by Rin Chupeco
I punched his chest, almost believing he would sit up and yell at me for the temerity. His body jerked up slightly from the force, then settled back down.
“You can’t,” I whimpered, burying my head against his bloodied shirt. He was dead. He’d been raised to hate me, but somehow I’d talked him into giving his life for me all the same. “Don’t leave me alone. You said you’re here to make sure I don’t trip into some damned hole or let some monster rip me to shreds, remember? You said I wasn’t going to survive on my own, and you were right! And now you’re going to leave me to fend for myself without you? You’re going to make me fall for you, and then pull this on me?” Another fresh wave of tears. I crawled up his body, cupped his face with my hands.
“Please,” I begged, pressing a kiss against his cheek. “Please look at me. Look at me when I tell you I’m in love with you. Yell at me for as long as you like, call me an idiot from here to Brighthenge and back. Just . . . let me tell you that I love you. Tell me you know that. Please.”
But there was nothing. And I knew then, in that bleak, horrifying moment, that he was gone.
I reached up and gently closed his eyes. Then I settled myself against his side, in much the same way I’d tucked myself against him for so many days as we crossed the desert, and cried until I had nothing left.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because when I woke the skies were darker than I first remembered. I was confused for a moment, staring straight up from my position on the ground. I had never been able to look right up into the sun before; it had hurt too much, and those who were both stubborn and reckless enough to persist irrevocably ruined their eyesight and eventually went blind.
Except the sun here wasn’t as hot as it was out east. I was used to it being in the center of the heavens, but the farther west we traveled, the lower it had descended behind us instead of hanging directly over our heads. A gradual darkness loomed up from the opposite direction, a faint suggestion of gray and black hues that told me somewhere farther toward the horizon was that phenomenon called night.
I could see faint wisps of smoke—clouds?—dragging through the air, drifting in the direction of the mountain.
I turned my head to look back at Arjun. Still caught in the fog before fully waking up, my first thought was that he was still asleep. He was still so warm to the touch. Then reality hit me, and a tight, horrible pain gripped my chest.
“We’re almost there, Arjun,” I whispered to him, gently pushing back some of the long hair that had fallen over his face. So close; we’d been so close to making it.
But I was still too tired. An attempt to summon a whisper of Air failed, and even that small act of gating made my head spin. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I had to make a choice. I had to bury Arjun somewhere, or perhaps cremate him, or find some way to bring him along for the rest of the journey.
But the thought of giving him back to the earth, of allowing buzzards and insects to consume the rest of him, brought another fresh wave of hurt. I was not yet strong enough to offer him the dignity of a quick burning, and it said much about my agonized mind that the third option sounded the most appealing, that bringing a corpse along with me actually sounded like the sanest, most sensible course of action.
A corpse. I began to cry again.
I hoisted his body back inside the rig and drove aimlessly for the next two hours, away from the stink of the dead scorpions, until I was too tired to drive any farther.
I was feeling cramped, so I dragged Arjun back out again, huddling with him against a large boulder. With nothing better to do, I watched the sky, taking in more peculiar features I’d never noticed before; the dark streaks of ash that stretched out in the horizon before us, a stark difference from the lighter tints of silver overhead. There I could make out the faint outlines of another shape that was as round as the sun, but with none of its heat.
“I’ve seen that before,” I whispered to Arjun, “in books. They called it a moon, and it acts like a light when the days are dark, to keep the world from complete blackness. The world no longer turns, but they say the moon still exists, although the sun’s too bright for us to see it in our part of the world. I would prefer the sun to its absence. Did anyone survive in this part of the world, I wonder? If we could live through the worst of the sun, I think some people must have survived the worst of the darkness, too. I would have gone out of my mind, living without light.”
I kissed his cheek again; his skin was cool, but it wasn’t as cold as I expected, and it made it easier to pretend. We’d replenished our water at the spring, so I dampened a fresh cloth and started to clean his face. I couldn’t stand for him to look so dirty.
“I think I love you,” I said again; if I said it enough times, perhaps somewhere out there his soul could hear me. “I can’t place exactly when or where it happened, but it crept up on me, the way I might read a book and know within the first few chapters I would fall in love with it before I’d reached the very end. Was it across the Sand Sea, when you were such a grouch to the dolugongs even when it became clear to me that you couldn’t stand to see them hurt? Or was it much later, when we were burying Parrick and you looked at me like . . . Or was it even earlier, when you found me sitting on the aspidochelone? When you told me you were going to kill me, but didn’t? I liked the look of you even then, and I was so mad when all you cared about was shooting me.”
I pressed another small kiss to the corner of his mouth, his death making me bolder, then drew away. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t know how to ask. You never seemed like you were interested, except maybe that day we buried Parrick, or at the hot spring, when you . . .” A sob found its way out of my throat as I moved the cloth down to his neck, pushing back his collar to clean as much of his skin as I could.
“I liked how you looked at me then. Like maybe you weren’t immune to me, either.”
I moved over him and pressed against his injured side again, wiping away what I could of the blood. “I would have liked to keep touching you,” I whispered, finally admitting out loud the one thing I’d refused to acknowledge that day. “And I think that’s why I ran. I didn’t want things to be weird between us, especially if I’d guessed wrong and you were never interested. But if I’d had more courage that day . . . I would have let you . . .”
A sudden rattling sound filled the air, and I leaped back in alarm. My first thought was that some new creature had stumbled into our makeshift camp. It had come from somewhere much closer—
From Arjun?
Still wary, I pressed my fingers tentatively against his chest. Was it my imagination, or could I feel, just barely, the very faintest of a heartbeat?
“Arjun?”
That odd deathlike rattle again. I was sure this time it had come from his mouth. I straddled him quickly, pressing my ear against his heart, battling a sudden surge of hope.
“Hai-dee.” It was my name, a barely understandable whisper. The muscles underneath me shifted, and Arjun grimaced twice before his eyes opened.
I couldn’t speak. We stared at each other for several long moments while my mind worked to produce thought. I opened my mouth.
I burst into tears.
“Idiot.” His voice was more croak than words, sandpapery to the ears. But he was talking, and he was breathing, and he was living, and oh sweet Mother, Arjun!
I fell on top of him, unintelligible sounds bursting from me as I babbled past my tears to try and form more coherent sentences.
He calmly waited until I was done and then spoke again, sounding stronger. “I heard you.”
No. That was impossible. I hadn’t thought about the whys and hows of his surviving just yet, but he’d had no heartbeat, and he hadn’t been breathing.
“Paralyzed,” he growled. “Damn scorpion . . .”
Oh. I’d read about animals who used paralyzing agents. I’d assumed poison but hadn’t thought about this possibility.
“Faded in and out,” he mumbled, “but
heard you most of the time.”
And then I realized what it was exactly that he had heard, and I turned beet red.
I felt him shift, his legs moving slightly and showing he was gaining back his mobility, though he was still sluggish. “Stop trying to get up!” I barked, struggling to hide my humiliation. He wasn’t supposed to know. There was no possible way he could have told me before now that he could hear me, but I felt betrayed all the same.
I stalked toward the rig and retrieved a small canteen full of water, returning and forcing him to drink some. “And stop talking.” I was embarrassed, but the last thing I wanted to do after his horrific ordeal was yell. “And stop squirming around.”
“No.”
My irritation grew. I welcomed the familiarity of it, the unexpected relief fighting him gave me. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve just returned from the dead, and I’ve got no patience for—”
His arms circled my waist, pressing me down against him. “I thought”—Arjun’s voice was deeper, a new raw timbre, but even that paled in comparison to the heat in his eyes as he looked up at me—“that you wanted to keep touching me.”
He’d never sounded like that before. Possessive and hoarse and wanting, and a million dark promises in those brown eyes. “Yes,” I whispered. It would have been pointless to deny it.
“Should’ve splayed you underneath me in the hot spring like I wanted, then.”
It was my turn to stop breathing.
His lips curved. With a strength I didn’t know he still had, he pulled me closer until his body covered mine, and then kissed me—fully, hungrily, roughly.
I gasped into his mouth, but it was like his near death had unleashed a hunger in Arjun I couldn’t comprehend. His hand roamed up my back, and his knee came up, carefully nudging my legs apart, so he could press himself more fully against me. A fresh jolt of excitement fizzled through my body, and I stifled another gasp.
“Yes, you sweet idiot.” He broke the kiss long enough to growl the words out at me. “Couldn’t move my blasted limbs, but there was one part of me that had no damn trouble this whole time.” His hands found my hair, fingers winding through the locks. “And your damn hair, you know that? Ruined me the first time I laid eyes on it.”
“I’m s-sorry,” I stammered, not sure what I was apologizing for.
He shifted me higher so he could start on my neck. “Gotten used to it. Waking up to see you curled beside me left me a mess most mornings anyway.”
“You mean—is that why you started sleeping outside the rig—”
“Why else? I thought I’d been rejected.” A new note entered his voice, quiet and teasing. “I even prayed to your damned mother while I was paralyzed, you know. I was so desperate that I prayed to your mother, and to you, that you wouldn’t bury me or set me on fire while I was still alive and helpless in my own body to stop it. And if I heard you right, you were more than willing to touch me more if I’d made my move back then. You gonna back down from those words, Your Holiness?”
A part of me wanted to, the part that was used to our constant fights and belittling, the part of me that had grown to enjoy our constant needling of each other. But I remembered the horror and the anguish of the last several hours, and while there was a lilting, cajoling cadence to his words, some of the wariness had returned to his eyes, like he wasn’t ready to believe I could announce this so easily to his face now that I knew he was alive.
“No, you idiot,” I breathed, and bent down to kiss him just as roughly as he had kissed me.
It took several minutes for the adrenaline to wear off and for Arjun’s strength to leave him again. “Damn it,” he snarled miserably, trying to move and only managing to lift his arms and legs an inch off the ground. “This isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little funny.” I wasn’t quite at peak health either, but I managed to dump his sorry ass in the back seat of the rig, where he could lounge around the larger space, with the bags that had survived our journey as his makeshift cushions. “Comfy?”
Arjun responded with a grunt, and some faint rustling as he struggled to find a better position. “We can start driving tomorrow,” he said roughly. “Come here.”
Obediently, I crawled over to him, snuggled against his uninjured side. Arjun hadn’t wanted anything for his wound, but I’d wrapped a fresh piece of cloth over it anyway, so as not to risk any infections. I’d also taken a look at his chest, worried that I’d gone overboard with my attempts to resuscitate him, but beyond his complaints of a faint soreness, nothing seemed to be broken.
He kissed me again. “It was the damned whale,” he said quietly. “I think I wanted you almost from the moment you looked down your nose at me from atop that aspidochelone of yours, with those stunning bright eyes. It made me angry.”
“As early as that?”
He shrugged. “You were right. I had no reason to follow you out here. I could explain away the mirage if I really wanted to, and Mother Salla wouldn’t have forced me to go. But I couldn’t walk away and see you hurt. And I knew for a fact you had no head for danger or anything remotely sensible—”
I punched him lightly on the arm. “I wasn’t that naive.”
“Naive enough that I wanted to protect you anyway.” He looked away. “Kept pushing it aside until the Liangzhu,” he admitted roughly. “When I thought you’d died at the Sand Sea—I thought I was going to lose my mind. When I saw that Sonfei had saved you, I wanted to kiss him for it and at the same time punch him because I thought he was going to keep you prisoner.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him that if we ever meet again,” I teased lightly, and he shot me a sour look. “I . . . I thought you’d rejected me.”
He laughed dryly. “I’d thought you’d rejected me. You ran like you couldn’t wait to be as far away from me as possible.”
I blushed. “I was seeing more of you than I knew I should. A lot more. I didn’t know how to react.”
He snaked an arm around me. “Was that . . . did you ever, uh, kiss anyone before . . . ?”
I flushed harder. “You know I didn’t. But I know you did.”
A pause. “Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “As I said, nothing serious. I liked Lisette well enough, but we never wanted something permanent.”
“Why did she move away?”
He sighed. “Hellmakers raided their camp. Wiped out half of them; she was one of the few to get out. They had to leave for somewhere safer, but we never heard from them again after that.” He didn’t say anything more, and I understood, leaning my head against him. It explained why his hatred for the Hellmakers extended beyond their just being cannibals.
“I suppose,” he said finally, “that once you get back to the city, your mother’s going to want to foist one of those lordlings on you.”
“I have a choice.”
“Somehow, I don’t think a desert boy’s gonna make it through the official selection process.”
“I don’t care. I’m not interested in anyone else.”
“Not even your Vanya?”
“Are you jealous?”
He scowled. Sweet Mother, he was.
I couldn’t stop grinning. “He’s nice, but too refined for my tastes. I like rude guys.”
He snorted. “You know we’re gonna have to deal with it sooner or later.”
“I know. I don’t want to deal with it now, though.”
“Fair enough.”
“But if Mother knows that—that I like someone else, she might . . .”
His laughter grew louder. “She’d have my head on a stake is the more likely possibility.”
“I won’t return until she accepts you. Your clan will have to take me in.”
“They’ll be more welcoming of you than your mother will be of me, at least.” He stroked my hair. “Are you sure, Haidee? I can’t offer much. You deserve better things.”
“I’ve had better things, and I don’t want them. I want to—” It was clear that neither of us were in any shape fo
r anything, but I turned red all the same.
“You deserve more than a fumble in the back of a rig, Haidee. You deserve a real bed, at least, and a good several hours for me to explore you proper. Or maybe we ought to head back to that hot spring and do it right this time. Unconsecrate the waters.” He grinned cockily. “Blushing again?”
“Go to sleep!” I shot back, trying to ignore the lightning bolt that had fizzled through my core at his words, and tapped him on the head with a book for good measure. He laughed and kissed me some more, but exhaustion was quick to take over and soon he was fast asleep. It took me longer to follow suit.
Things changed in the days that followed. I fixed the wheel with some metal scraps and we resumed our trek heading west, but now that there were no more secrets between us, we were prone to touching each other, and kissing often. Most of the paralyzing poison was out of Arjun’s body by the next day, and his staggered steps and clumsy movements evened out the day after that, until he could walk and drive the rig like he used to. I insisted on doing most of the driving, because his hands still spasmed every now and then and his grip trembled when he tried to line up a shot, to gauge his accuracy.
Without the barrier of secrets between us, I was surprised and thrilled by how affectionate Arjun truly was. Every now and then he would throw looks my way when he thought I wouldn’t see, making me ache with strange sensations. We hadn’t talked about the spring since he’d woken, and there was an unspoken agreement between us that it would be a matter to deal with after we’d reached Brighthenge.
There was . . . a lot of kissing. Making out. Hours when we should be sleeping, instead of stretching out side by side, my insides turning to mush wherever his fingers trailed.
I couldn’t stop touching him.
But despite his suggestive promises, Arjun was going slowly, a source of both gratitude and frustration for me. Did I want him to go further? I didn’t want to rush things. I knew he was right. But sometimes logic fell to the wayside whenever he was within lip distance.