“Those words don't matter now.”
“Why? What changed?”
Greg's throat was tight. He did not have time to be standing here arguing with Valerie. “Everything,” he pressed. “Everything changed.”
Valerie's features hardened. “If you interfere with this collection, you're done. Not suspended. Not reassigned.Done.” She held his gaze. “You could dissolve. Do you understand that?”
“I do.” Greg's gaze darted to the side. What was Dustin doing now?
“Then let me do my job!” Valerie demanded, dragging his attention back to her. “Walk away. Let this be what it's supposed to be. It's part of life, Greg. Losing the people you love. People do it every day and they survive and they go on. That's what makes them brave. You let go, and you go on.”
Greg wanted to brush the words off, wanted to brushValerie off, but he couldn't. The words snagged on something and burrowed into him.
Because Valerie was right. People lost the ones they loved every single day. They buried them and mourned them and eventually, somehow, kept living. He'd watched it happen. He'd documented it. He'd filed the paperwork.
But.
“How would you know?” he asked quietly.
Valerie blinked. “What?”
“How would you know what it's like to lose someone you love? How would either of us know that?”
“We've seen it. We've watched?—”
“We'vewatched.That's all we've ever done.” Greg's voice was shaking but he got the words out clearly. “They gave us bodies that need to eat and sleep and use the bathroom as if that's enough to make us human enough. But nobody taught us how to love someone. Nobody taught us what it does to you. They gave us a teaspoon of soul and sent us out to collect oceans and told us not to get wet.”
Valerie's lips parted but nothing came out.
“I have watched more people die than I can count,” Greg continued, his whole body feeling hot now in a way he couldn't explain. “I have watched them say goodbye to each other and I have written down the things they said in a notebook because I thought if I collected enough of the words, I would understand. But I never understood. Not until?—”
He stopped.
His heart pounded in his ears.
He hadn't understood until Dustin.
Not until he'd watched a man live instead of die. Not until he'd sat across from him in a diner and watched him eat a cheeseburger. Not until he'd felt thefull, terrifying, annihilating weight of caring about someone who could be taken from you.
“You can't ask me to let go,” Greg pleaded. “Not because I'm too weak to do it, but because you don't know what you're asking. None of us do. We were made to escort people through the door. We were never supposed to understand what it costs the people left standing on the other side.” He took a breath that shuddered on the way in. “And now I understand. And I can't.”
Valerie was quiet.
“Greg,” she said. Not Grigoreth, but the name he'd chosen because it felt more human. “If you do this, I can't protect you.”
“I know.”
“You'll lose everything,” she said, and she said something else, but Greg was no longer listening to her because he heard a different sound.
Metal groaning. A deep, structural sound, the sound of something heavy shifting beyond its tolerance. Then the slide — items moving, toppling, the cascade of weight redistributing along a failing structure.
It came from the next aisle over. The aisle Dustin was in.
Greg didn't think.
He ran straight at the shelves separating him from Dustin and phased through them.
Valerie called his name but he barely heard it over the cold shock of passing through solid matter, through steel and cardboard and glass, and then he was solid again on the other side.
