One of the other buildings in the center part that they call Shan is the pantry. Alis brings us to it, and tells us that usually he doesn’t let people just go in and take what they want, he has people distribute it. But he’ll let us go in, to see, because we’re new.
We go to bed with Ava again that night. I don’t know what time it is, but she has a watch, and she curls up on her mat inside her tent. I sit on the edge of it, watching Nua rummage through the bag that Bayan had packed for us. There’s some of Ava’s things in it, too, it’s a good thing for him that we didn’t look in it before we left or there would have been questions. He pulls things out, making piles, and Ava watches too. When he pulls out one of her sweaters she says, “Oh, yes, I love that one.”
He tosses it to her, and she smiles a little, throwing it over herself like a blanket, and then Nua pulls out a long black rope.
And Ava sits up, looking at it, and there’s an expression on her face that I can’t comprehend. She twists her mouth, and Nua just gently puts it back in the bag as the tunnel around us starts to shake.
“Just on time,” murmurs Ava, glancing at her watch. “That’s the 10:10.”
She lies back down, hugging the sweater to her chest, and I lie down next to her. “You alright?”
She just smiles slightly, her fingers curling against her chest. Nua says, “I’m gonna go talk to Penny.”
“Okay,” murmurs Ava, her eyes closing. I put my arm under my head. “So you’ve been helping Sigrid and Nova?”
“And Haywood and Alis,” she says with a smile, looking at me. “Mostly Haywood, actually. He’s the one with the spies.”
“Yeah, where did Sloan go?”
Ava shrugged. “He must have sent her somewhere. I just told him what I know about what my mother’s doing.”
“What is she doing?”
Ava sighs, adjusting herself a little, and rubs her chest where the stitches are. “Oh, Aber, I don’t want to talk about my mother.”
“Okay,” I say softly, “not right now. But I still have questions for you.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs. “I’m sure. We’ll talk, I promise.”
“Alright,” I whisper. She smiles a little, her eyes closed again, and I watch her fall asleep.
We both wake up when Nua comes back into the tent, a little while later, I think. He has a lantern with him, and I just open my eyes, and then close them again. Ava sits up as he turns it off. “Hey.”
“Hey,” he whispers. “Is Aber sleeping?”
“Yeah,” says Ava, lying back down. She turns carefully so her back is to me, looking at Nua as he sits down next to her. He smiles, and she smiles back, sounds confused when she says, “Nua.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Ava,” he answers quietly.
“Why are you here?”
He smiles again, exhaling, and thinks for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“I thought you hated me,” she whispers, and he laughs slightly. “I never hated you. Hated the marriage, maybe, but you didn’t want it as much as I did, and you never forced me to do anything. Never forced anyone to do anything.”
“You took care of me,” she murmurs. “After he died, and I got sicker, you took care of me.”
“And Aber,” he says, playing with a lock of her hair, and she nods. “Both of you.”
“Because we didn’t want you to die,” he whispers, resting his arm back around her waist. “Or Keol.”
She closes her eyes at his name, and he leans his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry about him.”
“I have his heart,” she whispers. Nua pulls away slightly. “What?”
She presses her hand flat against her chest, thin fingers spreading over the bones. A tear trickles over her temple. “My mother made them preserve his body. She said…”
She takes a shuddering breath, and Nua whispers, “It’s okay.”
“She told me,” she says, her voice breaking, “that he asked for her to save me before he died.”
Nua traces her fingers, then presses his fingertip against the skin above her heart. “He’ll stay with you.”
She smiles through her tears, and he presses his forehead against hers again. “So are we.”
I can’t help thinking that the ones she loved the most, Owen and Keol, her prominents, were the two that were ripped away from her the most violently, the most permanently.
“And Penny,” she whispers, and he grins, nodding. “And Penny.”
“Bayan helped you,” she murmurs into the darkness of the tent, and I feel Nua nodding. “Yes.”
“We should get him,” she says quietly. “I don’t want him to be left alone with my mother.”
“She was kind of broken up,” he says quietly. “Wasn’t her usual intimidating self.”
“Because I ran away,” she says, worry etched in her voice. “And sooner or later, now that you’re gone, she’s going to turn on him.”
“Okay,” says Nua quietly, looking over her at me. “We can get him.”
“I wish Penny had flowers here,” she says, and I recognize that tone of hers, the sleepy one that she slips into when she’s tired, her voice becoming sweeter, higher than it already is, lighter than air. “Or that I could bring him some. I used to bring flowers to Keol.”
“Did you love Keol?” asks Nua softly, and Ava opens her eyes slowly. “Love has-”
“-nothing to do with it, I know,” he finishes for her through a slight laugh, although I’m not sure how sincere it is. “You didn’t want to get attached.”
“Because of Owen,” she admits, her voice so quiet I can barely hear her. Nua’s silent for a moment, mulling that over, and then asks again, “Did you love him?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Have you loved any of us?”
My breath catches, but the two of them are too intensely wrapped up in each other to notice. I don’t know what I want her answer to be, but when I hear it I don’t know how it could be anything else.
“I love Penny.”
Nua smiles, and she closes her eyes again, rolling onto her back. He rests his head gently on her shoulder, his hand on her chest where Keol’s heart beats inside of her. Her fingers run through his hair like how she used to stroke her dead prominent, and her other hand once again lays over mine. This is never what I expected would happen if I married, to be voluntarily lying with my wife and her other husband, feeling safe and wanted and loved, feeling part of a family. A little light comes in from the tunnel outside, and it glints off the ring on her thumb, the one that matches mine and Nua’s.
“You did good with Aber,” whispers Nua against her, so soft I can almost not hear him. I wonder what he means, until he says, “He gets so nervous sometimes, I don’t know what to do.”
A smile curls on Ava’s lips. “Yeah. Not his fault, it’s a lot ot take in.”
“Yeah.”
“He should talk to Haywood,” says Ava sleepily, adjusting herself a little bit. “He’s good at helping people with things like that.”
Haywood, the information man. I wonder if Ava told him anything about Abigala. I wonder if he knows anything more about her. I should talk to Ava first, though, she said she would tell me more, and I trust her. She asked me once if that scared me, the idea that I can trust her, and I said no. I always trusted her more than her mother, at least, and I always trusted Keol, too, even when I thought he was going to kill me for sleeping with her. I wonder again if he hadn’t died and then Ava, would we ever have all three been able to love each other, the way that Ava loved him. Nua said that if she didn’t die I would have been her next prominent. And now there’s no prominent, because we’re in a subway tunnel and no one cares down here. I sigh, thinking of Keol’s rope belt in the bag by our feet, of Keol’s heart in her chest, and I wonder if every beat hurts her as much as every breath used to.