The Night Country

36

They were back on Earth. He knew it the way you know the shape of your body in the dark. He knew it by the specific way its gravity worked on him; he’d forgotten exactly how the air felt here, but his body remembered.

He let that air run through his fingers and felt a nameless grief pass through him. For something lost, something found. He was no stranger to nostalgia, but the feel and flavor of his abandoned world made a new kind of music in him, an endless complicated pain in his heart.

Io had stopped a few yards in front of him. She was looking at someone standing just beyond the door, the light of the last world shining full on her face.

A girl. She was petite, dressed like him: old jeans, tight T-shirt. Her hair was messy and brownish and she stood at odd attention, like she’d just received an electric shock. All that he took in at a glance. What he really saw was the way she was looking at him.

Like she knew him. Like she wanted to rush him. Hide from him. Kill him, maybe. Her gaze was so ferocious he didn’t notice at first how pretty she was, and when he did it was the beginning of the next revelation. The big one.

She was older. (His heart tugged; they’d lost time, more than he’d thought.) Sun-freckled and toughened. Her face held different things, and she’d only looked at him this way once, just once: right before she turned and left him, to walk off the edge of another world.

He tasted her name on his tongue.