It took longer than Maren expected — long enough that she simply sat with him, in the broken gray, one hand resting light against the edge of the receding dark, saying nothing because there wasn't anything useful to say, only presence to offer, the same patient currency she'd been offering since the very first day she'd found him.
When the black finally, fully receded, Ash came back into himself the way a held breath finally releases — all at once, and shaking, both eyes flooding back to their familiar banked blue the instant the last of the rootbound dark unwound from his shoulders.
"Maren." His voice cracked on her name, the old crack, worse than she'd heard it in a long time. His hands found her face, careful, frantic, checking her over with a thoroughness that had nothing to do with doubt and everything to do with fear. "You're bleeding. You're — I felt it, I felt them cut you, I couldn't — "
"I'm okay." She caught his hands, held them still against her own face, let him feel her pulse steady and present under his palms. "Look at me. I'm okay. It's already closing. You're okay too."
"What happened?" He looked around, at the cracked, empty gray, at the absence of everything that had just, moments ago, nearly ended them both. "Where did they go? Where did — the woman, the one who — "
"She's gone," Maren said. "She helped us. That's all that matters right now."
Stolen novel; please report.
"What did she want?" His eyes, still raw, still frightened, searched her face with an intensity that made her chest ache. "She talked to you. I saw her talk to you and I couldn't — I couldn't reach either of you, not through whatever that was, whatever I was — what did she say?"
Maren held his gaze, and lied for the first time in her entire death, gently, deliberately, the way you lie to spare someone a weight they aren't ready yet to carry.
"She said we were lucky," she said. "That's all. That she doesn't usually bother, but tonight she did, and we should be grateful, and get somewhere safer before something else finds us."
It wasn't entirely a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth, and Maren had already decided, sitting there in the broken gray with his hands still shaking against her face, that the whole truth could wait — could wait years, could wait forever, if forever was what it took for him to grow into a shape sturdy enough to hold it without it costing him something he couldn't afford to lose.
"Okay," he said, and some of the fear finally, visibly, drained out of him, replaced by something exhausted and grateful and entirely trusting. "Okay. We should go, then. Somewhere quieter."
"Yeah," Maren said, helping him to his feet, one hand still steady in his. "Somewhere quieter."
Behind them, unnoticed, the last of the cracked ground finished healing itself shut, and the Between settled back into its ordinary, patient silence, as if a girl had never bled and a stone had never woken and a woman with no face beneath her hood had never stepped, slow and deliberate, out of the dark to claim exactly what she'd come for.