Page 184

A short, disbelieving sound escapes me. “Yet you have done so to me.”

His gaze holds mine. “As I said before, you are not as the others are.”

I feel, with sudden weariness, how little use it is to argue with a truth I had already suspected.

At last I say, “You’re right. You ask a great deal of me.”

“I know, but some truths do not arm the soul. They only burden it before it is ready.”

I look back out over the black water.

Then, because there’s nothing else to do, I give him the only answer left.

“You have my word.”

The night takes it and gives nothing back. Wind comes off the sea in sharp, punishing gusts, dragging at my coat and setting the grass whispering over the cliff. Below, the waves strike hard enough to sound like stone splitting, white spray leaping up through the dark before disappearing again. There’s nothing gentle in any of it. Not the water. Not the cold. Not the road I can already feel narrowing beneath my feet.

Woven through all of that is another thought, meaner for how little use it is—that if this burden had rested with me alone, I’d have borne it more gladly. It sits ill in me that James and Alex must now hazard their lives because I once made a vow in haste and set some old machine of fate grinding into motion. I know well enough the oath was larger than me long before I touched it. Reason has little use of guilt, and mine has sharp teeth.

I ought to feel only dread. Instead, what rises strongest in me is a grim, terrible steadiness. As though the world, for all its menace, has finally stopped circling and put its hand squarely on my shoulder.

Mannie breaks into that thought so precisely it nearly feels as though he heard it.

“One more promise, Robert.”

Something in his tone has me looking at him again at once.

“When you learn the day of your death,” he says, “you must act no differently than you did the day before.”

I go so still it feels unnatural.

No part of that sounds like guesswork.

Mannie only watches me, and in his stillness it’s made plain enough that I didn’t misunderstand.

My throat feels too tight. “Do you⁠—”

“No,” he says, before I can finish it. “Not the day. But I suspect you may not walk blind toward it as other men do. And if that knowing ever comes, I need to believe you will not let it unmake you before its hour.”

I say nothing.

The sea continues to collide into the rocks again and again, as though trying to break something imperishable.

Mannie steps nearer, not close enough to crowd me, only enough that I can feel the force of his meaning before he speaks it.

“And I want you to promise me that if that day ever comes to you—by instinct, by vision, by whatever may stir in you now—you will not begin to live as though a part of you is already gone.”

My chest goes tight at that, because it comes too close to a truth I have never said aloud—that some part of me has long thought of my life as expendable.

With a tenderness so unlike him, he rests a hand on my shoulder.

“I know the world sits hard on you right now, harder than it has any right to, but promise me you will try to live like you are dying, Robert,” he says quietly, “not like you are already dead.”

For all the dread of this night, there’s a strange comfort in being seen so clearly by him. Mannie may understand me better than most ever have.

At last I manage, “That sounds a harder promise than the first.”

A sad sort of understanding passes over his face.