Her mind holds Iris’s Lifeline at a distance; then she feels the heat in her temples as she beckons Asher’s to the foreground.
All at once, he’s there.
Dez holds her breath. The first scene she pulls up shows him looking several years younger, in a classroom, standing behind a podium.He’s got a PowerPoint clicker in one hand, a laptop open in front of him. He’s addressing a room of college students while an exhausted professor watches from the front row.
Asher says: “We see here how early detection increases not only quantity but also quality of life.”
Dez lets his words wash over her, the sound they make coming out of his mouth, the serious expression they bring to his face. She takes in the details of the room, of Asher’s countenance and bearing, the sound of his breath and the wrinkles in his shirt and the shapes his hands make in the air as he talks.
She hangs on his words—cellular reprogramming, mitochondrial biogenesis, young blood transfusions. She wishes she knew this side of Asher. She wishes they’d stayed in touch. She regrets how her life has carried on without him, and his without her.
And she regrets the one night in November when she was given a choice to take Acheron’s Dream Expulsion, to go back to her old life, to not give up everything she knew before.
She gave up Asher that night. Now the only way she can see him is through this Lens.
Today she wants to see the day they met. It may torture her, but she needs to remember it was real, even if it can’t happen again. Her mind toggles through his fascinating life, trying not to get distracted by every single moment.
She pauses on one and can’t bring herself to swipe it away: Evening, an ordinary kitchen table. A plate with lasagna, peas, and a hunk of garlic bread. A hand uses a fork to spear a bite.
She knows that hand. Its strong shape and smooth fingernails. She’s felt it on her skin. And now she isn’t looking at recorded footage; she’s entered Asher’s actual memories, Asher’s POV.
She looks down at the black track pants he’s wearing. At his barefeet on the carpet under the chair. His body is smaller than the man she’d met. He’s younger, maybe fifteen.
Dez wants to see it all so badly that the ordinary scene feels illicit. She notices other people seated with Asher at the table, two eight-year-old girls, probably sisters, and two adults who must be his parents. His mother—the one who died from Alzheimer’s years after this moment. Dez studies the whole family like she’s cramming for a test.
His mother is beautiful, barefaced and ponytailed, tired, but not the way Dez’s mom looks tired. Asher’s mom looks tired in the way you might be after you come home from rewarding work only to cook a nice meal for your healthy family.
She also looks like Asher, or Asher looks like her. Gold skin. Gold hair. The same subtle bow shape at the top of their lips.
His father is darker, with glasses and an intellectual expression. The girls have sunburned noses, Asher’s eyes. One of them is sneaking her peas to the dog, whose tail curves up around the edge of the table like a periscope hunting for food.
There’s an empty chair at the table. As Dez stares at it, a clear, bright yearning rises in her. She wants to sit there. To fill the empty spot. She wants to pet the dog, pass the peas, know the girls’ names, answer his parents’ questions, and glimpse his bedroom. She wants to be far away from here, and most of all—
She wants him to look at her. Not through a camera lens, but into her actual eyes. Like he would if she were to walk into this house, this kitchen, into his life, right now.
Would he even want to see her, after she never returned his call?
How would she explain her life, her choices, these past few months?
She can’t answer that, so she keeps looking for the moment she and Asher intersected. She searches beach scenes, bar scenes, half-pipescenes, car scenes. She is as thorough as she has ever been. But Dez doesn’t find the afternoon they met. Try as she might, she sees no sign of a girl in a black dress coming up to Asher with a camera on her shoulder.
She isn’t there.
It’s like she never was.
“HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN Awhile,” Eri says to Dez that evening from behind the bar. Her silver cocktail shaker’s raised in the air, making the hummingbird tattoo above her neckline quiver as she mixes her concoction. “Was it something I slipped in your drink?”
“Not at all.” Dez smiles. “I like it here.”
Eri nods. “Dives always have the best atmosphere.”
Dez agrees. It’s been weeks since she’s been back to the chalet in the clouds. She’s longed for a night she wasn’t working late to come back here, for a wild evening at the bar with her roommates. She looks again in Eri’s dark, unusual mirror, seeing herself, but still not finding the bartender in the reflection.
As in Asher’s Lifeline, something’s missing. Something that should be there.
“I’ve just been …” she starts to say.
Eri raises an eyebrow. “Busy?” She slides forward a tray holding four drinks Dez didn’t order, each a different color, each in a different-shaped glass. “I’m glad you stayed, Desdemona. Once you ascend, Rafe’s not going to know what hit him.”
