Esther looked troubled, but didn’t press. “I’ll order champagne,” she said, “to celebrate your victory. I only wish you could be here to drink it with us.”
Eliza, all the while, sat staring.
“You’ll see to it she gets some help?” Karou asked Zuzana and Mik. “After we’re gone?”
Zuzana’s face immediately took on a hard set and she wouldn’t meet Karou’s eyes, but Mik nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have enough to worry about.”
He understood, if Zuzana didn’t, why things had to be this way. He had reminded her himself, several times, on the way here. “Remember how we’re not samurai in even the smallest way?” he’d asked. “We can’t help with this. We’d only weigh Virko down and get in the way. And if there’s more fighting…”
He hadn’t elaborated.
“Thank you,” Karou said, with one last, helpless look at Eliza. “I know it’s a lot to leave you with, but I showed you how to access money. Please, use it. For her, for you. Anything you need.”
“Money,” Zuzana muttered, as though it were worse than useless, an insult.
Karou turned to her. “If there’s anything for you to come back to,” she promised, hating the ifas though the word itself were her enemy, “I’ll find a way to come get you.”
“How? You’re going to close the portal.”
“We have to, but there are more portals. I’ll find them.”
“What, you’ll have time to be hunting for portals?”
“I don’t know.” It was a refrain. I don’t know what we’ll find when we get back. I don’t know if there will be any hope left to work with in all the world. I don’t know how I’ll find another portal. I don’t know if I’ll be alive. I don’t know.
Zuzana, her hard expression unchanged, tipped her head forward in a kind of slow-motion collision that Karou didn’t recognize for a hug until, at the last minute, her friend’s arms went around her. “Be safe,” Zuzana whispered. “No heroics. If you have to save yourself, do it, and come back here. Both of you. All three of you. We can make Virko a human body or something. Just promise me, if you get there and everyone’s…” She didn’t say it. Dead.“You’ll just keep out of sight and come back here and live.”
Karou couldn’t promise that, as Zuzana must have known, because she didn’t give her a chance to answer, but plowed ahead with, “Good. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to hear,” as though a promise had been given. Karou returned her hug, hating good-byes like she’d hated the if, and then there was nothing left to do but go.
MY SWEET BARBARIAN
Cleanliness, at last. Mik and Zuzana took turns in the bathroom, so that one of them could sit with Eliza, while also keeping a vigil for breaking angel news. The TV was on low, and Esther’s laptop was open with several feeds constantly refreshing, but nothing had happened yet, and wouldn’t be likely to for a while
Karou, Zuzana knew, had a stop to make before the Vatican: the Museo Civico di Zoologia. It was a natural history museum, and there had been a calm defiance in her when she declared her intention to go there. It had half broken Zuzana’s heart, knowing what it was for—to replenish her store of teeth, in case souls had been saved, at least, in the battle—and that she wouldn’t be there to help, whatever it was they found when they got back to Eretz.
Damned helplessness. Zuzana sensed a T-shirt design coming on.
BE A SAMURAI.
BECAUSE YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WHAT’S BEHIND
THE FREAKING SKY.
No one would understand it, but who cares? She’d just glare at them until they went away. That worked in almost any situation.
No, she chided herself. It did not. Because if it did, there would be no need to be a samurai, would there?
She looked at Eliza, beside her, and sighed. Eliza didn’t seem to need or register company, but the idea of leaving her alone in the corner like a piece of softly murmuring furniture just didn’t sit right. Zuzana was no nurse, and had no instincts for it, but she was mindful that the young woman needed someone to take care of her basic human needs for her—food and drink just for starters—and she was more docile now, at least, whatever Akiva had done. Less agitated, and that made it easier.
What they were going to do about her after today, Zuzana couldn’t think about right now. Tomorrow was soon enough. When all the tension of today was a thing of the past, and they’d had a full night’s sleep in an actual bed, and a meal that had never even been on the same continent as couscous.
Tomorrow.
But for now, it was good to be clean. It felt like rebirth—Venus emerging from a layer of crud—and the clothes Esther’s shopper had chosen were elegant and understated, of fine materials and nearly a perfect fit. Zuzana’s filthy stuff, zebra sneakers included, she’d stacked neatly and wrapped in several layers of plastic bags; it felt like a betrayal, especially after her old shoes sat next to her new ones on the floor and she got the idea that they were being forced to train their replacements. She scuffs a bit, they’d tell the new leather numbers, fond tears seeping from their rheumy old-shoe eyes. And she stands on tiptoe a lot, so be ready for that.
“Sentimental of you,” Mik had commented when she came back into the sitting room and shoved the bundle into her backpack.
“Not at all,” she’d airily declared. “I’m saving them for the Museum of Otherworldly Adventure that I’m going to found. Exhibit title: ‘What not to wear camping in freezing mountains while forging an alliance between enemy armies.’ ”
“Uh-huh.”
Mik, taking his turn in the bathroom, felt no such sentimentality for his dirty clothes. He was happy to drop them in the trash, though before he could do that, he fished furtively into the pocket of his old jeans and withdrew…
… the ring.
The maybe-silver, maybe-antique ring he’d been in the act of purchasing when the world went crazy. He turned it over in his fingers, looking at it closely for the first time since. Zuzana was always in proximity (and thank god for that); he hadn’t had a chance to take it out. It seemed to him a rough thing now, especially in the context of this ridiculous hotel. Back at Aït Benhaddou it had fit right in: primitive and tarnished, maybe a little lopsided. Here it looked like something that had fallen off a Visigoth’s pinkie during the Sack of Rome. Barbarian jewelry.
Perfect.
For my sweet barbarian, he thought, and as he went to tuck it into the pocket of his posh new Italian trousers, he fumbled and it spun from his fingers. It rang against the marble floor and rolled like it was trying to escape. Mik followed, thinking maybe it was real silver after all, because supposedly real silver makes that chime sound, and then it escaped into a three-finger gap beneath the marble vanity.
“Come back here,” he whispered. “I have plans for you.”
He dropped to his knees to grope for it as, in the sitting room, his sweet barbarian held water to Eliza Jones’s ever-murmuring lips to coax her to drink, and, in the smaller bedroom in the back of the suite, with the door closed and music playing to mask her voice, Esther Van de Vloet made a phone call.
It wasn’t an easy phone call for her to make, but the most that could be said in her defense was that she had hoped not to make it. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, and though a shadow of her true age may have haunted her face, no indecision did. She forced out a harsh breath and got on with it.