"Isolde?"
"I’m fine." Which was, he was already learning, not the same thing as true.
He knocked once and opened the door partway, not fully, keeping his eyes somewhere polite and unhelpful. "Do you want help, or do you want me to go back and pretend I heard nothing?"
A long pause. He could hear her breathing, frustrated and controlled.
"The transfer’s easier with two people," she said finally, like the words cost her something to hand over. "I usually had an aide for it. I didn’t think to ask your family to hire one before—" She stopped herself. "Before all this."
"Okay." He kept his voice even. "Tell me what to do. I’ve never done this. I’d rather you direct me than I guess and get it wrong."
That, apparently, was the correct answer. Something in her shoulders eased by a fraction.
"Chair angled in, brake locked first, check it’s locked, don’t take my word for it, I can’t always tell from up here." He checked it twice. "Arm under mine, not around my waist, I’m not being carried like a sack of grain. On three, I do the work, you’re just there so I don’t overbalance."
It was, in the end, clumsy in the way anything is clumsy the first time. His grip too tentative, then briefly too firm, he noticed, uttering an apology.
Her jaw tight with the particular humiliation of needing a stranger’s hands for something her body used to do without thought. Neither of them said much during it. There wasn’t much to say that wouldn’t have made it worse.
She settled back against the pillows, breathing out slowly.
"Thank you," she said eventually, stiff, like the word had to be forced past something.
"You don’t make it easy." He straightened, putting a careful distance back between them. "You just have to tell me when I’ve got it wrong. I’d rather be corrected than have you grit your teeth through it because you’re too proud to say something."
Her eyes narrowed slightly in a way that made him tense.
"Goodnight, Emeric."
"Goodnight, Isolde."
He sat alone at the edge of the sofa, his mind running wild. Technically they were now supposed to share themselves, and found himself thinking about the marriage certificate folded in his coat.
For better or worse, it had said, in the old formal wording nobody actually meant anymore.
He’d signed it anyway. He didn’t make promises he didn’t intend to keep. It was, as far as he could tell, the only thing of value he actually had.
He made the right choice. She did not need the extra pressure because they were now husband and wife. He would sleep in the living room.
***
Emeric woke to a sound that he had never heard before. It was a low tearing pressure that came up through the floorboards, vibrating violently up through the surface before it reached his ears at all. The sofa cushion under him vibrated with it. For one disoriented half-second he thought it was thunder.
Then the window in the sitting room shattered inward, and the light that followed it wasn’t lightning. It wasn’t the right color. Not at all. Without missing a beat, the whole house lurched sideways like something enormous had just leaned its weight against the foundation.
He was on his feet before he’d finished understanding why.
"Isolde—"
Her name tore out from his lips, already running for the bedroom barefooted. The hallway floor bucking under his feet like a deck in a storm. A ceiling beam came down behind him, close enough that he felt the wind of it. Plaster dust filled the air, choking, and beneath the tearing sound now was a scream from somewhere outside — a neighbor, a monster, he couldn’t tell.
Damn it! There were people who did these kinds of things. This was not him. Monster extermination units had been sent in to ensure the safety of the citizens some weeks ago.
Rifts were not rare, but they rarely opened in residential areas. They were common in places rich with nature’s mana, not here. But like he was seeing, a rift was opening right in the middle of his living room and from the sound of the chaos he was hearing, it was everywhere and boy, was it a big one.
They needed to leave. With Rifts came monsters.
Nobody had figured out where they came from yet but some theories said they came from another world, which earned the things they came through, ’Rifts."
If there was one opening here, it was only a matter of time before the monsters followed through.
He dashed forward, his mind set on one thing. This house was coming down from the look of it and they had to be far away from here by the time that happened.
Other people had sex on their wedding night. Not him. He was simply cut from a rarer more unlucky cloth. He cursed under his breath as he came to stand in front of the bedroom, assessing the situation.
He quickly hit the bedroom door with his shoulder because the frame had already warped and it wouldn’t open the ordinary way.
She was awake, of course she was awake. No one could have slept through this, he mused as he watched her, braced upright against the headboard. One hand locked white-knuckled on the bed rail, eyes wide but not panicked, already assessing the room the way she assessed everything. The tremors continued as the room was now taking on the faint violet glow from earlier.
"Chair’s pinned," she said, fast with a flat tone that he suspected was her trying to hide her emotions. "Left wheel, under the dresser. Forget it."
"Not leaving it—"
"Emeric." Her voice cracked through the noise like something of an authority behind it. "Forget the chair. Get me out."
He didn’t argue. He got an arm under her shoulders and another under her knees and lifted her the way she’d told him never to because there was no time left for the version where she directed and he assisted. She didn’t fight him on it. That, more than anything, told him how bad it actually was.