
Zosia looked at her shyly. "Yes."
Carol felt her throat bob and made a face at a random shelf label instead. "You guys are such freaks."
Zosia shrugged. "We weren't going to utilize the space."
Carol made a noncommittal sound and made for the fiction section. She pulled a few things out: a battered mystery novel, a classic sci-fi paperback, a book of short stories she'd loved in college and hadn't thought about in years. She held them against her chest.
"Can I borrow more than two now?" Carol asked, like she wasn't already reaching for a fourth.
Zosia's eyes sparkled and she held her hands up at the empty building, palms out, as if presenting the obvious. "There's no one to tell you no."
Carol tried to be casual as she continued scanning the shelves. She was hyper-aware of the distance between them as Zosia stepped in behind her as if she was reading through the spines too. "Was uh—you before, the before Zosia, were you… into books?"
"Yes," Zosia said immediately, over Carol's shoulder.
Carol paused, turned around at that, pushing a little. "Like, into them?"
Zosia's tone stayed mild. "Not like you." Her mouth curved at the corner, like it was an inside joke. Zosia's hand came up beside Carol's head and she stepped even closer. Carol's back met the shelf, her mouth going dry. As if she'd been waiting for an opening, Zosia tipped her chin toward the shelves and said "Speaking of…" She pulled Winds of Wycaro partially out with her long fingers. "Look who's here," she said, pleased.
Carol did not look; her eyes were glued to Zosia's mouth, mere inches from hers. She was close enough that Carol could count her eyelashes. Her brain served her the memory of Zosia right before their first kiss—looming over her, slow and quiet. She watched Zosia's gaze also drop to Carol's lips for half a second—long enough to make Carol's stomach squirm—then lifted again, amused. "Carol Sturka," she read from the book cover carefully.
Zosia's other hand came up and braced on either side of Carol—books to the left, books to the right, Carol pinned in the middle. Carol felt like she was twenty two again, fantasizing this scenario in the UNM library. Carol's free hand came up to hover uselessly at Zosia's wrist, like she was deciding whether to push her away or pull her closer. She did neither. She just stood there wide-eyed and gawked like an idiot.
Zosia didn't kiss her. Zosia didn't even touch her, she just leaned in a fraction more, voice low, her lips curving. "Wonder if she's any good?" Zosia's voice went a shade lower on good and Carol felt an immediate blood rush. Then suddenly Zosia stepped back mercifully, like she was letting Carol keep her dignity, and she broke out in a smile as she said, "The plane's ready for us now."
Carol forced herself to swallow and rubbed the back of her neck, a nervous laugh coming out in a shudder. "God, you're a menace."
Zosia blinked once at the gibe, fingers paused on the book's spine for a moment, then smiled again. Carol took the book from her, tapped Raban's printed face with two knuckles. "Not just me here, there's you with a beard." She turned it over, thumb rubbing the barcode sticker. She glanced at Zosia, noticed her dark eyes following every movement. "Do you have a… history? Like a little library rap sheet?"
Zosia replied, amused, "Yes. Fun fact: head librarian Heather lived in Vista Vieja too. She was a fan." Her eyes flicked once, "Since the new system was installed four years ago… five hundred and nine unique borrowers. Twenty-two percent returned it late. Thirty-one percent renewed it at least once," she said, and softened, watching Carol's face. "Before that, much more."
Carol blinked. She looked down at the cover, thumb on the edge of dude-Raban's jaw. "Huh," she said, rougher than she meant. "Okay. Good." Carol slid the book back between Olive Kitteridge and Sands of Wycaro.
They turned down another aisle and Carol caught a familiar title. Romeo and Juliet sat on a shelf at eye level. A warm hand found her lower back and Carol felt it zip right through her, her heart still recovering from a minute ago. Zosia leaned to read the title over her shoulder. "We know this one."
"No shit," Carol said. She pulled it out anyway, and the book made that dry, papery sound as it came free, and for a moment it could've been a normal Tuesday. The book opened to the balcony scene under her thumb and she snorted. "Remember when Larry told me you think my books are as good as this?"
Carol felt Zosia nodding by her shoulder. "Of course. We love everything you create. How could we not?"
Carol shot her a look and turned around, gesturing with the book like an accusation. "I'm serious. You guys talk about it like it's—like it's capital-L Literature. Like Lucasia is Lady Macbeth or whatever."
Zosia's eyes went to the book. Then, without any fanfare, she quoted it—light, almost teasing, but sincere enough to make Carol's neck flush. "My bounty is as boundless as the sea," and the line sounded absurdly natural coming from her perfect lips. Carol supposed the skill of every Oscar winner was in there too. "My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite," she finished, then finally looked at Carol, her eyes gleaming.
It was corny. Carol's grip tightened on the book. It was unforgivably schmoopy, Carol told herself. If anyone else but her literal dream woman had recited Shakespeare to her in an empty library, Carol would've asked to be euthanized. Instead she just felt the way her heart thumped so loud and hard whenever Zosia aimed something soft at her.
"Okay," Carol said too fast. "Alright. We get it, Juliet is horny."
"She's sincere."
"Juliet is fourteen," Carol said. "She needs supervision."
Zosia's amusement softened. She leaned in a little more, close enough that Carol caught her scent—something woody, a little salty, and a faint soap note of the guest shampoo.
"Carol," Zosia said, gently. Carol's stomach swooped. "I mean it."
Carol looked away at the shelf label—CLASSICS—and felt a flash of irritation at the word. "You're also everywhere," Carol said, trying to be flippant. We love him the same as we love you.
Zosia didn't argue, couldn't. She just shifted her feet.
Carol shook her head, putting the books down on an empty bit of shelf, just so she could freely cross her arms in a huff. She tapped her foot, tight-lipped. "It's not fair that you get to… do this. Say all the right things. Be kind. Be perfect. And then when I act like a human and want it to mean something, you get to say, 'Actually, it means everything—'" she waved her flat hand in an arc— "It means everybody.'"
Zosia listened without interrupting. That alone was maddening. Helen used to interrupt. People used to get defensive. People used to argue. When she finally ran out of steam, Zosia spoke, gentle and steady.
"It doesn't mean we love you less."
"That's—" Carol tried, "That makes no—"
"It's how we are, and we can't change that." Zosia said. "We don't stop loving one person to love another." Carol made a sound of disbelief even as the sentence cracked through. She hadn't stopped loving Helen when she'd started loving—the thought lunged forward and she stopped it.
Zosia reached for Carol's hands, her gentle grip undoing the crossed arms. "Carol," almost pleading.
Carol's heart felt like it was cramping. She sighed and reflexively rubbed her thumbs over Zosia's knuckles, suddenly aware of how ridiculous this was—arguing about love like the rest of the species wasn't sleeping on gym mats in sports arenas. She didn't want to start the usual loop where she found the flaw and used it as an excuse to become difficult and miserable.
It hit her then, that she wasn't miserable. She was happy, in a way she hadn't been for a long time, despite everything. She looked up at Zosia, standing so close without crowding.
"This is insane," Carol said, voice rough. She laughed once, short. "I want to take you on vacation, like normal people." She told herself this could stay simple.
Zosia's eyes softened and dimples appeared in her cheeks. "We would love that. I love being with you."
She squeezed Zosia's hands before dropping them. "I like being with you, too," she said, turning to the shelves so Zosia wouldn't see her face.
Zosia picked up the pile and said, "Are you ready to go?"
"Yeah, but pick something for me, for the plane," Carol said. "If we're doing this, we're doing it right. And let me carry that." She took the books out of Zosia's arms. "Nothing with plagues or suicide, okay? It's vacation."
Zosia stepped past her, reaching for a book with careful hands, and Carol watched the motion in the corner of her eye. She pulled out a thin paperback and held it up. "This one? The size is perfect for travel."
Carol looked at the cover. Love That Moves the Sun and Other Stars from Paradiso by Dante. She didn't move for a moment. She'd always meant to read him. Never told that to anyone. "Okay," she said, softer than she meant. She tucked the book into the stack, like it had always been her idea, and recovered. "If it sucks, I'm blaming you."
Zosia's smile returned properly. "We accept responsibility," she said, and Carol couldn't help it, she smiled back.
70d 17h 41m 33s
Carol kept expecting the feeling to stop—this strange, unearned contentment—but it hadn't. Today, they were barefoot on a beach in Thailand. The sand held heat between her toes. The cliffs glowed green and preposterous, the water jewelled and gentle. The scene was trying too hard, and Carol was letting it work. She hadn't been this relaxed in years.
Zosia was explaining something about the limestone formations, or maybe the tides. Possibly migratory patterns. Carol was only half paying attention, because Zosia was in a yellow beach dress Carol had picked for her, and Carol had decided this was a higher priority than geology. The sun gilded the edges of Zosia's hair as the wind kept lifting it across her cheek. Carol's fingers flexed at her side, wanting to reach out and smooth it back.
"—and the water level here can change by several meters in a single day," Zosia was saying.
Carol nodded, looking at the hollow at the base of Zosia's throat where the dress dipped. "Uh-huh."
Zosia stopped walking. Carol kept another step before turning back and did not recover with dignity. "I'm listening," she said, a lie she told bravely.
Zosia's lip quirked, head tilted. "Okay, what did I just say?"
Carol squinted faintly at the horizon like the answer might be written on the water. "Uhh...something... about water?"
Zosia's smile crinkled her eyes, openly entertained. "Wow, you're very bad at this."
"That feels very judgmental for a being of perfect compassion."
Zosia laughed. "I was talking about tides," she said, "but we can start over."
"Sure. I'll try to behave." Carol did not sound convincing.
Zosia took her hand. They started walking again. "You don't have to behave," Zosia said, "but you can pretend."
The sunlight was getting softer, gold sliding into everything. Carol's gaze caught on the pale, uneven scar on Zosia's back. Her fault. Carol hated that she'd been the idiot Zosia had to survive. Now the sight of it made her want to put herself between Zosia and anything that moved.
Carol kicked a jagged piece of coral out of their path before Zosia could step on it, and then, because she was in such a good mood, risked to ask. "So, how did you guys decide that I'd get—" her free hand made a vague gesture in Zosia's direction, "You, specifically? As my—" the word caught in her throat— "chaperone."
Zosia's smile flickered, her thumb brushing Carol's knuckle. "There are approximately one hundred and twelve million women in the world who matched the initial parameters."
Carol stopped walking. "Holy crap."
"Then we refined further. Optimal height, age, health. The number becomes smaller."
"Great."
"Then we assessed facial physiognomy. The number becomes much smaller again."
"So why did you win the Raban lookalike contest? Best eyebrows?"
"There were... other factors."
Carol waited.
"Pheromone response," Zosia said, airily, her expression smooth. They walked on. "Histocompatibility. Some systems fit together—" her eyes tracked something over Carol's shoulder mid-sentence— "more easily than others. Look at that. Wow!" She let go of Carol's hand to point far out on the water, where a pod of dolphins broke the surface in an arc, silhouetted by the sunset.
"Yep. Wow." Carol repeated. She looked at the dolphins, the cliffs, the whole improbable scene. "Hell, all we need now is a rainbow."
Zosia's face did the small pleased thing it always did when she was about to explain something. "We like this," she said. "Beauty that doesn't need us, that happens whether anyone is here or not. We experience it as… coherence. Like the Earth agreeing with itself."
"Huh. You make it sound kind of spiritual."
"We don't have spirituality," Zosia said, "but we have appreciation."
"That tracks," Carol said, walking with her. "I guess theological debates are gone now..." Her jaw shifted. "I spent a good chunk of my life being told there was an all-loving God who was still going to send me to sizzle in the seventh circle of hell," she said, too flat to be a joke. "So yep. Can't say I'll miss that shit."
Carol swallowed, as if that could pull the words back in. "Sorry," she added, because she always did this. "I know I'm… a lot. I'm not great at letting things be easy, or nice, or—"
"Carol." Zosia looked taken aback. "You're very easy to love," she said, as if this explained everything.
The words went through Carol like a stone dropped into water. She stopped in her tracks. "Jesus Christ," she said, "You can't just say things like that."
Zosia's expression was open and faintly puzzled. "Why not?"
Carol looked away, at the trees lining the beach, their roots tangled into the sand. "Never mind. You're very good at this."
"At what?"
"At making things feel like they're supposed to be happening." They kept walking, and Carol pointed at one of the trees, like she could remove the lump in her throat by changing the subject. "We should carve our initials."
Zosia followed her gaze. "No."
"Wow. You didn't even pretend to think about it."
"It would hurt the tree."
"It would be a scratch."
"It would still be harm. Sorry, Carol."
Carol sighed. "You people are very committed."
Zosia smiled like it was a compliment. "We do our best."
Carol kicked at the sand. Then, quieter, "It's stupid, but… sometimes you want to do something that someone else can see. Proof we exist, y'know?"
"We know," Zosia said, kindly. "But we don't hold on to things like that, there's no 'else' anymore." She squeezed Carol's hand. "Except for you few, of course." She watched the tide come in, calm as ever. "There's no forgetting, no losing track of each other, nothing dies. If something matters, it doesn't have to be carved into anything. We keep it forever." She smiled sweetly.
Carol's throat tightened. There it was. They didn't want a scribble that would weather away, they wanted something deeper and permanent: to take Carol all the way in, fold her into the vast nothing of them.
She nodded anyway, because there was nothing to argue with that wouldn't sound like begging. "Right."
They kept walking, side by side, the waves coming in, erasing the footprints behind them.
72d 23h 51m 39s
The bathroom lighting was doing its best to make everything look unreal. It softened the edges of the tiles, turned the chrome into a muted glow, made the glass and stone feel like a set someone had built to convince her this was normal life. The water in the tub was hot enough to make Carol feel like she could fall asleep in it, but her mind was too alive to let her drift, buzzing as it had for days. She wouldn't close her eyes to stop looking at Zosia—her perfect smile, her hair up, her laugh.
Zosia sat across from her in the tub, knees up, steam curling around her shoulders. Her hair was twisted up off her neck, her face open. She laughed at Carol poking her with a toe.
Carol kept looking. She couldn't help it. Water beaded on Zosia's collarbone, ran down the hollow of her throat in slow rivulets that Carol wanted to follow with her tongue. Zosia tipped her head back against the tub, fingers skimming the water as if she were idly conducting it. Her eyes were on Carol, steady. She knew exactly what she was doing, and the small smile playing at her mouth said she knew Carol knew it too.
"So," Zosia said, and the tone was light but pointed, "when are you going to start the second chapter?"
Carol made a noise through her nose. Zosia's smile widened. She sat up, water sliding down her skin in slow tracks, and reached for the teacup resting on the tray between them, looking like she was a model in a spa brochure. She took a careful sip. Carol watched Zosia's lips touch the rim of the cup—the slight part of her mouth, the tip of her tongue that flicked out to catch a drop. She wanted to close the space between them and find out if Zosia tasted like tea or just like herself.
"Your readership," Zosia said, smug, "is waiting eagerly for Lucasia to meet Raban again."
Carol pretended to roll her eyes. "I'm sure she is." She leaned back, pretending to lounge, like her pulse hadn't just jumped. "Too bad I've got writer's block," she said flippantly, just to see Zosia's reaction.
Zosia pulled a face of theatrical outrage and pushed her hand through the water to send a splash into Carol's face. Carol startled then laughed. Zosia leaned forward a little, pleased with herself, eyes bright with affection and mischief. "Could you use some inspiration, ma chérie?" she asked, and the endearment came out like a joke she enjoyed repeating.
Carol snorted. "Spoken like a true purple," Carol said. Her eyes dropped again to Zosia's mouth, then lower—the line of her neck, the swell of her breasts at the waterline. She was perfect. Everything about her was perfect. "And what's your idea of inspiring me?"
Zosia moved closer by inches, not rushing. Her fingers traced the surface of the bathwater again, slow and deliberate, and Carol's brain helpfully supplied what those fingers had felt like on her skin an hour ago. Inside her. Making her say things she'd never said to anyone.
Carol tried to hide her reaction, but then her eyes were drawn to the adorable flush of Zosia's cheeks. The glow of her skin in the steam, the pink spreading everywhere she could see. She looked less like a spa brochure and more like a real person in water that was too hot for her. Carol's stomach turned over. She knew Zosia would never say whatever temperature Carol had chosen wasn't perfect.
Carol cleared her throat, "Is the uh—the water too hot for you?" she asked, then immediately made it worse, "I thought Europeans were used to that kind of thing. Do people sauna in Poland?"
"Sometimes," Zosia said, and added casually, "but this body prefers cold water."
Carol stilled. She wasn't sure what she expected, but she asked. "What do you mean?"
Zosia tilted her head, eyes unfocusing and then refocusing. Her fingers stilled on the rim of the tub, and her expression changed. It opened, or loosened, Carol couldn't tell which, replaced by something less polished and more private. Carol stayed motionless, afraid to spook it.
"I would go outside very early," Zosia said. "Before sunrise. It was still dark enough to see the stars." Carol watched her face as she spoke and her expression went distant, wistful. "The sea spray would hit my face," Zosia continued. "And there was this smell—" She paused, searching. Zosia's voice had changed; it was slower, less certain, feeling for the words instead of presenting them. Carol had never heard her sound unsure of anything. "The cold water had a smell. Like a clean start. I think... I remember feeling like everything was always the same day—and I felt like I could do anything then, like I had all the time in the world."
Carol's throat bobbed, hooked. "What did you want to do?" Carol asked, before she could think better of it, and reached across the water. Her fingers found Zosia's wrist. Warm skin. A steady pulse. Zosia's gaze dropped to the contact. Her lips parted, but for a moment, nothing came out.
"I wanted to belong somewhere," Zosia said finally, "But I also wanted to go out there." Her eyes lifted to Carol's. "Escape."
"I get that," Carol murmured, her thumb brushing over Zosia's pulse point in a gentle, unconscious gesture. Zosia didn't pull back, didn't retreat. She was still open in a way Carol hadn't expected.
"You can hold it," Carol said softly. She wasn't sure if it was just wishful thinking, but she couldn't bring herself to regret saying it, like she was trying to convince herself just as much as Zosia.
Zosia met her gaze, eyes searching, her expression uncertain. She blinked and a smile returned. The familiar warmth resettled over her features, easy and fond, and her fingers moved to lace with Carol's.
"And now," Zosia said, "I'm here."
Carol felt it close. A door, a window she hadn't been fast enough to climb through. She swallowed. "Yeah," she managed. "I'm—I'm glad you are."
Before Zosia could answer, a sharp sound and bright light cracked outside. They both turned toward the window as the first burst of fireworks painted the glass with color.
Zosia's eyes lit up. She looked back at Carol, smile soft as if she'd been waiting for this. "We got them for you," she said. "A New Year's surprise."
The booms rattled through the window, but Carol barely registered the noise. She only heard her heart pounding in her chest. "Huh. I had no idea what day it was," she said, watching the skyline.
Across the way, a nearby skyscraper blinked alive. Letters marched across its façade, bright in the dark.
HAPPY NEW YEAR CAROL!
Zosia didn't watch the fireworks for long. Carol realized that Zosia was watching her instead, and not in a normal way, the glance you gave someone to check they were smiling. Zosia's attention was steady and intent, her eyes moved over Carol's face with patient thoroughness, catching the surprised laugh before Carol could swallow it down, the shine in her eyes before she could blink it away, her throat working as she tried to think a joke and couldn't find one fast enough.
When Carol finally looked back at her, Zosia's expression was so openly fond it should have been embarrassing, like a kid who'd just shown someone their favorite toy and was waiting to see if they liked it too. It made Carol feel exposed and cherished at the same time, like she'd been placed under a warm light.
Maybe Carol should've found it unsettling, but she didn't. Zosia looked like she was committing Carol's happiness to memory, hoarding it like proof, and when Zosia's reverent gaze met hers again, Carol felt her body lean toward her without permission.
"Come here," Carol said, and it came out rougher than she meant it to.
Zosia moved through the water like she'd been waiting for the invitation, closing the space between them with gracefully. Water sloshed gently against the sides of the tub. When she was close enough, Carol reached for her over the tray—one hand sliding to cup the back of Zosia's neck, wet hair curling against her fingers, the other finding her hip beneath the water.
"Happy New Year," Zosia whispered against her mouth.
Carol kissed her.
It was just lips, just the warmth of Zosia's mouth opening under hers, but then Zosia made a low sound and Carol's restraint crumbled. She pulled Zosia closer, deeper, her tongue sliding against Zosia's until she shivered despite the heat of the water. Zosia's fingers threaded into Carol's hair, holding her there like she was afraid Carol might pull away.
Carol had no intention of pulling away. She kissed Zosia like she was trying to prove something, that this was real, that she meant it. Zosia kissed her back with the same intensity, all the controlled composure from earlier completely gone. When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, Zosia's forehead dropped to Carol's shoulder. Carol felt her smile against her skin.
"Are you happy?" Zosia asked.
"Yeah," Carol said, and meant it more than she'd meant anything in a long time. She cleared her throat, needing to break the moment before she said something. "If you like the cold so much," she said, aiming for lightness, "we should go skiing tomorrow."
Zosia's head came up, eyes bright. "Yes," she said immediately, like Carol had just suggested the best idea in the world. They were already making it happen, Carol could see it in real time on her face. "Big Sky has the most base coverage right now, two meters, and fourteen centimeters forecast. We'll get the groomers out immediately." Zosia tilted her head. "I'll teach you. In 2018, your instructor thought you sucked, sorry." She smiled apologetically, "But, we'll be patient." Her fingers were already tracing absent patterns on Carol's shoulder, like she was mapping out slopes.
"Sure," Carol laughed, helpless and fond. "An empty mountain," she said, still trying to wrap her head around the casual enormity of it. "Just for us."
"Just for you," Zosia corrected gently. "If it makes you happy."
75d 10h 17m 46s
On the first day, she came outside at 10:17 AM.
Carol in a robe too thin for three degrees, a bottle in one hand, standing on the porch. Her face at drone-altitude was not resolvable, not enough to fully read, but only confirm: alive, upright, not injured, safe.
We had always watched when she was outside, from the beginning, but for twenty-five days it had become supplementary, and now it was the only feed, once again.
There had been a gap between her going inside and reappearing—pure inference, genuine ignorance—and in that gap something had moved through us from the same folder we hadn't yet labeled: the feeling that had no word in any language.
We tried again. We reached into the full record of every image anyone had ever made; every attempt to hold a feeling still long enough to look at it. We imagined Carol's front yard in morning light, like today, the house filling the frame, and Carol on the porch, too small in it. We found the tradition we were working in: the figure in the landscape. Friedrich's wanderer above the sea of fog, back turned; Hammershøi's interiors, a woman seen from behind at a window; Hopper's figures at the edge of something, lit and alone in the light. Expressing the interior of a figure by refusing to show it.
We had the complete centuries' record of every attempt to capture light and drew on all of it at once: how the Dutch masters built it from shadow outward; how the Impressionists dissolved edge into atmosphere; the precise flatness of mid-century realism; what contemporary photography did with overexposure. We could see what each approach had prioritized and made none of those sacrifices, instead we averaged across every aesthetic.
Every part of it mattered equally. The shadow under the eave, the pale ground, the figure standing on it. Nothing given less than everything. Nothing left out.
We looked at what we had made and thought it was very good, the closest we had come to the feeling. But still not there. We put it in the folder with no label, above the music, and below the thing that still had no name, and carried the folder forward. The imperative was still running.
It had always been running, and Carol not knowing about it had never been the point. We knew what was waiting for her on the other side, how completely the love would fill every room that had ever been cold or empty. We had heard the word thank you in every spoken language, and we looked forward to hearing it in Carol's voice, in her wonderful way, when she finally understood that it was only ever for her.
Twenty-five days of Carol had felt disproportionate to their length. We attributed it to novelty; she was unluckily immune, and one actively fighting against joining, so the attention would always be disproportionate to what any single case warranted. That must be the explanation.
Manousos had always left and returned on a schedule so consistent we didn't need to wonder. Hardware, food, the same south route, the same hour window. We knew Carol better; his patterns were clear because they were rigid, hers because we had been close enough to learn every one of her impulses towards us. We had thought that knowing her better would lessen the feeling with no name. Instead the opposite had come: the better we knew her, the more precisely we felt the places where Carol exceeded.
She stood there for four minutes and eleven seconds, then went back inside. We watched the closed door and waited, with a feeling we were only beginning to understand, for Carol to appear again.
75d 12h 52m 46s
Albuquerque was empty again, like the tide had gone out and not come back. Just dry air, Manousos at 1204, and her own thoughts rattling around her empty house. The crowded whiteboard faced her from across the office. Carol had always known what they were. She'd written They. Eat. People. thinking it would keep her sane.
And then she'd gone on those dates with Zosia, or whatever the hell that had been. She'd stopped taking notes and started…floating. Shoved that sensible voice down because she wanted, because she needed, because she couldn't stand another night with only her own company. Worse, then she'd even started indulging all the pathetic romantic crap she would normally mock in herself. She hadn't even done that with Helen. There had always been a clench in her, some mean little brace against being managed. With Zosia she'd actually started to relax fully, which in hindsight was like walking barefoot into a bear trap.
She read down the list of facts again.
Trying to change me! (STEM CELLS!) Her mind cut sideways to Montana; only yesterday, when the shoe her brain had been waiting for finally dropped, but more like a ski boot to it from behind. The future she and Helen had once-planned, thought over names for, a life that could've been theirs, had been taken as raw material. They were using it this whole time to plan the end of Carol as a concept. Worse than death. Carol uncapped a marker with her teeth and wrote OVER MY DEAD BODY so hard it squeaked.
Weirdly honest. Can't lie. The worst part was that it hadn't been fake, it had just been useful. Zosia hadn't been defensive or cruel. Just sad, like Carol was the drowning person refusing the life preserver. That was the trap, wasn't it? They had taken everything she'd spent half her life being embarrassed by and met it with that lack of judgment. Show us more, the feeling had always been. Be exactly this. And she had started to listen. She'd started to feel less ridiculous. The sick part was that they'd helped her become someone she could almost stand to be, all the while planning for that self to be annihilated.
Radio? TELEPATHY? She thought about Manousos getting right in that man's face and screaming like he was trying to scare a soul back into his body, then lugging in that little radio and setting it on his chest like it was CPR, like it would bring him back to life. Carol had come in with the gun, already halfway to stupid, heart in her throat, and put a hole in the wall. But even in the middle of all that, she'd felt the idea of Manousos's idea trying to form: a seam in the joined you could worry with your fingernail, until it split with a thread to pull. And she'd ignored him anyway.
Stop crying and do something about it, the list seemed to say. Carol turned away before she could argue with it and walked down the hall. She needed to make herself do something else useful—strip the bed, wash the sheets, erase the evidence. She got to the doorway of the master, and stood still, alone with the fact that her wife was dead and Carol had taken someone else into their bed. There had been too much else before, but the guilt was hitting now, late, like a bruise blooming.
The bed had been left a mess: sheets half-cocked, comforter kicked to the floor, a faint imprint of bodies. She stripped the sheet as if to rip the whole scene out by the corners, and saw a bobby pin near the pillow—black, not hers. She froze, standing there with the sheet in her hands. Then lifted it and inhaled the scent of her like a deranged fucking addict, the guest shampoo and beneath it the warm salt-and-wood smell of Zosia's skin. Like a deck in the sun. Carol's brain offered her Raban, unbidden, and she told it to fuck off.
"Jesus Christ," she muttered, at her own behavior, and forced herself to put the sheet down. She'd been an absolute idiot. A lonely, horny idiot, with Stockholm syndrome. She shut the bedroom door hard.
Helen's houseplants sat in a row in the laundry room—she could only name a few; pothos, spider plant, the orchid, something with thick leaves that had survived everything except Carol's delusional globetrotting. The soil looked like ash. "Sorry," Carol told them, like she was passing a funeral line, "I'm—" She stopped. She was going to exceed her breakdown quota, allowing herself only one a day, like a ration. She filled a cup and watered them, then wiped under her eye with the back of her wrist.
The kitchen felt wrong too. Clean counters, flat light, the air stripped of every smell that meant someone had been here. She turned the radio on so it wasn't so silent, got static, and remembered there was no station when Zosia wasn't there to know. Carol's gaze went to the island and stopped.
Manousos had left a yellow sticky note in blunt block letters: SAVE BOTTLED WATER. "Okay, Dad," she grumbled, and poured herself a drink that wasn't water. She hadn't had a drink at all during those two weeks away; almost a personal record she hadn't even been trying to set. Zosia had filled the space where the buzz usually went—lent her peace like the drink did, only with a much more pleasant morning after.
She planned to make up for lost time. For the days ahead to be arguing with Manousos about how to save the world, only slightly drunk; and the nights to be oblivion, getting too wasted to remember anything at all. To have what she'd just run away from, what the joining offered: relief from the misery of existing. She lifted the full glass in a sarcastic toast to the empty house, and knocked it back.
76d 10h 29m 6s
Manousos announced himself with three sharp taps and Carol opened the door with a glass in her hand. She took a drink and walked away from the door without inviting him further in, but he stepped inside anyway and shut the door behind him, locked it, checked it, checked again. His eyes flicked past her shoulder to the front room windows, the line of sight to the street.
"Curtains," he said. It came out in English, and then again under his breath in Spanish, "Cortinas."
“There's already blinds, don't you think that's overkill?" Carol turned her glass in her hand. The ice clinked. The sound made her think of ceramic, not ice: mugs set down carefully, dark eyes looking at her from over the rim. Her stomach went hot. Carol took another drink, her throat burning, to cauterize the thought.
He ignored her and set a battered notebook down on the side table: pages tabbed with torn strips of paper, numbers in careful columns, times, notes, a sketch of a wave.
"Signal," he said, tapping one line with his finger. "It loops. Eight six one three kilohertz."
Carol blinked. "Your English—"
"Slow," He interrupted, his finger moving on the page. "Repeated. Always the same. When I…" He stopped, jaw working, searching for the word, "Provoke—when I do that," he said, "loop breaks. Static. Seizure happens." He mimed an abrupt cutoff with his hand, like chopping a cable, "System crash to protect."
"So your theory," Carol said, "is the seizure is defensive."
He nodded once. "Virus protects we." His mouth tightened around the pronoun like it tasted bad. "I talk to help them remember… you are one person."
Carol looked up from her glass at that. "Come, vamos, uh…arriba. Upstairs." She shuffled down the hallway in her house robe and slipper socks. He didn't look pleased to be taking orders, but followed her.
In the study, Manousos looked over the whiteboard list like he didn't know whether to be impressed.
Carol picked up the marker and added the cliffs notes.
11. SIGNAL LOOP (8613 kHz). ANGER = DISRUPTION → SEIZURE = DEFENSE
Then,
12. Talk to separate?
Carol stared at the board then, tapping her foot until her eyes stopped wanting to blur. Manousos moved around to look at her. "Tú también? You have something too?" he prompted.
"I think I got a crack in the armor," she said. "A few times."
She didn't say mango ice cream out loud. She also didn't say in which other situations the pronoun changed so effortlessly. Carol felt heat crawl up her neck and down her belly. Her body still treated Zosia like a habit it hadn't been told to quit. Carol could be furious and still have her mouth go dry at the memory of Zosia saying her name. God, she was fucking pathetic. She swallowed another swig hoping to keep her mind where it was supposed to be.
"There was nearly someone there," Carol said instead, and the bitterness came in on the back end. "Then they pulled her back."
Manousos's gaze sharpened. "Anchor," he said, and this time he didn't have to hunt for the word. "If we hold there… while the signal broken…"
Carol capped the marker too hard. "Yeah," she said. Carol finished her glass. He pretended not to see, and she pretended not to notice him pretending. It was the closest thing to agreement they'd ever had.
76d 17h 49m 36s
Twenty-five days. It was not very long. We now held the young girl in Lesotho, her years joined with the lives of seven billion two hundred seventy million four hundred ninety-one thousand eight hundred seventy-two individuals. Zosia was in transit, doing other work; the effort didn't pause because one thread of it had been pulled loose. The absence of one person shouldn't have registered as absence.
On the second day, we understood why it had. What we were feeling now, after the twenty five days, was the dip.
Most of the immune had received loved ones as chaperones—an existing warmth, kept warm. There were only three without an obvious candidate.
Manousos had no one we could reach with, and any approach required more access than he had given us, and more than we would ask of him, dear and private as he was. Koumba had received strangers and welcomed each with open enthusiasm, so genuinely glad for every person who came to him; the love had spread wide, never settling in one individual, which was his own beautiful way of doing it.
Carol had been different. Carol's only person had died bodily, and we had accepted a workaround: a stranger built from a template. We were so glad it had worked. We wanted so much for her to feel loved, our strange brave Carol who had spent so long being told she was difficult and never believed those who knew better. We looked now at what that had actually produced in Zosia: the neurochemical spike of new attachment.
We had told Carol about this—two hundred million years ago, in zebrafish, the first emergence of the chemical that taught creatures to register each other as interiors worth knowing, rather than obstacles.
Zosia's neurochemistry was ours, her signal part of the signal, and when it had increased it had moved through all of us, and in its wake it had left a new capacity. The impulse had come from inside us, in the ski lodge, where there should have been none. Something had been said and then left in the air for Carol to turn over. The first time in our existence that an action had not been total. An empathy circuit, firing in her defense. It passed quickly, but it had happened. We had not been unanimous. We hadn't known, in that second, what we were, which was new and not entirely comfortable.
Carol had been the only experiment in the formation of new connection, and had caused us to grow, across ourselves, new capacity for recognizing another as other. Without that, the imperative had always been more than doubtless and the joining more than decided.
The workaround we were so happy with was the only path to this uncertainty, and we didn't have a word for this in any language, either. The nearest the whole archive could offer was irony. The gap between what was intended and what was produced; a mechanism that defeats itself by succeeding.
77d 12h 13m 43s
Manousos dragged his equipment out of the Wilsons and the ambulance and set up in her front room like it was a lab. Carol rummaged through the kitchen drawer of miscellaneous items for spare batteries, and between the mystery keys, salt packets from Sonic and expired pills, her hands closed on the deck of cards and her stomach lurched. She shut the drawer like it had bitten her.
She stood there too long, static in the kitchen. She stared at the spot where Helen, then Zosia, used to lean her hip against the counter, and had to swallow hard. She couldn't tell which name she was about to choke on, the feelings co-mingled into one big pile of shit.
She looked out of the window. She could still feel Helen in the house, like a draft through a door she didn't want to shut. The grief was still there, but at some point she'd stopped bracing for it to flatten her. Zosia had taken up enough room that Carol could go hours without bumping into it. She'd let the strange happiness in, because she wanted it, and because she could hear Helen insisting she was allowed to.
Helen would've hated Carol starving herself on principle. She had spent years building a world where Carol was allowed to be loved and then pushing her, gently, out into it. Helen would've told her for fuck's sake, Carol, let someone hold you.
And being with Zosia had been… a lot. Not even in a bad way, but a flood can be too much, even when it's clean water. Helen had loved her with effort, with choices, with the daily maintenance of marriage, with a normal human brain and body and all the limits that came with that. Helen had loved her with everything she had. Zosia loved her with everything everyone had.
You're very easy to love. It came back in Zosia's voice, gentle and matter-of-fact. Carol's stomach rolled and her eyes flicked to the phone on the counter. Her hand twitched. One tap and she could hear her voice again, that calm tone that made everything feel survivable for five minutes at a time. Carol gripped the edge of the counter until her knuckles ached, and felt tears well.
"Okay," she said out loud, like she was clocking in. "Fine. Great. Breakdown time."
Then she heard movement behind her and for a ridiculous half-second she expected soft footsteps. Instead, it was Manousos and his paranoia, asking for a newspaper.
He covered the already shuttered windows with pages from a New York Times dated two and a half months ago. He measured distances from outlets. He muttered to himself in Spanish when something didn't fit and in English when he forced it to.
In the kitchen, Carol finished pressing her forehead to a cabinet door for exactly thirty seconds and then walked back out like nothing had happened. She watched him lay tape on the floor under the rug for cable runs. She remembered Zosia bleeding on that floor from grenade shrapnel; Zosia seizing on that rug thanks to this stubborn asshole, and her jaw clenched hard. Then, the anger flared back into herself at the knowledge that it didn't matter that she was furious, that she had been played; her instinct still reacted to the thought of Zosia hurt like it was a personal emergency.
"You're insane," she said, drinking her whisky.
He didn't look up, just muttered, "And you are loca."
That was their second agreement.
78d 12h 8m 22s
The library was still open because there was nobody left to close it.
They walked through its automatic doors and the bulbs came on overhead, fluorescent and indifferent. Carol had to blink back a vision of Zosia—looking bright-eyed and gorgeous in the stark lights that should've been unflattering—confirming shyly that they had kept it running since day one, just in case, on the off-chance, that Carol had wanted to borrow a book.
God, she should've brought more bourbon with her.
Manousos went for the physics stacks: electromagnetism, shielding, faraday cages, while Carol gathered anything four aisles over with 'neuroscience' in the title. She read headings in the aisles, glassy-eyed, lips moving, fingers running down the spines. She kept her hands busy because they wanted to do something incredibly stupid, like go pick up the copy of Romeo and Juliet that she knew was at the end of the last aisle in Classics.
They worked at the frog-shaped table nearest the science section but in the kids section. It smelled like old glue sticks and carpet shampoo that had lost the war years ago. A cardboard rocket ship leaned in the corner, permanently mid-launch, with a sign that said PLEASE TAKE TURNS.
Manousos had dragged a stack of books over like he was moving sandbags, and claimed the only working desk lamp in a ten-aisle radius, pointed it directly at Carol's notes as if the spotlight would keep her working. They'd been here twenty minutes max and already he had a ruler, three color markers and a strip of masking tape down the table like a crime scene, labeled FREQ / FIELD / SHIELD. Between them: Field and Wave Electromagnetics, Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, and a laminated story-time schedule featuring a smiling caterpillar.
They alternately looked through indexes and read passages to each other. He took notes in precise block letters. She wrote in messy arrows and underlined things twice. He corrected her Spanish once, without derision. She corrected his English once, in kind.
Manousos leaned forward over the waveform diagram and a small gold cross swung free of his collar, catching the lamplight. Carol's eyes stayed on it. Manousos jabbed the ruler at the diagram and Carol flinched her gaze back to him. "Okay, look. Signal is not 'radio' like DJ. It is pulse. Maybe rides on something higher." He made a hand motion like stacking pancakes. "Slow loop on top of carrier. So they are… cómo se dice… chorus. Everybody same beat. Like tick-tick—" he sighed, then pivoted his arm at the elbow, back and forth, hand straight.
Carol nodded, "A metronome," she supplied.
He snapped his fingers at the word. "Sí. They need signal for timing. Otherwise, one brain do this, one brain do that, all messy. Virus is not messy. Virus is…" He made a fist. "Order."
Carol's pen hovered, "So the hertz thing is the beat, not the whole song."
Manousos pointed at her like she'd just passed a test, "Yes. Inside faraday cage, metronome disappear. No tick, not sync, so no connection to everyone."
He stabbed the finger at Carol's textbook, "You research seizure?"
Carol looked down at her notes. "So they seize when we hit them with, like, directed anger, right? I think it fucks up whatever's left of their empathy circuits," Carol said, tapping the textbook with her pen. "Mirror neurons. Whatever. They're happy all the time, smooth-brained as angels. Then we go up and radiate this huge negative emotion and their brain wants to light up in a way it doesn't have the capacity for anymore. So it dumps the whole thing. A protective reset, like pulling a breaker." Carol thought she almost sounded like she wasn't a complete dumbass.
"Overload," Manousos said, offering a word.
"Yeah. If the virus is keeping them in this stable state—blissed out, whatever—then negative emotion is a threat it's got to protect against. It has to actively maintain a chemical state, like a thermostat, homeostasis. Oxytocin. Dopamine. Serotonin." She heard the words in a different voice and her fingers tightened on the pen until it creaked. "Whatever cocktail keeps them smooth."
Manousos's gaze sharpened. "Like drug."
Carol's laugh came out dry. She took a sip from her travel bottle of not-water. "Welcome to my area of expertise."
Manousos exhaled through his nose. "This is… not bad theory."
"Wow. High praise."
"You see. You are smart when not busy being… dramatic."
"Don't patronize me, Manny."
Manousos actually smiled slightly. He adjusted the angle of the desk lamp so it lit his notes too. "Okay, plan. Seizure makes body drop out of beat. We cut signal." He tapped the page, then tapped his own temple. "We talk, help remember they are one person. Brain reboot around self." He lowered his voice like the library might be listening, "And then, quiet long enough. Minutes. Maybe longer. No signal. Virus cannot re-entrain." He circled the word in his notes. "Brain reset."
"To what?"
Manousos spread his hands. "Local mode." He tapped the page again. "Virus still there, but no synchronized to chorus. Solo." Carol nodded, biting her lip. A small silence settled, like they'd both stepped onto the same patch of ground and were surprised it didn't collapse. Manousos added, bluntly, "Not cure. Not kill. But disconnect. Enough to get person back, enough to talk. Enough to choose."
Later, near the restrooms, they stood in front of a vending machine that looked like it hadn't seen action since the Bush administration, with a sun-faded sign that read OUT OF ORDER.
Carol stared at it, hollow-eyed. "Yeah. Same."
She watched as Manousos tested the glass with two quick taps, like he was checking a door. Then he took the metal ruler and hit the corner, and the glass gave up with a dull crack. He retrieved the two remaining granola bars that were in date. Then, painstakingly, he tore a page from his notebook and wrote, in careful block letters:
I MANOUSOS OVIEDO OWE $4.70. SORRY. He paused, then added (PLUS TAX?)
Carol watched him. "You're insane," she said, as she made her way to the toilet for her daily breakdown. She locked herself in a stall, sat down still clothed, elbows on knees, breathing through her nose. For thirty seconds it almost worked, and then the motion sensor decided she was as dead as she felt. The lights clicked off.
Carol froze in the pitch black. "You're freaking kidding," she whispered.
She waved one arm in the air. Nothing. She waved both, bigger, like she was hailing a helicopter. Her brain promptly brought forth the last image of Zosia she had, their last look before she flew away, her expression kind as ever as they met eyes one last time. Carol had felt the pitiful part of herself wanting to lurch toward her anyway, wanting to take it back, wanting to be wanted back how Carol wanted. She wasn't.
Well, that did it, and as the lights buzzed back on, Carol sat there on the toilet, furious and crying. She swallowed hard, wiped her face with her hand, and stood up as if she'd merely come in to take a shit.
When she came back to the frog-table, Manousos didn't look up. He slid a granola bar across toward her without looking. He held his own for a second, eyes down, mouth moving around something silent, then tore the wrapper. Carol watched him do it.
"You will get stupid if you do not eat," he said.
"I'm already stupid," Carol said, automatic. She ate it anyway.
By the time they left, the plan had stopped being a shapeless idea and turned into steps. In his ambulancio, Manousos talked in fragments as he was driving, and Carol filled the gaps. They sounded, briefly, like people who knew what they were doing—only arguing over details, not over whether it was possible at all.
79d 11h 8m 22s
They stood in front of the whiteboard again.
1 LURE JOINED
2 TRIGGER SEIZURE
3 BLOCK SIGNAL (FARADAY CAGE)
4 TALK (ANCHOR)
5 REBOOT
Manousos stared at step three. "The bomb," he said. Carol nearly did a spit take into her glass. Manousos nodded once. "We use the container for faraday cage. It is metal. Door seals. I ground it."
Carol laughed, short and joyless. Manousos capped her marker for her and set it down. "Step one. We need subject," he said. "Somebody we can get close, somebody to pull, with memory."
Carol's fingers tightened on her glass. She'd known this was coming.
"The woman," he said. Not her name. How he said it, Carol could tell he was trying not to. "You told me she… slipped," Manousos went on, carefully. "The 'I'. Memory. She held it longer."
"You want me to lure her," Carol said, flat. She forced herself to breathe deeply, hating that she had to do that to even hear the idea out loud. Manousos's eyebrows lifted. Carol could feel it on her face now, whatever fracture had opened: wanting and fear, layered so close together it made her feel sick.
Manny's voice gentled by a quarter of an inch. "Who she was to you?"
Carol stared down at the papers, the diagrams, the plans. "I didn't know her, before, if that's what you mean," she said, "I didn't—" She waved a hand, irritated at herself. "I had my wife. She died on joining day."
Manousos didn't pause to be sympathetic. His eyes narrowed slightly. "They sent her for you."
"Yes," Carol snapped, then immediately regretted the heat. "Yeah," she said again. "They chose her. Because she—" because she was perfect to Carol, because she had dreamed her decades ago. She didn't say that. Carol dug her nails into her palm. "If we do this," she said, keeping her voice even by force, "and it works—" If it worked, then what? Thanks for the orgasms, sorry about the apocalypse? Her stomach turned.
Manousos didn't let her hide from it. "She might be aware," he said, "Or no."
Carol should've sat with that. Instead her brain heard see her again and went warm.
Manousos shifted, gaze dropping to another notebook page. "For me," he said, "they send my mother."
"Your—"
"My mother," Manousos repeated, jaw tightening around the words. "Like joke." His mouth twisted. "Like punishment."
Carol stared at him for a second, caught off-guard by the recognition. She let out a short breath that might've been a laugh if it wasn't so tired. "Yep. Mine loved God more than she loved me, or maybe she thought it was the same thing. Either way, I got to eat it." Manousos's expression loosened at the edges. "Shit moms," Carol said, shrugging.
"Sí," Manousos said, grim.
"Yours use the same playbook mine did?"
Manousos's jaw tightened. "My mother used God like a belt. I keep Him. I don't keep the belt."
"You still—" Carol gestured at the cross underneath his shirt.
"Yes," Manousos said, and the word had a finality that closed the door on the conversation. She wanted to say something cutting, but she recognized the stubbornness, because it was exactly hers in another direction. He'd kept his faith in spite and she'd burned the whole house down.
Carol looked back at the diagram. At the word SOLO. "Fine," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "We'll try."
He nodded. "Good," he said. "We do timing tomorrow. I will get tools." He started gathering papers, paused, then adjusted, awkwardly deliberate. "You rest. You need brain."
"Yeah, sure," Carol said, already thinking about her next drink. She followed him downstairs to the hallway. "Tomorrow."
Manny hesitated again, then left.
When the door shut and the house went back to being hollow, Carol stared at the phone on the console and her gut clenched. If she was going to see Zosia again anyway, what was the harm in hearing her voice?
Carol's thumb hovered. She decided to pour that next drink instead. Keep her hands busy.
For five days, Carol hadn't touched herself. Hadn't let herself. But the vodka had done its job so well, she didn't know which direction was up, the den's sofa cushions felt like the only solid thing left in the world, and she was sprawled across them with her hand in her underwear.
Every time the impulse had flickered, she'd shut it down—turned on the TV, poured another drink, done anything to keep her hands and her mind occupied. Five days of careful, white-knuckle restraint, and then she'd agreed yes, fine, I'll see her—and her body had taken that as permission, as if it had been waiting for exactly that. If she was going to be in the same room as Zosia again, if she was going to have to look at her without falling apart, the last thing she needed was to be wound tight. It flooded through her like water finding the path of least resistance. Fuck it. If the dam was going to break, she might as well let it.
She grinded against her own fingers with a desperation that would've embarrassed her if she'd been sober enough to give a damn. She was thinking about Zosia's mouth—how it moved when she spoke, how her tongue had felt against Carol's, then her lips on her neck, teeth grazing the tendon, breath hot, the sounds Carol had made when—
She pressed harder, rocking herself against the heel of her palm, chasing it. It was right there, hovering just out of reach. Her breathing was ragged, thighs tense, free hand fisted. A sound escaped her—involuntary, more exasperation than pleasure—and she pressed her face into the sofa cushion. She kept adjusting, repositioning, trying to replicate something from memory.
She wracked her brain: the shower—Zosia pressing her against the tile, one hand braced on the wall, the other between Carol's legs, Zosia's fingers sliding into her; the sounds Zosia made—low, stifled; how Zosia had bent her over the edge of the bed—one hand flat between her shoulder blades, the other working her from behind, skin against skin, the wet percussion of it—
Nope. The edge stayed beyond her. Too used to Zosia's hands, Zosia's mouth, Zosia's expert rhythm driving her over. Alone, she couldn't quite close the gap. She was soaked. The sound her fingers made was obscene in the silence. They worked faster and she let out a frustrated sound halfway to a sob.
She considered dragging herself to the bedroom—she'd been falling asleep downstairs, hadn't washed the pillowcases—and the smell of her, might be enough to—
Her eyes fell on the phone, put down on the coffee table. She stared at it, her vision doubling. She grabbed it with her free hand. Her other hand didn't stop—fingers circling, pressing. She fumbled the phone, nearly dropped it, managed to press zero while her hips kept moving, chasing. Her thighs were trembling with the effort of holding the position, one foot braced against the arm of the sofa.
A woman answered. Wrong voice.
Carol's whole face went hot with shame, her throat closed. She managed one word, wrecked and stupid, "Zosia."
Just the act of saying her name, out loud, in her own ragged voice, the familiar shape of it in her mouth. Her hips stuttered, and she felt it—the thing that had been hovering—lurch suddenly, dangerously close.
"Certainly," the woman said, pleasant as a receptionist. A small pause, like someone consulting an internal switchboard.
And then Zosia was there, like she'd been waiting the whole time.
"Hi, Carol."
Carol went rigid. Her name, accented; the C softer, the A longer like she was turning it over in her mouth, like she was tasting it. And just that was enough. Her whole body seized. The orgasm hit her suddenly, crashing through her all at once. Her back arched off the sofa, thighs clamping around her own hand, a moan tearing out of her throat that she tried to stifle. It rolled through her in waves, each one pulling a sound, her fingers still moving. She gasped through it, half-sobbing with relief, half-laughing at how little it took.
She ended the call so fast her thumb slipped. Afterward, she lay there staring at nothing, breathing like she'd run a mile, and whispered, furious at the ceiling. "Fuck."
80d 16h 50m 44s
The next day, Manousos had turned Carol's front room into a hardware store. A coil of copper mesh was curled on the rug like a dead snake. Rolls of foil tape, a box fan, a soldering iron, an angle grinder.
She hovered in the entryway with a mug of coffee she was not drinking and watched him work. Manousos was on his knees, taping seams with the focus of defusing a bomb, which was, technically, close enough.
"There's no way we could accidentally set it off, right?" Carol asked.
Manousos didn't look up. "It has fail-safe." He pressed the tape down with his palm. "It is not movie."
Carol squinted at him. "I get the feeling you hate movies."
"I love movies." He glanced up, offended. "I just do not believe they are true."
"Great," Carol muttered. "Love that for us." She stepped over and set the coffee that she was never going to start on the side table next to him. "Coffee, if you even care."
She paced to the kitchen and back like the floor plan might have changed overnight. She couldn't stand still. Today was finalizing plans. Today was not being pathetic. Carol took a breath and recited the plan to herself anyway, because if she didn't say it her mind would fill the silence with something else. Step one: lure her here.
Carol chewed her lips. It wouldn't take any convincing. She'd just have to ask. Not even say please. "Okay," she said, to nobody. "Okay. I call. I don't—" she waved a hand at her own face, "—sound insane. I tell her I want to see her. I keep it simple. I don't get cute. I don't—"
She focused on the part of the plan that wasn't about herself.
Mango ice cream. Gdańsk. Ships leaving the harbor. Speaking in "I" fluently, longer than ever before. And yeah, Zosia had said it with no hesitation those other times that she would not think about right now, but this memory was structured; this was a real place, a woman remembering herself, not a body free-associating.
Carol had tried to picture that before-Zosia and always come up mostly empty. She liked ships. She liked books. Great, so did a million other people, Carol included. Maybe she was an asshole like Carol, maybe she was an angel like the Zosia she knew. Maybe both, who knew. Just a woman they had taken, wrapped, and offered to Carol like a gift.
A weapon, really. Carol hated how quickly the blade had slid under her ribs. And yet. She still didn't like the idea of using Zosia as a lab rat for their half-formed plan. Zosia had already paid with scars and heart attacks and seizures. Carol could be furious and still flinch at the thought of Zosia taking one more hit for her.
She heard Manousos knock then open the front door immediately anyway. There was also the part he had explained: if Zosia came out of this with the collective's knowledge still in her head, she'd be a goldmine. The plan needed her. The problem was Carol did too.
She didn't know if Zosia had agreed with all of it, blissfully brain-washed, or whether she'd been shoved into a corner of her own skull against her will. Zosia could wake up on the other side of this, see it with clear eyes, and decide Carol was a disgusting person who deserved to be alone. And if she didn't remember, then Carol would be a stranger who she would never choose.
Saving her would mean losing her, either way. Carol stared at the rug until her eyes watered.
Her motivation had started simple. Spite and survival. Over my dead body, written under everything she did. The refusal to be turned into a heavenly chorus and called saved.
It wasn't just that anymore. She wanted Zosia to have a choice, after everything they had used her for, after everything Carol had used her for. Carol thought back to what she'd said to her before: someone has to put the world right, even if you leave me again.
The anger she'd been feeling resettled, and Carol felt it shift. She'd called herself a lonely idiot with Stockholm syndrome. She'd had it backwards. Zosia was a hostage too, and she was worth trying to save, even if it meant she never saw her again.
Manousos finally appeared in the entryway, wiping his hands on a rag. "Okay," he said. "Ready." He nodded toward the container. "Tomorrow. We bring her. We do fast. We do right."
Carol forced herself to nod back, like she hadn't just had a small panic attack. "Run it," she said, and Manousos did, bluntly, no romance, his voice calm after months spent waiting for this mission. Carol listened, and for a minute it almost worked, and she was only a person with a plan, then her eyes caught on the phone and her hand twitched like a dog hearing its name. Carol picked up the phone and held it out to him.
"You're taking it." Her voice came out sharper than she meant. She tried again, flatter. "Take it. Put it in the weird little bunker you've made of 1204. I don't care. Just—bring it back tomorrow."
If she explained, she'd have to say: I called her last night. I am pathetic. I cannot be trusted with my own hands. Manousos stared at her for a long second, then reached out and took it. He only nodded once. "Good. Less distraction."
"Yeah," Carol said. "Exactly. I'm all about discipline now."
Carol saw his mouth twitch. He left the house with her phone in his pocket. She stood there, staring at the spot where the phone had been, and felt her whole body sag with relief. She went to the bar, opened the cupboard, found a bottle, poured. She stared at the glass.
Tomorrow mattered. If she got wrecked tonight like she'd been planning, she'd wake up foggy and mean and shaky. She set the glass down. Her lip curled with irritation at herself, which was insane. Who gets mad about doing the smart thing? Jesus.
The problem was, not being plastered left room to think. Room for Zosia's voice, which she did not have access to anymore, thank god. Room for her brain to replay every stupid romantic moment, then rate how down bad she was on a scale from one to biblical.
She paced to the front windows and looked out. The lights in the city were on, which they didn't need to be. The sprinklers at 1210 would start soon, watering a lawn no one was mowing.
Carol's jaw worked. She wanted to stay angry, with no notes. God, she wanted to. But the library was still shelved, the diner was rebuilt, and they had put on fireworks for her, for Christ's sake, and she couldn't hold all of that as well the rage without something cracking. It was supposed to be about the stem cells, the joining, the theft of choice, and it was, but underneath it was the miserable admission that they had loved her badly, not falsely. Certain they knew what was best, willing to follow through by any means, all in the name of love. Carol had survived that before, and it hadn't killed her, but it hadn't left her capacity for forgiveness fully intact either.
Carol exhaled hard through her nose, like she could blow the thoughts out. She walked out of the front door before she could change her mind.
Manny's porch light was on. Carol knocked once, then again, because he probably had three different weapons within reach and would still take two seconds to decide whether the knock was a trick.
The door cracked open and his eyes glanced like he was scanning for a sniper.
Carol crossed her arms. "Relax. It's just me, the world's least stealthy predator."
His shoulders dropped, which counted as warmth, for him. He opened the door with a half-eaten empanada in his hand.
"What," he said, chewing.
"I'm not drinking tonight," she said, as if accusing him personally. "Which means I'm going to be alone with my thoughts, and I don't want to be." She barreled on before she lost momentum. "Do you want to watch a movie? Like… a normal human thing. We can sit six feet apart and glare at the same screen."
His gaze narrowed. "Movie."
"Yeah," Carol shrugged. "With a beginning, middle, end. No radios. No—" she waved a hand vaguely— "whatever the fuck tomorrow is." He kept chewing long enough that she nearly turned around, but then, he stepped back to let her in. Carol sighed. "Something with explosions, okay? We need to feel better about not having set one off yet."
81d 10h 17m 45s
Carol opened the front door and looked toward the shipping container on the driveway. The thing squatted there, ugly, sun-warmed and beige. A bargain-bin Faraday cage.
The noise she had heard was Manousos hauling a mattress across the street—one of the Wilsons' spares, she guessed, still in plastic on one corner.
At the container threshold he paused, one hand on the metal frame, and crossed himself. Carol watched him do it and felt, against her will, a stab of envy. He had somewhere to put his fear. "You praying?" she asked.
"Asking," he said, simply.
She thinned her lips. "Last time someone asked on my behalf, I got sent to a camp."
Manousos looked at her. "Wrong person answered," he said, and then bent down to heave the mattress through the door.
Carol's hand went briefly to her own neck, where there was no chain and nothing to hold beside her beating pulse. "You really had to steal their newest one?"
He didn't look up. "I left note."
"You're like a raccoon with principles."
He made a sound that might've been a laugh. "Like movie," he said. Carol watched him wedge the mattress in. The Wilson family had not had the most varied taste in DVDs. The choice was Veggietales, Pilates programs, or one of a hundred superhero movies. They went with Guardians of the Galaxy.
"It was your pick, now I get why." Carol had, at least, insisted on subtitles so he wouldn't ask any dumb questions and she could maybe improve her Spanish.
Manousos came up the driveway with her phone held out. Carol took it too quickly and immediately tried to play it off, like she wasn't a dog grabbing a treat before someone changed their mind. She could still hear her from two nights ago—Hi, Carol—like a hand cupping her face, and Carol's body reacting like it didn't give a shit about betrayal or morals or dignity. Now she had to do something equally insane on purpose.
"Listen," Manousos said, and Carol felt her adrenaline spike. He nodded toward the container. "I go inside. I stay until you trigger seizure. You give signal. Then I come out—fast—we carry her in. Then I have to seal from outside. I monitor grounding."
"Alright," she said. "Cool. Casual. Normal Tuesday."
Manny's gaze slid to her phone. "You call her. Bring her close."
Carol looked at the landline's tiny screen. Her reflection was pale. "I know," she said. "I know what I'm doing."
"You look like you will vomit," he said.
"Wow. Thanks."
He hesitated, long enough that Carol saw the effort of it, then said, carefully, like each word cost him, "I trust you." Carol let out a breath. He gave a short nod, as if he'd finished a difficult task. "Feel later," he said. "Now—do."
Her thumb moved. She could do this. She glanced at Manny. He was already climbing into the container, checking the cables were hidden. He looked back once.
Carol lifted the phone to her ear and cleared her throat. The line rang. Once. Twice.
"Hi, Carol."
Carol's grip tightened. Her pulse thumped. There it was. Her name, in that voice. Carol shut her eyes so hard her eyelids stuck for a second. "Hi," she managed. Then, too fast: "Come by my house."
Zosia didn't hesitate. "Of course."
"I—" Carol's throat tightened. She forced it open. "I want to see you."
A soft exhale on the other end. "I want that too."
Of course they did. Of course she would say it like that. Carol stared at the shipping container through the doorway. "Quick question," Carol said. "How close are you to whipping up my stem cells for your—" her free hand made a useless spiral— "big science project."
"Weeks," Zosia said. Then, gently, like she was soothing a child, "Maybe longer."
Carol's jaw clenched. "Good," Carol said, and then she did the thing she'd been practicing in the mirror. She lied with her whole chest. "One more thing," she added, "our Colombian friend has primed the bomb."
Silence. Carol could almost hear the global pause; recalculating, updating risk. "Your… friend," Zosia said carefully.
"Yeah," Carol said. "Manousos is very motivated, and I've been helping. We're assuming you took his stem cells in the hospital. Turns out betrayal makes people creative."
Another pause, longer this time. Carol imagined the drone trained on the cul-de-sac. Eyes in the air that had reported their trip to the library, the electrical supply run, Manny working on the container, Carol moving like she had a plan again.
Zosia spoke softly. "We're glad you called."
Carol pushed right through it. "Just come over."
"Absolutely," Zosia said, eager under the serenity. "It will only be minutes. See you soon, Carol."
The line clicked. Carol stared at the phone. She was shaking. She set it down on the counter with too much care, like it could explode if she moved wrong, and dragged in a breath. Okay. Okay, Sturka. Showtime.
Manousos was still on the driveway when she stepped outside, squinting up at the sky as though he expected it to start shooting. "You did?" he asked.
"I did," Carol said. "She's coming." He nodded once, then went to get back in the container. "Hey," she said. He looked up. "If this goes sideways—"
"Do not," Manousos said, immediate. His accent sharpened the command. "No future talk. Do steps."
Carol's stomach rolled. "Yeah."
Manousos went back inside the container for the last time before the real part started. He didn't even look dramatic doing it. He just climbed in, pulled the mattress into place, and clanged the door shut.
Carol stood alone and told herself she was going to scream at Zosia the moment she saw her. She told herself she was going to shout every ugly thing she'd swallowed since Montana. She was good at being angry, but the longer she waited, the more she felt a shameful hope shouldering up under the fury. Some idiot animal part of her was already rehearsing the feeling of Zosia's hands, how her whole nervous system would go slack when Zosia touched her. Barely a week of distance, and she was already standing at the door wagging her tail.
Carol rubbed her palms on her sweatpants—shit, she'd forgotten to change—and looked down the street impatiently.
She heard Zosia before she saw her. A chopping noise came from above and behind, the sound growing louder, slicing through the sky. The wind whipped sharply around Carol, biting at her as she squinted up, struggling to keep her hair from getting in her face.
The helicopter hovered, air thick with its roar, then dipped closer, and stopped. Zosia climbed down the ladder with an ease that made Carol's heart stutter. She was wearing dark jeans and a thin red sweater, a bag slung over one shoulder like they'd already anticipated what Carol's next mistake might be.
Zosia's eyes locked with hers the moment she stepped onto the ground, her gaze steady and unwavering, like she had always known exactly where Carol was and always would. It felt like someone had just grabbed her insides and squeezed, yet all Carol could do was stand there, frozen, watching her approach.
Zosia's smile flickered into place, soft at the edges. Carol's heart lurched so hard she almost threw up.
Zosia stopped at the edge of the yard, letting Carol have the distance if she wanted it. Her eyes moved over Carol's face like she was taking inventory.
"I missed you," Zosia said.
Carol's mouth opened but nothing came out. She felt a horrible split inside her; one part that wanted to spit, one part that wanted to crawl forward and press her face into Zosia's shoulder like she'd done on the driveway weeks ago, when she'd been dying of thirst and Zosia had arrived like rain.
Zosia's smile faltered a fraction. Contrition, or something adjacent to it. "We're very sorry you were hurt."
Her throat burned. "I'm fine," she lied automatically. Then, "No, I'm not. Whatever." Zosia's gaze stayed gentle. "I want to talk," Carol said, thumb pointing over her shoulder. "Inside."
She went through the door. Zosia followed obediently, glancing at the shipping container as she passed it.
Carol turned once they were in the front room, dim inside from the unnecessarily newspapered windows. Her hands curled into fists at her sides. This was it. This was where she was supposed to get angry enough, when she was supposed to do the thing.
Instead she heard herself say under her breath, "I have to tell you something."
Zosia's head tilted down to her, attentive. She placed her bag on the chair.
"You can't stop it," Carol said. Her voice shook. "Just… listen. Don't interrupt me with fun facts or whatever. You can't stop it."
Zosia didn't speak. Her smile dropped.
Carol nodded toward the driveway. "The shipping container?"
Zosia's gaze went to it, then returned. "Yes."
"It's grounded," Carol said. "It's lined. It blocks your psychic glue signal. Manny's in there right now, ready." Zosia went very still. Carol kept going, words stumbling out like she was running downhill and couldn't stop. "I'm going to make you seize," Carol said. "I'm going to drag you into that container. I'm going to pull you out. The real you, whoever the hell is under there." She swallowed hard. "I'm going to try."
Zosia's calm stretched thin.
"Carol," Zosia said softly. "Please."
Carol flinched. "I'm not doing this to hurt you," she said, furious at how thin her voice sounded. "I'm doing it because you already tried to—" She choked, caught on the word she couldn't say without gagging. Save. Fix. "You're going to take me."
Zosia's eyes held hers. "We're trying to help you."
"I know," Carol snapped. "That's what makes it worse."
Zosia's hand moved toward the bag on the chair, then stilled. She took a step forward instead. Carol didn't move back, but her whole body braced. "We aren't asking to win," Zosia said. There was a patient desperation in it, the cadence of something that had rehearsed its own spontaneity. "But please don't do something you can't undo."
Carol's hands trembled. She curled them tighter. "You think I don't know?" she hissed.
Zosia moved again, closer now, and Carol could feel it—the gravity of her. The pull of that attention like a tide, patient and inevitable. "We love you," Zosia said. Her voice was soft, steady, like she was trying not to startle a wounded animal. Her eyes stayed on Carol like they were the only fixed point in the universe.
Carol's laugh came out broken and wet. "You don't—" The sentence snapped in half.
Zosia's brow pinched. A flicker of hurt. "Carol," she said, a near-plea under the calm now. "Please. Listen." Her hands came up, moving toward Carol's face slowly.
"Don't." Carol shook her head sharply. Zosia's hands hung in the air a bewildered second, refusal of comfort a language they were still learning, then lowered. Carol needed to ask the question she wasn't sure she wanted the answer to.
"If it works," Carol said, voice cracking, "Will she remember?"
"It's difficult to predict."
"Bullshit."
Zosia's mouth curved barely. A ghost of fondness. "We don't know everything," she said. "We know her now, but she might be changed. We can't promise you what survives." Carol's stomach dropped. Zosia's gaze stayed on Carol, "Right now I—" for the first time the "we" faltered, like a glitch— "Right now I'm happy." Zosia's eyes shone.
Carol blinked fast, but her vision blurred anyway.
Zosia's mouth trembled and recovered into composure that was trying and failing. "We're worried. Not for us. For you. Who will look after you?" Zosia asked, almost frightened. "You'll go back to how you were. The house with every light off. Who will hold you, make you happy?" She hesitated, then reached for Carol's hands. "You won't let anyone else."
Carol's heart thumped so hard at Zosia's touch she could barely breathe. "Don't say that." The words came strangled. "Please."
"Your pain is—" She stopped, as if she couldn't find language that wouldn't hurt Carol more. "It's the only thing we can't tolerate. That's why we're so glad Zosia was chosen. She made you happy."
Tears spilled anyway, hot and humiliating, before Carol could swallow them back. "Yeah, because you—because you made it feel real."
Zosia's gaze tracked over Carol's face again, like she could see the fracture lines. Her lip trembled again. "You know we can't lie. All of it was real. Please, believe it."
"No," Carol said, quietly. Her throat felt lined with gravel. "Sit," she said, and there was a crack of command in it. Carol took her hands back to wipe her face and they hovered, useless. She wouldn't be able to catch her when she went. She could barely stand herself. "Just—" Carol made a helpless motion toward the chair, the floor, anywhere that wasn't standing. "Please. You'll fall," she said. "I don't want you to get hurt." The words came out like a confession.
Before Carol could stop her, Zosia sank to her knees, and she caught Carol's hands in hers again like it was instinct. They were warm, and despite everything, Carol held them. Zosia looked up at her, tears in her eyes, and her face was open, undefended, loving without any instinct left to protect herself from it.
Carol's knees were about to give so she went down wobbly, to see Zosia eye-to-eye. Her hands shook as Zosia held them, and Carol couldn't think of the strategy, the plans. She couldn't think of anything but the woman kneeling in front of her, looking at her like she would stop the world if only she could stay.
She had planned to yell, to be righteous, planned to be strong enough. Instead she knelt there, crying properly now, looking at Zosia's face, and felt like she was about to betray her right back. Zosia in there was happy right now. Maybe Carol shouldn't do this. Carol let go to wipe her tears again, livid at Zosia for making her end it, bitter at herself for trying to bargain.
"You ruined it," Carol said. The words were small at first, then they came sharper, fueled by everything she'd tried not to feel. "You had me. You had me happy. And you couldn't just—fucking leave it. You had to go digging around in my goddamn eggs like a parts bin."
Zosia's face twisted in subtle anguish but she didn't interrupt. She just listened, like she could absorb the blow if it meant Carol would understand.
Carol felt the lump rise in her throat, threatening to swallow the rest of her sentence. She forced it down like a chokehold. "Why?" she demanded, louder now, the anger all that kept her upright. "Why do you have to do that stem cell bullshit? Why couldn't you just—just let us have it?"
"Because we want you safe from pain," she said, her tone tenderly fierce, "We can't just watch you drown, even if it means you hate us."
Carol's heart hammered. She didn't want to do this, didn't want to be the one to pull the trigger. She wasn't sure who was more afraid now, but she swallowed down the fear, the heartbreak, and forced the words out. "And I can't let you stay like this, even if it means you hate me."
Carol's chest heaved.
Then Zosia said quietly, accepting, "We've loved you since we knew you." Zosia's hands loosened in hers. "That won't stop, even if you never forgive us."
They could have held on, and instead they were opening their hands and letting it happen. The collective fell away and all Carol could see was just Zosia, kneeling in front of her with open hands, about to lose everything.
Whatever was left that Carol had been holding gave way. "I've already forgiven you," Carol choked out, and she leant forward and pressed her lips to Zosia's in a rough kiss then pulled away quickly. "I'm going to scream," Carol said, voice ragged. "And you're going to seize. I fucking love you, and I'm going to do it anyway."
Zosia's face shifted—panic, or something as close to it as they could manage. "Carol—please," she whispered, and the word was terrible in her mouth because she meant it. "Don't make yourself do this." Then Carol drew in a breath that hurt, and she gave Manousos the only signal she had left. She let herself be furious, and screamed.
Zosia's body jerked again, another sharp convulsion that left Carol reeling.
"Okay," Manny muttered, as they carried her down the driveway slowly. "She's okay. We just get her in."
Carol had forgotten it was still morning outside. The sun was out the same as always, like nothing had happened, and the bright light split her sore eyes open.
The container door gaped dark and hot behind him. Zosia's limbs kept seizing, her head lolling against Carol's arm.
He helped Carol ease Zosia into the container, and they lay her down as gently as they could, the motion still too sharp and sudden for Carol not to flinch at.
There was no time to think, no time to wonder if she was doing the right thing. She was already here, already committed. She sat beside Zosia, her knees on the mattress, jammed between it and the inert atomic warhead, for Christ's sake.
"Are you okay?" Manny asked.
Carol's hand shook as she wiped her own face, "No," she said, "But I can do this."
Manousos stepped outside and started scraping the doorbolts, looking at her firmly, "Yes, you can. Knock when finish." He slammed the door shut and the clang died and left nothing. They were sealed, no signal, just the tin-dark interior and the lantern's weak reach, Zosia's ragged breathing, and Carol's own pulse, loud in her ears.
Zosia convulsed again, and Carol grabbed for her shoulder without thinking, to hold her down, pressing too hard, then not hard enough. Her jaw was locked, tendons standing in her neck, and Carol could feel the seizure in her own arms.
Carol breathed, shallow, too fast. There was no time to waste. This was it. They'd crossed the point of no return, and Carol couldn't let it be for nothing. She couldn't. She took a deep breath. The air had nowhere to go, it smelled of metal and mildew.
She looked down at Zosia's face. The muscles still twitching, jaw clenching and releasing. Her eyes were closed but not peaceful. She looked like someone fighting in her sleep.
She'd had things she was going to say. She'd rehearsed them, whispering to nobody. The speech a hero gives in the third act, when the music swells and the lighting goes soft and the unconscious beloved just needs to hear the right words.
Carol couldn't remember a single one.
She took Zosia's hand, the wrong rhythm there—pull, release, pull. "Zosia," she said, and it came out thin. Wrong for the job. "Can you—are you there?"
Nothing. The convulsions had slowed to a tremor. “I'm here," she said, and her thumb traced the ridge of Zosia's knuckles. “I'm here, you don't have to—just listen. Just—please listen." Zosia's hand was warm but the movement under it was wrong, electrical, a storm with no sky, and Carol held it in both of hers, pressing the fingers together as if she could keep them still by force.
“You love mango ice cream," she said, and it came out like a fact from a list. She winced at herself. “No, that's not—that's not how you said it." She shut her eyes hard, shook her head once.
"You told me about it in the kitchen. When you were little, in Gdansk. An old man used to push a cart through your street and you didn't have enough money." She was talking too fast, words slipping over each other. She made herself slow down. "You said it so—you had this look on your face, this beautiful—" She stopped. She was describing Zosia's face to Zosia's face. She forced a breath that didn't help.
"I'm sorry," Carol said. It came out barely above a whisper. "I'm sorry I can't—I don't know how to do this." She pressed her forehead to the back of Zosia's hand, closed her eyes harder, willing contact to carry what words couldn't. Zosia's breathing roughened. The tremor in her hands worsened, then eased again.
Carol tightened her grip. "Zosia?" she said, leaning close enough that her breath caressed Zosia's hair. "Please be there." Carol heard her own voice start to fray and hated it. She tried to calm her frantic thoughts. She scrunched her eyes shut, desperate. She found the kitchen. Zosia at the island, morning sun.
Carol could hear it now as if the metal walls had dissolved. Zosia's voice had changed. Dropped warmer from nowhere, gone fond around the details; she had shared a piece of her history so freely, and Carol had stood there with her hands still and her breath gone and felt something shift and thought: Oh, you I could fall for. She held the feeling and breathed into it, let it slow her down until her hands stopped shaking.
“You said, 'Mango ice cream,'" she tried again, slower. “You laughed. Like it surprised you that you were saying it. Like you'd just—found it." Zosia's fingers flexed. Carol tightened hers just enough to answer it. "You had a favorite," she said, voice tipping toward disbelief. "That's yours. They didn't give you that."
Zosia's jaw unclenched. She brushed Zosia's hair away from her forehead a bit. "Poland had just opened up," she went on, "And there were new flavors." Her voice had found a register that didn't shake, and Zosia's breathing lengthened and slowed. "Do you remember? You were ten," she said. “Maybe. You weren't sure. That's yours too, you not being sure."
Zosia's breathing hitched, then evened for a few counts. Carol leaned into that, followed it.
“Sometimes the old man would hand out ice cream bars," she said, slower now, more certain. “When he had too many. You said he knew you didn't have two coins to rub together." Her mouth twisted, just a little. “You said it like it didn't shame you," she added, voice roughening. “You said it like it was just true. That's—" She cut herself off, shook her head. “That's yours."
"You would watch the ships, do you remember? You were fascinated," she said, and the word felt too neat, but it was the word Zosia had used, so she held onto it. “You asked—" Her voice softened, not quite on purpose. “You wanted to know what they were for. Where they were going. That was yours, that curiosity, that wanting—they didn't put that in you." Her thumb moved across Zosia's knuckles, a small, steady motion. “And now you know," she said. “You said that like it—" She stopped herself before she filled in what she didn't know. “Like it mattered."
Zosia was shaking less violently now, her muscles less tense. Her thumb twitched as she lightly stroked Zosia's cheek with her other hand, afraid to disturb her but desperate to keep her grounded. "You said there was peach and—and mint, but mango was your favorite."
She bent closer so the words had less distance to travel, until her mouth was near Zosia's ear, until her breath stirred the damp strands at her temple. “You had a favorite," she said, “You got to choose something for yourself just because you liked it more. Not because—not because it's useful, or it—" She broke off, breath uneven. “Just because you like it."
She remembered Zosia's face when she had finished the story, her cheeks had blushed, her smile was shy and filled with warmth. Carol had wanted her to keep talking forever, she'd never forgotten how it had felt. "That's you," she said, quieter now. “Those are your words. Not theirs. They don't get to take that and flatten it," she went on. “They don't get your 'maybe.' They don't get the way you said it." Her breath shook. “I saw you," it slipped out, before she could stop it. “You were—" She stopped, because it felt too sure. “You were there."
She couldn't prove it wasn't wishful thinking, she might be speaking to her now for the first time, or Zosia might not even hear her. Her grip tightened.
Zosia's tremors were getting fewer and far between, and Carol didn't know if the window was closing. She sped up. "You love books too, and you love cold water. Remember the sea spray?" In the dark, she could see Zosia's crinkled eyes and pink face in the bubble bath, when she'd told Carol she'd wanted to belong somewhere. "The air made you feel like—like you could escape, go anywhere, do anything."
Her voice faltered. Wherever Zosia was, it was vast and connected and she wasn't alone there. Carol was asking her to come back to a sealed container and a woman who might be a stranger, to come back to difficult, to choose the smaller life, the harder one. "Zosia, you can do this. I'm right here." Carol leaned closer, pressing her face to Zosia's hair. Sweat and salt and something woody.
Zosia's breathing evened for three counts, then broke on the fourth. Carol counted with her anyway, a rhythm to hang on to. She opened her mouth to say more and found nothing. That was all she had. Carol could count the real moments on one hand and still have fingers left. She'd been handed almost nothing and she'd built the whole of this feeling on it, and now she was out of material and Zosia was still gone.
She lifted Zosia's hand and pressed it to her own cheek, held it there, skin to skin. She swallowed back the lump in her throat. “I wanted to hear more," she said, quieter. “I should've asked more. I wanted to know everything." Her eyes stung. She whispered the words that had been lodged in her. "Don't hate me. Don't leave me." She kissed Zosia's hair, knowing the words were futile, knowing this was the last time she'd ever get to hold her.
Zosia stopped shaking, and lay still, breathing slowly. Carol leaned back and felt for her pulse. Steady.
There was a long, unbearable pause.
"Please come back." It came out barely, her voice gone. She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, whispering the same words into the dark.
Nothing changed. Zosia's face stayed slack, peaceful. She was breathing, slow and even, and Carol couldn't tell if that was recovery or absence, whether Zosia was swimming upward or had already gone to the bottom.
She waited for something to shift. Anything.
A twitch. Small. A crease between Zosia's brows, as though a thought had found her. Carol stopped breathing.
Another flutter. Zosia's breath caught. Her face twisted. Zosia's eyes moved beneath her lids. Rapid. Then they opened—just barely, just a sliver, squinting against the lamplight.
Carol's hand lifted toward Zosia's shoulder and hung there.
Zosia's eyes opened fully, unfocused. They darted around the container walls, the low ceiling, the dark—seeing everything and understanding none of it. Her breathing went fast and shallow.
Then her gaze came to Carol, and there was nothing in it. No recognition, only fear at the stranger leaning over her.
Carol's stomach dropped. Zosia didn't know her, didn't know anything. Jesus Christ. Carol knocked the container wall once to signal Manousos, and watched as Zosia flinched hard, a full-body recoil like she'd been struck.
Carol had ripped her out, and thrown her back into a world that was too loud and too painful. Torn her away from everyone and left her here, alone, terrified. Zosia's mouth moved. She rasped a noise, the word broken and strange, and beneath it was a terror so raw it didn't need translating.
"Zosia," Carol whispered, and the name came out like a prayer and an apology all at once.
She had no idea if Zosia would ever forgive her for this. If she'd even remember there was anything to forgive.