Felix
The cards have been still in my hands for a while now, which is how I know I've stopped pretending.
I clock it late. A full beat behind, the same jolt as catching yourself mid-breath.
The deck sits dead in my palm, both halves squared, no walk along the knuckles, no riffle, nothing.
It's not really one deck anymore. Hasn't been in months: a tarot deck folded into an ordinary poker deck folded into a dozen cards I've started inking myself now that the other two are running out of meanings I need, plain black stock, my own cramped symbols in white.
Just my hand and all of it, holding very still while the rest of me runs.
Everly's on the bed with her back against the cold wall and her knees pulled up, watching me from across the dark like she's been watching the whole time the cards went quiet and decided not to mention it. She's good at that. Better than she lets the room think.
It's past two. The house has done its rounds.
The fox downstairs is aimed at an empty parlor, the raven at a stairwell no one's climbing, all of it feeding back to Wheeler's chimera in its covered cage, the one suffering thing that's been swallowing the truth of us for weeks now and getting nothing for it but more cloth over the bars.
I came in through the odds. Held them loose on the way across the green so the mark on my hand couldn't say which branch I was in.
For an hour I could be anywhere, asleep at Long Shot, drunk in the Tumult cellar, dead in a ditch, here.
The leash burns low against the back of my hand the whole time anyway.
It always does. I let it. It's the cheapest thing I've paid all term.
"You went quiet," she says.
"I'm restful."
"You're never restful."
She's right. I'm so far from restful I can feel the sight pressing up behind my sternum, the weight of a swallowed stone, the futures fanning out wide the second I stop holding them back: four threads running off her and out across campus to four men who can't reach her tonight, and under that the other thing, the wider field, the branches.
It used to be numbers. That was easier. A branch was a weight on a scale, this much chance against that much, and I could hold it the way you hold arithmetic—at arm's length, no faces in it. That stopped a while ago.
Now they come as visions, whole and moving.
Worse than that, they come as feelings—a dread with no shape yet, sitting wrong in my gut hours before I know which branch put it there.
A certainty that settles over me like a hand on the back of my neck when something's about to go right.
An uncertainty just as physical when it isn't, a kind of vertigo, like the floor hasn't decided yet whether to hold.
I see the room. I see what she's wearing.
I see Nell's hands shaking on the platform and the gray Atlas goes when the thunder won't come for him and the exact angle of Callum's jaw when he understands too late.
They have faces now. Possibilities with faces, feelings I have to live in before I know why they're there.
That's the part nobody warns you about—that the sight grows up, that one day it stops being odds on a page and starts being people you'd die for, walking toward the worst day of their lives in full color, and I feel it in my chest before I understand what I'm looking at.
I'm tired. That's the part I won't tell her. The bone-deep kind, like I've spent the whole day walking through rooms where she dies. I'm worn thin enough tonight that the wall between what I see and what I say has gone soft, and I feel it going, and I can't stop it in time.
"Do you want to know how we lose?" I say.
It comes out light, like asking if she wants the window open.
She goes still. Not afraid—she's not a coward, never has been, the stillness is her deciding. "Tell me."
I shouldn't. There's a version of me that doesn't. He's three branches back and I can already see he doesn't get to stay.
"It's not a fight," I say. "That's the thing everyone gets wrong about it. Nobody loses this in a fight. We lose it on a Tuesday, in a hallway, when Callum's mother comes to him."
The cards are still in my hand. I look at them instead of her.
"Not a call. She never calls—calling would mean she thinks about him when he's not standing in front of her, and she doesn't. She comes herself. Four years and she's never once climbed those stairs to find him. Then one Tuesday she does."
Across the room, Everly's stopped moving. No shifting, no picking at the blanket. Just watching my mouth like she can already hear the rest of it coming.
"She doesn't threaten him. Doesn't ask him for anything." I turn one card, then another, not looking at either. "She sits down across from him and she talks about Noah. What he's been doing. How he's sleeping. The kind of thing a mother asks when she's spent a lifetime not asking it."
My throat goes tight around the words. Some branch's grief, bleeding through into mine.
"Twenty minutes of that," I say, "and Callum's so busy holding onto the fact that his mother is finally talking to him like he's her son that he doesn't feel the door she's opening behind it. That's how it starts. She's so reasonable, once she gets there."
Everly's arms come up, wrapped around herself. I see it and keep going, because stopping now would be its own kind of cruelty.
"She offers him a way to keep you safe that costs almost nothing, and he's tired too—everyone's tired by then—and almost nothing sounds survivable.
So he says yes to the small thing. And the small thing is a door.
Once it's open she walks the rest through it one reasonable step at a time.
He moves you to a safer room. Then a safer hour.
Then a review, just a formality, down where the marks die and we can't feel you. "
The cards go still in my hand.
"And he believes every step of it, because he made each one himself, and none of them looked like the end."
My voice doesn't do anything dramatic. That's what makes it true.
"I've stood in the room where it finishes," I say.
"It's quiet. You go down the last stair on your own feet because that's the only way the thing at the bottom takes anyone, and nobody drags you, nobody has to, you just—agree.
And we feel it happen from too far away to matter.
Callum feels it worst. He spends what's left of his life understanding that he chose every step. "
The room holds its breath. Old house, old stone, a hundred years of girls who went down stairs they agreed to. It listens to me say it.
"Felix." Her voice is even. "How many of the branches go that way?"
"Don't ask me that."
"How many?"
"Enough." The number sits behind my teeth and I don't give it to her, because numbers make it sound managed and there's nothing managed about it. "Enough that I don't sleep great. There. You got the charming version."
She uncurls. Crosses the cold floor in three steps, no hesitation, and takes the deck out of my hand, just lifts it out of my grip, sets it on the desk by the sad little bag of stale snickerdoodles she still hasn't thrown out, and the second it leaves my fingers something in my chest gets loud, the sudden loud of a room right after the radio dies.
"Stop looking at the worst one," she says.
"It's not a choice. They're all just—there." I spread my empty hand. "I look at all of them. Most of yours are bad. You want to know my one comfort? In the bad ones I'm usually already gone, so at least I don't have to watch."
I meant it light. It lands like a stone in a well, and we both hear it hit the water.
She doesn't flinch from it. That's the thing about her. Everyone else I've ever told the truth to has needed me to take it back. She just steps in between me and the deck, between me and the branches, and puts both her hands on my face like she's deciding to.
"Then look at this one," she says.
She kisses me before I can find a card to hide behind.
It's not careful. There's nothing careful left in either of us tonight.
Her mouth opens under mine and the futures keep fanning out behind my eyes, same as they always do, and then she does the thing she's the only one who can do, which is be so completely here that for a second the field collapses to one branch, this one, her hands fisted in my shirt and her breath going ragged against my mouth, and the relief of it is so big it's almost grief.
"Don't go anywhere," she says against my lips.
"I'm right here."
"You're three branches deep. I can feel it."
She can't feel it, not the way Ren feels things, but she knows me. Ten weeks in a car taught her my tells; it taught me hers right back. She presses her thumb to the corner of my eye, the place the grin climbs to and stops.
"Right here," she says. "Your smile never makes it past right here. Not with anyone else. I've watched for it a whole year."
So I let the grin go. All the way. Two seconds after it should've moved on. That only happens with her.
She takes my hand—the marked one, the one with the burn glowing low across the back of it—and she lifts it to her mouth and sets her lips to my knuckles, one at a time, over the leash, over the place the school carved into me to keep me away from her, and I feel that everywhere. The sight goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet.
"There he is," she says.
I get a hand into her hair and kiss her properly then, and the want comes up out of me with no charm on it at all, just teeth and breath and the low filthy run of everything I don't say out loud—how I've wanted her under my hands since a parking lot in Kansas, how I've spent every session at that table three feet from her bending the odds so my face stays bored while I think about exactly this.
My hand finds the hem of her shirt. Hers finds my belt.
"Tell me what you want," I say, because I want to hear her say it, and because she always does.
"You already know."
"I want it out loud."