“Tell me what happened to Flint, and to the some-ways-lover. Where are they now?”
I froze. There were stories I would tell and stories I most certainly wouldn’t, and that story—which canny readers might also realize isthisstory—I wasn’t ready to share. Not then and perhaps not now.
So I said, “I don’t know.”
It was half the truth. After all, who truly knows where anybody is? Are the dead floating forever on the winds of Jupiter; are they swimming like superconductive merfolk through the hydrogen sea? Are they with us all for always?
So instead I told her about ambergris. About how we’d found it in a bloated carcass in the deep sky, and how dram for dram it was one of the most precious substances in the system. And then I told her, because it was what she wanted to hear but also because it was a cold and brutal truth that I couldn’t look away from, that it became still more precious when it was processed and bottled and used, at last, to adorn her beautiful body.
I don’t remember, now, the color of the light in that place that might or might not have been a library. But in my imagination it was red. And when Cora stood before me, all she wore was a perfume made from the vomit of a Leviathan, and her skin gleamed as if it were painted with blood.
And it was, in a way.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOURA Bower in the Arascides
The weirdest thing about making the coffin for Q was the point where she started helping me.
There was no ceremony to it. On one of my growing-more-bearable visits to her bedside, I found her standing. She was still bandaged and, under the bandages, there were probably still nanosurgical drones doing whatever it was nanosurgical drones did. But she lookedalmostback to her old self.
“Done?” she asked.
“The coffin?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how to play this. Barring sudden complications, and honestly, sudden complications were common enough with medical treatment, especially if your bank balance started running low, she was clearly not in urgent need of a coffin. “Working on it,” I told her. Because it was true.
She didn’t reply verbally. She just nodded, took my hand, and led me down to the bay where I’d been working.
She undid most of it.
Well, not most of it, but she had a lot of opinions and made a lot of adjustments. She tweaked the engine, stabilized the fins, and hooked power to some of the Leviathan bone I’d worked into the structure at her insistence.
When she did, it luminesced like her tattoos.
I watched her work and, when I thought she was sufficiently occupied that I could speak without choking, I seized my moment. “So. We good?”
I might have seized the moment too well, because she was so occupied that for a good while she didn’t reply. Then finally she pulled her head out of the guts of the coffin and said, “No.”
Well, that sucked.
For a moment I just stood there. I’m not sure I even blinked. “What do you meanno?”
You probably don’t need me to tell you that her response was just “No.”
I glared, increasingly frustrated, at the coffin I’d spent too much time and energy on. And okay, it wasn’t great, and okay, she seemed to want to change almost everything I’d done to it, and okay, as big gestures of reconciliation wentOhai, I maked you a coffinwas fucking weird, but she’d literallyaskedfor this. “Do you have anyidea,” I blustered, “how muchwork—”
“Non ex operibus ut ne quis glorietur.”
I still didn’t understand her.
Fuck. That was the whole point, wasn’t it.
I dropped to my knees beside her and told her I was sorry. Then I told her again. Then I cried. Proper, ugly, pride-is-a-sin cried.
To this day I don’t know if I was forgiven. But then I came from a world where forgiveness was for sale, so perhaps I was a bad judge. Or perhaps I was trying to judge the wrong things.
