18. Erik
Erik
I try to keep the smile off my face.
I do.
But sitting here watching the three of them go through what took me months to sort out around her? Let’s just say I’m glad I’m on this side of it.
I’m in the nest while I do it. Hers — the one she built me out of nearly every blanket and pillow she owns. And the throw. Can’t forget the throw.
She called it excessive.
It’s perfect.
The nest is mine. I’ll share, but I don’t really want to. Not a problem tonight — Gunnar can’t commit to sitting down.
He’s tried twice now. Knee on the edge, hand on the blankets, and then whatever a nest does to a man like Gunnar happens, and he picks himself back up like the pillows said something offensive to him. It’s the funniest shit I’ve seen him do in decades, and I once watched him argue with the weather.
I’m already grinning.
So much for that.
I have not told her I’d hold this pile of blankets through an actual war before I give it back. Gunnar and Rayner are arranged around it like it’s giving off heat, and neither one will sit in it, and neither one will leave it alone. Brock’s claimed the window and hasn’t left it.
Down the hall, her door clicks shut.
Everything stops.
Both of them go still on the same beat, chins tipping a half-degree toward the sound, and I watch a couple hundred years of discipline turn into golden retrievers.
She moves around in there — a drawer, the give of the mattress, one shoe hitting the floor and then, a while later, the other.
They track every inch of it, and I’d put money neither of them knows he’s doing it.
I glance over at Brock. He’s right there with them.
I know the feeling. Three years of it. I’ve just never been able to watch it from the outside before.
They’re learning her sounds right now, all of them, in real time.
I already know all of them. The keys. The deadline walk.
The chain going on late when an article’s going badly.
The drawer that sticks. The left side of the bed.
Three years across one hallway with ears like mine — there isn’t a sound in that apartment I couldn’t name in my sleep.
I never had the right to learn any of it. I learned it anyway.
The only thing new tonight is the distance. No hallway. No door. We handled that.
Same sounds. Ten feet closer.
It’s not easier.
“She’s texting,” Gunnar says. Out loud. Like a man who has never once been hunted.
“Gunnar.”
“What? She is. I want to know who she’s texting.” He’s looking at her bedroom door like he’s about to barge through it, but then he drifts back to the edge of the nest. Again. He hooks a pillow off the wall, puts it back exactly where it was.
“Nice blanket fort,” he says.
He said it was a nest. He hit me with the word twice and enjoyed himself both times. Now it’s blanket fort, every time. I know why. I’m not touching it.
He’s still standing over it.
So I grab his wrist and pull.
He comes down hard, half on the pillow wall, swearing. Goes still. And then — nothing. No getting up. No complaint. He just settles in slowly, like that’s enough to make sure it doesn’t count.
“Better?”
“Shut up.”
“It’s a guest bed,” I say. “People do that here.”
“People.” Brock, from the window, and I’d forgotten he was standing there, which tells me exactly how far gone I am. “Do they?”
He doesn’t push it. He doesn’t have to. Brock’s been reading this room since he walked into it, and there’s plenty to read tonight between the strange bedding, the woman he’s already gone for, and Gunnar, refusing to admit he’s comfortable.
I give him nothing.
Giving Brock nothing is its own tell, and we both know it.
There’s no way I win this, so I’m going to ignore it and enjoy my blanket fort.
“Leif?” I say, to get him off me.
“Not coming up.” Brock finally leaves the window, pulls the chair out, and doesn’t quite sit. “He’s down there walking the same line he’s been walking for an hour.”
“The perimeter’s fine.”
“I know.” I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “He knows it too.”
So. Leif is downstairs inventing reasons not to be in a room. I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen him do that, and not one of them ended anywhere good.
“Wonderful,” Gunnar says. “He’s pacing the lawn, she’s in there texting, and nobody’s told me why the three of you crossed a realm and lost your ever loving minds the moment you saw her. And that houseplant… It’s not normal.” He glares at Gerald.
He says all of it from inside her blanket fort.
“Somebody brief me. Quietly,” he adds, and before anyone can tell him why that’s a horrible idea, “I can be quiet.”
He cannot be quiet. But the question’s fair, and it’s mine, because I’m the one who’s been here.
So I tell them.
“Three years ago, the Vestry came to me.” I give it a second, because I know they’re not going to like this. “Not the unit. Me, specifically. Down a channel that isn’t supposed to exist. Around Leif. Around all of you.”
Gunnar sits up in the blankets. “They went around Leif?”
“They’d felt a disturbance on this side. Something they couldn’t figure out, and they wanted eyes on it. Quietly.” I can still hear the way they said quietly. “So I crossed.”
“And?”
“I found her.”
Nobody moves.
“I knew what she was the moment I saw her.” I don’t say the word. Nobody asks me to. “And more than that. I knew what she was to me.”
I look at them, one at a time, because they’ve earned the whole thing.
“I was done for. You’ve had one night of it. I’ve had three years.”
Nobody laughs. Nobody argues either.
“I stayed. I told myself it was for a little while — just until I figured out how to make sure it ended well. I never figured it out. The report was supposed to say what the disturbance is. I knew what it was by the end of the first day, and I could not work out how to hand it to them, because I don’t know what the Vestry does with something that isn’t supposed to exist.”
The radiator ticks. Down the hall, her mattress shifts.
“She’s not supposed to exist. But she does.”
“You let us bury you,” Brock says. There’s no accusation in it, which is worse.
“I know.”
I don’t like the thought of that, but this was the only way I could see through it.
“I kept meaning to send word. Kept meaning to. And then one night I walked back out to the crossing and it didn’t open. The space around it is dead and I still don’t know why. I’ve walked out there every night since. It hasn’t changed.”
Gunnar opens his mouth.
“If the next words out of your mouth are did you try knocking, you’re sleeping in the hallway.”
He closes it.
“I ran theories for a year. Earth. The crossing. Me.”
Her. The fourth one. I’ve never once been able to finish it, and they’re not getting it.
“We know,” Gunnar says. He’s not grinning now. “We crossed at the clearing. The grass is dead thirty feet out, and there’s a shine on that rock, Erik.”
The room goes quiet in a way I don’t care for.
Three years of going out there alone, and it turns out the ground kept minutes.
What I don’t give them is last night. For the first time in three years, that clearing made a sound.
Humming. Low, half a bar, gone before I could be sure I’d heard it.
An hour later it was standing six inches from me in an elevator, wearing a green dress and asking my jaw if it required a membership.
It’s the answer to the question they crossed a realm to ask, and it’s sitting behind my teeth, and it’s staying there.
That one’s mine. They can have everything else.
“The stories,” I say. “The ones we all got at bedtime, back when we were young… They’ve been circling in my head all this time.
In the stories, she was never just one man’s.
” I look around the room at what’s left of the most disciplined unit in Teth.
“I had a feeling it wouldn’t be only me.
Hoped, maybe. Then tonight I watched the four of you come through her door and forget your names. ”
“Three,” Gunnar says, from the blanket fort.
Nobody dignifies it.
“So now you’re here. We find out if the door opens for you, since it won’t for me.”
“And if it does?”
“Then we have a way home.”
The word comes out fine. It just doesn’t point to where it used to.
“And her?”
There it is. The question with the whole night folded into it.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if she can cross. I don’t know if it’s safe for her to. Can you imagine what the Vestry would do? I don’t like it. The not knowing.”
Three years of watching her, and that’s the full report. I’ve got her Sunday order and her real laugh and the way she wins arguments with furniture, and on the only question that matters I’ve got nothing.
They’re too quiet.
“Does she know any of it?” Rayner. The first thing he’s said since her door shut.
“No.”
The word lands in the middle of the floor, and nobody picks it up.
“None of it,” I say, because they need to hear me say it all the way down.
“Not Teth. Not the crossing. Not what any of us are. An hour ago someone fucked up and said four hundred. She knows it wasn’t a joke, she just doesn’t know why.
That’s where she is. That’s the foundation we’re standing on. Which is basically nothing.”
“She’s tougher than that,” Gunnar says, and he means it kindly.
“She is.” I hold his eye until it lands. “She carried more tonight than anyone should have to. You fuckers broke her door and she decided to give you coffee anyway. But we’re not dumping this on her. That’s not fair to her.”
Everyone nods but I have a feeling Gunnar isn’t really listening.
“I mean it. We go slow. She’s drawn to it, I know that. I just don’t know how strong it is and we can’t afford to scare her. She has to know. Deserves to know, but we need to do it right.”
Even Gunnar goes quiet at that one. Somewhere in the last ten minutes he’s gone fully horizontal. Nobody’s mentioned it.
“So meanwhile,” he says, from her pillows, “what. We smile. Make small talk. Four very tall cousins from out of town.”
“Yes,” I say.
“…Truly?”
“Truly. The door gets fixed first — I’m not leaving her behind a hole in the wall. Past that, I stay where she can see me. She knows me. The rest of you let her come to you.”
Not one of them will do it. We’ll agree to every word, and the first time she walks into a room, all of us will orient on her like fucking magnets. I know, because I’ve done it alone for three years, and I’m supposed to be the disciplined one.
“Dorne?” Brock asks. He’s migrated over to her desk, definitely not snooping through her things.
“Elara Dorne.”
I nod because he’s staring at me.
I know that look.
“Brock.”
“It’s not a name from here.” Quiet, half to himself, still thinking about it. “I’ve heard names like that. Not on this side — back home.” His eyes come up to mine. “Erik, that’s—”
“Don’t.”
Rayner interrupts him and we all let him.
Because she’s ten feet away behind one door, and whatever Brock was about to say doesn’t need to be said right now.
Brock nods and lets it go. He doesn’t forget things, though. He’ll be reminding me probably at the worst possible moment.
Then he’s on his feet, moving for the gap where her door used to be. Nobody asks where he’s going. The perimeter’s about to get company.
And Rayner’s already somewhere else.
His shoulders come down. His eyes drift. His whole attention turns toward her door — not like the rest of us, the half-glances, the listening. This is different. Like something reached out and set a hand on him.
I know that look. I know where it goes.
Three years I’ve been the closest thing to her on two worlds. I’d have told you nobody could get closer without a key.
Turns out somebody can.
“Rayner.”
He doesn’t answer.
He’s already gone.