He had stopped counting time and started counting counts.
It was the only honest thing left. He could not trust a second — a second had no floor, nothing to press it flat — but he could trust the act of beginning. So he began, and reached some number, and lost it, and began again, and set each beginning down in a row only he could see.
That's a thousand. Set it down. Start the next.
By the row, it had been about two days.
By everything else it had been no time, and also always, and he did not look at the everything else. He looked at the row.
The thread of pale thread of fire appear where nothing used to be there. He walked toward it. It came no closer. He walked toward it anyway, fast now, faster, because slow had not worked and nothing had worked and maybe fast would, maybe if he just—
One. Two. Three. Sol? Sol, say something, anything, just—
Four. Five.
—Sol—
The light did not move. He walked faster. He was not walking. He performed walking, harder and harder, flinging the memory of his legs forward into the black, and the thread of fire hung exactly where it hung, patient, fixed, and he could not get one inch nearer to it and he could not stop trying and he could not stop and he could not—
Where are you. WHERE ARE YOU. You were right there, you were an arm away, I had you, I had your hand—
He had not had her hand. He could not remember the last time he had been certain of his own hand.
Sol. Sol. Please.
One four four four two.
One four four four three.
Isolde said the numbers the way you'd touch a wall in the dark to know the room was still there.
One four four four two.
One four four four two.
She had stopped at that one. She did not try for the next. The next was where the floor of counting ended, and she had looked over that edge once, and she did not look again.
Aim.
She said his name into the nothing, softly, the way you say a name you no longer expect an answer to.
Aim. I'm here. I'm here, where are you.
I'm sorry. I don't know how I lost you. You were right beside me. I had one job and it was to stay beside you and I don't — I don't know where you went.
She swept an arm out through the dark. Slowly. Then the other. Wide patient strokes, the way you'd feel for something dropped in deep water.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
That's all right, she told herself, told him, told the place where the answer should have been. That's all right. You're close. You have to be close. Nothing here goes far.
One four four four two.
Aim.
He was talking now. Out loud, or what passed for out loud — he had stopped being able to tell whether the words left him or only rang inside the shape where his mouth had been, and it had stopped mattering, and he talked.
Const. Const, you absolute — you said trust you. You put your boot on its neck and you said trust me and where ARE you, it's been DAYS, it's been—
—Lady Vine. Anyone. The Goddess herself, I don't care, I'll take anyone, just open the—
He laughed. It came out wrong, scraped and small and not at all like laughing, and he heard the wrongness of it and the wrongness frightened him more than the dark had and he stopped.
Don't. Don't do that. Hold on. Hold the row. Hold the light. Just hold—
The thread of light hung there.
Please be move, he told it. Please. Just once. Just move once so I know you're real, so I know it's you, so I know I'm not—
—talking to a scratch on a piece of glass for the rest of—
He flung himself toward it again, the whole fraying everything of him, all at once, and got no nearer, and made a sound that the void took and did not return.
One four four four two.
Isolde had gone quiet.
She had run out of things to say to Aim. She had told him she was here, and that she was sorry, and that he was close, and she had said all of it many times, and the saying had stopped doing the small warm thing it used to do.
She tried to sit down.
She drew the memory of her knees up to the memory of her chest and folded the memory of her arms around them and waited to feel herself hold herself — that one simple thing, a body keeping its own company — and felt nothing meet. No warmth. No weight. Her arms closed through her legs like smoke through smoke and went on closing and met only each other and not even that.
She stopped trying to sit. There was no down to sit in.
One four four four two.
She did not say his name again. She had started to be afraid that if she said it too many more times it would come apart the way the number after one four four four two had come apart, and she did not have many whole things left, and his name was the last one, and she wanted to keep it whole.
So she only held it, behind her teeth, in the dark, and said the number instead.
One four four four two.
One four four four two.
The thread of fire shivered.
Aim saw it and his whole ruined attention snapped onto it like a hand around a railing. It had hung dead still since the dark took the light — never closer, never further, never bright, never dim — and now it staggered, a dip, a flicker, the pale of it lurching down toward dark and catching.
He did not know what it meant.
That was the thing that broke him — not the dark, not the days, but this: the change he had begged for, any change, and it arrived meaning nothing he could read. The light was doing something. He had no way to know if it was her coming closer or her going out. Reaching for him. Or letting go.
He stopped counting. He let the row fall.
He reached for the thread of light — not the patient walk this time, the real thing, an arm thrown out with everything left in it, because it was moving and it might be her and if it went out while he stood here counting he would never, he would never—
Sol—
SOL—!
And a sound came back.
A real one. Vast, low, grinding — stone hauled over stone — and it came from somewhere with a direction in it, somewhere that had an over there.
Light followed it.
It fell across his eyes — eyes, he had eyes, the light found them and they answered — a blade of pale brilliance widening as the great door dragged itself open, and the world came swimming up out of the nothing into being: wet black floor, rotted shelves, hanging chains, the long stone of the vault rising back into place around him — and there, in his arms, a weight, a warmth, green hair against his collar, Isolde, real, here, breathing.
A figure stood in the door, haloed in the light it stood against.
A voice came across the threshold. Soft. Lilting. Gentle as a hand laid on a fevered brow.
Like a saviour.
It should have been the most welcome sound in the world.
"...two of you?"