31. Chapter 31 #2
My three men, each in his place, each himself, holding the pride between them while I held the ground beneath it.
We had built something here over a long warm summer, the four of us and all of them.
Now, in the cold and the ruin, I felt it hold, and I understood that a home isn't a thing that can't be broken.
It's a thing that holds together while it breaks, because of who's in it.
Ours held through the worst the earth could do.
* * *
I don't know how long I knelt there pouring myself into the ground; time had come unstitched.
It might have been the length of a scream or the length of an hour, and either way it ended the same way, with the last of the great gathered wave rolling off harmless into the empty distance and the deep earth going still beneath us at last, truly still, as it hadn't been since before the dawn.
The power guttered low in me. I felt it go, and I let it, because there was no holding back a thing I'd already spent, and there was so little of it left.
Some part of me had known there would be.
I'd known before I opened my hands what I was choosing, and I'd chosen it clear-eyed, and I didn't take a word of it back even as I felt the great reserve I'd carried across twenty-five thousand years run down to the bottom and stop.
Dev found me in the settling quiet.
He came stumbling through the wreckage grey-faced and wild-eyed, the small carrier, the only other soul alive who could feel what I'd just done and knew what it meant.
He dropped to his knees in front of me and took my face in his hands and looked at me with a grief so total it stopped my breath.
He didn't need the words we didn't share.
He'd felt it go, as only another carrier could, felt the great reserve pour out of me into the ground and not come back, felt the level drop and drop and never once stop dropping.
He cupped his hands in front of me, the old gesture, the imagined water.
Then he turned them over and let the last of the nothing run out between his fingers, and he shook his head, and his eyes filled.
It's gone, his hands said. You spent the thing we crossed the whole world for, and there's no getting it back, not ever.
"I know what I did," I said softly, though I hated saying it to him. "I know exactly what I spent, Dev, and I'd spend it again."
And I did know. I knew it with the terrible clarity that comes after, when the thing is done and can't be undone and the cost of it lands in full.
The power had been meant for the rift, for the dying world, for the wound at the heart of everything that Dev and I had carried the only known cure to across the whole of time.
There'd been a question all along of whether even the two of us together held enough to heal it.
That question had an answer now, and the answer was no, because I'd poured the greater part of what I carried into an ice-age fault to save one settlement, one grey frightened woman, one small early life, when the cold arithmetic of the mission said those lives weighed nothing against the world.
I had done the exact thing Nathan named when he called me weak.
I'd chosen the people in front of me over the sum on the page, and spent the world's one hope on a pride of shifters twenty-five thousand years dead and a baby that might not see the morning, when the cold arithmetic of the mission said those lives weighed nothing against the world.
In doing it, I might have doomed every soul who would ever live.
The triumph drained out of me as the power had, and left the cold thing standing in its place.
* * *
The dust settled slowly over the ruined settlement, silver in the first grey light of the dawn that had finally come.
All around me the pride was already doing the work of survivors, pulling the last of the trapped from the wreckage, tending the wounded, gathering the frightened children, counting themselves and finding, against every expectation of a night like this, that they were nearly all still there.
Nearly all of them alive, because of what I'd done.
I should have felt only that, only the saving of them.
Every argument I'd ever had with the voice, every time it had called me worthless, every ledger anyone had ever run on my life and found it wanting, I'd answered all of it in the space of one impossible hour, with the whole pride living to prove it.
I had reached into the breaking world and held it, I had felt myself do it, and I was undeniably and completely alive for the first time in two years.
But feeling everything means feeling everything.
That's the thing no one tells you about coming back to life after two years numb.
The wall I'd taken down to pour out the power hadn't been a wall around the good feelings only.
It had been a wall around all of them, and with it gone I felt the triumph and I felt, rising up hard behind it, the other thing, the thing that had been waiting two years for exactly this crack to come through.
Look what you've done, the voice said, and it had never been so quiet, or so certain, or so terribly kind.
You've killed the world. Every soul who'll ever live and die of the drain, you've just spent their only hope on people who turned to dust before history began.
Nathan was right about all of it, right about you, right that a heart like yours is a fault in the foundations of anything that matters.
You couldn't do the sum, could you, not once in your whole soft life.
And now the world will die because a broken woman couldn't bear to let one baby go.
I knelt in the settling dust with the dawn coming up grey over a settlement I'd saved, the power spent to nothing in my chest, every nerve in me screaming back to life after two years of silence, and the guilt came down on me like the second wave I'd held out of the ground, an enormous blind weight impossible to brace against, because this one wasn't in the rock.
This one was in me, and there was no pouring anything out to hold it back.
I'd held the whole earth still; I couldn't hold this.
Somewhere close, Daska said my name. I heard the change in it, heard the healer hear something wrong, heard him leave a wound half-tended and start toward me through the dust. Every part of me wanted to answer him, wanted to tell him I was all right, that I'd saved them, that it had worked.
I couldn't find the breath for any of it.
The guilt had both hands round my chest now and was pressing the air out of me, the dawn had gone strange and swimming at the edges, and the ground I'd fought so hard to hold steady was tilting slowly up to meet me.
The last thing I felt, before it took me down into the dark, was that after two years of feeling nothing at all, I was feeling this, and that of all the things to come back to life for, this was the one I'd have given the power back to hold at bay.
Then the grey dawn folded over, and I went down into the churned earth I'd saved, and the dark came up and had me.