Half a heart

Five days.

That's how long it takes to bury someone when the country they died in doesn't exist anymore.

Nobody tells you that. It's not in any of the novels I wasted my previous life on. Heroes die on page three hundred and get a funeral on page three hundred and one, clean, sad, beautiful.

In reality there are logistics. There is ground to choose, in a tower that floats above a sea of clouds. There are clothes nobody packed for a treasure hunt. There are bodies that need—

Yeah. Five days.

Knock-knock.

"Come in."

Helena enters, already dressed in black. The tower people found mourning clothes for all of us; hers fits almost right, which somehow makes it worse.

She looks at my collar, sighs, and crosses the room.

"You did the clasps wrong."

"The clasps are wrong," I say. "Whoever designed this robe hated people."

"Uh-huh." Her fingers redo them in silence, top to bottom. She doesn't meet my eyes. "Ready?"

No.

"Yeah."

⁂

The twins' tower has fields inside it. Trimmed grass, stone paths, crooked towers on the horizon of a space that shouldn't fit in a building — I stopped asking how weeks ago.

At the edge of the fields, under a tree that looks older than most countries, there are two graves.

Clara prepared the bodies herself. The tower offered — apparently there are people for that, even here — and she refused so quietly that nobody dared insist. She's a Healer, she said. Her mother taught her that the job doesn't end when the patient does.

She combed Dan's hair.

They'd combed it wrong the first time, she told Helena. Flat. Dan never once in his life had flat hair.

So she fixed it.

I have died once, and I still don't know where people find that kind of courage.

⁂

We stand in a small half-circle. Me. Helena. Clara. Joseph, fists at his sides, jaw set like he's holding the whole ceremony shut with his teeth.

No Alex.

His door didn't open this morning. Clara knocked twice and then just rested her forehead against it for a moment, and we left without him.

A handful of tower people stand further back. Madame Regina, in dark purple, for once not introducing herself to anyone. The lady from the pink kitchen, holding a covered tray, because grief in any world apparently smells like too much food.

And the twins.

Nihil in black robes with no adornment at all. I didn't know he owned clothes that weren't shouting. He hasn't said a word all morning, hands behind his back, violet eyes fixed on the graves like they're a problem he can't solve.

Nemo steps forward.

There are no priests left to pray over anyone. Nobody suggested asking Pyreon for anything — the church buried itself, along with the country. I keep waiting for that thought to feel like justice. It just feels like more dead people.

"Everything is borrowed," Nemo says.

His voice isn't the classroom voice. It's smaller. It fits.

"Every particle in every body — lent to us by the universe, for a while, on terrible interest." A few of the tower people smile, the way you smile at a funeral, mostly with your eyes. "Today we return two of the finest things it ever lent us. Daniel. Joh."

He doesn't say Smith. He doesn't do titles. He just looks at the graves for a while.

"They were sixteen," Nemo says, and for a second the smallness in his voice isn't rhetoric at all. "We will not forget what that means."

I don't know what the twins remember, or how much of it is measured in centuries. But Nihil closes his eyes at that, and doesn't open them for a long time.

⁂

The coffins go down slowly, on ropes handled by tower people. No levitation. I notice that, and then I notice that I noticed — the two most powerful men in the region, and they chose to let their people lower the boys by hand, at the speed grief actually moves.

Dirt hits wood. The worst sound in any world.

That's when the door in the field — a door, standing alone on the grass, because this place has given up on architecture making sense — opens, and Alex comes through it at a run that dies after three steps.

He stops at the edge of the half-circle like there's glass in front of him.

He's in yesterday's clothes. His eyes go to Dan's grave and his hands start shaking, and I watch him decide, one muscle at a time, not to run back.

Clara reaches out and takes his hand.

He doesn't say sorry. Nobody makes him. He stands there shaking and staying, and honestly, of all of us, he might be the bravest one on this field.

Dan died pushing him out from under a spider.

Alex came to the grave anyway.

⁂

Afterward, when the half-circle loosens and the pink-kitchen lady starts pressing food on people with the gentle ruthlessness of a war medic, Joseph comes to Helena.

He's holding something small. He's been holding it all morning — that's what the fist was about.

"We shared a room," he says. His voice is careful, engineer-careful, load-bearing. "I sorted his things. He'd have hated anyone else doing it, he had a system, it was a stupid system—"

He stops. Adjusts his glasses.

He opens his hand. On his palm, on a thin chain: half a heart.

"He was wearing his half," Joseph says. "It's still— he kept it. This one was always yours. He never stopped calling it a protection necklace. Right up to the end, that's what it was."

Helena's face does something I can't watch and can't look away from.

She takes it. Both hands, like it's heavier than it is.

"It didn't work," she whispers.

"It wasn't his half that was supposed to protect him," Joseph says.

Except Joh, I don't like him.

I thought that once. Some throwaway line in the comfortable dark of my own head, back when the worst thing in this world was a boy giving my— giving Helena a clumsy necklace.

Joh charged the spider first. Before Joseph. Before me.

I stand there while Helena puts on half a heart, and I eat the thought whole, and it tastes exactly like it should.

⁂

Two graves.

There should be more. Nobody says it, but it's there in the spacing, in all that empty grass under the old tree — the others from our class never got graves. There was no one left to ask for them, and nothing left to bury that anyone went back to find.

Lucy. Jacob. The rest.

A whole classroom, and what's left of it fits in a half-circle with room to spare.

I knew this kingdom would fall.

I've been carrying that sentence for five days, and it gets heavier every time Helena touches that necklace. I knew something. Not when. Not how. Not that "the kingdom will perish" would arrive on eight legs and find us first, in a forest, on a game—

Enough.

I cross the grass to where the twins stand apart, at the tree line, watching their people herd my friends toward food.

"Tomorrow," I say, "you're going to tell me what really happened. All of it. What the church did. What that voice in the sky was. Why." My voice doesn't shake, which surprises both of me.

Nemo looks at his brother.

Nihil looks at the graves.

"Tomorrow," Nihil says. For once there's no joke waiting behind the word, and that scares me more than the spider did. "Ask everything tomorrow."

He turns back to the tree, and the two boys under it.

"Today belongs to them."