Chapter 22 #2
"You mean it right now," he said. "I believe that, genuinely. But right now you're reacting to pain that isn't yours, and reactions don't hold. I need something that holds." He began walking again, slower this time. "So. One more thing. And then we'll be finished."
He stopped circling.
He looked at me.
"Imagine," he said quietly, "someone you love more than this."
The sentence hit like a hand closing around my throat.
"Someone whose face you've been very carefully not thinking about since you arrived here.
Someone you've been keeping very deliberately blank every time my attention moves in a certain direction.
" His voice remained conversational. Almost gentle.
"I don't need the name. I'm not asking for it. I'm asking you to do one simple thing."
He waited.
"Look at your mother," he said. "And imagine it isn't her."
I didn't look at my mother.
I looked at him. I held his gaze and I held the blankness and I threw every wall up that I had—
"That's the wrong choice," he said.
My mother went down.
The shadows took her knees—not all the way, not to the floor, but to the exact angle where the cage's geometry became its own cruelty. Suspended between standing and falling, her bad hand groping instinctively for something to hold onto and finding nothing, the sound she made—
I looked at my mother's face.
And then I did the thing I had been refusing to do.
Just for a second. Just a fragment—gold eyes and warmth and the sound of laughter in a library—before I slammed every door shut and buried it back down under six feet of nothing.
But he saw it.
Of course he saw it. That was the whole point of the exercise.
His expression didn't change. But something in the room did—a subtle shift, a pressure that hadn't been there a moment before.
"There she is," he said softly.
"Stop." The word came out already broken. "Stop. I understand. I understand what you're showing me. Stop."
He looked at me for a moment longer.
Then he let my mother go.
She buckled the instant the shadows released her—not a fall but a controlled collapse, hands and knees on the obsidian floor, her body finally allowed the relief it had been fighting toward for hours.
The sound she made when her knees hit the stone, the way her broken fingers curled against the floor—
The barrier dissolved.
I crossed the distance in three steps and went down beside her and she pressed her face into my chest and held onto my shirt with her good hand and I held her and said nothing. There was nothing to say. Every word I could form was inadequate to the room we were sitting in.
Erlik stood above us and said nothing for a while. He let us have this — whatever this was. He'd already gotten everything he came for.
"The memory," I said, eventually. My voice came out wrecked and I didn't try to fix it. "Give her something she can live with."
He looked down at the two of us with an expression that passed through his face too briefly to name.
"She carried enough," I said. "Two hundred years of it. She doesn't need this too."
A pause.
"As you like," he said.
He crouched and pressed two fingers to my mother's temple, and I held her and watched her face as the horror left it—not torn away but lowered, like a flame turned down degree by degree.
The lines around her eyes released. The catch in her breathing eased.
The rigid set of her jaw softened. She became, slowly and quietly, someone waking from an unremarkable sleep.
When she opened her eyes they were clear. Confused, but clear.
"Human realms," Erlik said, folding the words in quietly. "The portal scattered you. You sheltered somewhere dull. The food was terrible."
My mother frowned with the minor indignation of someone recalling an inconvenience. "I remember the food being terrible."
"Yes," I said. The word tasted like ash. "It was."
Erlik stood. He moved to the center of the room and the shadows gathered at his hands the way water gathers in a low place—without effort, without drama, simply because that was what it did.
A tear opened in the air. Clean and surgical, nothing like Milan's portals with their visible cost and strain.
This opened the way a door opens when someone has always owned the key.
Through it: pale afternoon light. The smell of the city.
He didn't look back.
"Don't make me come to you," he said pleasantly. "I find travel irritating. And apparently that's hereditary."
Then he was gone—not dramatically, not with any final gesture, just absorbed back into the dark of his own realm as though he had never quite been separate from it.
I looked down at my mother. Her broken fingers were cradled against her chest, the swelling angry and dark, and she was frowning at them with the vague bewilderment of someone who doesn't remember acquiring an injury.
"Can you stand?"
She tested her legs. "Yes."
I helped her up. She leaned into me slightly, still finding herself, examining her hand with confused concentration. "I must have fallen somewhere in the mortal realms," she murmured. "I don't—the portal was so disorienting—"
"Yes," I said. "We'll have someone look at it when we get back."
She nodded, distracted, and looked at the portal ahead of us with the expression of a woman ready to be somewhere else.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go home."
We stepped through together.
The cold emptied from my lungs in one long exhale.
Warm air, city noise, the smell of the market three streets over.
My mother straightened beside me and blinked in the afternoon light, the confusion already settling into something she could account for—a strange few days, a misfired portal, the ordinary disorientation of being returned to familiar ground.
I did not look back.
I walked with her hand in mine and the deal I had made settled into my bones the way something heavy settles when you finally stop fighting to hold it up—completely, and without drama, and in a way that was never coming back out.
Somewhere ahead of us, Ada was still looking for me.
I walked toward her.
And I thought about what came next, and what it was going to cost, and I kept walking anyway.