Page 124 of Love, Nemesis
“All this time,” Lethe said, remembering all of the times she’d acted as if it were simply a fable, living a life that was carefullystitched together with obscure hopes. “How do you—?” he began to ask, but she cut him off.
“I remember,” she said, breathing hard as she sank back down against the wall. He didn’t approach her this time, getting the sense that the only reason she wouldn’t back farther away was because she was too exhausted. “I remember how I died,” she said. “I don’t know why. The Great Light isn’t perfect. It has…flaws. Nothing of this magnitude could be flawless.” Her breathing shuddered as if the removal of this secret from her core caused a hemorrhage of feelings. Her life had been built around this secret, and taking it out seemed to risk the total collapse of what remained.
“I remember,” she said again. “I bled out in that woman’s arms. Emma, you called her. She was there for me in the end. She gave me what she had left, and I’ve never forgotten that.”
He saw Ana’s strength come to the surface, the strength forged through a lifetime of a woman who’d been haunted by the reality of her own existence. “Hours later, I woke up in ashes without a scratch on my body.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I followed other survivors to the State. They didn’t remember dying, and eventually, I tried to forget too, able to accept some version of reality where all of that was just a nightmare, a really bad nightmare. But I knew the truth.”
She swallowed dryly, and he could see that the pain inside her had eased, released at last to flood the space between them.
“When you told me about Emma’s fate, I didn’t have the heart to tell you about what might have been my own, and even then, I felt relieved to have your forgiveness anyway. But now, you have to know,” she said, rousing from where she rested before lookingaway from him. “I don’t have anything to offer you. I don’t have anything real to offer anyone.” She rubbed her face. “I tried to do what I could to make up for…any of it, but all along, I’ve been just waiting for my time to run out. I was so close to…”
“Rest,” Lethe finished.
She rubbed more tears from her face. “From the burden of questioning myself every second of every day, from the burden of being a ghost. I felt so trapped in life, trapped without any remedy, Lethe. I am so lost and the only way out I had is gone now. This is torture.”
Lethe approached, concerned as he searched her face, guiding her up to him. He wrapped her back into his arms and whispered her name as he looked into her eyes. He wasn’t sure which nature spoke for him. As he watched her soul, he saw that strange and familiar thing nestled and hidden beneath all of her emotions. He spoke to that, and with frightening ease, confessed a truth that he accepted only as he revealed it to them both, “I would love even the ghost of you.”
Her expression faltered, and he saw in her an invitation, his affections finally given passage by an unburdened secret.
He kissed her again.
She jolted as if the sensation shocked her and then her hand moved into his hair. He leaned forward, kissing her neck as he hoisted her closer to his body, one hand circling her thigh.
He followed her breathing like a map, the subtlest changes voicing a turn in her feelings as she shook against the sensations he played through her. He swept her down into her small bednear the fireplace. For a beautiful moment, she was nothing but warmth in his arms and he coiled them both in a blanket.
She unraveled beneath him, but he held fast to her with the truth that he was the one hanging by a thread.
Evira had been right.
One glimpse into Ana’s soul and he found himself a subject of it, able to fight and suffer at the hands of the Strike empire, and then laid bare in worship at the mercy of this tender and infinitely rich woman.
He was swept up in the solace of her spirit and the tangle of her form, and it felt all-encompassing, like he’d been lost in a sea of fire for a decade and at last had come home. His mind and body were for a moment empty of their demons, and in the warm shelter of Ana, he thought of Emma Shepherd. The sensation of her was so striking that he hesitated, drawing away from her lips, hands poised against her skin beneath the dress.
As if his pause had been a conscious and necessary thing, Ana embraced him a final time, chest to chest, before easing out from under him. A single tear trailed down her face. He watched her eyes, mesmerized by a building realization as a soft smile tugged at her lips.
Adjusting her dress, she looked over at him with the warmth of gratitude. “We have to finish this,” she whispered, the decision firm and light in her eyes, given new spirit by a renewed courage and direction. He realized then he had treated her symptoms, but not the condition, when she added with a now emboldened, almost grateful breath, “Let’s break The Great Light.”
He wanted to ask her what she was running from, but reminded himself that he had been the one to draw back from her.
Why?
The thought of Emma hadn’t felt shameful or wrong. It had felt strange, the Strike and human part of him conversing in a passionate dialogue as he’d been so determined to have Ana close, to savor the respite of her body.
As Ana walked to the door and leaned against the doorframe, Lethe watched her shape from the bed, and like the smallest whisper in his mind, he understood at last what he had seen and felt in her. He recognized that strange, familiar thing in the depth of her soul.
Ana had a mutation.
She was like him in more ways than either of them could have ever imagined.
“Illusions aren’t bad,” was all Lethe could say. “We need them to stay alive.”
Ana turned her head and looked over her shoulder at him. She didn’t disagree, but not because she didn’t have anything to say. Indulging in the senses of a Strike, he was now able to see the words float through her mind.
But what kind of life is that?
He disagreed with the sentiment behind it. She had a thought that she was better off dissolving in the vacancy of the universe.
“There has to be a better way,” he said. “Even if we can’t see one. Even if the other way is just having faith.”
