Chapter 167 The Place Beside Me

When I woke, my left arm belonged to Sera.

I could see it. I couldn't feel most of it.

She was asleep with her cheek against my shoulder and one hand curled in the front of my shirt. Luna lay on my other side, facing the window. Risa had drawn her blanket up almost to her nose, with her injured ankle safely beyond the reach of anyone who turned over badly.

The stripe of light had moved across the floor.

I watched it for a while.

Nothing was falling. Nobody was calling my name.

There was a cup on the table and a curtain that needed one more stitch and three women asleep within reach of me.

I hadn't known a person could be so happy while losing the use of an arm.

Sera opened her eyes first.

She looked at me, then at the hand she had trapped beneath her.

“How long?”

“Not very.”

“Can you feel your fingers?”

“Some of them are making suggestions.”

She shifted carefully and lifted my wrist.

The feeling came back with unnecessary enthusiasm.

I made a noise.

Risa opened one eye.

“If something is on fire, put it out quietly.”

“Nothing's on fire,” Sera said.

“Good.”

The eye closed again.

Luna turned toward us, still half asleep, and put her hand against my chest as though checking I hadn't gone somewhere.

I covered it with mine.

The fingers that worked, anyway.

She smiled without quite opening her eyes.

We got up in stages.

Risa needed help arranging the ankle before she moved. Sera wanted water. Luna discovered she'd slept on the folded corner of her jacket and had a mark across one cheek that she refused to believe was there.

I was apparently not a reliable witness because I was smiling.

By the time we were sitting up, somebody had left food outside the door.

A covered pot. Four bowls.

A note in Liam's hand said that if we were planning to sleep through another meal, he needed advance warning because romance was making the cooking quantities difficult.

Sera read it aloud.

Then turned the paper over and wrote that he could practice counting by adding Anja to wherever he expected to sit.

Luna laughed into her cup.

I hadn't heard her laugh that often in one room before.

I wanted to keep earning the sound without making that another job.

The mattresses stayed where they were while we ate.

Nobody began rolling them up automatically.

Eventually Risa looked at the floor, then at all of us.

“I don't want to put mine away yet.”

Sera set down her bowl.

“Neither do I.”

Luna glanced at me.

I said, “I'd like you to stay.”

“All of us?” Risa asked.

She was teasing a little.

Not entirely.

“All of you.”

Luna looked toward the window.

Then back at the mattresses.

“I'd like that.”

It was a quieter conversation than I'd imagined something important ought to be.

No speech. No decision about the rest of our lives that we had to make while eating reheated soup.

We wanted another night.

That was enough to arrange another night.

We moved the table first.

Not far. Enough that a person could get to the door without stepping over two people and apologizing to a third.

I made a low support for the mattresses, in separate pieces that could be moved if we changed our minds about the room. Sera checked the joins from her seat. Risa pointed out the corner I would inevitably catch with my bad leg.

Luna asked where the water would go.

I put a little shelf within reach.

Sera inspected it and nodded with great seriousness.

“A cup could survive there.”

“That was the intention.”

“Your intentions have not always helped the cups.”

Risa laughed.

We kept the chair by the window and the clear space beside the drawing table. It still felt like a room people could spend a day in, not a bed with walls squeezed around it.

When we were done, Luna stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.

Then she came back inside and put her jacket on the hook she'd chosen.

Toby came to check Risa's ankle after lunch.

He asked whether she wanted us there.

She said we could stay unless I began making the expression again.

I tried to look like someone who had never had an expression.

Toby examined the swelling, listened to what hurt, and told her what he thought the next few days should look like.

Rest. Support. No proving she could cross camp because she was tired of asking for things.

She looked at me when he said that.

“That was for you,” Toby told her.

“I was sharing.”

He smiled and checked the wrapping.

Outside, Wren called to ask where he wanted the clean cloth.

“On the shelf by my bed,” he answered.

Then stopped.

She appeared in the doorway, holding the bundle.

“Which shelf?”

“The left one.”

“The one with the shirt you've washed three times?”

Toby went red.

Sera became very interested in her cup.

Wren set the cloth down and waited while he finished.

She didn't hover over him. Didn't offer to take the case before he'd closed it. Just leaned against the doorway with the comfortable attention of somebody who had chosen to be there.

When he stood, she held out her hand.

He took it.

It was such a plain thing that it made me smile.

Toby saw.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Risa made a doubtful noise.

Toby looked from her to me, then back at Wren.

“We're together,” he said.

The words surprised him slightly. I could see it.

Wren's fingers tightened around his.

“Yes,” she said. “We are.”

Nobody cheered.

Nobody made it an announcement for the whole camp.

Sera said she was glad, and Luna smiled at them, and I told Toby I was glad too.

He looked pleased enough to have survived a much larger ceremony.

Wren took him away before Liam could find out and supply one.

Risa watched the empty doorway.

“He looks happy.”

“He is,” I said.

“I know. I like seeing it.”

So did I.

For a long time, I'd thought of Toby with his notebook open and somebody else's pain in front of him. Even after he'd survived, I'd kept watching for the next thing that might take him away.

Wren had offered him an evening without the records.

Now he had a hand to hold on the way back from work.

I looked down at Risa's hand beside mine.

She turned it over before I asked.

I took it.

Later, Luna brought the western route map.

She stopped outside the door first.

“Is now all right?”

Risa nodded and cleared a place on the table.

The map wasn't an instruction to return to the broken path. It was an attempt to stop treating every journey as if it had to begin again with somebody finding out where the ground failed.

Corr had marked the upper route he and Ilse had used. Ossa's older line lay beneath it in a different color. The new runoff cut crossed both at an angle nobody had drawn before the storm.

Risa looked at the marks for a while.

Then moved the pencil to the place where she'd fallen.

“The edge looked dry here. That's what fooled me.”

Luna wrote that beside it.

I wanted to tell Risa she hadn't been foolish.

Instead, I let her finish explaining what she'd seen.

It mattered more than getting my reassurance onto the page.

We needed a better crossing.

Not an enormous road made in one afternoon because I'd been frightened.

A route that stayed above the runoff where it could. A supported section where there was no good way around. Marks a person could follow when the ground was wet and the light was bad.

A place to wait out weather before it became an emergency.

Sera drew a simple shelter beside the map.

Open front. Raised floor. A roof that drained away from the entrance.

“Somewhere you don't have to sleep beneath your transport,” she said.

Risa glanced at me.

“There were compensations.”

Sera raised an eyebrow.

I felt my face warm.

Luna looked between us and smiled, then pointed to the sketch.

“We should still build the roof.”

“Yes,” Risa said. “We should.”

Holt came in to look at the route.

He stood in the doorway, took in the low bed, the cups, and the four of us around the table.

Then asked whether anyone had thought of putting a shelf beside the shelter drawing.

“For supplies?” Luna asked.

“For a cup. People will use it, you know.”

Sera added one.

He nodded approval.

We showed him the crossing.

He knew one part of the old approach. Not the new cut. He marked what he remembered and told us not to give a memory the authority of a fresh look.

Then he sat in the chair and described the way water could come around the far ridge without rain falling on the camp at all.

Risa listened closely.

When he'd finished, she asked whether he'd come on the next survey once her ankle was ready.

“Yes,” he said. “On the broad route. You can have Corr do the scrambling.”

I wrote his name beside the plan.

He had things to do next week.

I liked seeing them on paper.

That evening, I began a letter to Mother.

Not the first letter I'd written without a way to send it. There were others in the chest, with folds worn soft by being checked and put away.

But this one was different.

I wrote that we had a room.

Then crossed out we and began naming who I meant.

Seraphina. Risa. Luna.

I looked at the names for a long time.

Sera sat beside the window with the curtain in her lap. The last few stitches had somehow become a task she intended to win an argument with.

“Difficult part?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you like help?”

“I don't know.”

She put down the needle.

“Tell me what you're trying to say.”

I looked at her.

“That I'm happy.”

She smiled gently.

“Then start there.”

I did.

Mother,

I'm happy. Not every minute, and not because everything here is easy. But there are people I love, and they love me, and I want you to know their names when I tell you about home.

I stopped.

Sera read only what I turned toward her.

Then rested her hand on the back of my neck.

“That sounds like you.”

“I thought you'd tell me it was awkward.”

“It is a little.”

“Thank you.”

“So are you. I love you anyway.”

I pulled her close enough to kiss her.

The paper waited.

For once, that didn't make me feel as though I'd abandoned something important.

Risa wanted to know whether I was going to describe her as sensible.

“Sometimes.”

“Don't. She'll meet me eventually and think you've lied about everything else.”

Luna looked up from the book she'd brought from her shelter.

“What are you going to say about me?”

I looked at the page.

Then at her.

“That you make me feel less alone when I have to decide something.”

She became very still.

Risa stopped smiling.

I hadn't meant to make the room quiet.

“And that you laugh more than you think you do,” I added.

Luna's eyes lowered.

After a moment, she said, “You can write that.”

Sera squeezed my shoulder.

I wrote it before I lost the courage to say anything else properly.

I wrote about Risa next.

The way she could hear something in my answer that I hadn't admitted was there. How she liked making me laugh at exactly the moment I'd begun taking myself too seriously.

How she was frightened sometimes and told me, and expected me to tell her too.

“That's better,” Risa said.

“Than sensible?”

“Much.”

For Sera, I wrote about the forge and the way she looked at a broken thing until she understood why it had broken.

Then I stopped and added that she could sit beside me without asking me to explain myself, but would not let me disappear into silence forever just because I found it easier.

Sera read that part twice.

She didn't say anything.

She kissed the top of my head and went back to the curtain.

A little later, she put it down again and sat beside me instead.

I didn't send the letter with the next packet just because I'd written it.

There was no next packet yet.

And we still had no confirmation that anything Ruan had taken reached the families whose names were on the outside.

I folded it and wrote Mother's name.

Risa watched me.

“Keep a copy?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I put it beside the other letters to be copied when I was ready.

It didn't make the distance smaller.

It made the thing waiting to cross it more true.

We ate late.

Liam brought the pot because, he said, we had become impossible to find even though we'd moved approximately the length of a rope from where we'd been before.

Anja came with him.

She carried the bowls, and he moved a stool for her before putting the pot down.

Sera watched that with open interest.

Liam pointed at her.

“No.”

“I haven't said anything.”

“You're related to me. I can hear it preparing.”

Anja looked at him.

“What is she going to say?”

“That I'm being an idiot.”

“Are you?”

He considered this.

Then, unexpectedly, looked straight at her.

“Probably. Would you have supper with me tomorrow? Somewhere I can be one without quite so many witnesses.”

She smiled.

“Yes.”

He stared for a moment, as though he'd prepared several difficult answers and she'd chosen one that wasn't on the list.

“Good,” he said.

“Very good,” Sera murmured into her cup.

Liam pretended not to hear.

On Day 470, we chose the first part of the route to improve.

Close enough that I could work after Sera's treatment and return without turning the day into another expedition. Far enough above the runoff that the new shelter wouldn't become a thing people had to escape from.

Risa stayed at the table with the maps. Her ankle still needed time.

She didn't pretend to be pleased about staying.

She did help decide what Corr and I would look for.

Before I left, she caught my sleeve.

“Don't build my mistakes into a monument.”

I looked at her.

She nodded toward the shelter sketch.

“Build something people can use. It doesn't need to be enormous because you were frightened.”

I smiled a little.

“How large can the cup shelf be?”

“Holt will negotiate that.”

I kissed her and took the drawing.

We did less than the whole plan.

Enough to see the load-bearing ground properly. Enough to mark a route that stayed clear of the broken edge. One short set of broad steps where the slope became awkward, with room to place both feet before taking the next.

Corr checked them carrying the empty supply frame.

Then without it.

A step that looked comfortable from above was too high when he came back tired.

I changed it.

We left the shelter for another day.

At the old cache, we refilled the clean vessel and added the current date. The message that had led us to Ossa and Merrin stayed there beside a new one saying they had been found alive.

I stood looking at those words longer than I needed to.

Corr waited.

Then we went home while there was still light to make the path easy.

Sera was outside when I returned.

She had a small dish on the table and Toby beside her.

For one startled moment, I thought something had gone wrong with the treatment.

Then she looked up and smiled.

“I'm going to try a little warmth.”

Toby showed me the notes they'd made. How she felt. What they'd agreed to stop for. No forge work disguised as a test.

Sera waited until I sat beside her.

Not for permission.

Because she wanted me there.

She held her hands around the dish.

A faint warmth reached my fingers when I touched its edge afterward.

No great flame.

No triumphant return to everything she'd been able to do before.

She sat back and let Toby ask his questions.

Her smile remained.

I couldn't help smiling too.

We watched for the rest of the afternoon.

No second attempt because the first had gone well. No pretending one warm dish meant the illness was finished.

She was tired afterward, but not emptied in the way she'd been when this began. Her hand remained steady enough to hold mine while we sat.

“I'm glad,” I said.

“So am I.”

“Not because I need you at the forge.”

“I know.”

She leaned closer.

“I'm glad you know why I'm glad.”

I kissed her.

She tasted of the tea Risa had insisted on making for everyone despite having to supervise me carrying half of it.

Across the table, Luna was drawing the new steps onto the route map.

Sera watched her for a while, then asked where the shelter's window ought to face.

We discussed it until the light began to go.

Before supper, Sera finished the curtain.

She bit the thread, inspected the hem, and handed it to Risa with an expression of considerable satisfaction.

Risa ran her fingers along the seam.

“That's better than I would have done.”

“Yes,” Sera said.

No false modesty. I liked that about her.

Luna held one end while I fastened the other. When we let it fall, the cloth stopped just above the floor instead of collecting everything our boots brought in.

The last light came through it softly.

Risa asked us to leave it closed for a moment.

We did.

The room changed. The path was still outside. People still passed, their voices reaching us through the open upper part of the window. But we no longer had to look up every time someone went by.

Luna sat down beside me.

Sera rested against the window seat. Risa stretched her good foot into the patch of light.

Nobody asked what needed doing next.

We let the room be finished for five minutes.

That night, nobody asked whether the mattresses were staying.

We put the books away. Moved the cups where they would survive. Left enough light for Risa to settle her ankle without knocking it against the low frame.

Luna stood beside me at the window while Sera folded the curtain back.

“You wrote that I make you feel less alone,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

She took my hand.

“I wanted you to know it goes the other way.”

I turned toward her.

She kissed me before I could ruin the moment by trying to deserve it aloud.

I held her close.

When we drew apart, she rested her forehead against my shoulder for a moment, then went to put out the lamp by the door.

Risa was already sitting on the bed when I joined her.

“How is the visiting cup?” I asked.

“Settled in beautifully.”

“Is it moving back to your shelf?”

“We're considering our options.”

I laughed.

She took my face between her hands and kissed me slowly enough that I forgot what I'd intended to say next.

When she let go, she was smiling.

“That was for getting home before dark.”

“I thought affection wasn't meant to be a reward for useful behavior.”

“It isn't. I'd have kissed you anyway. I'm allowed to be pleased about two things.”

Sera laughed from behind me.

I reached back for her hand, and she came to sit beside us.

Luna returned from the door.

The room grew quiet around the four of us.

We talked for a little while after lying down.

Small things.

The step Corr had made me lower. The way Toby had looked when Wren took his hand. Whether Liam would manage an entire supper without claiming he had only asked Anja because the pot needed carrying.

Eventually the spaces between sentences grew longer.

Sera's hand rested against my chest. Luna lay close on my other side. Risa reached across from where her ankle was supported, and I held her fingers without making her stretch farther.

I listened to them settling.

There would be work in the morning. Another treatment. Routes to mark. Questions from Command we hadn't answered, and questions we'd sent that somebody still owed us answers to.

Tonight, I didn't need to solve the morning before I could sleep.

I had a place beside them.

I closed my eyes.

Days 469–470. The place beside me.

We woke together. Decided to stay another night. Then another.

Low frame made for the mattresses. Clear way to the door. Water within reach. Jackets on hooks.

Toby and Wren told us they're together. Liam asked Anja to supper and survived her saying yes.

Route plan made with Risa. Holt will join the next survey when her ankle is ready. First steps improved with Corr. Shelter still to build.

New note at the cache. Ossa and Merrin found alive.

Sera warmed one dish. Stopped there. Watching how she feels afterward. Treatment continues.

Letter to Mother. Three names. What I mean when I say home. Not sent yet.

Risa's cup remains on my shelf.

I haven't moved it.