Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

Andy knew how she wanted to spend the time she had left.

She put Copley in charge of acquiring the ship. She liquidated assets and scrutinized each list; the tech, the sonar, the captain and the crew.

“You can have all the technology in the world,” Copley pointed out. “It’s still a needle in a haystack.”

As though this was something she had not lived, as though she might not know. She felt her hand tighten, ready to lash out, ready to strike him down. But that wouldn’t solve anything. It wouldn’t help. She stretched out her fingers, watched the tremor shake through. How they ached, how they protested, how they trembled with this new mortality.

“If it all goes well, we can be on the water next year,” Copley said, leaning over a stack of papers on his desk. He’d brought in cleaners. It hadn’t helped. Andy could still see the faded stains of her blood on his carpet.

“We’ll be on the water next month,” Nile said, her voice direct, firm. An order. Andy smiled. Nile was going to turn out just fine.

Andy looked up from her fingers to find Nile watching her. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, but her eyes were warm, a comfort. She didn’t seem comforted by the fact that Andy was smiling.

“Next month,” Copley repeated, mouth tight on the words. He wiped sweat from his brow, pulled his cellphone from his pocket and got to work.

**

It was not what time stole. It was what it left behind. It was the things she couldn’t forget.

She’d tried. She really did try.

What else could she do?

She tried so hard to forget after the first time she failed. Decades of searching, decades spent on the unforgiving sea, each morning dawning bright with hope that this day would be the day. This day would be the day they found her, that Andromache wrenched open the coffin and pulled Quynh out of the sea and into her arms. Decades, until finally, finally, she reached the end of her meticulously curated guest list. They found every sailor on that boat, listened to every account of the coffin being pushed overboard, every report of Quynh disappearing beneath the waves.

Andy killed the ones that wouldn’t talk. The ones that spilled promises were dragged out to sea, and when the search came up empty, again and again and again, she could not find mercy in her heart. She cut them down, tossed them into the sea, hoped that Quynh would feel the change in the water and know that it was Andromache’s gift to her, know that it was vengeance paid in blood, know that it was not enough.

Day after day, Andromache failed. Day after day, the sun set and her arms were empty, her hands bare, until finally, another morning and Andromache could not go on. There was no hope to be had there.

She remembered the sky that morning, a thick mat of grey clouds that rolled toward the horizon, toward the edge of the earth. The air felt thick with salt that burned her nose and dried her throat.

Yusuf and Nicolo stood before her, the chain in their hands, the hook and the weights. Andromache turned her backs to them, stared down into the black water, not a hint of blue to be found that day. She stared until Nicolo placed a hand on her shoulder and then she pushed him back, watched him fall, watched Yusuf rush to his aid. She collapsed to her knees on the deck. Her mouth opened on a great wail that tore at her throat and yanked at her chest, a tearing hook through the heart. She punched the wood with all of her strength. She threw her ax at the mast and watched it stick with a satisfying thwunk.

“We’ll find her,” Yusuf promised, his hands still on Nicolo, pretty lies on that pretty tongue. “Time is on our side and the ocean is not growing wider.”

The hopeless romantic even then.

It was the first battle that Andromache ever truly lost, the most painful of her many million deaths.

**

Andy sat beside Nile’s bed, watched the rise and fall of Nile’s chest as she slept. She drained the rest of her whiskey, set the empty glass down carefully, quietly. She didn’t want to wake Niles. Her expression was soft, innocent, so young. Andy studied the fan of Nile’s eyelashes against her cheeks, the slack heaviness of her mouth, the gentle curl of her fingers against the pillow. She watched for every movement, every twitch, her fingers pulling at the cord around her neck as she stared in anticipation.

It had been at least a century since she’d done this, since she searched for Quyhn in their dreams.

By the time they found Booker, Quynh had been lost for two hundred and fifty years. The first time Booker mentioned his dreams, it shook Andromache to her core, left her curled in her cave for six months, her fingers clutching, twisting the pendant around her neck, tightening it hard enough to choke herself, hard enough to leave a mark. When she found the strength to stand, the resolve to try again, she ignored the helpless set of Joe’s face, the weary resignation in Nicky’s sagging shoulders.

They spent the next year back at sea, relying on Booker’s dreams to lead them to Quynh. Andy sat up nights listening to the creaking of the ship, watching Booker’s face for signs of the dreams. She studied his face, learned every detail of every expression, learned the pattern of every hair on his chin, every spot left by the sun. When his lip twitched she saw Quynh’s face. When his teeth clenched, she heard Quynh’s screams.

Nile opened her eyes, shouted when she saw Andy leaning over her. Her hand went for her gun, but Andy was smarter than that. She moved it as soon as she sat down. She couldn’t take chances. Not anymore.

“Fuck, Andy,” Nile breathed, her hand pressed to her chest, the beating of her heart almost audible in he room.

“Do you still have the dreams?” Andy asked. Nile’s brow furrowed and Andy knew how she must look. She could hear the intensity in her own voice. She knew what came next: Nicky and Joe making Nile promise never to mention the dreams again. She knew that was how it went with Booker, knew that was why the dreams suddenly stopped. There was no other reason. Booker never found Quynh. Did he still feel her drown, feel the water flooding his lungs as he slept?

“The dreams?” Nile asked, fingers rubbing at her eyes. She pulled back the covers, patted the mattress. Andy ignored the gesture. A cuddle wasn’t going to douse the fire in her gut, the rushing in her head.

“The woman in the coffin,” Andy said. She spit the words fast, unable to handle the weight of them otherwise. “Quyhn.”

“Yes,” Nile said, eyebrows low, forehead tight. “Sometimes.”

Andy sagged, her arms on the edge of the bed, her head in her hands.

Nile reached for her immediately, pulled her forward until Andy gave in, climbed into Nile’s bed without taking off her shoes.

“You need to sleep,” Nile said.

“They say insomnia can kill you."

“Not you,” Nile countered. “Not on my watch.”

Andy let herself be held, listened to the sound of Nile’s breath against the shell of her ear.

“Promise you’ll tell me if the dreams stop,” Andy said into the dark.

Nile was quiet behind her.

Andy started to twist, needed to see Nile’s face, needed to know that Nile wouldn’t hold back like Booker. Nile held her tight, pressed her chin to Andy’s shoulder.

“Promise,” Andy said again.

“I promise,” Nile whispered. “Get some rest.”

Chapter Text

Andy stared out at the horizon, anticipation twitching through her limbs. It shook through her fingers and she tightened her grip on the rail. Standing on the deck of a ship again, going back out on this sea, it felt in Andy’s heart like going home. As much of a home as she had these days. She had homes and hideouts across the globe. She had Joe and Nicky, of course. She had Booker. And now she had Nile, but no single place, no location and no person felt as inevitably hers as this.

Nile found her sea legs quickly, navigated the boat with surprising ease. She held the rail and swung her body past a stack of bins as she came forward to stand beside Andy. Her face was set, determined. She’d had the dream again in the early hours of that morning. Quynh screaming, crazed, the ocean bubbling up with her cries. If only they’d dropped her somewhere shallow. If only she was close enough that her bubbling screams could really make it up to the surface, a beacon, a flare, to guide Andy's search.

Nile really believed that the dreams would lead them to Quynh. She was young and, as it turned out, she was an absolute hopeless romantic. Was that what they all had in common? Andy's old guard? They were all a mess for connection.

Nile must not have spoken with Booker after that dream. Had there been time?

No, it wasn’t any time at all between Nile’s dream and the grenade in Booker’s chest, between Nile’s dream and Joe and Nicky’s capture.

Nile stood now on the ship with a chest full of hope and Andy caught herself actually believing that this would be it. This time, guided by Nile’s brand new eyes and haunted by her dreams, they would succeed. Quynh's calls would guide them through Nile's nightmares, draw them to her prison, and Andy would finally, fucking finally, pull her to the surface and set her free. Andy wanted -- needed -- to believe that Quynh still called out specifically for her, that Quynh still held onto that hope. It'd been so long. Had Quyhn forgotten? And if it was all replaced by iron and water, by blood and rage, could Andy bring her back from that? How could she make up for five hundred years in a single lifetime?

**

Joe and Nicky did attempt to steer Nile toward a different course. They invited her with them to Malta and when that didn't work they cornered Andy in the London safe house, a property that had been Nicky’s since the 1890s, where they launched right into their tired old list of concerns. They didn’t even attempt to placate Andy with baklava first, to soften the blow of centuries of failure replayed in cruel detail.

Nile -- bless her -- held fast, kept her eyes firm on Andy, could not be swayed. Those dreams were really rattling her. They could do that, the first sets of dreams. They could set you walking across continents, combing deserts, searching and searching, desperate for that connection. They’d found Booker within a year of his death. For Nile it was less than a week. She didn’t have to search to set out in search of them, she hadn't even had time to realize her dreams could lead her somewhere real.

It was only Quynh that haunted her thoughts now, Quynh’s siren song.

“We shouldn’t have had to hear about it from Copley,” Joe grouched, his fingers pulling at his beard. “Copley, Andy. Of all fucking people.”

Andy shrugged. “I remember what you said in ‘85. I knew you wouldn’t be interested in the boat ride.”

“What I said in ‘85?” Joe repeated. “You mean, ‘It’s not smart to get Bob Ballard involved in this?’ I think recent events demonstrate very well how right I was to steer you away from exposing us to a high-profile team of the world’s top scientists, Andy.”

Beside Nile, Nicky nodded and said, “1985. The year they found the Titanic.”

Joe turned back to Andy, his mouth set in a tight exasperated line. At the tone of Nicky's voice, he'd snapped shut on his list of concerns, his reasons for giving up. Andy couldn’t help herself. She smiled. She’d been making anonymous donations to oceanographic research for decades.

“Just don’t forget you’re not immortal anymore,” Nicky suggested. “If you try any of your little drowning experiments this time, you’ll actually drown.”

Andy held her smile firm, though she supposed her thoughts could be read well enough by these men who had known her a thousand years. They could read it all in the turn of her lips, the light in her eyes. Nicky knew what she was imagining now. She was imagining pulling out her gun, shooting Nicky right through the heart. It wouldn't last, of course, but it would hurt. It didn’t seem fair now. It didn’t seem fair when they could no longer retaliate in kind.

She was so fucking breakable.

“Drowning experiments?” Nile asked. She’d been sitting with her hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans, but she pulled them out now, held up a hand, fingers curled.

“Oh yes,” Joe said with a nod. He stood and crossed to the counter, began pulling out glasses. He better be pouring something good. “We had some great times out there, didn’t we, Boss?”

When Andy spoke again it was through gritted teeth. “I had to know what she felt. You, of all people, have to understand that.”

“I understood it,” Joe agreed. He paused what he’d started at the counter to take a step closer to Nicky, as though to show Andy just how much he understood. Yes, yes, she knew. They’d made it halfway as far as she had with Quynh. Another thousand years to go before Joe even begin to understand her loss. That much time was hard to imagine, even for those who had lived half of it.

He continued: “I understood it the first time, but what about the second? What about the third time and the fourth?”

“What drowning experiments?” Nile asked again.

“I had to know,” Andy repeated. Andy felt it rise in her, the guilt bubbling, drowning her. She was not the one thrown into the ocean that day, but she knew how it felt to drown. She made sure she knew how it felt. She had them lock her up, had them chain her to the ship so she would not be lost. She had to know. She had to know what Quynh suffered. And when she forgot how it felt, when too much time passed, she made sure that she did it all again, made sure the memory was fresh.

“But you said she was a soldier,” Nile paused. “You said you lost a soldier.”

“I’d go to the ends of the earth for all of you."

“She wasn’t a soldier though, was she?” Nile pressed, her voice low, as though they could have a private conversation in this overcrowded room. It was amazing how four people could feel like the press of hundreds given the right space, the right tone and the right conversation.

Andy pressed her teeth into her lower lip. They didn’t have time for this. She was running out of fucking time, and -- fuck, she needed a drink. She stood, brushed past Joe and took over where he’d left off, turning the glasses upright, filling them to the brim with scotch. It splashed over the edges, dousing her hand, and she pressed the sides of her fingers to her lips, sucked the scotch away and wiped her hand on her jeans.

She pushed a glass into Nicky’s hand. Another into Joe’s. When she turned back for the last two glasses, Joe reached out, caught her arm. His touch was firm, but his fingers were gentle as they brushed against the skin of her wrist.

“She wasn’t just a soldier,” Joe confirmed. “She wasn’t just a soldier anymore than you or Nic or I are just soldiers.”

Andy yanked her hand away. She grabbed the last two glasses, handed one to Nile and swallowed half of her own glass, savored the burn in her throat. Nile held her glass in both hands, but didn't not sip. She was waiting for Andy to go on.

“She was mine,” Andy said, the words coming out hot and gasping. “She was my everything for two thousand years. Two thousand years. She was mine, and I was hers. Before we had each other, we had no one. And now -- now, we have no one.” She pointed a finger at Joe. “You should have dropped the fucking chain like I told you to back in ‘62.”

“1562,” Nicky supplied, again answering the question before Nile had a chance to ask.

“That wouldn’t have brought her back,” Joe sighed.

“I’m going out there,” Andy stated. “It’s past time for another pass. There have been technological advances, there have been -- fuck, Booker should have told me sooner. He should have told me that the dreams were still coming. I thought -- ”

Joe shook his head. “You knew,” he said. “He didn’t tell you, but you watched him. You knew.”

Andy downed the rest of her glass. She set it down hard on the counter. “Come with me if you can stomach it. I won’t hold it against you if you can’t.”

Joe and Nicky stared at each other for a long time, engaged in a silent debate. Finally, Joe shook his head, just slightly, just enough for the room to understand. Andy nodded. She would go alone. It wasn’t the first time, but this time it might be the last.

“I’m coming with you,” Nile said. She stood. She took the empty glass from Andy's hand, pushed her full glass into it instead. Andy accepted, drank deep.

“You don’t have to," she said, once the scotch was gone.

“I want to,” Nile said. “The dreams -- she’s in my head and she’s -- if there’s a chance I can help her, that these dreams will lead us to her, I have to try.”

Joe made a noise, visibly bit back on the truth -- that there was nothing in those dreams to give them any clue as to where Quynh might be. They’d done this all already with Booker as their guide. They'd gone down this road before and it ended with Booker never breathing a word of his dreams to Andy again.

Andy looked past Nile to Joe. Joe shook his head, but his eyes were softer now. He put up a good fight, a necessary fight, but deep down in his heart, he understood Andy. He would do the same.

**

They watched the sun set, listened to the rumble of the engine, the water that slapped against the bow. Andy had seen countless sunsets, and somehow never tired of the artistry of it, the intensity of light and color. That light, that saturated richness, was reflected in Nile’s wide eyes, in the hope and wonder that was easily read on her face. When she felt Andy looking, Nile turned toward her and that gleam intensified.

“This sunset is insane,” she said, and couldn't seem to stop her smile.

“Yeah,” Andy agreed. She took it in, the dark line of the water, the brilliant reds and dark purples of the sky. How many sunsets were left? Would she miss this when it was over, or would it seem a relief? An ending long overdue?

“I’ve never been on water like this,” Nile admitted. “No land in sight. Never even been on a cruise.”

“Have you ever been in love?” Andy asked. Beside her, Nile froze, not expecting the sudden subject change. Andy relaxed against her seat, listened to the sound of the surrounding sea. Two of the scientists started laughing from their gathering place on the deck. They’d pulled out the liquor to lighten the mood and loosen their tongues. As soon as the sun went down, Andy planned to join them. Maybe she'd even find reason to laugh.

“I don’t think so,” Nile admitted. “I thought I was. I thought I was in love with my boyfriend in school, but that was, you know. We were kids, turned out I didn't even like him. And then, once I was grown -- “ she shrugged. “ -- sure, I thought I was a couple times, but it never stuck.”

“A love that fades is still love,” Andy said. “Not everything is meant to last an eternity. That doesn’t mean that how you felt while you were in it was wrong or lacking.”

“Yeah, but --” Nile stared up at the sky. “I see Joe and Nicky, I see what you’re doing here. It doesn’t compare, does it?”

“You see my pain,” Andy said. “You see my chest ripped open and my heart laid bare. That’s beautiful to you?”

Nile flinched at that, but Andy shook her head, pulled Nile in with one arm, hugged her close to her side.

She’d seen this line of thinking with Booker. She’d seen the loneliness eat at him, knew that he was still so young, that she was alone thousands of years before she found anyone, before Quyhn, before Lykon. Another thousand before Joe and Nicky. In the grand scheme of things, the time that passed between Booker and Nile was the blink of an eye. In the grand scheme of things the time that Andy had left was a fraction of that.

Andy laughed and it felt forced in her throat. She hoped it sounded better to Nile’s young ears.

“Besides, you missed the century of Joe and Nicky at each other’s throats. They were killing each other daily, sometimes multiple times,” Andy said. She tapped the palm of her hand against Nile’s knee. “You’d have seen them a lot differently. You’d have felt lucky to be alone back then.”

It was a lie. Andy had not looked at Joe and Nicky and wished she was alone. She hadn’t needed to think about such things, not then. She had Quynh at her side. Quynh as her partner, her friend, the love of her entire eternal life. They lay awake at night, their ears straining as they listened to the ceaseless fighting of the two soldiers who couldn’t set aside their war, even after death, even though the game and the stakes and the very ideas they were fighting for had changed.

“To be young,” Quynh said, as she pressed kisses to Andy’s lips, as they fell asleep to the sounds of swordfight and shouting, secure in their own love, in their own endurance.

Andy couldn't afford to fail again. She couldn’t give up, not now, so close to her end.

Nile had the dreams. Quynh was still out there and Nile would help lead Andy home.

Chapter Text

“Rocks, gravel drifts, tree trunks, three shipwrecks, two shipping containers, one car -- a whole lotta fucking nothing,” Nile summarized. She sat beside Andy, shoulder to shoulder, as they watched the readout from the side scan sonar trace. Twice they found an object that had seemed promising. In three weeks. Twice the divers went down with their equipment to retrieve the objects. Twice Andy stood on that deck with her heart hammering in her throat.

Each time they came up empty, shaking their heads at what they found--twisted metal debris that happened to resemble the shape of iron coffins dropped into the ocean during the 16th century, a perfectly coffin shaped rock--and Andy’s heart ossified into a heavy weight that hung in her gut, that pulled her down toward the water. Somewhere below the waves, Quynh called out to her, sang to her, begged her to climb over the rails and sink beneath the surface.

Beside her, Nile’s phone buzzed, a text message slipping through the ship’s wi-fi. Nile checked it discreetly, typed out her response, and then shoved the phone back out of sight, into the pocket of her jeans.

Andy did not ask. It was Copley, or it was Joe, or it was Nicky checking up on Andy-- worst case it was Booker in search of connection. Actual worst case, it was Nile’s family, but Andy didn’t think so. This mission was the best thing for Nile, the best thing to keep her focus elsewhere while Copley arranged the details of her death, while Nile let her family mourn her without being tempted to intervene. One day Nile would give in, she’d decide she had to see them one last time. Maybe in ten years, maybe twenty. But for now, a mind busy with other things was the best way to ease through the transition.

Nile squinted back at the screen for a moment, then squeezed her eyes shut, rubbed them with her fingers.

“Hey,” Andy said. She set a hand on Nile’s shoulder, squeezed it in an attempt to stave off Nile’s disappointment at another day of nothing. “It’s early. There’s a lot of ocean out there. Believe me, I know.”

Nile had had the dream again. It started out the same as it always did, Quynh screaming, drowning, crazed. Quynh’s fists, her knees, pushing at the iron, banging at it. Fish swam in the dark above her, swarming at the smell of her blood. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel them as they slid past, as they cut through the water, as they knocked against her prison. Nile had described it for Andy so many times, every time Andy asked, and Andy listened with eyes closed. She caught the change in Nile’s tone first, a hint of wonder that slipped in, and then Nile said, “She punched at the iron and it gave way. It began to crumble, bits of metal deteriorating, itching at her skin in the moment before she drowned again.”

Andy understood this dream. She recognized it and she remembered how it felt. Usually the dreams came in flashes, images, scraps of information that weren’t enough to form a full picture until they began to compound, until you had enough of them that you were able to rearrange them and make the pieces fit, to fill in the shadows, those essential blanks. Occasionally the dreams were different. Occasionally the dreams were actually dreams. Occasionally you slipped into the head of that other person, saw their dreams through their eyes, sometimes you saw your own.

She dreamt fragments of Yusuf and Nicolo’s union centuries before they stopped killing each other. She dreamt her own future with Quynh so many times in the centuries it took to finally find her. She saw the first tentative touch of Quynh’s fingers to hers, saw the wonder on her own face filtered through Quynh’s eyes.

Later Quynh admitted that she was convinced their dreams were all that they’d ever have, that Andromache was a figment of her imagination, designed to push Quynh through a millennium of lonely wandering. They both knew where they wanted to end up before they ever met, but they were no better than Joe and Nicky. It took them centuries to admit it aloud.

These were the dreams Nile saw now, Quynh’s wish for her future, her desperate attempt to manifest her reality in those seconds between each death, to will the world to bend for her, to break and set her free.

Nile took her dream as truth, trusted that if everything she’d seen until now was real, then this must be too. She hadn’t lived long enough yet to know what it was like to truly yearn for something, to long for something so deeply and for so long that you were haunted, could not escape your longing even in sleep, even in death.

**

The first time they kissed outside of her dreams it was fueled by adrenaline, that post-battle high, the righteous thrill. It was the early years, when they still marveled that the other existed, when they could not believe that they were no longer alone. That kiss, another revelation. Afterward, Quynh’s dark eyes danced with delight. Her fingers traced a line along Andromache’s jaw. Two millennia later Andy still felt that touch tingle beneath her skin, just before it was drowned out by the gurgling shriek of a submerged scream.

Together they were unbeatable, unbreakable. Together they were remarkable. Together they outshone everyone, they ruled their world. Together Andromache felt every inch the God she was once mistaken for. The things they did, what they were fighting for. It felt like they were making a difference then. It felt like they had purpose. It felt like they would go on forever, never tire, never get over that initial kiss, that revelation.

The last time they kissed, they were in a prison in Plymouth, hands bound and planning their escape. The kiss stung against her split lip and tasted of their blood.

**

Three nights, one shipwreck, and several rocks later, Andy woke to Nile shaking her, Nile’s feet on the lowest rung of the ladder to Andy’s berth, her eyes bright in the dim light of the room.

“Go back to sleep,” Andy groaned. She checked her watch and then groaned again at the early hour.

“She’s out,” Nile announced. She was gasping for breath, gulping “She’s out, Andy.”

It took Andy a long moment of staring at Nile’s agitated face to understand. And when she finally did, she shook her head.

“It’s just a dream,” she said. She rolled onto her other side, her face toward the wall of their cabin. “You’re in Quynh’s dream.” She squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to remember Nile’s last dream, the rusted iron flaking off onto Quynh’s skin. She focused on her own dreams of Quynh instead, dreams of seeing that familiar shape on the screen, of waiting impatient on the deck as the divers went down, of the crane hoisting the coffin onto the ship, and then Quynh’s face. The feel of Quynh in her arms for the first time in five hundred years. Her Quynh, her soul, her reason.

Behind her, Nile huffed, frustrated. She stepped off the ladder and began rummaging around in the cabinet beside the bunks.

“I know what I saw,” Nile said, her words short, muffled.

Andy twisted back to find that Nile was pulling on a sweater, a coat to protect against the cold sea spray.

“Where are you going?”

“To search.”

“It’s a dream, Nile,” Andy repeated. She was awake now, could tell that she was going to have to talk Nile down from this ledge. Andy had been there before, so fucking sure, and so fucking wrong.

“She doesn’t dream,” Nile snapped. “She hasn’t slept a single second in five hundred years.”

That snapped something in Andy’s brain, in her heart. Of course, of course, Nile was right. There was no sleep for Quynh, just the drowning, her only relief those seconds of death before the drowning began again. Quynh didn’t sleep and she didn’t dream and she was--Andy slid from her berth, caught the jacket that Nile threw into her arms. She shoved her feet into her boots and then they rushed out into the corridor, up the stairs and onto the deck.

“What did you see?” Andy shouted over the roar of the ocean, the whistling of wind in the crane’s rigging.

“She’s at the surface,” Nile shouted. “She’s fighting against the waves. She’s screaming.”

Andy closed her eyes, listened to the waves and the wind. She couldn’t hear her.

Nile rushed along the edge of the boat, stared down into the water. One of the night crew shouted down to them from the bridge and without thinking, Andy shouted back: “Man overboard!”

That got them what they needed; within seconds the boat was flooded with bright light that blotted out the stars. Next came the large spotlight, scanning across the water, reflecting against the surface and illuminating the waves.

Two of the crew--Andy wracked her brain for their names, had downed whiskey with them just a few days prior--rushed up beside Andy and Nile.

“Who was it?” the woman asked, her dark hair whipping across her face, sticking to her skin.

“We didn’t see,” Nile said. Her hand found Andy’s side, but she kept her eyes on the water.

The woman (Shannon?) pulled a life ring from a yellow bag attached to the rail, scanned the water, searching for movement, for the flailing fight of a fallen scientist.

“Where did you see them?”

“I don’t know,” Nile said again. She sounded ragged, raw.

“We heard a scream,” Andy supplied, but the wind caught her voice, carried it. “A woman’s scream.”

Shannon did not respond, and Andy stepped away, began to walk the perimeter of the ship, eyes looking for breaks in the waves, searching, searching. She took the stairs to the ship’s bow two at a time. Once there, she stood at the rail, shut her eyes, tried to feel Quynh’s presence.

“Where are you?” she asked, and as she said it, she knew that it was just as hopeless as it had always been. She felt nothing but that same hopelessness, that weight in her gut that pulled her down, down, down.

Maybe Quynh was out of the coffin, maybe she was at the surface, maybe she was fighting the waves. It changed nothing. She was still lost to Andy. She was out there, somewhere, still struggling, still dying, still completely and entirely alone.

Andy couldn’t bear this alone, not for another thousand years, not for another forty. How many did she have? Thirty, forty if she was lucky. Realistically, given her line of work, much much less. She imagined how it might feel, to climb over this rail, to slip beneath the waves. She imagined how it would feel to end it here and now. She could end this quest, this waiting game, once and for all.

She wouldn’t--she wouldn’t do that to Joe or Nicky, to Booker, to Nile. She wouldn’t do that to Quynh. Not if she really was out there, not if she might find her way to some distant shore, might lie in the sand, might feel the sun on her shrivel soaked skin.

Andy’s hands ached where they gripped at the rail, her heart pulsed tight in her chest, and her throat was raw with her screaming. Fuck, that was her screaming. She heard herself now as it tore from her lungs, ripped at her throat, and she couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop the sound, the fury, couldn’t stop the shaking of her body, couldn’t, fuck--

Nile pried her hands from the rail, tried to wrap Andy in a tight embrace. Andy couldn’t bear it, fought against it. Fuck, she had no fucking time, and she screamed it at the sky, at every god she’d ever known, at every made up god she’d cast aside. She pushed at Nile and when Nile fell away, Andy pushed her again, felt satisfaction when Nile stumbled and relief when she caught herself on the rail and did not fall. Andy fell instead. She fell to her knees, pounded her fists against the deck, and when Nile found her again, when Nile draped her body over Andy’s, Andy didn’t fight her off. She let herself be held. She listened as Nile spoke into her ear.

“She’s out there, Andy. She’s out there. Saltwater rusts iron five times faster than freshwater, did you know that? I’ve done the research. It’s real and she’s out there. She’s free, and she’ll find the shore. She’ll find it eventually, won’t she? She’ll be carried on the waves and the currents-- And you know what happens when she reaches that shore, Andy?”

“What happens?”

“She’ll sleep,” Nile promised. “She’ll dream.”

Chapter Text

The first time Andy assumed she was simply seeing things.

Her sudden mortality had done nothing but narrow her focus. The weeks at sea whittled it down even further. Add in her proximity to Nile’s dreams, Nile’s ready and open honesty about them, and Andy’s thoughts were on endless rotation: Quynh and Quynh and Quynh.

The first time she was sitting at an outdoor table at a café on a grey English afternoon, drinking a glass of wine with Nile and Nicky and Joe, just before Nicky and Joe left England for the second time in less than six months. They’d cut their thousandth honeymoon trip short and returned from Malta, returned to Andy’s side. They met Andy and Nile on the docks in Plymouth.

“Congratulations on staying dry,” Joe said as he pulled Andy into a tight hug. Once released, he shoved his hands into his pockets, shrugged beneath the thick fabric of his sweatshirt. “So she’s out?”

“She’s out,” Andy agreed, and though Quynh hadn’t been found, though she was still out there somewhere, still suffering, still drowning, she couldn’t help but smile at this new promise. Eventually Quynh would reach some shore, and then Quynh would dream. She would see Andy through Nile’s eyes. She would see Andy waiting here, in the very place where they were once torn apart.

Andy sipped her wine, pressed her fingers into the condensation that had gathered on outside of the glass.

Joe was saying something, something about Copley, about Malta, maybe something about finding a new mission, something to get Andy’s mind onto other things while they waited. Truth be told, no one wanted her on a mission with them now. Truth be told, they wanted her in an office with Copley, running things behind the scenes. She was too fragile, too temporary. She should hang up her labrys, stay out of danger. She should concentrate on this theoretical mission from afar instead of thinking about other things. That was the answer Joe had for her, that was his answer to a heart that had been broken for centuries.

None of it mattered.

One second the conversation was there, skimming at her thoughts, just barely registering, the next it was erased entirely from Andy’s memory. She remembered she smiled at something Nile said, something supportive and biting and very Nile. Andy smiled, she looked up, and the world stopped.

Quynh was there. She was there, not far, just at the end of this narrow cobblestone street. She was there, at the corner, leaning against a building and looking at a fold-out map. She was exactly as Andy remembered her and somehow, entirely new. She was breathtaking, and Andy realized that, in fact, she was holding hers. She gasped, and jolted forward. Her wine glass tipped, spilled, shattered against the cobblestones at their feet. Down the street the breeze blew strands of Quynh’s hair across her face and Andy remembered how that hair felt brushing against her skin, slipping through her fingers. She remembered how it smelled like home when she pressed her face into it.

Andy ignored the commotion at the table, the waitress rushing to gather the sharp shards of glass. She watched, rapt, as Quynh turned the map in her hand, her mouth twisted into a deliciously focused little frown. She didn’t notice Andy. When she finally looked up, it was out toward the water, out toward the sea.

“Andy?” Nile asked--shouted--a hand on her arm. Andy looked down at Nile’s hand, fingers careful on Andy’s skin. She reached up to cover Nile’s fingers with her own.

Quynh started to walk away, toward Sutton Harbor, and Andy shook Nile off, started down the street after her.

“What is it?” Nicky asked, behind her. He was following close on her heels. When Andy reached the corner she stopped, searched for Quynh’s back, for the map in her hand. Which way had she gone? Andy rushed to the next corner, looked in every direction. No Quynh.

“Andy!” Nicky said, catching her with hands on both arms, stopping her in the street. “Talk to me. What did you see?”

She ran a hand through her hair, shook her head. She laughed.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I didn’t see anything.”

It was nothing.

She was gone.

**

This was how it went.

A fishing boat went missing in the North Atlantic.

A month later it turned up grounded off the island of Cézembre. There was no sign of the fishermen. The boat was empty of people and fish.

That night Nile dreamt of Quynh walking the narrow streets of a European city. They assumed it had to be Saint-Malo. A mermaid taking those first steps on land, careful wondrous steps on unsteady legs, in rubber boots too large for her feet. Andy held Nile’s head in her hands, pressed her forehead to Nile’s, pressed her lips to Nile’s hairline.

“My messenger,” she said with reverence. “My oracle.”

“Oh God, stop,” Nile protested. She pushed Andy away, shrugged Andy off, but she was smiling, glowing.

She was using Quynh to distract from her own ghosts, her own yearnings, just as Joe tried to find something to distract Andy from hers. In the long afternoon hours, while Andy stared at maps, as she traced the lines of their history in an attempt to guess their future, Nile stared at the photos on her phone -- at the photos of her mother, her brother, her friends, all lost to her, all gone.

Cézembre.

Joe and Nicky left for Saint-Malo before sunrise. Before they left, Joe held her tight, kissed her cheeks. He held her out, hands firm on her shoulders.

“We’ll bring her back,” he promised, and she understood it for what it was. An apology, an understanding.

Nile paced the room, occasionally shot sharp glances toward Andy. She looked like she might rush after Joe and Nicky at any moment.

She didn’t. She stayed, but she wasn’t happy about it.

“Why aren’t we going with them?” Nile asked, incredulous. She was impatient, eager. She still didn’t understand how this worked. “Why aren’t you going after her.”

“We stay put,” Andy said. They’d learned this the hard way, back when the world was still unfamiliar, largely unmapped, when they’d had no choice but to keep moving. There was no way of knowing if you were moving toward one another or away. This, at least, was so much easier now. Now, at least, they understood how it worked.

It was nearly impossible to disappear in the world today. Andy was counting on that.

Quynh wouldn’t be able to track Andy, not directly, but if Nile was seeing Quynh in her dreams, then Quynh would soon be seeing Nile. There was no one else, no one new except Nile and Booker and --

Did they know where Booker went? Had he mentioned any plans before they’d parted ways?

“Did Booker give you his number?” Andy asked. Nile’s brow furrowed and Andy held up her hands. “I won’t tell the others if he did. She’ll dream of you and Booker. It’d help to know where he is, in case that’s the direction she goes.”

Nile shook her head, still upset at being left behind, her arms drawn tight across her chest. “No. One hundred years, like we decided.”

Shit. Okay, well, it wouldn’t matter. Quynh would look for Nile. She would look for Nile and she’d find Andy.

“You and I stay put,” Andy reiterated. “You stick to me like glue. We spend our time at identifiable landmarks. Visible landmarks.”

Nile turned this information over in her mouth, felt it with her tongue. “Is anything in Plymouth that identifiable? It’s not like--she’s been down there five hundred years, Andy. She’s not computer savvy.”

“She’s smart,” Andy countered. Smart and dangerous. Absolutely irresistible to Andy. “She’ll figure it out faster than you think. And while she does that, we keep Joe and Nicky informed on your dreams, and they’ll follow in her wake.”

“Okay,” Nile said. “Yeah, okay. I get it. Now it’s your turn to be found.”

**

The second time it happened they were on their way to the Royal Citadel. The Citadel wasn’t giving guided tours at the moment, but Copley was still trying to impress, to make sure they knew he wasn’t expendable. He pulled some strings.

It happened as they passed through a crowd of tourists waiting for a bus on the Hoe Road. Suddenly, she was there. Quynh, walking through the crowd in the opposite direction. They locked eyes and Andy’s heart stopped. She froze and turned. Those around her didn’t expect it. Someone walked right into her back. A man shoved her, cursed.

Andy ignored them all. She called out, pushed through the crowd after Quynh. Quynh didn’t stop, didn’t even slow her pace. It didn’t matter. Andy had always been faster.

She caught up with the Quynh quickly, a hand on her shoulder to stop her, to turn her around. She held her breath, her heart a hammer in her chest, a reverberation in her throat.

It wasn’t Quynh.

Frightened blue eyes stared back at her for just a moment before the woman screamed. Fuck, shit, she thought she was being mugged. On instinct, Andy threw up the hood of her jacket, tried to shield herself from the inevitable cameras. This made it worse. The woman shoved her, screamed in her face. Spit splattered onto Andy’s cheek. She held up her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”

Nile had made it back through the crowd and was running toward them. The woman shrieked again at the sight of the oncoming woman. She took off across the Hoe, stumbling across the grass, wobbling in her heels.

Andy pressed her fingers to her forehead until it hurt. Fuck, she was losing it. Thousands of years and now she was fucking losing it.

Nile caught her, looped her arm in Andy’s, started walking at a brisk pace.

“Let’s get out of here before someone gets a clear photo,” Nile said, admonishment thick in her voice. “How am I supposed to take you out if you’re going to accost women who don’t even look like her? Fuck, Andy.”

“I know,” Andy agreed. She adjusted her sunglasses, pushed tight over her eyes. “I know. Let’s go.”

**

She walked the perimeter of the Citadel, walked Madeira Road and stared out at the sea. She walked the streets of Plymouth well into the night, long after Nile had begged off, asleep on her feet and past ready to turn in. When Andy finally stumbled home it was on aching legs, the taste of saltwater thick on her tongue.

In the dark, everything was worse. Everyone looked like Quynh. Add a few drinks to the mix, far less than she ever used to need, and Quynh was absolutely everywhere.

She thought of little else. She slept in short bursts, awoke to thoughts of Quynh, shook Nile awake.

“Did you dream?” she asked each time Nile so much as moved, each time she twitched or rolled over in an attempt to get more comfortable. “Did you dream?”

**

They loiter on a bench near Smeaton’s Tower. Andy lost herself in the usual, the all-consuming. She stared out at the sea and remembered how it felt to drown. Nile sat beside her, one knee bouncing. She stared down at her phone, consumed by her own loss. This wasn’t the same phone that Nile had on her when Andy found her. Copley had set Nile up with a new one, with all of the old information removed except the photographs, transferred over at Nile’s request.

Occasionally Nile looked up and squinted at Andy, made sure to get a good look at her, sitting there, the lighthouse framed, big and bold, just over her shoulder. Occasionally Nile stared out at the water, toward Mount Batten.

In all honesty, Andy was not sure this would work. Nile could stare at Andy and this lighthouse all day long. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps Nile’s dreams flashed nothing but family instead, nothing but long lost friends, a life ended and a new one just begun. Andy wanted to ask her to focus but didn’t dare. Nile already did so much. Nile was allowed to mourn her losses too.

“You know, they turned on me?” Nile asked, eventually. Her back curled, head bowed over the glow of the phone screen. Her thumb swiped over the faces of two women in uniform, Nile smiling between them. “I loved those girls, I trusted them with my life. And -- look, my throat was slashed, deep,, and when I didn’t die, they went cold, turned their backs like it was nothing, like it was my fault.”

“It’s too much for most people to grasp,” Andy agreed and hoped she’d infused it with the right amount of sympathy. It was easy to sound cold, to sound like she had seen it all. Nile was still too new to understand.

Beside her Nile nodded. “When I want to punch my mom’s number into this phone, that’s what I remind myself. I remind myself of Dizzy’s cold face and Jordan’s stiff shoulders. I don’t know what I’d do if that was my mother’s face, my brother’s stiffness, if they turned their backs on me like that.”

Andy rubbed a hand across Nile’s back. She turned toward the lighthouse and watched a woman with Quynh’s dark hair and gait walk through its door.. She closed her eyes. It wasn’t her. There was no way it could be Quynh. Quynh was in France. She would find Andy when she was ready.

**

Nile dreamt of Paris. She woke up swearing, scrambled for her phone, knocked it off the table and cursed as it slid across the floor. Andy intercepted it and punched in the numbers as Nile relayed the details of her dream to a bleary Nicky on the other end. They left from Saint-Malo in pursuit.

Nile dreamt of Booker and Andy hoped they were good for each other in this moment, that they could help each other to heal. She tried to understand why Quynh made the choice to go to him instead of to her. She tried not to think about what that meant. She took Nile to the Mayflower Steps, to the Barbican, to the Plymouth Synagogue.

**

Notre-Dame de Paris was burning. They first heard the news on the Hoe in the early evening hours, people hunched over their phones, gasping and tutting at the footage. A man with a half moon of unkempt hair wiped his eyes, perhaps especially debout, moved to tears by the loss. Catholics loved their churches. The cathedral would survive. This wasn’t the first time she’d come back from the brink.

Nile pulled out her phone and found the footage immediately, the smoke rising from the cathedral’s roof. When the sun sets, they start back to their flat, Nile walking a few steps behind Andy, her nose still in her phone.

“They think it was electrical,” Nile noted. “Or maybe a cigarette, something with the renovations.”

“Maybe.” It wasn’t electrical. It might have been a cigarette. A cigarette was easy to write off.

There were echoes of Quynh all over this damn world. Plymouth was full of them. This was the spot where Andy knew the boat departed, the hill where they shared their last free kiss. This was where they hung, where they were left swinging for a full day and long into the night. That was where they huddled together, locked in the dark. They’ve been in this damn world for thousands of years. Thousands of years, together. For the last five hundred, by far the longest period of separation since finding each other, the world has been one constant reminder after another of what Andy lost, of how she’d far she’d fallen, how badly she’d failed.

Notre Dame was not the first time that small men tried to cut them down. It was not the first time and it certainly would be the last. They’d heard rumors of children living in attics, then rumors of children being kept against their will. Orphans, maybe homeless. They’d simply intended to investigate. If it turned out to be true, well, then--

There were things that hurt, even after lifetimes. There were sore spots that ached when touched. They all had bruises that didn’t go away, bruises that they ignored until pressed. At Notre Dame, several of Quynh’s bruises were pressed. Everything went wrong. They’d split up on purpose, but Andromache was caught up, flanked by priests and barred from the steps. She was escorted away and held for hours. She should have fought. She shouldn’t have tried to spare a scene, to spare their lives. In Andromache’s absence, Quynh was cornered and she fell.

And the children were all right. The children were fine, had been fine before they arrived. Andromache had millions of reasons to believe that all rumors spread were real on first introduction; they so often were. When they weren’t, it should be a relief. It usually was.

They pieced together the report of events from those congregated on the parvise. By the time they tracked her down, Quynh was buried beneath a heap of dead and awaiting burial. When the damage was extensive--a large gut wound, a missing limb, numerous broken bones, a smashed skull--it took time to come back. It took time to come back from a fall off Notre Dame.

Andromache tore her throat raw on Quynh’s name as she pushed the bodies aside. Don’t let this end like Lykon. Don’t let this be the end. She sobbed in relief when she heard Quynh shout in return. Nicky prayed aloud beside her, dumped bodies unceremoniously to the ground as he fought his way to Quynh.

“What happened to you?” Quynh gasped once she was free of the pile. “You left me, you left and I--” The smell of death clung to her skin. Andromache ignored it, pressed her lips to Quynh’s forehead, her mouth, her neck, to every inch of exposed, renewed skin.

“Never,” she said. “Leaving you would be the end of me. Never, I couldn’t.”

Quynh clung tight to Andromache, laughed at Andy’s response, her face turned away. She’d always held the belief that she needed Andromache more than Andromache needed her. When Andy first found her, Andy was standing on both feet and Quynh had surrendered to the sand. Quynh was the one perpetually lost, Andy the one who always found.

Andy could not remember the face of her mother or the sound of her sister’s voices. She could not forget the pure fear, the horror on Quynh’s face as she was pulled away from her in that cell in Plymouth. She remembered the snap of her wrists as they broke against her cuffs, as they healed and broke again, until she pulled hard enough that her hands shattered and slipped through the rings. If she closed her eyes she could still taste the blood of the men she’d murdered as she rushed to the dock. She was too late. Too fucking late.

That night Nile dreamt of bright red fire and white hot rage.

**

The third time, they were walking home after dark. There were no crowds on the street outside their flat, no milling tourists. There was no mistaking her, but Andy still doubted she was real. She reached out, her hand on Nile’s arm.

“Do you--”

“I see her,” Nile confirmed.

This time she was on Andy in seconds, fast and brutal. She shoved Nile back and Nile fell, her hands at her throat, blood on her fingers. Quynh had slit her throat and Andy still hadn’t seen the knife. Quyhn pushed Andy into the shadows of an alley, up against a wall, her forearm pressed tight to Andy’s chest. In the shadows, Quynh’s eyes were dark, her face obscured.

“Andromache,” Quynh breathed. Andy had waited centuries to hear that voice again and her heart shuddered and stopped at the sound of her name on those lips. Quynh’s hair fell forward, a curtain cutting them off from the rest of the world. It smelled sweet with soap and sharp like the ocean. She held like that for a moment, so close that Andy could taste her in the air, and then Quynh made a noise low in her throat. She kissed Andy, her body a wave crashing against the shore, her mouth all salt and bite. Andy had searched for so long, had waited so fucking long. Her legs buckled beneath Quynh’s kiss and her back slid down the wall. The cement render caught on her shirt and scraped the skin of her back. She ignored it. Her hands found Quynh, pulled Quynh down with her. Quynh folded at the knees, her arm still pressed to Andy’s chest, her mouth a miracle.

Movement to their right and Andy saw someone helping Nile to her feet, recognized his voice. Booker. She never planned to see him again and his presence rushed through her, a cascade of relief.

“My Quynh,” she said. Her mouth pressed kisses to Quynh’s salt skin with each word. “My soul, my heart, my heartbreak. I knew you’d find me.”

They were the wrong words. Quynh reared back and--Ah, there was that knife, visible in a flash of reflected streetlight and then pressed sharp against Andy’s chest. Andy pulled her hands away from Quynh, held them back up against the wall. Her chest heaved against the point of the blade and she felt its sting beneath her breast with each inhale.

“How many times should I kill you to make up for what I’ve suffered?” Quynh asked, her voice a slow scratch against Andy’s heart. “How many times should you die before you can understand?”

“I understand,” Andy said. She knew what she was now. She knew she was temporary and she knew she should be terrified. This didn’t terrify her. It felt an awful lot like coming home.

“Let’s start then,” Quynh suggested. Her voice sounded wet, like her lungs were still full of the sea, like her words could only gurgle up, bubble up through her throat.

Andy relaxed beneath Quynh’s hand. “Do it, Quynh. Do it, love.”

Behind her Nile screamed. Behind her Booker shouted. In front of her, Quynh pressed the knife to her skin.

“Ignore them. You and me.”

Chapter Text

The shot rang out, reverberated off the rows of houses that lined the quiet street, and Quynh flinched back, her knife falling to the ground at Andy’s feet. Andy didn’t lunge for it. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move. Another shot and this one hit Quynh square in the chest. She fell to the ground and the third shot pushed through her back.

Andy began her count. One second, two seconds. She made it to eight before the bullets clinked against the concrete, ten seconds and Quynh was back, her hands reaching for the knife. She swung fast toward Andy. Andy held.

“Wait!” Nile shouted. This time her gun was pointed toward Quynh’s head. A headshot might buy Andy fifteen seconds tops. “She’s mortal, you psycho saltwater bitch. You’ll fucking kill her.”

Quynh paused, the knife hovering over Andy’s heart. She turned her head toward Nile, the gun now pointed at the center of her forehead.

“Do you want to fucking kill her?” Nile asked, her voice a little softer now, no more insults on her tongue.

Quynh’s eyes slid back to Andy’s. She brought her knife up to Andy’s face--Nile shouted again, long and loud, and Andy held up a hand to still her. Quynh was careful as she traced the blade in a line down Andy’s cheek. The blood welled, but Quynh was there, wiping it away with the soft pad of her thumb. The cut remained. She pressed her palm against it and Andy turned her head to press her lips to Quynh’s wrist.

“It’s true?” Quynh asked. She wasn’t surprised. She’d already heard the news. Good old Booker.

Andy nodded her head, pressed her face to Quynh’s hand. “It’s true.”

“What will I do then?”

There was shouting on the street, doors slamming.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Andy said. They didn’t have much time. “Finish it.”

Quynh pulled back, her fingers curling against her blood-smeared palm. “How can you say that?”

Sirens in the distance. They’d be on them in no time.

“We have to move,” Booker said. He stepped back to look up the street, his gun held out before him in both hands. A door opened a few houses down and Booker dashed back, slipped into the shadows of the alley. Nile followed, careful to stay out of the light.

Quynh did not react. She knelt before Andy, the knife in her hand, her eyes on Andy’s face, on her throat and the exposed skin around her collar.

“I don’t care where we go,” Booker said. “But we better go now.” He pushed a hand to Quynh’s back, nodded down at Andy.

Nile crouched to collect the bullets that Quynh’s body had rejected. She slipped them into her pocket. “This way.”

Nile turned her gun back on Quynh, reached out with one hand to pull at Andy’s arm. Quynh let Nile pull Andy away, followed on their heels. She waited until they emerged from the other end of the alley, then she moved fast. She was always so fast. Quynh grabbed Nile’s gun, wrestled it from her hand. She shot Nile and Booker, lightning fast and perfectly precise, one bullet each, right to the heart. She turned the gun on Andy. Andy ignored it, surged forward to take Quynh in her arms.

“If you’re going, go fast. When you’re ready, come to this address.” She spoke the numbers and the street, three times, close to Quynh’s ear. Beatrice Ave. Beatrice Ave. Beatrice Ave. “You’ll remember?” Of course she would.

Behind Quynh, Booker began to push himself up from the pavement.

“Go,” Andy said. “I’m here, okay. I’m here when you’re ready, my love.”

Quynh paused like she might pull Andy in for a kiss, like she might pull Andy in, slide a knife into her heart, and kiss her right into her death. She didn’t do it. She shoved Nile’s gun into her pocket and she ran.

Andy did not watch her go. She did not have time to get sentimental. The sirens were close, one street over, that was all. She helped Booker to his feet, checked Nile’s chest as she gasped back to life, and together they ran, as far and as fast as they could manage.

**

Quynh didn’t return to the hotel room that night. Andy did not mention that she’d given Quynh the address to their flat, but it didn’t matter. They couldn’t go back there anyway, couldn’t check, couldn’t risk it with the police combing the area. They’d find the blood in the alley, they’d be asking questions. Quynh was too smart to attempt to go there now.

Andy, Booker, and Nile crowded into the hotel instead, slipping in through a back door that Booker had disabled earlier that day, wrapped in cheap blankets that covered the bloodstains. In the room, Andy took in the two beds, the suitcase full of women’s clothing. She wanted to shake Booker until he told her which bed was Quynh’s. She wanted to press her face into the pillows, lay naked in Quynh’s sheets.

She didn’t.

Instead she looked up at Booker, and said, “It’s good to see you,” as though her entire world hadn’t just exploded, as though she had space for anyone other than Quynh. It amazed her that she did, that what she said was the truth, it really was very good to see Booker.

Booker laughed. “Is it?” he asked. He collapsed into a chair by the window. There was a bottle of whiskey on the floor beside the chair, half empty. Andy nodded toward it, held out her hand. He passed it to her and watched as she took a swig. When she handed it back to him, he raised his eyebrows and looked at the whiskey that remained in the bottle. “Things really have changed.”

She felt the whiskey burn in her throat. “I guess they have,” she said, and then coughed once.

Nile was pacing the short hallway by the door. She had her phone pressed to her ear. “They aren’t answering.”

“Give it time,” Booker said, speaking up before Andy had a chance to say the same thing. “Sometimes they get distracted, don’t hear their phones. Here.” He held up the bottle of whiskey.

Nile brushed him off, then reconsidered. She crossed the room, swiped it from his hand, and then collapsed onto the bed opposite Andy. Nile fell back until she was lying on the bed, her feet still firmly on the floor. She stared up at the ceiling and then shook her head.

“I thought you were dead, Andy,” Nile said. “I thought you were fucking dead and it was my fault because I led her right to you.”

“You did exactly what I wanted you to do,” Andy said. She pulled at a frayed spot on the knee of her jeans.

“How are we gonna--she’ll tear this town apart. Why aren’t they answering their goddamn phones?”

“Drink the whiskey, Nile,” Booker ordered. Nile lifted her head long enough to drink some whiskey and then fell back with a huff.

The town was going to be fine. There was only one person Quynh hoped to tear apart. Quynh needed to pull Andy apart, but her back together in a way that made sense, a way that she could understand. Five hundred years apart.

Andy knew how it felt to drown.

“She isn’t going to kill me.”

Nile laughed and held up the bottle in a salute. She took another sip.

“She isn’t going to kill Andy,” Booker repeated.

Nile pushed herself up on her elbows. She looked hard at Booker, then Andy. “Are you both blind? She just got really fucking close to doing exactly that.”

“She didn’t do it,” Andy said.

“Yeah, okay, because of the police.”

“No,” Andy said. “She had plenty of time to kill me, take the two of you out, and disappear. She didn’t do it because she already knew what was at stake. She already knew because Booker knew. You told her.”

“I did,” Booker agreed. “Multiple times.”

Andy started at ‘multiple’, at the realization that Booker had spent actual time with Quynh, but it wasn’t just those few moments for him. Her eyes returned to the suitcase full of women’s clothing. She longed to lock Booker and Nile from the room, to press those clothes to her face, to lie in the bed where Quynh slept, to push her mouth to the pillow, to rest her hand in the barely perceptible indentation Quynh’s body had left behind.

“How is she?” Andy asked instead.

Booker shook his head. He stood and grabbed the whiskey back from Nile. “Better than I think I expected.” He grimaced at the burn of the whiskey sliding down his throat. “Better than I think I would be. But you know... not good. She’s not good, Andy.” He sat down again, beside her this time, his body pressing heavily into the mattress. She set a hand on his back, her head on the hard curve of his shoulder.

“No,” Andy said. “I know. Notre Dame?”

She watched him nod from the corner of her eye.

Later, after they’d reached Joe and Nicky, after they showered and waited and then gave up exhausted, Andy pressed her face to Quynh’s pillow and remembered how it felt to drown.

**

Three days later. Nile slept easily now without the dreams that jolted her awake. Joe and Nicky were back from Paris, their faces hard and their weapons ready. There was no sign of Quynh. Three days later and Plymouth was quiet, safe, but Andy could feel Quynh in the air, could feel Quynh’s presence tickle the hairs on her arms, could feel water gurgle in her lungs. Three days later and Andy slipped out of the hotel in the early hours of the morning, crept out silently while the others slept, and returned to the flat on Beatrice Ave.

The street was quiet, asleep, and when Andy stepped into the flat, she knew at once that Quynh was there.

“It’s Andromache,” she said. Her voice low, just above a whisper. “I’m here, love, and I’m alone.”

A shadow moved at the end of the corridor and Andy paused, her hands held out in front of her. She had no weapon. She was not a threat.

“Is that you?” she asked the dark, sure that it was, that it had to be, knowing beyond a doubt that while they searched everywhere else, that this was where she’d be. They’d stopped by the flat just that morning, just to check, and nothing was out of order, nothing was out of place, but Andy knew. She could feel it in the pounding of her heart and the pulling of her gut. She could smell the salt in the air.

“I’ve missed you,” Andy said. “I’ve missed you every single day.”

Something shattered in the kitchen, a loud thump against a counter, like a body falling, like a head or a fist. Andy rushed forward and then fell back, surprised by the sudden force of Quynh pushing against her, Quynh rushing from the shadows, hands tight on Andy’s arms.

“Every single day?” Quynh demanded, her voice a painful ragged whisper close to Andy’s ear. Andy let her head fall forward, her nose pressed to the collar of Quynh’s shirt. She turned her head and her mouth found Quynh’s skin and she pressed her lips to Quynh’s neck. Quynh’s body tightened against her. Her hand fell away from Andy’s arm and fumbled against the wall, searching for the light switch. They weren’t near a door. There was no switch within reach.

“There,” Andy said. She guided them along the wall and when Quynh’s fingers found the switch, she pressed it and the world went bright and Andy’s heart was there, illuminated, truly visible for the first time in so fucking long.

She hadn’t forgotten a single detail of Quynh’s face. Five hundred years and she was exactly as Andy remembered her. She took it all in again anyway, the depth of Quynh’s eyes, the curve of her mouth, the turn at the tip of her nose that always caught the light. She remembered the sound of Quynh’s laugh, the sharp smell of her sweat.

Quynh wasn’t laughing now.

“Every day.” Andy confirmed, and then: “Please.” She wasn’t sure what she was asking. How many times had she died and gasped back into this life? How many times had Quynh died in a single day? How many times over five hundred years?

The next time Andy died it would be her last.

Quynh’s hand found its way around Andy’s neck, and Andy longed for more than the simple touch of Quynh’s fingers. Her head fell back, hit against the wall, and the ache of it helped. It still wasn’t enough. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard against the pressing pad of Quynh’s thumb.

“Please.”

Quyhn’s fingers tightened and Andy gasped at the pressure against her throat. Both hands now, and Andy wrapped her fingers around Quynh’s wrists. Soon she would start to struggle. Soon she would fight back. Quynh would let her go. Quynh didn’t want to kill her, not really. Not yet. Quynh would give her this.

Quynh stopped too soon. Andy deserves worse. Quynh’s fingers stilled, her brow furrowed. She’d found the cord of Andy’s necklace and she pulled it free from beneath Andy’s shirt and rubbed her thumb over the filigree.

“Every day,” Quynh said. “So what are we to do?” She leaned in. Her fingers were careful on Andy’s skin now, her touch gentle, but when she leaned in, it was to press her teeth to Andy’s collarbone, the necklace tight in her hand, the cord pulling hard at the back of Andy’s neck. When Quynh spoke again, she was close enough that Andy could feel the words forming against her lips. “I long to shove my knife into your gut, to listen to your heart stop, to swallow that moment when it starts again. I want to hold you beneath the waves and watch you drown so that I can suck the sea from your lips. And you stand there and say please when you know that I can’t. So what are we to do?”

“We can. I’m ready,” Andy said, and she believed herself. She believed with her entire heart and her entire soul that that was true. Her death probably wouldn’t repair the damage done to Quynh. A single final death for five hundred years of smaller ones. It couldn’t change the past and it couldn’t give them a future, but it was something. It was the most that Andy could give.

“The smaller death then,” Quynh said, eyebrows high, almost smiling. “How do they call it in French?”

Quynh had learned a lot in these few short weeks. Andy was almost certain they’d never used that phrase before she lost Quynh to the sea.

“Le petite mort,” Andy breathed.

It wouldn’t be enough and she wanted it just the same.

“Le petite mort,” Quynh repeated. She looked around the room, at the old sofa, a wooden chair. “I would have you on a bed. I spent long enough lying on iron and the beds are so soft now.”

Lust and longing curled in Andy’s gut. She leaned forward to kiss Quynh, but Quynh held her back, pinned her against the wall with her forearm. “A bed.”

“Upstairs,” Andy said, and was rewarded for this response with a crushing kiss. She gasped for air when Quynh pulled away. Quynh’s hand slid down over Andy’s clothes, over Andy’s breasts and across her stomach. Qunyh’s hand curled between Andy’s legs and Andy rocked against that pressure, swore and pressed her mouth to Qunyh’s jaw, teeth to skin and tongue to sweet stinging salt.

“Lead the way,” Quynh said.

**

Once a very long time ago, on a particularly tender night at least a century before the sea separated them, Quynh stared up at the star-filled sky and said, “There is no one who knows anyone better than I know you. Nor that knows anyone better than you know me. Have you ever thought about this?”

Andromache laughed, her body still shaking through the breathless aftermath of sweet release. A breeze cooled the damp on her exposed skin and she shivered as she moved over Quynh. She dropped a kiss onto swollen lips and tasted herself on Quynh’s tongue.

“I’m thinking about it now,” Andromache said. She leaned back on one arm, her head propped in her hand. The fingers of her other hand traced circles low on Quynh’s belly. She slowly worked those circles lower, still longing for more.

Quynh smiled. “Good,” she said. “There’s more.”

“Go on.”

“There’s no one in this world that has known one person as often and as intimately as I’ve known you.”

“I see what you’re doing,” Andromache whispered. “It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have to be poetry. We’re the only ones here and we can say what we mean.”

Andromache’s hand worked lower and Quynh’s eyes fell shut, sealing out the stars. “Say it then.”

Andromache said it: “It’s impossible that there exists any two people in this entire world who have fucked each other as many times as you and I have fucked. There is no one that’s loved for as long or as often as we have loved.”

“It’s a beautiful thought, isn’t it?”

**

Andy woke to shouts, to the shriek of metal sliding against metal, to the muffled but unmistakable sound of death. She woke alone in the big soft bed, her heart pounding as her friends died the many deaths that she could no longer give.

Chapter Text

The room was silent.

The blood was everywhere.

This was on Andy. She should have known that they’d wake up in the hotel, that they’d find Andy gone, that they’d know exactly where to check. Sometimes she thought she knew Joe and Nicky and Booker better than she knew herself. She didn’t know Nile as well--it just wasn’t possible to compare, not yet--but she understood Nile and she knew her better every day. Andy should have known that this was how it would go. She should have pulled Quynh out of the flat, brought her somewhere safe, somewhere where the others wouldn’t find them for a while, somewhere where they’d have the time to go through this without four other people contributing to the mess of it.

And if she was honest, of course she had known. She was just too blinded by her want for Quyhn to care. This, like many things, was Andy’s doing.

Quynh had been thorough; she’d done a lot of damage even after they went down. Quynh knew exactly how long it took to come back, knew how to prolong the moment, to buy herself more time. She had to slow the recovery enough to make it last longer than a second or two. She had to slow it down enough that even when they came back, the healing would take time, ten minutes maybe, fifteen, twenty.

Nicky’s hand twitched and Andy pushed back his hair. He’d drag himself up first. He’d go to Joe. Joe would take longer, his torso a bright bloody hole. Booker--Booker’s time would match Joe’s. And Nile--

Andy shifted Nile’s arm closer to her shoulder, something small to ease the process. She leaned over Nile, tapped her cheek.

“Come on, baby. Come on, wake up.”

There was no question that Nile was going to be okay. She was still so fucking new. But Andy had to check, had to know. She had to see them all stir before she could rush after Quynh.

Joe groaned. Andy found her discarded clothes on the stairs and finished getting dressed. Her labrys was missing. She grabbed a duffel bag, some extra clothes. Booker let out a pained laugh. Nicky’s head lolled. And then Nile gasped.

Andy couched over Nile, wrapped a hand around the back of her head.

“You’re okay,” Andy said. “It’s okay.”

She pressed a kiss to Nile’s forehead and then Andy was gone, out the door and into the street.

They would still follow. Even considering the damage, it wouldn’t be that long.

She paused in the center of Beatrice Avenue and closed her eyes, felt the breeze tickle the hair at the back of her neck. It was going to rain.

Where would Quynh go? What would Quynh do next?

Andy knew exactly where to start.

**

Andy found her just as the rain began to come down. Quynh stood at the edge of a residential neighborhood, of streets lined with tidy terrace houses, with well-tended gardens. Quyhn’s clothes were stained with blood, visible in the light from the street lamps. Her hands hung at her sides. Her left arm looked deceptively limp, and in her right hand she held Andy’s labrys, her fingers gripped tight.

Quynh wasn’t hiding herself, her weapon or the blood. It was early still, dark, but the lights would start switching on soon enough. It was dangerous, careless, and Andy was glad she thought to bring the bag.

Andy made sure to make noise as she approached. She stepped down harder than she might have otherwise, rustled the bag on her shoulder. She made noise that made it obvious who she was, noise that made her unmistakable. And then, just in case, she said: “I should have known they’d come looking. I’m sorry for that.”

“I knew,” Quynh said. She didn’t turn. “I knew as soon as you arrived alone. I was ready.”

Andy unzipped the bag she’d brought--it was large enough to stow the labrys--and pulled out a long jacket. She held it out to Quynh. Quynh reached past it, her fingers sliding over Andy’s skin to circle around her wrist. She held her like that for a moment, her grip reminiscent of those old shackles, those old restraints transformed by love. Quynh’s fingers were sticky with blood. Joe’s? Nile’s?

“You did a number on them,” Andy said. When Quynh didn’t respond, she wondered if it was the first time she’d heard the expression. She clarified: “You were very thorough.”

Quynh pressed her lips into a tight line and tilted her head up toward the sky. She closed her eyes against the rain and her hair slipped off her shoulders and fell down her back in a tangled cascade. “I needed time.”

“Can I?” Andy asked. She reached her free hand toward the labrys, fingertips light and careful against Quynh’s damp arm. Quynh tightened her grip and then relaxed and passed the weapon to Andy. She released Andy’s other wrist and accepted the jacket, sliding her arms through the sleeves and shrugging into it while Andy slipped the bloody axe into the bag and out of sight.

“You left them like that?” Quynh asked.

“I waited to make sure,” Andy said. It had lifetimes since they crouched over Lykon and sometimes it felt like yesterday. They never knew whether he’d just learned the truth at that moment, or if he’d known it for some time and had intentionally kept it from them. She hadn’t understood why he would do that then. She understood it all too well now.

Quynh stared at a group of houses to her right, eyes hard, unmoving. Andy wanted to reach out and take her hand but she wasn’t sure it would be welcomed. She shoved her fingers into the pockets of her jeans instead. Rainwater dripped from the tip of her nose and sniffed, twitched her face to ease the itch of it.

“I’ve come here so many times,” Andy said. It wasn’t even that long ago that she’d come. She’d stood in that very spot with Nile, realized that there was nothing left there for Quynh to recognize. There was a time, five hundred years ago, when a jail stood in this location. There was a time when Andromache and Quynh were restrained in a cell for weeks, their wrists raw and their mouths bruised. The only thing that made it bearable was the fact that the chains were set close enough that they could still find comfort in the physical presence of each other, Quynh pressed to Andy’s side, the pressure of Quynh’s forehead against her own. Over there, down at the end of the street, near the white terrace house with the pretty front garden, was the edge of the old field, the spot where they were hanged and hanged and hanged.

“They tore it all down and built this,” Quynh said. “How do these people live and love here? The ground must remember.”

But that was the truth all over this world. They didn’t tear down the jail and build houses the next day. There had been any number of buildings and lives lived on this patch of earth before it became what they saw before them. There was five hundred years of history buried beneath these homes and thousands of years before that, before Andy and Quynh ever set foot in this place. Quynh knew that, had seen it countless times before, but this spot had seemed unchangeable, significant. Sleeping soundly beneath these roofs felt unfathomable.

Quynh’s fingers worked at the cuffs of the jacket. It was Andy’s jacket, and they were nearly the same size, but it seemed far too big for Quynh somehow, the shoulders just a little too broad, the cut of it wrong for her shape.

“What happened to you after they took me?” Quynh asked.

Andy shook her head. “Not now. We should go somewhere safe. We should--”

Quynh turned and caught Andy’s arm. “Andromache. I have to know and I need to hear it here, in this spot..”

Andy closed her eyes. She nodded, convinced by the sure pressure of Quynh’s hand on her arm. “It’s hard for me to remember exactly how it happened. I wasn’t myself. I--I pulled against those chains until my wrists broke and even then I still couldn’t get myself out. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually I managed to shatter my hands against the iron rings and slide them free. I took down the next man to open the cell. I took his weapons and I fought my way free. I rushed to the docks, but the boat was gone, not even visible on the horizon. I failed and I’ve never forgiven myself. If I’d broken free of the chains sooner, I could have stopped it from happening. I could have stopped them.” Her voice caught and she shook her head, swallowed. When she spoke again her voice was no more than a whisper. “I searched for centuries. Nicky and Joe and I, we spent lifetimes.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Quynh said. Her hand fell away from Andy as she folded her arms across her chest. She held herself tight. “I thought I’d be satisfied in your bed, but I’m not. In fact, it’s worse. Nothing else will fill me and I--what has this endless life done to us? What has time done to us, Andromache? What kind of monsters are we?”

Andy let out a puff of breath, the start of a small tired laugh. “It’s turned us into Joe and Nicky, the early years?”

“I won’t laugh at that,” Quynh said, but at least she smiled. It was brief, it was slight, but it was there.

“I would give it to you,” Andy promised. “If nothing had changed, I would give you as many lives as you needed.” Quynh was right. This endless life had done something to them. Kill me, bathe in my blood, and kiss me alive again with everything forgiven. Who was she that this thought felt reasonable to her, who were they that this seemed within reach? It was in reach once, but no longer. There was no hope of kissing Andy alive again. There was no time to get back on equal footing.

“All this time and it still takes so much,” Quynh sighed. “I want to tear down this world. And who could blame me?”

“We’ll stop you,” Andy said, because it had to be said. She was sure that Quynh knew, but the words needed to be said aloud, the truth of them made clear, a promise and a safety net. “We’ll always be here to stop you.”

Quynh studied Andy’s face, her eyes shadowed. “The others, but what about you?”

“Me too,” Andy confirmed. “I’ll stop you.” She’d do whatever it took to do right by Quynh. The hard part was already over, the drowning, the boats, the endless search. The rest of this was easy. At least, it was an easy lie to tell.

“You’ll be killed,” Quynh said.

Andy shrugged. “Might as well finish me off now then.”

There--almost a laugh from Quynh. She turned away from Andy and was quiet for a long time. Andy knew this move. She’d seen it countless times in battle. Her mighty Quynh, turned away from an enemy, back exposed. Quynh waited just long enough for her opponent to relax, for them to forget that she was a threat, and then she swung back and hit them when they least expected. They never saw it coming, fell hard, hit the ground with an ungraceful bloody thump.

Andy waited there in the rain. She willed herself to relax; she knew that Quynh would feel the precise moment when she did.

She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and felt the air move through her hair, felt water against the back of her neck.

And then Quynh was back, Quynh was there with her hands on either side of Andy’s face as she pulled Andy in for a searing kiss. Andy could smell the blood on their skin, sweet and sickening and so familiar that it still felt a little like home. Quynh bit at Andy’s lips, followed the sharp pinch of her teeth with the soothing press of tongue, and Andy melted beneath her hands, surrendered, defeated. Quynh pressed kisses to Andy’s jaw, up toward her ear, down to the spot where neck met shoulder. Once there, she wrapped her arms around Andy, their first real hug in five hundred years. Only then did Andy move, only then did she hold Quynh back.

When Quynh spoke, she formed her words against Andy’s skin, and they tickled and shivered down Andy’s spine.

“I understand how it happened and why it happened, and I still don’t know how to forgive you. I can’t stay, Andromache, but I don’t think I can stay away from you either.”

Andy turned her face in toward Quynh, pressed her lips to Quynh’s hair, breathed deep. “Don’t forgive me. I don’t forgive myself. But I ask you to stay with me, just for this short time that’s left. Stay and we’ll figure it out together.”

Quynh shifted against her, pulled back just far enough to slip a hand into her clothes, to come back with a knife. The blade gleamed beneath the streetlights. For one brief moment, Andy thought that might be it, the short time she had left. And then Quynh pressed the knife into Andy’s palm, wrapped Andy’s fingers around it and pulled Andy’s knuckles to her lips, to her teeth.

“If it can’t be you, then perhaps it should be me. You know what to do. I know you do.”

Andy remembered Quynh’s words from hours before, from before the bed and before the blood: I long to shove my knife into your gut, to listen to your heart stop, to swallow that moment when it starts again. I want to hold you beneath the waves and watch you drown so that I can suck the sea from your lips. And you stand there and say please when you know that I can’t. So what are we to do?

It couldn’t be Andy; it had to be Quynh.

“No,” Andy said, but her chest was tight with anticipation. It curled in her gut and raced through her veins, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to say no, that she didn’t want to, not really, and not for long. Five hundred years, she’d imagined that moment, on her knees on the deck of a ship, Quynh in her arms, Quynh gasping that first breath between Andy’s lips, down Andy’s throat, filling her with it. She felt drunk on the thought, and when Quynh pulled back, Andy stumbled, unprepared to stand on her own two feet.

“Andromache--”

Andy swallowed, nodded. Time had stopped. The waves crashed in her ears, and when she spoke, it was like she was hearing a stranger’s voice, sound from a stranger’s lungs and a stranger’s throat.

“It can’t be here. Not here."

She pocketed Quynh’s knife as she scanned the street for the oldest car she could find, one on its last legs, one she could still hotwire. She pulled her phone from her pocket. She’d switched it to silent when she left the hotel, and now she saw a screen full of messages. Twenty from Nile, twelve from Joe, eight Nicky, five from a number she didn’t recognize, which meant it must be Booker. It was Copley’s number she was after. Needed car. she texted. More info to follow. She couldn’t give him more than that, not until they were finished. She smashed the phone and tossed it into a hedge, then she reached for Quynh’s hand.

“Let’s go.”

**

The sun was coloring the horizon by the time Andy pulled the car onto the beach. There was no one on the private road and they saw no one in the field leading to the tiny parking lot. It was still raining, coming down hard enough to discourage even those morning walkers who would venture out in a drizzling mist, intent on walking the beach in the early hours, on letting their dogs loose to roam.

Quynh followed her onto the stand.

“We don’t have to, if--”

Quynh paused for only a moment, her eyes hard on the sea. Her fingers found Andy. She squeezed Andy’s hand in hers, and then her hand fell away and she stepped away, toward the water. At its edge, Quynh turned and beckoned to Andy as she backed into the surf. Andy followed, drawn by the longing on Quynh’s face, by the wind in her hair and the push of the waves against her calves.

They stood in the water, the waves hitting their thighs, each swell pushing their bodies into each other.

Quynh kissed her, the rain and the saltwater mixed on her lips.

“Do it,” she said. “I’m ready.”

Andy took the knife in her hand. She reached for Quynh, pulled her in. Quynh took her hand and guided it to a spot between her breasts. Andy had been so sure she could do this, but here and now, the knife in her hand, her heart felt heavy in her chest. It hammered so fast. She felt close to some edge, some point of no return. If it didn’t go the way they hoped, if it didn’t fix this ache, scratch that unscratchable itch, what then? What else was left after this?

“You can,” Quynh said, reaching the doubt on Andy’s face. Her voice was firm. A voice that Andy remembered from countless battles with Quynh strong and resilient by her side. “You must.”

Andy stared down at the knife, at the length of the blade. “Lykon--Quynh, first it was Lykon and now me. You might not come back.”

“I will come back,” Quynh said, with an adamant shake of her head. Strands of hair clung to her face and Andy brushed them from her cheek. “I can feel it. I’ve died so many times, so many more times than any of you. It isn’t over yet, not for me. I feel it in my veins. Do you know how many times I’ve died? Have you counted?”

“Yes,” Andy said. She'd done the math, knew the impossibility of the numbers. Resolve strengthened, she pulled back, and then she thrust the knife forward into her heart, into her purpose and reason, her past and her future.

The knife went into Quynh the same way it did anyone else, as though she was ordinary, human.

“Again,” Quynh gasped, and Andy followed these orders, the same she would have given had the tables been turned. She pulled out the knife, refused to close her eyes at the sound of Quynh’s cry. She stabbed her again, and realized that this time the cry came from her own throat. Fuck, she’d done this so many times, but for some reason she thought--there was no reason for Quynh to feel any different. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t go exactly the same way. It went exactly the same way, Quynh’s eyes wide, her mouth slack, and when she coughed, a splash of red blood on her lower lip.

“Let go,” Quynh said and she sounded like she was drowning. Andy let go and Quynh fell into the waves.

Andy caught her with one arm to keep her from turning, from being pushed away by the waves. She wiped the rain from her face, stood over Quynh until she saw it happen, until she saw Quynh’s body still, saw her eyes go dark. There was enough light now to see the blood in the water, the dark cloud where the knife was lodged in her chest. And then Andy collapsed to her knees. She ignored the sharp press of stones; she ignored the water that came up to her chest and the waves that tried to push them back toward the shore. Andy gathered Quynh’s floating body in her arms. She cradled Quynh’s face with her hands, kissed her still and bleeding mouth.

She swallowed her screams and the rain on her face hid her tears. She reminded herself that this was for Quynh, she’d do it for Quynh as many times as it needed to be done, and she’d ignore the ache that said it should be her. It should be Andromache lying in the surf, Quynh’s knife in her chest. It should be Andromache bleeding them back to life.

Quynh jerked in her arms, and when she gasped, when she sucked air into her repaired lungs, Andy was there with her lips on Quynh’s face, on her cheeks and her nose and her mouth. Andy was there and Quynh grabbed her with force, kissed her with an intensity that Andy hadn’t felt in centuries, that she'd longed for like a missing limb. Quynh’s mouth tasted like blood and salt. She tasted reborn, brand new, but when Quynh found her voice, it was soaked through with desperation and she said:

“Again. I’m ready. I need it again.”

No knife this time, just Andy’s hands holding Quynh beneath the waves, while Quynh tried to accept it, tried to stop her thrashing limbs. Andy climbed on top of her, held her down, and when Quynh went still, she yanked Quynh from the water and sobbed against her shoulder, loud keening cries that were swallowed by the wind and the rain, anguished screams that fell on dead ears.

Quynh clung to her, shaking, her fingers grasping at Andy’s arms, nails sharp and scratching.

“I’m here,” Andy said, mouth against the shell of Quynh's ear. “I’m here, I’ve got you. I’m not ever going to leave.”

And Quynh pressed sucking kisses to her throat, to her shoulder, and then she said: “Again.”

Again and again, countless deaths there in the dawn, in the surf, their mouths raw with the salt of their kisses, Andy’s lungs full of Qunyh’s breath, and when it was over, when Quynh was satiated and when Andy felt that she could not possibly go on, it was Quynh that stood and lifted Andy in her arms. It was Quynh that helped Andy back to the shore, Quynh that eased her down onto a wet bed of discarded clothes. Quynh brought Andy back to life with her hands, with her fingers and her mouth, and the next time that Andromache cried out, it was with a different sort of anguish, a different sort of release.

Chapter Text

Andy woke in an empty bed, the sheets beside her still warm to the touch. The house was quiet. The morning sun streamed in through the window and left a bright parallelogram of light that bent over a rumpled pillow and onto the mattress. Andy pressed her face to the pillow and breathed deep, enveloped herself in the warmth of the morning and the echoes of Quynh. Quynh slept beside her in this bed, woke with the sunlight on her face, the light warming her dark hair.

It had been nearly a year since Andy woke alone in a different bed, to the sound of her family screaming. It had been nearly a year since that night on the beach in Plymouth and it still didn’t feel real. They’d lived so many lives, but so few of them were quiet, so few felt like they moved at a normal human pace.

It was the longest Andy had gone without dying in five hundred years.

She grew reckless after she lost Quynh to the sea. She saw that now. When she lost Quynh, she lost herself, her reason and her purpose. She pushed on. She tried to ignore it, tried to keep to the mission, and for so long she succeeded. Booker helped. Nile helped. It still wasn’t enough.

This might not be enough either. She had Quynh, but she’d lost all the rest to mortality. She’d been a warrior, a valkyrie, a god. She spent thousands of years working to right the wrongs of humanity, and now she was out of the game. She would spend the rest of her life--as long as that turned out to be--here on this island, here in this cottage, here with her love by the sea.

Sometimes it made her panic and she shot up in bed and rushed to her feet. Sometimes it was Quynh who woke in a panic instead, convinced her lungs were filling with water, convinced of iron above her head.

There was no panic now and Andy was reluctant as she slipped from the bed and shouldered on her robe. She took her time in the bathroom and then she padded down the hallway--there was Quynh and it all fell back into place. Quynh in their small kitchen, a bowl and a cloth still set on the table beside her, the water red with her blood. Andy leaned down to kiss her, and her fingers curled around Quynh’s hand, opening it, examining. The skin of her palm was smooth and unmarred.

“No change,” Quynh said. Andy wished she would stop checking.

“There’s time,” Andy said, though she didn’t think time would make a difference. She would grow old. Quynh would stay the same, and each day Quynh woke, and each day she checked her humanity and hoped for its return. And Andy would still grow old. Quynh would still stay the same. Andy wasn’t sure of many things, but she was sure of that. “We have so much time.”

There was a noise at the door and Andy turned to see the dogs shaking their butts, tails frantically swinging, desperate for entry.

“Bak,” Andy groaned as she watched him smear his wet nose across the glass, leaving a new wet streak over several dry stains at the exact same height. She opened the door and he and Cam rushed in and began to circle Andy’s feet. They were Icelandic sheepdogs, siblings, and there was never a day when Quynh didn’t delight in their presence. Even now she leaned down in her seat to hug Cam around her neck, to press her nose into the dog’s fur.

“You smell like snow.”

Not true. They smelled like dogs, but Andy was smiling as she turned to the counter to pour her coffee.

When this was over, Quynh would rejoin their fold. She’d return to Joe and Nicky and Booker and Nile and they would welcome her. What else could they do? What else could she do? She couldn’t stay there forever. She couldn’t sit by Andromache’s grave for eternity. They burned Lykon on a pyre and carried his ashes for centuries before letting him go over the land he’d called home. When Andy’s time was finished, Quynh would move on, just as Andy had tried to move on from Quynh.

Anyway, it wasn’t time for that yet. Andy’s time wasn’t over.

“I would grow old at your side,” Quynh whispered to Andy on cold northern nights, the wind howling outside their windows and their dogs curled up in front of the stove.

“We have so much time,” Andy returned.

**

They watched the sun rise on that beach outside of Plymouth, their blood in the surf, mixing in with the rain and sinking into the sand.

“What will I do?” Quynh asked. She spoke the words into the skin of Andy’s shoulder and Andy shivered at the rain and the cold and the touch of Quynh’s lips. Their clothes were soaked and torn. They had a stolen car and a bag of weaponry. She hadn’t thought this moment through, not entirely. She was hardly equipped to answer questions about their future.

She tried anyway and said: “The same thing we’ve always done. You’re one of us. You’re still one of us and you always will be. You stay and we’ll work through it together.”

Quynh considered this quietly and eventually she said: “And what, Andromache? Fight for the people who did this to us?”

Andy shook her head. It was never for them. “Fight for the rest of them.”

“They’re all the same.”

Andy squinted up into the rain, felt the water hit her forehead. “I thought so too, not that long ago.” She would show Quynh Copley’s work. She’d show Quynh the difference that they could make, the difference they had made. It’d never been possible to see the scope of it all before, to really understand their reach. It was difficult to see that it made any difference at all, but it had, and they had, and Copley had the proof of that. Quynh would see it and she’d understand.

Quynh pushed herself up on her elbow to look down at Andy with narrowed eyes. “You’ll be dead in a year.”

She seemed more balanced now. Quieter. Andy could no longer see the desire for destruction thrumming beneath her skin. It would return, no doubt. It’d return, and Andy would quell it, and it would return, and they’d do this again. She’d fight it back until it was gone and forgotten.

She shifted beside Quynh, brought a hand to her cheek, fingers catching in Quynh’s dark hair. “You don’t know that.”

“Don’t I? There was a time when I knew you better than anyone could possibly know another person. I think I still do. So tell me, how many times did you die in the last year?”

The answer was five, but that didn’t include the damage done that didn’t end in death. It didn’t count the wounds that healed before they had time to kill her.

Andy shook her head. Quynh was probably right. It didn’t matter; it was only one option. There were others.

“Okay, just you and me then,” Andy offered. Quynh turned to look up the beach and Andy set a hand on her arm to draw her back. “Look at me. Maybe you’re right. I’m out of the game, too fragile. We can leave, the two of us.”

“Just you and me,” Quynh repeated.

“Until the end,” Andy agreed.

“Until your end,” Quynh corrected. “And then?”

And then Quynh could do whatever she wanted. There was plenty of time to convince Quynh she wanted to live in the world instead of tearing it down.

“I’ll get to watch you grow old,” Quynh said with a hint of wonder in her voice.

“Great,” Andy laughed. “I get to watch you not grow old.”

In all of this, in all that had happened since they found Nile, since Andy lost her immortality--she never actually considered the possibility that she would live long enough to grow old. She’d sort of thought she’d go out in a blaze of righteous glory, a hailstorm of bullets, Quynh’s knife plunged mercifully through her heart. Never once did she consider that she might just live a normal life beside the woman she’d always loved.

“Andromache?” Quynh asked, after a long moment of silence. “How are we getting back?”

A man had appeared, walking a dog far off at the other end of the beach. He was a long way away, moving slowly, but the dog was loping ahead and would catch sight or smell of them soon enough.

“We’ll take the car,” Andy murmured, reluctant to leave this moment behind, the real peace of having Quynh back and whole in her arms.

“And clothes? Are we to walk naked through the streets of Plymouth?” Quynh was smiling. “I tried it just a few months back in Saint Malo. Times have changed, but not that much. A naked woman in the streets still causes quite the stir.”

“Might be fun.”

In the end they found a pile of folded blankets in the trunk of the stolen car.

Back in the city, they paused, blanket-wrapped outside of the house. “They might attack,” Andy said. “I’ll do what I can to keep them off you.”

Quynh shrugged. “Let them. Then we’ll be even.”

**

Andy picked Nile up from the airport in Reykjavik. Nile was bundled in the biggest sweater Andy had ever seen, most of her face obscured beneath a hat and scarf, and Andy had to hug her pretty damn tight to feel the hard muscle Nile had hidden away under all of that soft.

Nile took one look at Andy, thermal fleece, no hat and no gloves. “I overdressed.”

Andy laughed. “You’re just right.”

Nile stared out across the parking lot at the low rise of the hills beyond. “I don’t know why I expected snow.”

“It’ll be here soon enough.”

Andy tossed Nile’s bag into the back of her jeep and then opened the front door for Nile, ushered her inside. Nile talked non-stop for the start of the drive, about travels, and a new friend that Andy knew could not last. It was difficult to make connections when you knew you couldn’t stay.

“Damn,” Nile said, reaching up to push back Andy’s hair. “You’re turning grey?”

“Shh,” Andy said. She knocked Nile’s hand away.

“How old were you when you died anyway?” Nile asked.

Andy wasn’t actually sure. She might have known once. It lost importance over the years. Her fake IDs provided a range of ages between thirty-five and forty-five, so she split the difference and said, “I don’t know. Forty, maybe?”

“Course you don’t know,” Nile said.

Nile came with baklava from their travels, with a promise to relay Andy’s guesses as soon as she tried it.

“How are they?” Andy asked. She didn’t mean the sweets.

“They’re good,” Nile said. “Everybody’s good.”

“Booker?”

Nile nodded, and when she continued her voice was a little slower, a little less sure. “Yeah. Booker’s good.”

Andy laughed. She wasn’t fooled. Nile punched her shoulder. “Who told you?”

“Booker told me! I’ve been waiting months for you to spill and you’re over here talking about some new friend.”

Nile shrugged. “It’s still new, but you know, it’s good. You know that’s not why I’m here. I want to hear about you.”

Andy smiled, big and wide.

Nile sucked at her lips, attempted to repress her own smile. “That good, huh?”

Andy gripped the steering wheel tight as she leaned forward, then pushed back in her seat. She grinned over at Nile. “It’s so good. So good.”

**

They were mostly silent as Andy announced their plans. They’d move somewhere quiet. Andy would remove herself from danger. Most of the danger. All of the danger except for Quynh.

Joe nodded. His eyes look wet. Nicky looked at the floor. Nile was the hardest to convince. She stood before Andy with her arms folded over her chest and her eyes narrowed in Quynh’s direction.

“And if she tries to kill you?” Nile asked.

“She won’t,” Andy said.

Quynh stayed quiet, and after a moment she left the room, leaving Nile to discuss her freely. Nile relaxed, just a fraction. Her shoulders slumped and she moved forward to sit down beside Andy.

“She nearly did,” Nile countered. Some of the heat had drained from her body, but it was still there in her face. Andy set a hand on Nile’s knee and sighed.

“We’re learning,” Andy admitted. “None of us are used to being breakable, but she’s learning. Death means something different now.”

Nile chewed on this for a long moment. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Andy said. “You just have to trust me.”

**

That night they were quiet, coupling in silence, in rushed breathing and swallowed gasps. They’d done this so many times, sliding silently together while the others slept, slipping away just far enough to feel alone. The quarters weren’t so tight here. Nile was set up in the other room on the couch. Their door was shut, but they spoke in hushed whispers, touched in soft sighs.

“She looks at me different now,” Quynh said the next morning. “She’s settled into my presence.”

“I would hope so,” Andy snorted. “It’s been a year.”

“A year is nothing.”

“For you. It’s still something for Nile.” A year was something for Andy now too.

Sometimes Quynh smiled, and Andy’s life flashed before her eyes. Two thousand years of that same smile, a laugh that transformed an entire face. There were people who got sick of looking at each other in five years, ten, fifteen. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand what it was like to never ever tire of seeing one face.

Quynh turned that face toward the ceiling and Andy studied the sharp lines of her profile. Every night Quynh wished to wake mortal. Every night she whispered promises into Andy’s ear. “We’ll bend like trees in the wind. Old and happy.”

And each day Quynh sliced the skin of her hand, each day she watched it heal before her eyes. At first glance, she was Quynh at rest, but Andy knew where to look and she found the slight bouncing of Quynh’s knee beneath the table.

“Where’s Nile?”

“She took the dogs out for a run,” Quynh said, frowning, still disappointed by the absence of change. “They’re down on the beach.”

Andy pressed her hand to Quynh’s shoulder and stared out the glass door toward the figures frolicking in the black sand.

**

There were repeats of the night on the beach in Plymouth, just twice more over the course of a year, and then once the night after Nile left. She wrapped Quynh in a hug so tight that when Quynh laughed, it sounded like Nile was squeezing the air out of her, like the stretch of a balloon, high and long. Quynh stayed behind while Andy drove Nile back to the airport.

“We miss you,” Nile admitted as they got close. She’d said it a dozen times since she’d arrived. “It isn’t the same.”

“What you’re doing is important,” Andy said. “I can’t be part of that now. I’d just hold you back.”

“And Quynh,” Nile said.

“And Quynh,” Andy agreed. She wasn’t ready, but she would be. Andy would grow old and Andy would leave and Quynh would be ready for them.

“I like her,” Nile admitted. “I see her now. I see how you are with each other.” It was nice to hear, nice of Nile to say, and then Nile punched her shoulder and said, “Joe was right though. You two really do need to learn the meaning of quiet.” She mimicked a low breathy moan. “You’d think in a country this cold, the walls would be thicker.”

“He did not say that. We’ve always been very discreet.”

Nile snorted and stared out at the hills.

They hugged long and hard at the airport. Andy gave as good as she got. And then she returned to the cottage and found Quynh already standing in the ocean.

“It’s cold!” she shouted from the edge of the beach.

“It’s always cold,” Quynh shouted back, but she understood. She understood the smell of snow on the air. She understood that Andy should not expose herself to the surf for too long. She moved back onto the sand and she pressed her knife into Andy’s hand.

**

Nearly two years, and a morning like any other. Quynh at the table with her bowl and her cloth. The dogs pressed eager noses against Andy’s thigh, hoping for a scrap of breakfast. A long walk in the afternoon, a cup of tea while Andy watched Quynh paint, thick layers on canvas, blotches of blue on Quynh’s arms and Quynh’s cheek. And then in the evening, Andy misjudged a distance--that still happened, even after thousands of years--and her glass of wine hit the edge of the table wrong. It shattered in her hand and sliced the skin of her thumb.

Quynh rushed to Andy’s side and fell to her knees, heedless of the shards of glass scattered over the floor. “Let me see it.”

“It’s nothing,” Andy said, with a shrug. “It’s just a slice.”

“Let me see.”

Andy opened her hand, turned it to show Quynh her thumb. “It just needs a small bandage. It’ll be fine.”

Quynh frowned and wiped the blood away with her fingers.

“There’s nothing.”

“I know, I told you it was--” Andy stilled. She closed her eyes. “Don’t.”

“Look, Andromache. You know me. You know I wouldn’t lie about a thing like this.”

Andy did know Quynh and Quynh would not lie about a thing like that. Andy felt Quynh’s fingertip slide over her skin. There was no pain. Quynh’s finger didn’t catch on a wound, didn’t spark Andy’s nerves. Andy opened her eyes and looked.

Nothing. Andy rubbed her fingers against her thumb. Nothing. Not even blood now that Quynh had wiped it away. There had been blood, though. Andy could see the smear of it on Quynh’s skin. But the cut itself, sealed. Gone as if it never happened.

“No,” Andy said. She felt dizzy and folded down to her knees. Quynh was waiting there to catch her, to wrap her in strong arms. “No. No, no.” It couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be real. She stood and went to the counter. She found Quynh’s knife. She didn’t bother with the bowl or the cloth.

“Andromache,” Quynh said gently, from her place on the floor. She didn’t rush after Andy or try to pull the knife from Andy’s hand. She already understood the truth of it.

“No.”

“Andy.”

Andy ignored her and pressed the blade into the palm of her hand. She hissed as it sliced through skin. By the time Quynh pulled herself up from the floor, the wound had closed. Andy dropped the knife on the counter, listened to it bounce once before settling within its small splatter of blood.

There was no reason to it. No pattern. It wasn’t one full year, nor was it two. There was nothing special about the day Andy died. Nothing special about the day she knew she was able to die again. There was nothing significant about now, this moment, when she knew she was immortal once more. It might not even have happened today. This could have happened days ago, but without wounding herself, how could she have known? It could end again tomorrow, and how would she know?

No. No, it was nonsensical. It was wrong.

She rushed from the house, the dogs following at her feet. She rushed out onto the black sand of the beach. She lost herself in the roar of the waves, and she screamed, and she screamed. She stayed out there all night, and Quynh--Quynh knew her well enough to wait, joining her in the sand sometime during the early hours of the morning, the world still dark, the ocean still endless black.

“Well? What do you think?”

“I need to finish what we started in Plymouth,” Andy said. “I need it done right. Kill me. Make me yours again.” Kill me, bathe in my blood, and kiss me alive again with everything forgiven. This endless life really had done a number on them. Two years of mortality couldn’t change that.

Quynh leaned her head against Andy’s shoulder, the warmth of the house still caught in her hair. “Shh. You’re mine. You’ve always been mine.”

“You know it won’t be real until I feel it,” Andy said. The life extinguished then ignited again. She had to feel it to know for sure. “You know if you won’t do it, I’ll just do it myself. I’d rather it be you.”

“You might not come back,” Quynh warned. “If you don’t come back, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

She’d tear the world apart, but it wouldn’t come to that. “I’ll come back,” Andy promised. “I can feel it.”

Quynh shook her head. “We don’t know. This is all so new.”

Quynh was right, of course. Andy did not feel the change when it happened the first time. She did not feel it when it happened again. “I can feel it,” she insisted anyway, an echo of Quynh that first night.

Andy had a lot of time out there on the beach. She had a lot of time in the surf and the wind. She thought, perhaps, this was how it went. She thought that if Lykon had realized, if they’d moved him to safety and they’d waited it out, he would have passed through it too. “I need it done. I want to feel your mouth on mine, kissing me back to life.”

They were Quynh’s words, always more romantic than Andy. She felt Quynh soften against her and knew that she’d won.

“I’ll get the knife,” Quynh said, finally. She moved to stand, but Andy caught her arms.

“Not the knife.” There was no other way. “I have to drown.”

Quynh was quiet for what seemed a very long time. Her head settled back on Andy’s shoulder and she stared out at the ocean. Eventually she stood. She walked to the edge of the sand, and then out into the surf. Once there, she turned back to look at Andy.

It was time.

I want to hold you beneath the waves and watch you drown so that I can suck the sea from your lips.

The water felt ice cold against her ankles, even worse against her shins. The dogs were shut in the house and if Andy stood still long enough, listened hard enough, she could almost imagine the sound of their barking, their agitated pacing at the door. She continued into the waves, away from the warmth of their home, into the cold Atlantic Ocean, into the arms of her Quynh.

How many times had she done this before? How many times in the last five hundred years, imagining Quynh was there to hold her down. Instead it was Joe and Nicky on the ship, Andy far below. Instead it was the fights when they inevitably pulled up the chain too soon, unable to bear for a day what Quynh bore for centuries. Andy was good at drowning, but Quynh was the expert.

She knew exactly how long it would take, how long to hold. The water rushed into Andy’s lungs. Andy fought, but Quynh knew how Andy fought, knew exactly how to fight back.

And the world went black.

**

Life rushed in, a burst of adrenaline, heart beating too fast, body twitching awake. She was still in the water. She could feel Quynh’s hands tight on her arms. She opened her eyes and at first saw nothing but black. And then Quyhn moved into her field of visit, her eyes dark and her mouth set in a line.

The waves rocked against them, tried to dislodge Quynh’s feet, but she held fast, leaned in, pressed a hard kiss to Andy’s lips.

“Welcome back, my love.”

And then she pushed Andy under again.

**

Another life lost, another life started with Quynh’s mouth sucking salt from her skin. Andy turned to cough water back into the sea. It tore at her throat, burned in her nose.

“How does it feel?” Quynh asked in her ear. She must be screaming to be heard over the crash of the waves. It felt like a whisper against Andy’s skin.

It didn’t feel right. It felt far too kind.

Andy caught Quynh’s jaw in her hand, made sure Quynh saw the set of her eyes. It hurt to talk, but it wouldn’t last long. Her voice came out a ragged rasp. “Hold me down and keep me there for as long as you can.”

Quynh started to shake her head. She stopped. She nodded.

Quynh wanted this too.

**

Andy tried to scream, but had no air. She tried to breathe, but her lungs were full. She felt Quynh on her, Quynh’s fingers digging into her skin, Quynh’s knees digging into her hips. She thrashed twice. She died. She died again and again and again.

She lost count. She lost time. She lost it all except for the water, except for Quynh, and then finally, she opened her eyes and she wasn’t in the ocean. She wasn’t on the sand. She was in the warmth of their home. She was in their bed, and Quynh was there, her fingers light on Andy’s arms, her knee pressed in between Andy’s thighs.

Andy pulled her in. She came back to life.

**

“What will you do now?” Quynh asked, looking down at Andy, her head propped in her hand. It had been three days since the beach.

“What kind of question is that?” Andy asked, without a second of hesitation. “I’ll stay with you, if you’ll have me. Until the end, remember?”

“I remember,” Quynh said. She studied the lines of Andy’s face, the grey strands of hair at her temple. She leaned in to kiss the hairline there, and then, still close to Andy’s ear, she said: “You’re already restless, thinking of them.”

“I’m not.”

Quynh laughed and pushed Andy’s shoulder. “You think you can lie? To me? I see through each and every one of your lies, Andromache. You’ve been restless for two years. It’s a fact.”

“I’m restless,” Andy admitted. “This isn’t like--we’ve taken breaks from each other before. You know that. We go our separate ways, a long holiday. One year, five. But they’re out there, doing what we do without us. They’re out there doing the work that we set in motion: you and me and Lykon. Of course, I’m restless.”

Quynh kissed her, familiar lazy kisses. Kisses perfected over millennia, exquisite kisses, tailored precisely for their mouths. When they surfaced again, some time later, Quynh said, “If we went back to them, would they have me?”

“Yes,” Andy said, without a single doubt. “Of course.” What was one moment? What was one month in relationships that lasted centuries? “Can you do it, though? Can you go back to them, go back to the work after everything?”

“I can do it for you,” Quynh said. “And if I do it for you, I’ll understand it again and it’ll be for me too.”

They took their time thinking it over. They took months. Months of long calls, logistics to discuss and relationships to consider. There was Bak and there was Cam and the house. The house could be sold. The dogs would move with them. Copley would arrange it all. And in the morning Andy said, “Are you ready?” And in the afternoon Quynh returned, “Not yet.”

This went on.

Sometimes they didn’t think about it at all for a week. They went about their lives as though nothing had changed. Quynh checked her palm less frequently after Andy, but she still checked, a drop of blood into water before the wound was healed. She checked Andy’s too, and their blood danced together, mingled in the bowl.

No change.

And then finally, three months after Andy drowned, Quynh came in from the snow, the dogs trailing behind her. She paused to kiss Andy with icy lips. She pressed her thumb into Andy’s palm and said, “Promise you won’t go into battle without checking this first.”

Andy looked up. “It could happen anytime.”

“It could,” Quynh agreed. “But if circumstances allow, beforehand we check, like it was in the years after Lykon.”

Andy nodded. Of course, they’d made this promise before. Nothing changed, and with time the little rituals were forgotten, and then they were lost to the sea. Now they would start again.

Quynh kissed her a second time and then released Andy’s hand and disappeared into their bedroom. A moment later Quynh returned. In one hand she held her bow. In the other, Andy’s axe.

“All right,” Quynh said. “Let’s go to work.”