I blink, and blink again, trying to wipe away the fog in my brain. It won’t go away. There’s a misty sort of quality to the world around me, and I didn’t really wake up just now as much as I sort ofdriftedto life. I’m in a gray room, sitting on a flat, featureless bed. It almost looks like a hospital but there are no beeping machines, no generic art on the walls, and I’m not in a paper gown. “Where am I?”
“You’re dead. I pulled your thread back to me.” She takes a drag on the cigarette and studies me. “Why’d you do it?”
“…die?”
She rolls her eyes and flicks the ashes of the cigarette into my lap. “No. Why didn’t you tell your buddy Kalos where you were headed? Do you know what a shitstorm you threw into my lap?”
I brush the ashes off my legs, idly noticing that I’m wearing a plain gray sheath, my feet bare. Nothing hurts, but nothinglooks familiar, either. I raise my hand, staring at my fingers, and they’re translucent. “Am I a ghost?”
“You’re dead. Don’t change the subject. We’ve got a very pissed god over in Aos and everyone’s staring at me like it’s my fault.” Lachesis has gray hollows under her eyes, and she looks tired. I’m not sure if this is more of her “everyday working woman” motif or if that’s because of me. Her clothes are wrinkled, and her brassy hair is pulled into a messy knot that highlights the dark roots at her hairline. “It’s been two months of pure hell.”
Oof. “Twomonths? I just woke up!”
“Time is different when you’re dead.” She tilts her head. “You didn’t tell Kalos you were returning to me as requested. Why?”
I suck on my lower lip, feeling ashamed. “At first it didn’t seem important. By the time it was, there wasn’t a good time to bring it up. I wasn’t thinking about dying, I was thinking about how to stay alive. And then when I fell in love with him, I couldn’t bring it up. I didn’t want to hurt him like that, to make him think I couldn’t wait to get away from him.”
“Oh yeah, this issomuch better.” She flicks her cigarette ashes at me again. “Good job.”
“I fucked up.”
“I’ll say.”
“How…how is he?”
Her eyes narrow and she gives me a withering stare. “You don’t get to ask that.”
I shrink back, wounded at her anger, and at the realization that I’ve hurt Kalos, badly. “I was hoping he’d forget about me. That he’d go home and realize I’m nobody and that I’m not important.”
She just glares at me. “You’re a really sad sack, Elsie Anderson.”
What?
“I realize you’ve got a few hang-ups due to what you’ve been through. You mortals like to call it PTSD. I call it dealing with hard knocks. I get that you’re used to devaluing yourself so you don’t inconvenience others, but at some point you do realize it’s bullshit, right? That you’re allowed to be a person in your own right, with wants and needs?”
I stare at her.
“Right, well, that argument is too late now, isn’t it?” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “Horse out of the barn and all that. Anyhow, thanks to you, our friend Kalos has entered a fugue state and refuses to come out of it. Aos now has a disease god who refuses to do his job at all. The population of that world is disgustingly healthy, and because of that, the influx of souls to the underworld has cratered.”
“You…make it sound as if that’s a bad thing?”
“Did you learn nothing at his side?” She finishes her cigarette and flicks the butt in my face. I bat it aside as she lights another. “Overcrowding in cities, food scarcity, those are just dandy and fun, aren’t they? Disease is all about balancing things out. Remember our conversation from before?”
“Clearing the forest for new growth,” I murmur. I remember.
“There’s no balance right now. The poor will continue to be ground underfoot by the rich because survival will get harder with more mouths to feed. There won’t be enough land to grow food for all the people depending on it. Because people are scrabbling for existence, there will be no renaissance, no great thinking, no progress of society. Not until he breaks free of his own apathy, and that might take hundreds of years.” Her lip curls. “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
“You’re blamingme? Because people aren’t dying?”
“Because you fucked a fragile ecosystem. There’s a differencebetween helping the lesser of four evils and fucking it over entirely.”
“I’m not that important?—”
She snarls, cutting me off before I can finish. “You could have prepared him. Had a hard conversation with himearly. Now I’m pissed that I’m being made to look like the bad guy by sending you there. I was doing a buddy a favor, and you blew this shit up in my face. I tried to do you a solid, too.” She shakes her head, her new cigarette forgotten in her irritation.
Do me a solid…? I gasp, remembering my brother. “David! Oh my god. How is he? Can I see him?”
Lachesis’s unplucked brow goes up. “You want me to help you out now? When you’ve fucked me?”
