I don’t know if my eyes opened, or if I simply became aware of the depths to which I’d fallen; darkness extended in every direction save one, where a verdant needle stood, winching me forward in stuttery steps toward whatever lay hidden behind its emerald luminescence. Time was of no concern as I walked, found my footing, and increased pace to a jog. Gaining on that needle which widened into a wall, yawned open—a circle whose top and bottommost sides were cleaved to a precise horizontal-ness—to heights that quintupled my own, and displayed, behind frail silken gauze of shifting color, a hallway lined with bookshelves.

  My shoulder met silk, and all the force I’d built up carried me forward, forward, before that gauze snapped back into place, rebuffing me as many steps as I’d taken in testing the barrier. Despite its demonstrated elasticity, it didn’t quiver back into place—it was made of sterner stuff than me. Rising to my feet, I opted for an approach of respect and humility, inching my way toward it like it could bite or batter me, and when I pressed my palm against it…it did. Not with teeth or the prick of a needle, but vicious memory—Mom’s voice. A looping refrain of the lesson that had safeguarded my tenuous humanity, “this is what it means to be human,” coupled by the phantom sensation of a pinch against my cheek.

  “I know Mom,” I whispered to the gauze, “but I need answers, about everything.”

  Raising my hand, I recalled that I didn’t have soft pads of flesh and well-kept nails anymore, this was a memory of myself. Skin dried, fell like a dying flower’s petals, revealing claws that glowed the cutting orange-white hue of a horizon, the molten wounds of severed steel. These were my hands now, and, like slicing open a box, I slit the protective gauze which doubled as caul for the secrets of myself that’d been denied a chance to mature through the consideration of years, and stepped into the chthonic depths of a memory that I’d thought a dream.

  Beside me, farther apart than my arms could ever reach and double that of even Sphinx’s prodigious wingspan, were bookshelves, warped along the curved walls of the hallway, their texts squirming and singing for attention. Above and below were transparent panes of a malachite-hued glass—what counted as glass in the Underside, anyways—through which I could spy a thousand-thousand hallways with their bookshelves below me, another thousand-thousand above me. They were layered in sharp angles, offsetting the hallway’s curved composition, and ascended up and down without necessarily connecting to each other in any causal fashion—Escher-esque, as Mom would say. Before I could get lost in the memory of those hallways, shifting like pieces of a puzzle box with infinite formations, a girl ran past me.

  Barrettes—lovingly shaped from bone when observed in Realspace, but Crystalline in the Underside—clacked together as she ran, braids bouncing with every step. Not to mention how her Metallic musculature converted even the quickest, briefest step into a cymbal cry whose quivering echo reflected her fear—my fear. She was me, wearing the braids I’d worn all the time when I was eight. The only ones Dad knew how to do, and when I’d ask him why he couldn’t do more he’d say, “Life likes to test you on what you never thought to learn. Keeps you humble.” Then I’d reassure him that I love these braids more than anything. All of this came back to me as I watched myself, that younger self, flee from a terror I knew wasn’t far behind.

  It was like a centipede, though one whose legs were replaced by those belonging to a desert reptile and its antennae now a bouquet of human arms bent beyond limb-cracking angles. The fingers, stained in the dark hue of unactivated Underink, were a sharp contrast to the parchment skin of its antennae arms—the result of handling the many books in this labyrinthine library. That was its duty, to reshelve misplaced books and slot new acquisitions into the appropriate shelves, and this would be fine—I’d have been fine—if it didn’t have the impulse to shelve first and question never. An action which I’d seen it do when I’d first opened my eyes here; finding an entity that’d wandered in, just like me, and deciding to shove it into place on a shelf somewhere, and when it wandered away, the newly shelved “book” dripping a milky ichor from its folded up body, I knew I couldn’t let it catch me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have many places to hide here, loud as I was, and it was gaining behind me, emerging from the shadowed distance of the hallway, hands applauding in absolute glee—it loved to shelve.

  I pried myself from the memory of my terror, undiluted over the years as time couldn’t touch it, and pressed against the hallway as this place’s “librarian” surged past, its own claws lightly rapping against the glass floors. At the hallway’s end, my eight-year-old self cowered against the back wall of this dead-end. She plucked a book from the shelf, interposed it between herself and the entity as if a shield, and tried to hide within the fantasy that this would save her. It meant she didn’t see the entrance of what did, but, from my unique vantage of dreamy recollection, I did. I watched as this entity charged, fingers squirming in warm-up to handle my younger self, and before it could grab her…space shifted, parted like curtains, and out stepped a woman with a shadow made of light, sporting a blazing halo proclaiming her rule—Amber, it was Amber.

  She glided in front of the librarian, clapped her hands together to form as if in prayer, and shoved them forward before parting them, parting space, and causing the librarian to tumble into that interstitial space that Amber used. After dealing with the entity, she turned around to catch that younger Nadia in the ensorcelled throes of a good book; its song having filled her ears until it’d replaced her heartbeat, seducing her thumbs to curl around its cover and back, slowly parting them…and again, Amber came to the rescue, clapping the book shut without harming younger Nadia’s hands.

  “Please,” Amber sighed before plucking the book from her hands. “stop trying to destroy yourself.”

  It was a kindly entreaty, but came from an alien face; Amber greeted her as the faceless Sovereign I’d seen just before parrying a neighborhood leveling blast with a single finger, and younger Nadia, bereft the pre-existing context of friendship, presumed her fate had fallen into the clutches of a new alien thing. Screaming, she ascended the curved bookshelf, throwing volume after volume of strange ego-obliterating texts at Amber’s head.

  She said, “Go away, go away, I’m not tasty or something to be shelved. I’m just…”

  “Lost?” Amber offered, swaying around each literary projectile.

  My younger self lowered her throwing arm. “Yes. I am.”

  “Well, that’s why we don’t go wandering down Staircases, kid.”

  “I didn’t ‘wander’ down one,” she said, pouting. “I just end up here at night.”

  “Without your family?” Amber asked. “You do have one of those?”

  She nodded. “A sister, my mom and dad. I, um, don’t see them much. They’re up top.”

  “Realspace, you have a full family that lives in Realspace,” Amber said, “but they let you wander around here at night? That’s a pretty shitty family.”

  Younger Nadia whipped the book at Amber, this time not at her head, but her foot. The edge of its spine slammed into her big toe, forced her to hop about on one foot as she clutched the wounded one. When she looked up from the injury, she was rewarded with the sight of my younger self pulling a face mocking her sharply mundane pain.

  “Language,” she snapped, “and my family isn’t…that word. They don’t listen to my sister, but she’s trying to help me get home.”

  “Awesome, then you can wait here for her,” Amber snapped darkly, the raspberry flames of her eyes smoldering to a low burn. “I only came here to get a book anyway.”

  Amber turned on her heels, the shimmery white of her dress fluttering her goodbye before she reversed in the other direction. Younger Nadia, torn between putting her hope in her sister and getting aid from a stranger, hopped from the shelf, raced after Amber, to clutch the hem of her dress. Amber turned around, her Sovereign body allowing her spine to twist like a cat’s, and bent low so the black oval of her face met the little girl’s.

  “What?” she asked, a merciless glint in her eyes as she approached the end of her patience.

  Younger Nadia asked, “What’s your name?”

  Amber’s eyes widened, a vulnerability that my younger self noted, and she reared back up, looking away from the small child—my younger self noticed this as well. “Redacted,” she answered. “Miss Redacted, as my team called me.”

  “That’s not a name,” Younger Nadia said.

  Amber exhaled, “It’s not, but it is. They all took names and I didn’t…couldn’t.”

  “How can it be ‘not’ and ‘is’ at the same time?” she asked. “Isn’t that kind of…”

  “Oxymoronic?” Amber offered.

  “No, you don’t look stupid,” Younger Nadia said. “It’s more sad, like you’re making do with something not meant for you. My sister’s friend, Melissa, gets teased sometimes for wearing her sister’s hand-me-downs. Everyone says they aren’t really her clothes, and they aren’t but also are the best her family can do. They’re too busy making everyone else’s clothes.”

  “Your point, kid?” Amber asked.

  Younger Nadia pouted. “First, my name isn’t, ‘kid,’ it’s Nadia. Nadia Temple.”

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Amber said, sarcastically.

  “I’m sure it is, people always say that to me,” Younger Nadia replied, casually oblivious to Amber’s disbelief at my inability to read tone. “Second, to get back on topic, is that you deserve something that’s your own. Not given to you by others and used to hurt you.”

  Crouching down, Amber pushed her finger into my younger self’s chest. “That’d be a dream, ki—Temple,” Amber said, “but I made my choices—best I could at the time—and now I can’t name myself. Goes against the rules.”

  “Then we cheat, and I’ll name you…” Younger Nadia declared like it couldn’t be simpler. She fished a necklace out from beneath her nightgown, an amber magatama on a leather cord, and held it up. “...after this!”

  “Magatama?”

  Younger Nadia pursed her lips. “No, dummy, amber. Your name can be Amber.”

  “Not really that creative,” Amber said, rolling her eyes, “but I’ll try it around. See how the entities like it. See ya, Temple.”

  She turned to walk away, but again my younger self clutched her dress, preventing her exit.

  Amber asked, “For someone so afraid of a soldier, you really have no fear fucking with me, do you?”

  “Language,” Younger Nadia snapped, “and why should I, your face is weird but you’re nice.”

  A laugh rolled through Amber’s body. “You’re a terrible judge of character, Temple, I’m one of the worst people on the entire planet you could’ve ever run into.”

  “Mom likes to say, ‘everything in context,’ so maybe, but right now you’re nice,” she countered. “Right now, you’re mine.”

  “Huh?” Amber groaned.

  Younger Nadia nodded, emphatically. “I named you, like a dog, so now we have an unbreakable bond, and obla…oblo…”

  “Obligation,” Amber answered, seeing where this was going.

  “That! We have an obligation to each other,” she said. “So you can help get me out of here, and I’ll help you with whatever you want…like helping show people that you’re actually really nice.”

  From behind my younger self, I watched Amber’s eyes flit about to read my younger self’s face, wondering, what’s the angle? Is this some other scheme? A trap? Only to discover that I, in my innocence, had nothing behind my words than a guileless kid’s conviction. Amber closed her eyes, muttered the word, her new name, “Amber,” over and over, tasting it. Her eyes opened, she lowered her palm, and said, “Hop on. It’ll take too long if we go at your pace.”

  My younger self squealed with joy and climbed onto the survival raft she’d made of this unknown giantess. I felt conflicted, so many feelings counter to each other cannibalizing their energies to decide the direction of my heart; Amber had known me before all of this, and I’d forgotten her. I shut my eyes, cleared the set of this memory play…

  * * *

  …and opened them, revealing a coffered ceiling overhead. Its lights, set into the beams at each intersection, were dimmed to a whisper of lavender, but sunlight still found a way in, slicing through my artificial twilight. I slumped up, feeling a kinship to slugs sweat as I was, and noted a large furry loaf at the end of the bed. Reaching out, I pet it…and it turned out to be just a bundled blanket—very soft, impeccably made—and not who I wished it was. I felt around in my spirit, confirmed that Sphinx hadn’t left, nothing had changed. My bondmate and love was still a protean mass of possibility that hovered beyond the other side of a trial that I’d initiated, but hadn’t discovered the mechanism that’d allow me to undertake it.

  Attention flicking to the mirror across from the bed, I sneered at the woman I saw, my sister-self; she was clean, the secretaries—those in the triple digits—saw to that while some other contingent took stock of my things, what Amber hadn’t gathered in her escape, and inquired about Mother’s Last Smile. They were relieved when I said it’d been shattered. The woman in the mirror, now she looked shattered, her face broken up in fracture lines of self-directed fury that spiderwebbed from beneath her eyepatch. She’d been played, she’d set up the innocent to die, and lost everything in pursuit of a vengeance that seemed farther than any knife, than the horizon she’d never cross. She—I—we were set to be executed; not at any particular time, not that it stopped me from glancing at the clock, but at whatever hour drew Nemesis’s whim. The woman in the mirror, she set her eyes on her reflection—dead center of the temple—where a black star waited to be given its cue. It wouldn’t be an escape, but at least I’d decide when I went out, I thought to myself. This sated my sister-self, but left me quietly asking, do I deserve that choice?

  I listened for an answer, heard a knock, and stumbled to my feet in surprise—guess that’s my answer. A brick of orange light blinded me, blinking it away I spotted the folded-up binding suit I was to wear for transfer. After taking it, the light disappeared, and I wasted little time in getting changed.

  When I’d knocked, a quaint syncopated beat, the door to my room—a cell in purpose though not decor—opened, to the reveal of a secretary, plump in the manner of a pear, with a face meant for smiling but had decided to exercise new muscles for scowling. I smiled, wan and polite, and the secretary spit in my face. They smiled after that. Then they led me through the lower intestines of Lodge headquarters where people like me, traitors, and other sorts, villains perhaps, were kept in equally plush cells for when we’d be brought to task for what we’d done. Most of the villains were judged by the city, as it was the city and its people who were harmed by their actions, but traitors like me…we got to ride a swanky elevator up through floor after floor toward the very top of the building to be judged by the face and voice of the institution we’d stabbed in the back, Nemesis.

  “I’ll take it from here, #562,” a secretary in a raspberry skirt-suit combination said, smirking around the pleasure of getting to hand me off to Nemesis themselves.

  #562, as I’d learned was their name, frowned. “Really, I never get to see the Lodgemaster, let me have this.”

  The other secretary said, “You’ll be delivering plenty of others to the Lodgemaster, and I’ll trade you some good intel I found out.”

  “What’s the intel?” #562 asked.

  The secretary said, “I know where a chunk of Marduk’s throne landed.”

  #562’s eyes widened—that’d be a massive coup for someone otherwise stuck in the basement. The secretary in raspberry leaned forward, whispered it into their ear, and the deal was done. #562 hurried back into the elevator, and my new keeper led me down a hallway past office after office, a blurring backdrop of wood detailing and black rugs. We took lefts, rights, and soon the floor started dipping downward. Carpet became cobblestone, and the grinding groans of a city healing scrabbled into my ears, muffled by a kind of pressure change—pop.

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  I was in the streets of Brightgate, free. Whirling around, I discovered that my binding suit was gone, replaced by a button down with the sleeves rolled up and a white caplet cut from the same fabric as my skirt, cotton woven in a fashion that created a grooved pattern, like a vinyl record. A whistle drew my attention, that raspberry-suited secretary had been replaced by Amber—the one I’d become familiar with—who waited farther down the block. I ran to her.

  “Pretty sly escape, huh Temple?” Amber asked once I’d caught up to her. “One of my smoother—”

  Leaping, my fist caught her in the jaw to a resounding crack. She stumbled, holding out an arm to catch herself, but it was Nahey, back as a cloud of butterflies, that’d saved her from collapse. I stalked toward her, swinging my arms to have somewhere for my rage to go as it surged in me—I’d not forgotten what I’d realized before she flung me to Nemesis’s office, she’d helped Marduk. Was the reason that everything went wrong.

  “Temple,” Amber said, trying to ward off my violence, “Temple, please, I just freed you. Let’s get out of the city, and then we can—”

  I lashed out. Jab, cross, jab, a reverse rend with my claws—they all whistled in the air, my form and speed were perfect, but perfection was the ground floor to a godtender, her body swaying around every blow, as her brow knit in focus to maintain what I presumed to be her field-spell.

  She said, “Temple, don’t make me hurt you.”

  “You already did,” I growled, snapping out a front kick with the heeled boots she’d put me in.

  Her face fell flat, darkening in response to my accusation. Catching my kick between her hands, Amber latched a single hand around my ankle, swung me up into the air, released, and then the world tumbled end over end. Streets became sky, sky became streets, became sand and sea, and then I landed…supine, face to a woolen sky peppered with quills of sunlight. Amber’s face entered view, upside down, and worried about how I’d landed on the sand.

  “Are you oka—” she tried to ask, before my leg snapped up, toebox hammering into her orbital bone.

  I flipped myself over, on all fours fangs bared, and my one good eye, a supernova of hatred that most people with two eyes would struggle their entire lives to rival. Amber shrugged her jacket off and dropped to the sand, lowering herself to my level. An irony, as she’d been doing since I’d met her on that hunt. From inside her jacket, she withdrew a rapier with a guard of black-iron rose stems and a serrated blade the color of obsidian—I hadn’t seen it since the first test, which didn’t bring back good memories for me. Amber tossed the sword toward me, it landed in the sand just ahead of my right hand.

  “You know I’m not a swordswoman,” I hissed.

  Amber shrugged, “And I’m not going to dodge.”

  “Would this even work on you?” I asked. “You are a godtender, remember?”

  Running her hand through her locs, she said, “Not like this, I’m not. My role, at this point, is to be a Baron and I’ll suffer as any Baron should if Prick of Plague touched me.”

  I curled into a crouch, my hand grasping Prick of Plague’s hilt before angling swordpoint at Amber. With three limbs I slowly picked across the sand toward her, slid the blade just below her chin, rose to my full height, and made her look at me. Alls below, she smiled at me and I remembered all those smiles, knowing, loving, burning with a passion for me. My saliva tasted of whiskey.

  “Stop doing that,” I screamed.

  “Doing what?” Amber asked, concerned that something was wrong.

  Tears streamed down my face, wet my eyepatch, as I cried, “Making me remember!”

  “My Court’s Masks, not Remembrance, Temple,” Amber explained.

  “You’re still a godtender, you can make reality whatever you want!”

  She wobbled her hand in the air. “It’s more complicated than that, trust me.”

  “Who’s ‘me’ in this scenario,” I asked, “Amber, the person who swore to help me; maybe it’s the Sovereign of Masks, who I had to beg to not callously ignore thousands who’d died; though at this point, it’s probably Miss Redacted talking, hmm?”

  That last name hurt her, good. The light in her eyes, the hope that everything would be fine between us, sputtered and my heart soared in heavenly elation; before me was a Baron hiding a god, and she found herself kneeling at my feet, seeking my understanding—it felt great, I felt horrible, I sobbed.

  Screamed, “Who even are you?”

  “Someone who loves you,” Amber said, “that hasn’t changed. It’ll never change.”

  “And if I want it to?” I asked, probing for the dark flash of something I could make into a simple enemy.

  Tears beaded at the corners of her eyes. “Then I’d encounter the second order of yours I couldn’t complete, and the first that I’d have no regret in denying.”

  “Fuck!” I screamed, removing the sword from beneath her chin, whipping it out to be claimed by the ocean before turning back to my kneeling god-love. “You’re impossible. Alls below, you’re fucking impossible.”

  I kicked her in the chest, knocking her to the ground, and pounced, driving my fangs into her shoulder. She should’ve struggled, punched in my floating rib until it pierced a lung, or bucked her hips to throw me off. Instead, she cradled my head, my feelings, as I drank her blood in the hopes that I could guzzle down whatever made her care for me—I never found it, and rolled off of her, droplets of blood dotting a line toward where my head rested; against her shoulder, a lover’s position, and my claw rested over her chest where I could feel her heart beat alluringly. Though I wasn’t keen on claiming it, I didn’t want it, not in the way I’d taken #404’s. Never and no one, would I take in that fashion after them.

  “On the matter of what I can do,” Amber said, the crashing surf filling the space between words, “you can trust the Sovereign.”

  I asked, “Is she who decided to help Marduk?”

  “No, but she had the skills to back it up,” Amber said. “That one was a joint operation. Amber, couldn’t allow you to die, and Miss Redacted couldn’t—despite how awful he turned out—let Marduk go out like that.”

  “Then I suppose I only hate two-out-of-three of you,” I said, “so far.”

  I propped myself up, gazed out to the horizon where things were flat and simple, then back to my love who was anything but. In her eyes I was a dark thing framed by a neutral heaven, and her lips—regardless of how serious I was, this moment was—twitched in appreciation of what I assumed was my beauty. While I curled fetally, she laid back against her elbows. If no one knew us we looked like two gals on the cutest date, on a beach all by ourselves.

  “Thank you…for freeing me,” I whispered.

  Amber grinned, “Anytime, Temple.”

  “Really,” I asked, “I thought I wouldn’t be seeing you for a while after bringing everyone back?”

  Her grin died at my signal of more serious talk. “The assessment was…before your proposed changes. I had a new role, and it’s more permissive—lets me pull you out of there, take us to the beach…and make you an offer.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Amber reached into her discarded jacket, removed a small velvet box, and rolled back onto one knee. My mouth swung open in disbelief, and my eyes opened to the truth—she was proposing. The box cracked open with a mouse-sized whine, revealing a ring of carved wood, golden wired inlaid, and at the center was a smooth chalcedony gem. I looked up to find Amber’s expression awash in affection begging for reciprocation.

  “Nadia Temple, would you—”

  “No,” I said, rising from the sand and walking away. Of course, Amber chased after, dog and servant to my heart and whims that she was.

  She said, “Temple, I’m not asking lightly.”

  “I know,” I said, seeking out the end of this damned beach. “Though you’re a bit late if you want my parents’ approval. As a match, they might approve of you being a godtender, but they always wanted me to be with someone honest, forthright, transparent.”

  “That’s three words to say the same thing,” she yelled. “Temple, please, this is the best way for us to stay together.”

  I stopped, sighed, and turned to face her. “Let me correct you. This is the best way for you to stay with me this way. I don’t know if I want to be with you, Amber, let alone ‘with you.’ Besides, I already ducked out of one marriage for power, who’s to say I won’t do that to you?”

  She shrugged, “If you marry me you’d be ducking into a marriage for power. I’ll show you everything I can when it comes to climbing the Chain. Help you plan out every bit of your upChains so you don’t end up making poor decisions.”

  “I haven’t even graduated, and I’ve made the worst decisions of my life!” I screamed from down the beach. “I trusted you all the way down into that cell!”

  Her brow furrowed as she fought down her anger. “Don’t put that on me,” she screamed back. “I gave you my counsel, my body, everything, and you decided to abandon it all to help out a fucking secretary and one of Marduk’s fucked up grandkids!”

  It wasn’t that she was right—though maybe she kind of was—but her words drove me into a full-body paroxysm. My feet stamped into the sand, kicked apart the tiny peaks created, and I ripped apart the shirt and skirt she’d dressed me in, tore the boots from my feet, and tossed all of them at her in one chimeric blast of apparel—that the wind returned the bulk of in my direction, my shirt hitting me in the face and silencing my fury. Peeling it off, I stared at it, then at her, and giggled. Tiny bubbles of sanity popping into a layered choir of laughs.

  Amber’s rage dissipated, as she raced over toward me. “Temple, I’m sorry—”

  “No, no,” I said, short of breath as any and all were claimed by laughter, “this is pretty funny. I’m on a beach, arguing with you, standing around in tights and panties while you’re a fucking godtender begging the crazy bitch in tights and panties to marry you. How does that make sense?”

  “My current role lets me make an offer that will let us stay together forever,” she explained, voice soft and guilty. “I can teach you everything, give you everything, and we can just run from all of this. Be anything we want, be anywhere we want, and…”

  “And what?” I asked.

  “You won’t have to die,” she said. “If I didn’t steal you away, if you don’t say yes, then you’ll die.”

  “I’ve nearly died before and gotten out of it,” she said.

  Amber conceded that point. “That’s most people, Temple. Every step is a moment where death reaches out to pluck you from the wings, and you’ve been too downstage to be caught.”

  “Until now?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Until now.”

  “Hmm,” I hummed, “that sucks. Any chance you can—”

  “This is the choice,” Amber said, “die with Nemesis or live with me.”

  The sea breeze never felt colder, but I didn’t put the shirt back on or the skirt that came with it; my head had to be clear because my heart was lead, and I didn’t want to sink to the bottom of things due to another wrong choice. I looked out toward the city, away from the infinite horizon where I could easily imagine running off with Amber—I could imagine forgiving her, in time, knowing she’d swim to the depths of the Underside and back to earn it—so that I could see what I was running from, my mess. Brightgate’s skyline was missing some teeth that Marduk’s attack kicked in, and I’d held them down so it could happen. The people in that city didn’t have a godtender to offer an easy escape, they’d be working for at least half a year, maybe longer, to find all the missing bodies, repair the broken infrastructure, and hunt down those entities that Nemesis had missed when she consumed most of Marduk’s forces. That was everything before actually rebuilding buildings.

  Amber pinched my chin between her thumb and the edge of her index finger, guiding my face toward hers, pressing my lips against hers. It felt warm, right, and the kind of ease of burdens that I’d been chasing since that time in the bathroom with—I shoved Amber away from me, Turning around so I didn’t have to look at her, but she wrapped her arms around me like so many times before to help pull me together.

  “Amber,” I said, “I want to say yes, I want to say yes so badly.”

  “Then say it,” she whispered, “and we’ll go anywhere you want.”

  “Before that, I…,” it was hard to get the words out, “I need answers, Amber. There’s been too many reveals, half-truths, and alls below who knows what else that’ve made this entire journey beleaguered. So, if this is you making your offer, then wrap it up in the truth and I’ll take it.”

  “What do you want to know?” Amber asked, offering her heart and our future together as votive.

  “Question one,” I said, tears welling, “if you’re a godtender, why didn’t you save my parents?”

  Amber’s hands went cold, clammy against my skin as she said, “It wasn’t my role.”

  “Is that all you are,” I asked, “a role?”

  “Is that your second question?” she asked.

  I answered, “No, but that’s something of an answer. Question two, were you ever going to tell me that Nemesis didn’t do it?”

  She growled into my ear, “Nemesis had done enough. If fate was to steer you—”

  “That’s not my question,” I stated.

  Amber’s breath was hot against the nape of my neck, but her tears were hotter, warming my chilled skin as they struck delivering her answer.

  “Question three,” I said, turning around in her arms to face her, “is my life my own?”

  She searched me for clues. “What do you mean?”

  “Is. My life. My own?” I asked. “Or is it just another thing you’ve ‘directed?’”

  “Temple, I wouldn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “That just means you might fuck up in the attempt, but maybe you’d try.”

  “Temple—”

  I burrowed my head into her chest, my claws sank into her back as I latched myself to her—the last mast holding me up, or potentially taking me down—and begged, “Amber, just say the words. ‘Temple, I did not direct your life.’”

  Her lip quivered, but no words came out.

  “Tell me, and I’ll run away with you,” I said. “We’ll hunt down whoever is left, track down whatever you need to leave your past behind you, and then we do whatever we want, go wherever we want, be whoever we want.”

  Amber lifted her head, looking past me and toward the truth she refused to put into words.

  “Amber, please,” I said, “say them otherwise I won’t know if..if this is a love I’m feeling for you, or if this feeling, these words, this moment were all scripted. Alls below, Amber, are tears scripted? Are they hitting the right cue? Are my tits the size you’d edited to fit your desire? The angle I tilt my head, how wide I open my eyes…how I can’t stop looking at your mouth and dreaming of pressing mine to it, is any of that me, or am I your damsel, following along to your plot where I’m forced to choose between you and death?”

  “You’ve never been a damsel,” Amber said, kissing the top of my head.

  I sobbed, “And there’s the lie.”

  “But, you haven’t—”

  “I remember,” I said, “how we first met. Not in the van on the way to the Staircase, but in the Underside. Where you saved me.”

  I opened my arms, but Amber refused to let me go.

  “Is that what this is about?” she asked. “Temple.”

  “Send me back,” I said.

  She shook her head, “Over that? Temple, I forgot, I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t. Give me a different reason, and sure, but I didn’t lie.”

  “You didn’t give me an answer either,” I said, looking away from the pain in her face. “Not a real one to any of my questions. You’ve deflected, been silent, bit down on whatever truth you’d refused to part with. Alls below, maybe you did forget how we met, or maybe you just had to lie so that I’d know the right decision to make. Now send me back.”

  Amber’s hands fell from my arms. She formed a hand-spell, then dragged it through the air as if there was a curtain part, and space parted around the motion creating a jagged doorway back to the Lodge’s headquarters. I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Is being with me worse than death?” she asked.

  “No, but I’m tired of not knowing anything,” I said. “So, while the choice seems ugly on its face, feels to you like an insult, know that it’s not me choosing death over you. No, it’s me choosing answers over ignorance, even if it’d be with someone I can really love. And Amber…”

  “Yes?” she asked, relocating tears from her cheeks to her sleeve.

  My voice breaking under the weight of forced levity, I winked, lashes kissing a tear from my eye. “You’re free from your oblo…obla…”

  “Obligation,” she said, picking up her side of an old conversation now a new joke between us.

  “Y-yeah, that’s the…” globs of tears drowned my words, my heart, but I had to finish the joke…for her. I needed her to know that maybe this would only be a goodbye for now, not forever. “That’s the word…that’s the word…yeah.”

  “Nadia, you were never an obligation to me,” Amber cried out, needing to yell so her words had enough space for every feeling. “You’re my temple, and I’d worship you forever.”

  “Sounds boring,” I chuckled, as each word between us—steps taken to avoid goodbye—accompanied a profound snap in my chest; the fingers of love that’d choked my heart for so long, snapping backward as I let go of my own, uncompromised, volition. “Enjoy forever.”

  I passed through the doorway she’d made for me, felt reality swing back in place to barely a flutter—Amber was a master of subtle sorceries—and made my way through the top floor of headquarters. In tights, black panties, and crying down to my bare tits I sought out Nemesis’s office. Not like it was hard, it was the place that had the thickest scent of Bloodlust. As I navigated those hallways, secretaries stopped in shock and disbelief, Lodgemembers froze as they tried to discern if this was some hazing ritual or something stranger, and in spite of the maudlin air about me, I kept my head up. I kept it up, just like Dad always told me to when I had to face something that turned my stomach—he’d meant it for eating my vegetables, but I think my own execution still applies. When I reached Nemesis’s office, #2 and #3 rose from their desks to, not really greet me, but to see me off in some sense.

  #3 asked, “Did you run?”

  “No, just, took a stop by the beach,” I said. “See the horizon one last time with someone special.”

  “Was it fun?” #2 asked.

  I said, “No, Christy, it was awful.”

  “Apologies, then,” #2 said, her expression lifting as I returned to them their name. “Nemesis is…ready for you.”

  Walking past them, I clapped their shoulders. “Cheer up, I’m the one dying.”

  Then, I pushed open the door, and entered Nemesis’s office, that plush cage which no one could see into save a godtender—I hope Amber didn’t watch, and found my executioner, legs crossed with a plate of tacos balanced over her knee, smiling.

  “Well then, let’s get this started, hmm?” Nemesis asked.