“Ora?”
My name on his lips sounded different than it did on anybody else’s. I wondered what it would sound like if he whispered it—there, against my lips.
My heart did that thing it kept doing lately—the skipping, the falling, the starting up again too fast, too eagerly.
“Can I come in?” I said without really planning to.
A pause. Then, “Yes,” he said—in that same way: too fast, too eagerly.
He pulled the door open and stepped aside, and my heart flipped for a whole other reason now before I went in—the floor of his room was made out of glass.
Thick, cloudy glass, through which you could see the shadows of massive gears in the darkness beneath, coming in and out of smooth, gray rocks. Red light pulsed up through it from somewhere far below, dim and warm. Whatever machinery was under there wasn’t moving, but I almostsawhow it looked when it did.
It was like looking through a window into the guts of a sleeping animal.
“Do you mind?” March said when he noticed my hesitation. “We can go someplace else if?—”
“No, it’s fine.” I stepped inside before I gave myself more time to think. I liked to jump headfirst into what I feared and then deal with the aftermath later. It usually worked out, since the alternative was complete paralysis.
And the glass held.
I was still wearing those sneakers, but I could have sworn I felt the cold surface right against my feet as I took one step after the other and stopped in the middle of the room.
A narrow cot was against the wall on the right, a basin with a round mirror hanging over it on the left, and a chair where March had put his jacket, his old boots by the legs. The room was even smaller than mine.
“I woke you,” I said when the sound of the door closing echoed in my head, and I had the overwhelming desire to kill the silence dead.
“You didn’t.” A step closer to me, then two.
I looked up at him, ignored the way my heart pounded because of the floor underneath my feet. It was going to start pounding for a whole different reason any second now, anyway.
“You should be sleeping,” he then said.
“So should you.” He didn’t look like he’d been asleep, though. Yes, his eyes were swollen, and those lips were slowly becoming the center of my universe, but he looked wide awake, March.
He smiled, just a little. That one corner of his lips curled up.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed, patted the gray sheets next to him and said, “Sit.”
I did.
And I was absolutely right—my heartwaspounding for acompletely different reason now that our shoulders were touching.
We were sitting on a bed, and we were close, and we werealone.
We’d never been alone before.
Together we stared at the gears below the glass floor but didn’t really see them. We just…caught our breaths, which fell into the same rhythm, like our lungs were friends already.
“I keep thinking,” he finally said. “About everything they said. About…who I was.”
“Me too.” That’s why sleeping was impossible.
“The way they talked.” March flinched. “They sounded so…sure. Like all of that had really happened. Like I really had been…that person.”
The person who pretty much hadclaimedme, according to Silas, since day one. And he’d said it so easily:“Then there was March, who claimed Ora from the beginning, and let the whole world know,”to which Master Kohen had smiled and nodded too many times, and said, “Yes, yes—backward, too!”
Something about being told things like that. Something about beingspoken aboutwithout any memories of it that tried to turn my mind inside out.
