19. Luna
LUNA
Iwas cheating on a man with himself, and somehow I was the only one who didn't know it.
What it felt like was a very ordinary kind of ruin. I had kissed Pavel Reznikov against a brick wall in the dark, the wreck of the ambush still ringing behind us, and I had meant it down to the marrow, and now I couldn't look at the man I'd loved for eight months without feeling like a liar.
That was the morning after. I sat in the kitchen with my hands wrapped around a mug I wasn't drinking from, and Pavel came in wearing a gray shirt and the particular expression of a man who had rehearsed casual and lost.
"Coffee," he said, like a hostage naming his one demand.
"There's coffee."
"Good." He got a mug. He did not fill it. He stood there holding an empty cup by the counter as if it were doing important work.
"You're just going to hold that," I said.
"I'm considering it."
"The coffee, or the concept of coffee?"
"Both." He finally poured, and the ordinary sound of it was so loud in the quiet that we both flinched. "Luna."
"Pavel."
"About the..."
"The thing," I offered, because he clearly wasn't going to make it to the noun.
"The thing," he agreed gravely, and I nearly laughed, and hated that I nearly laughed, because it felt like laughing was one more thing I was stealing.
"We could not talk about it," I said. "That's an option people choose. Mature adults. All the time."
"Are we mature adults?"
"One of us is thirty-eight."
He set the mug down. "That's not the same as mature."
"No," I said softly. "I've noticed."
We looked at each other. The kitchen had that early hush to it, the compound not yet fully awake, and I could hear Baba Luda somewhere down the hall arguing with a radio. Pavel's jaw did the thing it did when he was choosing between two hard sentences.
"I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen," he said.
"Good, because I'd be terrible at it. I have a face. My face tells on me constantly."
"I've noticed," he echoed, and there was the corner of a smile in it, and my stomach did something undignified.
"So what is it, then?" I said. "What are we? Give it a name. You people love naming things. You have a name for the guy who parks the cars."
"Grisha."
"See."
"That's just his name."
"Pavel."
He exhaled. He crossed his arms, which meant he was about to say something honest and hated the vulnerability of it. "I don't know what to call it. I know what it is. Those aren't the same either."
And that landed in me like a stone dropped down a well, because he was right, and because I understood exactly what he meant, and because I could not say it back.
It was already defined. We both stood there inside its definition like two people who'd walked into a house and were pretending it was weather.
"Okay," I said. "Undefined. But established."
"Undefined but established," he repeated, testing it. "I can live with that."
"You'll have to. I'm not good at the other version."
What I didn't tell him was the other version, the one on the screen.
Because here is the part I couldn't say out loud to anyone, least of all to Pavel: for two full days I could not open the Shadow channel.
I would sit with my laptop in the blue dark of my room, cursor hovering over that little window where eight months of my actual soul lived, and my hand would not do it.
The moment I opened it I would have to be Nyx, and Nyx belonged to Shadow, and Shadow was a man I had never touched, never seen, never smelled, and I had just kissed someone else against a concrete wall like I was trying to survive him.
I understood how insane this was. I want that on the record.
I lectured myself about it in the shower.
You cannot cheat on a man who is a set of messages.
You have never held his hand. You don't know if his hands are real.
He might be seventeen. He might be a retiree in a cardigan.
He might be nobody. You owe him nothing.
And I believed all of it, and none of it, and the guilt sat in my chest anyway, cold and specific as a coin under the tongue, because I had loved him, and love doesn't check whether the object of it is standing in the room.
Mine had never once needed him to be in the room.
That was the whole architecture of the thing.
I'd built an entire cathedral out of a man made of light, and now I was ashamed to walk into it smelling of another one.
So I ghosted him. I was the girl who had answered him at three in the morning through a fever, through a panic attack, through a night my landlord banged on the door. I went dark for two days like a coward, and told myself it was strategy, security, discipline, anything but what it was.
On the third night I opened it. I had to. I wasn't opening it to answer, only to admit to myself that I couldn't. I just wanted to see his name.
The messages were waiting.
SHADOW: You've been quiet longer than you go quiet. That's not nothing to me.
SHADOW: Nyx. Tell me you closed the laptop and went to sleep. Tell me it's that.
SHADOW: If someone is near you and you can't talk, send me one character. Anything. A period. I'll understand.
SHADOW: I keep thinking about that meeting you mentioned. Please tell me it didn't go the way I'm afraid it went.
SHADOW: I don't care if you're angry with me for the thing I didn't answer. Be angry. Just be alive and angry.
SHADOW: It's late where you are. I'm still here. I'll be here.
I put my hand over my mouth.
He thought I was in danger. That was the joke of it, the whole exquisite cruelty of it: he had read my silence and gone straight to blood and rope and vans, and he was sitting up somewhere in the world with his stomach in a fist because Nyx had gone dark, and the reason Nyx had gone dark was that she couldn't look him in the eye.
He was afraid I was hurt. I was hurting him by hiding, and he was worried about me, and I could not tell him the truth was so much stupider and so much worse than a snatch team, that I was simply a girl who had kissed a man in an alley and couldn't hold two loves in the same two hands.
Be alive and angry, he'd said, and he had built me an exit and left it unlocked. All I had to do was type a period.
I couldn't even do that. A period would be a lie of a different kind, a green light that everything was fine, and nothing was fine, and Nyx had never once lied to Shadow, not once in eight months, and I would rather leave him afraid than start.
I closed the laptop. I felt like the worst person who had ever been given a keyboard.
Pavel found me on the roof an hour later, and not by accident. He came up with two plates and a mercy I hadn't earned, which was that he didn't ask what was wrong.
"Baba Luda made too much," he said, which was a lie. She never made too much. She made exactly enough to feel like being loved.
We ate on the ledge with the city smeared out below us, all sodium light and distance. For a while there was only the food and the wind and the ordinary animal comfort of another body next to yours in the cold.
"My father died when I was sixteen," I said, because it was dark and he wasn't looking at me, and those are the only conditions under which I can say true things.
"Heart. Fast. He was there and then the house was just...
a container. My mother left the year before.
So it was me and Danny and a lot of rooms that used to have people in them. "
Pavel didn't say sorry. I've never trusted people who say sorry fast.
"Then Danny went," I said. "Two years after.
He didn't die. Worse, almost. He just...
subtracted himself. And that was the rest of my family, gone, and the thing nobody tells you about being the smart one is that smart doesn't equal wanted.
I got scholarships. I got recruited. Nobody ever came to get me.
There's a difference between valuable and claimed. I was very, very valuable."
The wind took a while with that one.
"You don't have to match me," I said, when the quiet had gone on too long. "That's the reflex, right? Trade a scar for a scar. You can let mine just sit there."
"I wasn't reaching for a scar." He turned the plate a quarter circle on his knee without eating from it. "I was deciding whether to give you the real story or the one I hand people."
"You hand people a story?"
"I hand people a wall with a story painted on it." He was quiet a beat. "You, I don't want to paint anything for."
"I was eleven the worst night of my life," Pavel said, and I went still, because he did not do this.
"There was a man who bought and sold boys.
He had bought me. I was in the back of a room waiting to be a number.
" He turned his fork over. "And these people I'd never met walked in and paid too much and took me out into the street and put a coat on me and never once made me feel like I owed it back.
That's my family. That's the whole thing.
Men with blood on them who chose me on purpose. "
"You love them," I said.
"Completely," he said, "and I know exactly what their hands have done, and I've decided both of those can be true and I can still sleep.
Mostly." He looked at me then. "You build walls because nobody claimed you.
I built mine because someone did, and I couldn't survive it if I lost them too. Same brick. Different reason."
I couldn't breathe right for a second.
"That's the most anyone's ever seen me," I said, and my voice did an embarrassing thing.
"I doubt that."
"No. It is." And I thought, unbidden, of the man on the screen, who had seen a version of me that had no face, and I felt that cold coin turn over again, and then I did something I'm not proud of and am entirely proud of: I set it down, just for tonight, and put the ghost on the shelf.
Because that one was made of light, and this one had once been a half-sold boy that strangers chose to put a coat on, and this one was here, breathing, close enough that I could see the gray coming in at his temple, and I was so tired of loving carefully.
"I should go in," I said. "It's late."
"It's late," he agreed, and neither of us moved for a long moment, and then we did.
I lay in my dark room and watched the clock crawl.
I did not open the laptop. I thought about walls and bricks and the difference between valuable and claimed, and I thought, with a clarity that frightened me, that I was done being torn in half, at least for tonight.
I didn't have forever in me, but I had tonight.
At midnight I got up.
I didn't decide to, exactly. My feet decided, the way they do when the rest of you has finally stopped arguing.
I walked the hall in bare feet past the sleeping bulk of the compound, past Zoya's shut door and the dark, humming operations room, and I stopped in front of Pavel's room with my heart going like something trying to get out.
I raised my hand.
My knuckles came down on the wood.