Daughter of Smoke and Bone(74)

She never has to know.





41





ALEPH



Karou was exactly where Akiva had imagined her to be, at a cafe table at the edge of the Jemaa el-Fna, and also as he had imagined, she was unquiet in the absence of the wishbone. Once, her fingers would have needed no occupation but the holding of her pencil. Now her sketchbook lay open before her, white pages blinding in the North African sun, and she fidgeted, unfocused, unable to keep her eyes from searching the plaza for Akiva.

He would come, she told herself, and he would bring back the wishbone. He would.

If he was alive.

Would they have harmed him, those other seraphim? It had been two days already. What if…? No. He was alive. To imagine him otherwise… Karou’s mind couldn’t approach it. Absurdly, she kept remembering Kishmish, years ago, gulping down that hummingbird-moth—the stark suddenness of it: alive, not alive. Just like that.

No.

Her thoughts veered away, finding focus on the wishbone. What did it mean, that it had had that effect on Akiva? And… what could he have to tell her that had made him fall to his knees? The mystery of her self took on a dark tint and she felt a shiver of apprehension. She couldn’t help remembering Zuzana and Mik, the looks on their faces—stunned and afraid. Of her. She had called Zuzana from her airport layover in Casablanca. They had argued.

“What are you doing?” Zuzana had demanded to know. “Let’s not regress to the time of mysterious errands, Karou.”

There wasn’t much point being cagey now, so she’d told her. Zuzana, unsurprisingly, had taken Akiva’s line that it was too dangerous, and Brimstone wouldn’t want it.

“I want you to take my flat,” said Karou. “I already called the landlord. He has a key for you, and it’s paid for the rest of—”

“I don’t want your stupid flat,” Zuzana said. Zuzana, who boarded with a cabbage-cooking elder aunt and joked not infrequently about killing Karou just for her flat. “Because you live in it. You are not just going to vanish like this, Karou. This isn’t some goddamn Narnia book.”

There was no reasoning with her. The conversation ended badly, and Karou was left sitting with her phone warm in her hands and no one else to call. It struck her with terrible clarity how few people were in her life. She thought of Esther, her fake grandmother, and that just made her sad, that her mind would default to a standin. She almost tossed the phone in the trash right there—she didn’t have the charger, anyway—but was very glad the next morning that she hadn’t. It vibrated in her pocket at the cafe, on the dregs of its juice, and disclosed the message:

No. Food. Anywhere. Thanks a lot for starving me. croak expire

She laughed, and held her face, and even cried a little, and when an old man asked her if she was okay, she wasn’t quite sure.

Two days she had been sitting here now; two nights she had tried to sleep in her rented room nearby. She had tracked down Razgut, just to know where he was when she was ready to go, and had left him again, wailing for his gavriel, which she did not give him. She would make his wish for him when the time came to go.

To go. With or without Akiva, with or without her wishbone.

How long would she wait?

Two days and two unending nights, and her eyes were darting, hungry. Her heart was gasping, empty. Whatever resistance had been in her, she gave it up. Her hands knew what they wanted: They wanted Akiva, the spark and heat of him. Even in the warmth of the Moroccan spring she was cold, as if the only thing with a chance of warming her was him. On the third morning, walking through the souks to the Jemaa el-Fna, she made a curious purchase.

Fingerless gloves. She saw them in a vendor’s stall, densely knit things of striped Berber wool, reinforced with leather at the palms. She bought them and pulled them on. They covered her hamsas entirely, and she couldn’t deceive herself that she’d bought them for warmth. She knew what she wanted. She wanted what her hands wanted: to touch Akiva, and not just with her fingertips, and not with caution, and not with fear of causing him pain. She wanted to hold him and be held, in soft perfect unity, like slow-dancing. She wanted to fit herself to him, breathe him, come alive against him, discover him, hold his face as he had held hers, with tenderness.

With love.

“It will come, and you will know it,” Brimstone had promised her once, and though he had surely never dreamed it would come to her as the enemy, she knew now he hadn’t been wrong. She did know it. It was simple and total, like hunger or happiness, and when she looked up from her tea on the third morning and saw Akiva in the square, standing some twenty yards off and looking at her, it thrilled through her like her nerves were channeling starlight. He was safe.

He was here. She rose from her chair.

It struck her, the way he was just standing there at a distance.

And when he came to her, it was with a heavy tread and a closed expression, slowly, reluctantly. Her certainty vanished. She did not reach for him, or even step out from behind the table. All the starlight shrank back up her nerve endings, leaving her cold, and she stared at him—the heavy slowness, the flatness of his look—and wondered if she had imagined everything between them.

“Hi,” she said in a small voice, hesitant and with an uplift of hope that she might be misreading him, that he might still mirror back at her the starburst that the sight of him had ignited in her. It was what she had always wanted and thought that she’d found: someone who was for her, as she was for him, whose blood and butterflies sang to hers and answered them, note for note.