30. Chapter 30 #2
She nodded, the barest fraction, clinging to it.
And Daska came out of the smoke with Sawa a stride behind him, dropping to his knees on Megan's other side, his big gentle hands already moving.
I watched the healer take her in with one sweep and go very still for the length of a heartbeat as the whole picture landed on him, the pregnancy he'd suspected since a riverbank half a year ago and never once confirmed, laid bare now under the worst possible sky.
His eyes came up and met mine over her body. Neither of us said it; there wasn't the need, and there wasn't the room.
"How far along is she?" was all he asked me, low.
"Thirty weeks by my count, maybe a shade under."
Something crossed his face that he didn't let reach the rest of him, and he bent to his work, his hands moving over her with that terrible focused gentleness, and he gathered the news from her body as he read weather from a sky; then his face showed he'd found the thing he'd hoped not to.
"The fall's brought it on," he said, for my ears, in the plain flat voice he used when the truth was hard and pretending wouldn't help.
"The baby's coming, and it's coming wrong, and it's coming now.
In a warm hall with a fire and time and the herbs from my stores I might hold it back a day or two, might buy the little one another week of growing.
Out here, in this..." His eyes went to the wreckage, the smoke, the freezing dust, the ruin of everything that might have helped.
"I can catch it. I can't save it. Not both of them.
Not out here, not this small, not with the cold and the shock and nothing to hand.
She hasn't the strength, and the baby hasn't the weeks, and I have not one thing in the world to give them but my two hands. "
* * *
And there it was.
I knelt in the dust with Megan's terrified face turned up to mine and Daska's honest verdict sitting between us, and the whole thing came clear in me with a simplicity that was almost peaceful, as the very worst moments sometimes do.
There was a way to save them; there had always been a way.
I'd been carrying it in my chest since before I fell through the stones, the borrowed weight, the power that wasn't mine, the thing Dev cupped in his imaginary hands and mourned, the thing that strained toward the moving earth even now so hard I could barely kneel upright under the pull of it.
It had woken with the quake and it was raging in me, reaching, wanting to answer the wound in the world, and I had spent my whole life doing the one thing I knew how to do with it; I clamped it down.
I'd clamped it down at the killing river and clamped it down through every shaking of the ground all autumn, clamped it down as I'd been taught before I understood I was being taught anything, because the power was for the rift, the power was the mission, the power was the one thing twenty-five thousand years and a dead world were counting on me to carry safe and spend in the right place.
And Dev's face swam up in front of me, grave over his cupped and emptying hands.
It's not enough, and if it runs out, there's no getting it back.
Even together, he'd meant, even his share and mine spent as one, there might not be enough to heal the thing we'd crossed the whole of time to reach.
There was certainly not enough to spend a great gout of it here, now, on a collapsing settlement and one small early baby, and still have what the rift required.
To pour it out for Megan was to choose her over the mission, over the dying modern world, over every soul who'd ever live and die of the drain, all of them weighed against this one grey frightened woman and the flutter of a life come too early into her arms.
That was the arithmetic; Nathan would have done it in a heartbeat, and called it strength.
I could hear him doing it, that cool reasonable voice that lived in me next to my father's: You can't spend the world's one hope on a PA and a baby that won't live the winter anyway.
Do the sum and be honest about it; one life against all of them isn't even close.
A strong woman knows which lives are worth the cost. He'd built his whole self on that sum.
He'd read me out of his life on that sum, two years ago on a bright stage, because I hadn't balanced against whatever he was totting up in that cold ledger where he kept his heart.
I looked at Megan, at the woman Nathan had chosen over me, grey and trembling as she clutched a child neither of us had had a word for, a woman I'd spent two years hating and one long journey learning, who'd become somewhere on the cold roads of this world the nearest thing I had to a sister.
And I found that Nathan's arithmetic meant nothing to me at all, and never once had.
That was the very thing he'd called weakness, standing over me, that I would always, every time, choose the person in front of me over the sum on the page, that I could not do the cold maths that sacrificed the one for the many, that a heart like mine reached for the drowning thing within its arms and let the ledger fall where it would.
He'd meant it as the reason I was worthless. Kneeling in the ruins with two lives running out under my hands, I understood at last that it was the truest and best thing about me.
Somewhere across the settlement Nathan's voice rose, thin and far, directing the haul of survivors from a fallen storehouse at the settlement's far edge, kept busy and useful and a hundred yards distant by the plain geography of the disaster, too taken up with his own corner of the ruin to come looking for the woman he thought carried his secret safe.
He would not see this; he would never know what I weighed here, or what I chose, or that the choosing broke his verdict over my knee.
"Ellie, look at me." Daska's voice came low, urgent under the roar, because he'd seen my face change and he knew me, and some part of him had already guessed what I was reaching toward.
"Whatever you're thinking, the cost of it, you don't know what it'll take from you.
Dev doesn't even know. It might be everything. "
"I know exactly what it'll take." That much was true.
Somewhere under everything, I'd always known what I was for.
I pressed my hand flat to my chest where the borrowed weight raged and begged to be let go.
I looked at the man I loved, then at the sister I'd found beside him in the dust, and I stopped doing the only thing I'd ever done with the power in me.
I stopped clamping it down.
"Get everyone you can behind me," I said, and my voice was steady as still water. "Do it now, Daska. And whatever happens next, don't you let go of her."
Then I opened my hands, and reached back for the thing that had been screaming to be let out since before the dawn, and let go.