“Was there something else, or. .”
She turned her stare at the hut’s door, looked at it for a moment. When she turned back to Denaos, her face was a hard, iron mask. “Why not just kill her?”
“What?”
“Go in there and open her throat.” She scowled at the door. “She’s too dangerous to leave alive.”
“Granted, but that’s not for us to decide. Lenk thinks she still might have-”
“Lenk doesn’t know them,” she snarled, whirling on him. “He thinks they’re savages. The only reason he hates them is that they’re more longfaced than his little savage. I know them.” She jabbed a thumb at her chest. “I know what they’re capable of. I know what they do. I know how foul and utterly-”
“You think I don’t?” he interjected. “You think I haven’t seen what they’ve done?”
“I don’t think anything about you,” she said. “I know you, too. I know you’re scum.”
He knew why she knew, too. Just as he knew he couldn’t deny it.
“And I know that you know nothing about them.” She turned on him now, turned a face cold and trembling upon him. “Because you came too late to stop it from happening. Because you did nothing to stop it from happening and because you. . you. .”
Asper was an honest woman. Too honest to survive, he had once thought. Her face wasn’t made for masks. Her face fragmented with each moment it trembled, cracking and falling off to reveal eyes that weren’t as cold as she wanted them to be. There was fire there, and honest hate.
“Everything. . everything that happened to me, what Sheraptus. .” She winced at the name, clenched her teeth. “He violated me. . and then. . then, my arm-” Her face trembled so violently he had to fight the urge to reach out and steady her. “And with it all, after all the secrets about it and all that happened with him, I thought at least I had you, at least I had someone to. .”
A curse would have been nice. Spitting in his eye would have been workable, too. The sigh she let out, though, was less than ideal.
“I needed you. . and you shoved me away, like I was. . like I was unclean. Trash. And now you won’t even look at me.”
And Denaos wasn’t looking at her now. He was looking at her forehead, at the hut door, at the sand and the unbearable sun. Her eyes were too hard to look at, too shiny, too clear; he might see himself in them.
“You don’t need me.”
“You’re the only one who knows this,” she grabbed at her arm, “any of this. Do you have any idea how long I’ve-”
“Yes.” He looked at her now. “Yes, I know what it’s like to wait that long. And yes, I know what happened to you and I know what’s happening to you.”
“Then why won’t you?”
“Because I’ve seen it before.” He clutched his head. “I know why you threw yourself at me because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen women, children, people get torn apart like you did. I’ve seen them carry worse things and think that they have go into the arms of someone, anyone, just to tell it. But it can’t be anyone, Asper, and it can’t be me.”
Not entirely true. There was a lot she could tell him, a lot he needed to tell her. But what, he did not know. How exactly a man went about telling a woman he had seen what women do after being violated because he had watched it happen was beyond him. He neglected to tell her that. That, he reasoned, was slightly better than lying.
“I am not a good man. I am not what you need.”
She stared at him for a moment. He never saw the blow coming. It was only after she had struck him, sent him reeling, that he admitted she might be better with masks than he thought.
“No one tells me what I need,” she said. “Certainly not a man hiding cowardice behind more cowardice.”
She stalked off silently, swiftly, leaving him alone with his conscience.
Could have gone better.
True, he admitted.
She might hit you less if you actually talked to her, you know.
That sounds really hard.
Good point. Want a drink?
Wanted one, yes. Needed one, yes. He needed many things at that moment. The most important of which became apparent when he looked back, toward the distant huts and the figure standing amongst them.
Bralston stood out in the open, unabashed, unafraid. A Librarian did not need to hide. This Librarian, however, didn’t bother to hide many things. The stare he fixed upon Denaos among them.
Denaos, too, did not bother to hide his stare. In the moment they met, the brief moment before Denaos turned and stalked into the distant forest, there was a brief trial. Accusation, confession, sentence, all handed down in the span of a blink.
And Denaos knew what he needed most, then. In the feel of heavy leather on his wrist and in the sound of feet crunching upon sand, following him into the forest, he knew.
This, at least, would be easier.
FOUR
She was floating, drifting upon a current that seemed to obey her without a word. Through the fish that had thinned from colorful curtains to ragged schools, over coral that was dying out and becoming barren desert underneath Lenk’s feet, still stubbornly bound to the sandy floor.
But no matter how he changed his pace or tried to navigate through the coral, she remained always above him. Her shadow was colder than he had expected.
“You’re not talking,” he said.
A condition she was apparently not prepared to break with his stunning observation.
“If you don’t talk, this all seems slightly more insane,” Lenk continued, throwing up his hands. “Because now I have to start looking for meaning everywhere.”
He swept his stare around the sea floor. The coral had vanished, leaving nothing but the most stubborn outcroppings of rock. The sole fish was a lone, ragged creature: something that vaguely looked like a bloated axe-head if bloated axe-heads were capable of eating disorders and stares that belonged to veterans, whores, and herb-addicts. Everything about the creature suggested something that had no business existing and being keenly aware of it as it slowly swam away from decent sea-going society.
Lenk blinked, staring blankly. “Okay, this one is going to take some doing.” He held out his hand, as if to grasp the meaning implied by this finned degenerate. “All right. . it looks like a. . what? Some kind of hoe? So, it’s suggesting I invest a future of farming. . fish?” He furrowed his brow, looking thoughtful. “I guess that’s not the weirdest way this could-”
“Ask me.”
Her voice struck him across the cheek. A shadow stared down at him, not nearly dark enough to hide the merciless blue of her stare.
His words tasted like salt. “Ask you what?”
Her glare and the abrupt end to his heartbeat suggested they both knew the answer. It didn’t start again until the words had pulled themselves from his mouth.
“Who are you?”
She shook her head. His heart moved under her gaze, trying to avoid being seen behind an immodest curtain of flesh. He wanted to say anything else. If he didn’t say it, though, someone else would.
And they would speak much louder than she could.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“Kill.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I wasn’t talking about your friends.”
“Neither was I.”
She looked inside him. What she saw caused him to turn his head down. He was not lying.
“You listened,” she whispered, “to the demons.”