"We can't end like this — in here... right...?"
Aim's voice came out smaller than he meant it to.
Isolde turned toward him. Her mouth opened. He saw the shape of his name begin on her lips—
—and the sound arrived late.
"...Aim—"
A full breath late. The word reached him after her mouth had already finished making it, trailing behind her face like something that had come unfastened from her.
"Sol. Sol, say something else."
Her brows drew together. Her lips moved again — a whole sentence this time, quick, frightened, he could see the fear shaping it — and he waited for it.
It did not come.
He watched her finish speaking. He watched her wait for her own voice the way a person waits for a struck match to light. He watched her understand that it wasn't coming, that the sentence had gone somewhere and never arrived, and he saw her mouth form one more word, slowly and deliberately, no sound at all now, not even late:
Aim.
"I'm here," he said. "I'm here, I'm right—"
He heard the first two words.
The rest happened in his throat and chest and mouth — he felt the breath leave him, felt his tongue and teeth do their small familiar work — and nothing came back to his ears. Nothing at all.
He said her name again.
Silence, in his own mouth.
The lantern light was wrong now too. He didn't notice it begin; he only noticed that it had been happening for some time — the light was not flickering, not dimming, but stopping, the way a stream stops in a hard frost. The room had ceased to update. Isolde's face, half-turned toward him, eyes wide — the image of her hung in front of him, perfectly still, perfectly clear, like a painting of the last thing he had ever seen.
He reached for her.
The painting faded from the edges inward. The rotted shelves went first, then the door, then the floor between them, then the lines of her shoulders, then her face — not into darkness, exactly. Darkness is a thing the eyes can look at. This was the eyes being quietly told that there was nothing left to do.
The cold of the stone under his boots went next. Then the smell of dust. Then the weight of his own coat on his shoulders.
Then his shoulders.
...where are my hands.
He flexed them. He was almost certain he flexed them. There was no answering pressure of fingers against palm, no stretch of skin over knuckles, no signal of any kind from anywhere on the map of his body. He told his arm to rise. Something may have obeyed. Without sight, without touch, without the small constant hum of a body reporting itself, there was no way to know.
He was a thought, suspended in nothing, wearing the memory of a shape.
Okay, the thought said. Okay. Okay. Don't panic. Do not panic.
Think.
He was an investigator. He fell back on the only thing he had ever been any good at.
Catalogue it. What do I know.
One. I am alive. I am thinking, so I am alive.
Two. I can move — probably. I cannot confirm it, but the intention goes somewhere.
Three. I am breathing. Am I breathing?
He stopped.
He could not feel his breath. No rise of a chest, no air over lips, no rhythm of any kind. But he wasn't suffocating either — there was no burn in his lungs, no panic of the body starving. Either he was breathing and couldn't feel it, or he no longer needed to, and he genuinely could not have said which idea frightened him more.
Three, he amended carefully. I am not dying. Provisionally.
Four. Isolde is here. Somewhere. She was an arm's reach away when it took the light. She cannot have gone far. Nothing in here goes far. There is no far.
Five—
He stopped again, because he had nothing for five, and the silence where five should have been was somehow worse than all the rest of it.
He decided to count.
It was the obvious move — the textbook one, the thing they taught you for blackouts and cave-ins and any long dark where the mind starts to slip its mooring. Count seconds. Keep time. Time is a rope; hold the rope.
One. Two. Three. Four.
He counted in the steady internal cadence of a man marking a patrol shift, each number a deliberate footstep.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. One minute.
Good. That's one minute. Someone is coming. Const is out there. Even Miss Vine is out there. One of them will notice. Hold the rope.
Sixty-one. Sixty-two.
He counted to three hundred. Five minutes.
He counted to six hundred. Ten.
Somewhere after that — somewhere in the long blank stretch where the numbers got heavy and identical — he realized he could not remember whether he had passed nine hundred already or was still approaching it, and the two possibilities sat side by side with exactly equal weight, and there was nothing in the world to check against. No heartbeat. No breath. No ache in the legs. The numbers were footsteps on a floor that did not exist.
It's fine. Round down. Call it nine hundred. Fifteen minutes. Start from there.
Nine hundred one. Nine hundred two.
He lost it again somewhere in the eleven hundreds.
He started over from one.
It was easier from one. One was solid. He counted to sixty, and sixty minutes — no. Sixty seconds. One minute. He counted sixty seconds, which was one minute, and then he counted it again, and somewhere in the counting the thought arrived, quietly, the way water arrives under a door:
How many times have I started over?
He didn't know.
Three? Three felt right. It might have been three.
It might have been thirty.
The counts he had finished and the counts he had abandoned all lay behind him in the dark with nothing to mark them apart — no fatigue, no hunger, no light grown dimmer, no sound grown older. Every restart was identical to every other restart. He was not keeping time. He understood that now with a slow cold totality. He was decorating the inside of his own skull with numbers while something outside of numbers went on and on and on around him.
One, he thought anyway, because the alternative was nothing. Two. Three.
Aim.
Isolde shaped the name with her whole mouth, slow, exaggerated, the way you'd speak to someone deaf and far away.
Nothing came out. Or something came out and the world declined to carry it. She had no way left to tell those two things apart and the distinction had stopped mattering some time ago.
Aim. I'm here. I'm here. Where are you. I'm here.
She had been walking. She believed she had been walking — her legs were doing the remembered motion of it — but there was no floor pressing back against her boots, no air parting in front of her, and after a while (a while; what was a while) she could no longer rule out the possibility that she had been standing perfectly still the entire time, marching in place in an infinite nothing, like a toy soldier wound up and set down nowhere.
She reached out as she went. Wide sweeps of both arms, methodical at first, then less so.
He was right there. He was RIGHT THERE—
Her hand closed on nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
Am I dead?
The thought did not frighten her the first time it came. It was just a question, one of many.
It came back, though.
It kept coming back.
There was one thing left in the universe, and it was a smudge.
Aim found it sometime after the counting stopped meaning anything — a faint, formless paleness hanging in the absolute black, so dim that for a long while he was sure it was only his eyes inventing texture out of starvation. Phantom light. The retina's last little lie.
But it didn't drift the way phantoms drifted. When he turned his attention away and back — it was there, in its place, patient.
The glasses. He was still wearing the glasses — he had to be; he could see nothing of his own body but this one thing came through anyway, the way it had come through in the vault, light that wasn't light. Lines of pale color that lived underneath seeing.
A small dim cloud of it, hanging in the void.
Brightest at the head, he remembered. People are brightest at the head.
Isolde.
Something in him that had been coming apart pulled itself back together around that smudge of pale fire, and held.
That's her. That's her. She's there. She's alive, she's there, it's her.
He moved toward it. He performed every motion of moving toward it. The smudge came no closer.
He moved toward it for what might have been an hour, and might have been a day, and might have been the space between two heartbeats of a world that no longer sent him any heartbeats, and the smudge of light came no closer, and got no further, and did not change.
It's fine. Distance might not work here. Nothing else works here. Just keep it in sight. Keep her in sight. As long as I can see her—
He kept it in sight.
He kept it in sight.
He kept it in sight.
The voice was the next thing to go wrong.
Not hers. His.
The voice he thought in — the constant silent narrator that had been him for twenty-some years, so close to the center of him that he had never once in his life heard it as a voice — began, very gradually, to sound like one.
One. Two. Three, it said, and he noticed, the way you notice a stranger's accent, the particular way it leaned on the numbers.
Keep her in sight, it said, and he found himself thinking — with what? with which part? — that it didn't sound quite the way he remembered sounding.
Don't, he thought. Don't do that. Don't start that.
Don't start what? the voice asked, in his voice, which was almost his voice, which was a very good likeness of his voice.
He stopped thinking in words for a while after that.
It didn't help. The silence underneath his thoughts turned out to be enormous, and not empty so much as waiting, and after a while he went back to the words because the words were at least the shape of company.
Sixty. That's a minute.
...was it sixty? Count again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
...
What comes after seven.
He knew it. Of course he knew it. It was right there, the way a dropped thing is right there in dark water, visibly sinking, exactly one reach too deep.
Eight, he retrieved, after a gap he refused to measure. Eight. It's eight. It was always eight. I knew that.
I knew that.
He noticed his hands again — noticed the absence of them — and could not now clearly remember what the weight of a hand felt like from the inside. He had the fact of hands. Ten fingers, calluses from the pistol grip, a scar at the base of the left thumb from a filing-spike at the office, three years ago, Rafael had laughed—
He had the facts.
The feeling of having ever lived inside them was thinning, somewhere behind him in the dark, like a town he'd left by night.
Keep her in sight.
The smudge hadn't moved.
It hadn't moved.
...has it ever moved?
The thought arrived in the voice that was almost his, and once it arrived it would not leave.
Light that never moves. Light that never comes closer, never drifts further, never brightens, never dims. He had been holding on to it the way a drowning man holds a spar — but a spar floats, a spar moves, a spar behaves like a thing in a world. This just hung. Fixed. Painted on.
What if it's not her.
What if it was never her. What if it's a stain — a burn on the lens, a scar on my own eye, the last image of the last light I ever saw, seared in. What if I've been walking toward a flaw in a piece of glass and calling it by her name for—
for—
For how long. There was the question under all the other questions, the one with no floor in it. He had restarted the count three times or thirty. He had walked for an hour or a week. Isolde had been an arm's reach away — seconds ago, surely, only seconds, it had all only just happened — and also, simultaneously, in some way his mind kept flinching off of, it had been going on forever. It had always been going on. The vault, the temple, the rain at the eastern wall, the office, Rafael, his whole small life — a bright little story he'd told himself once, a long time ago, here in the dark, to pass the time.
No, he thought. No, no, no — that's backwards, that's BACKWARDS—
He screamed.
He threw everything he had left into it — hauled air he couldn't feel through a throat he couldn't find and screamed, her name, his own name, anything—
The void did not even give him the dignity of an echo.
The scream went out of him into the nothing and the nothing accepted it without comment, the way it had accepted his footsteps and his counting and his name for the smudge of light, and when it was over he could not be certain it had happened at all.
He hung there. A thought, in nothing, wearing the fraying memory of a shape.
The pale smudge floated before him, exactly where it had always been.
He no longer knew whether his eyes were open.
He no longer knew whether he had eyes.
One, he thought, in a voice that sounded like somebody doing an impression of him. Two. Three.
Four.