Page 46 of Property of Prophet

“And I don’t know what I’m going to be when it’s done.”

Her eyes stay on mine. “Neither do I.”

That stops me.

“Five years ago I knew exactly who I was,” she says. “Look how well that worked out.”

“Lily—”

“Stop trying to give me an informed consent speech.”

I stare at her. “Occupational hazard.”

“I’m aware.”

“Lily, I need you to know what you’re choosing.”

She gets up and comes around the table. “I do.”

“You don’t know everything.”

“Neither do you.” She’s standing between my knees now. “Still here.”

I should sleep.

The call and the conversation with Lily took what little I had left from last night, and two days is not long, and rest is logistics. I know all of this.

Instead, I lie on the bed and let myself have what I haven’t had since I woke in this cabin.

Not the grief of losing something I didn’t choose to lose. The other kind. The grief that comes when you loved a thing fully and chose to leave it anyway, and you’re only now sitting still long enough to feel the shape of the leaving.

The wings, not their absence. I can’t feel the absence. There’s nothing left to remind me of the space they occupied, the fall burning all of that clean. What I grieve is the fact of them. The weight, the movement, and the absolute, specific joy of being made for something enormous and having the capacity to do it. The choir. The certainty that ran in my veins the way blood runs in the body, not faith, not aspiration, but knowledge, clean and structural, the way a bone knows what it’s for. I knew what I was for, and I loved what I was for. I haven’t let myself think about that part until now, because thinking about it and surviving it seemed like different operations.

I let the full measure of it come with no resistance.

It comes quietly, the way Lily said things come that matter to her. I lie here in the cut and the afternoon light through the west window, and I grieve the angel I was, and I don’t turn away from it.

Tessa’s face is still there when I’m done. Still alive, still real.

I would make the same choice. Without hesitation, without regret, without anything changing. The grace was mine to spend. I spent it on the best thing I could find, a life that would have ended wrong. I would reach back through every consequence of that choice and make it again.

At the end of it, the crater, the fall, weeks learning to exist in a diminished body in a wilderness that doesn’t negotiate. Then there is Lily. Her cabin, her stove. Bear’s solid warmth against the foot of this bed. The knot I showed her for the supply ropes, and the soup she made from the venison. The sat phone on the table, and the cut on my shoulders.

I don’t wish myself back.

Not once.

Not even the part of me that knows exactly what it gave up.

The light through the window has moved by the time the bed shifts.

Lily doesn’t announce herself. She doesn’t need to. I heard her at the shelves. Heard the sat phone case click open and shut as she checked the battery. The particular sound of a woman running through her logistics for the days ahead and finding them in order. She crosses to her side of the bed and sits on the edge with her back to me.

I watch her pull her hair loose from its tie. The auburn of it falls to her shoulders, longer than I expected the first time I saw it down. Lily works her boots off and sets them precisely beside the bed, lined up the way she lines everything up. Some people arrange the world to manage anxiety. Lily arranges it because she’s thought about the most efficient configuration and implemented it.

There’s a difference, though I’m not sure anyone else would see it.

Lily turns.