by Patrick Ness
“Yeah, you do.”
“Don’t go anywhere?”
She took the flesh of his upper arm between two fingers and gently pinched. “Not even when I’m across a continent and an ocean,” she said.
“Not even then,” he agreed.
“Not even until the end of the world.”
He set off to find Linus, but only got to the other end of the little campground before Karen and Renee stopped him. “What happened with you and Wade?” Karen asked. “You ran out of there like he tried to kiss you.”
She meant this as a joke, but when Adam didn’t answer, Renee said, “He didn’t.”
“He did. When I said I wouldn’t sleep with him, he fired me.” Adam blinked. Was it as clear as that? Maybe it was. Maybe it really was.
“He can’t do that,” Renee said, concern all over her face.
“He really can’t,” Karen agreed.
“We’re backing you up,” Renee suddenly said, which surprised him as he always thought of Karen as the more take-charge one.
“Hell, yeah, we are,” Karen said. “How dare he?”
“Are you going to talk to Mitchell?” Renee said.
Mitchell was their regional manager, a man Adam had never even spoken to. “I’ve never even spoken to him.”
“He goes to our church,” Karen said. “He’s a good guy. You should talk to him.”
“We’ll back you up,” Renee said again.
“You didn’t see it, though.”
“Please,” Karen said, “all the stuff Wade has said while we worked there? The way he looks at you?”
“The way he always touches you?” Renee said, softly.
“You guys noticed that?” Adam said, honestly amazed.
“Impossible to miss, Adam,” Karen said. “We always wondered how bad you needed the job to put up with it.”
He felt a little knot in his stomach. “I need the job pretty bad.”
“Then you’ll get it back,” Renee said. “No way I’m working there if Wade’s there and you’re not.”
“This isn’t over, Adam,” Karen said. “No way, no how.”
“Well, that’s…” Adam said. “That’s kind of amazing. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Renee smiled, shy again.
“Now, really, have you seen Linus?”
“I think he went out on one of the paths by the lake,” Karen said. “Why?”
He looked her right in the eye and said, “I have to give him a rose.”
“No,” she says, and the rebuke is not for the faun, nor is it for the dead man whose head she still holds, whose blood spreads across the floor of the cell, a brook overflowing its bank.
“No,” she says again.
In an instant, the man is whole again, cowering back in the corner, his blood running through his veins, though the smell lingers, a smell still churning the ferocious hunger in the faun’s belly. It has been so long–
And then he realizes. These desires, this hunger, this is because his Queen really is slipping away.
“No,” she says, as the man looks back up at her, the shock in his eyes not lessening. She has allowed him to retain the memory of the beheading, to remember the pain, the feeling of separation. It would normally tip his mind beyond reach, but she disallows that. He will remember. He will always remember.
And that’s enough.
A part of her feels that the beheading was only right, but the larger part, the part that drove her here, that part knows his death would be only the most callow of revenge. It’s what she learned the moment he said yes. The moment where everything changed.
It had taken pushing beyond that to realize its folly.
“You are so small,” she says to him. “So … puny.”
He goggles back at her, mystified at what she will do next. She doesn’t know that either.
“I came here to tell you of my murder,” she says, “and then to kill you, but you…” She steps back from the man. “You are so small.”
The faun does not know who is speaking now. He doubts she does either.
“There is more here,” she says, feeling it as she says it. “You loved me.”
“I did,” the man says, simply.
“But you loved the drugs more.”
“Everyone does.”
She nods at the simple truth of this. “I loved you, once.”
“I know.”
“Even when I loved the drugs more, I would not have done what you did.”
“I’m weaker than you.”
“You are. Everyone is. Do you know the responsibility of that?”
“No,” the man says.
“And for that, this world rejoices.”
She turns to the faun, looks in his eye, and says, “I am lost.”
Adam found Linus on a little promontory looking out over the lake, across the inlet from the path he’d run what felt like a hundred years ago but was actually just this morning. Linus had a beer in his hand, watching the sun dip low in the sky.
“Hey,” he said, seemingly cheerfully as Adam came up. “Is that for me?”
Adam held the rose in his hand. He’d gone back to his car to get it.
“Will you take it?” Adam said.
Linus looked up and said, plainly, without malice, “No.”
“Linus–”
“I tried for you, Adam. I really, really did.”
“Linus, I know–”
“I don’t think you do. You’re not the easiest guy in the world, you know.”
Adam faltered, that knot in his stomach again. “What do you mean?”
Linus made a rushing motion with his hands on either side of Adam’s head, spilling a little beer on Adam’s shirt. “All this stuff,” Linus said, “always going on. Always the world tumbling down on you. Always you trying to hold it all up.” He sipped his beer and said, more quietly, “It’s no wonder you only notice the guys who treat you badly.”
Adam swallowed and turned the rose in his hands, turned it round and round. “The pizzas,” he said. “The pizzas were meant to be a last gift to Enzo before he moved away. He didn’t say as much but that’s what we both meant.”
“Yeah, I got that. Look, Adam–”
“He tried to pay me for them.”
Linus hesitated, clearly not sure where this was going.
“That’s how he sees me,” Adam said. “I hoped and hoped and hoped. For a year and a half. And then he dumped me. For the worst, stupidest reasons. And I guess… I guess I still hoped. Even when I knew I shouldn’t. Even when I had better things right in front of me.” He looked over at Linus. “He was the first way out for me. The first way out of all the rest of this stuff that races and races. The first window to a world that could be, a world I’m kind of desperate for. And he had my heart, I admit that.”
“That much was obvious, Adam. To anyone who looked.”
“But he tried to pay me for the pizzas. He wouldn’t even let me be generous. Which I think is what I was secretly hoping for all this time. He didn’t calculate it or anything. There was just … no connection left for him there.” He turned the rose again. “Whatever I was before, I’m now just a guy who did him a favour he needed to repay.”
Linus eyed him. “That must have hurt.”
“Who cares, Linus? Who cares? It woke me up. I’ve… God, do you know how little I think I have? How much I think goes wrong for me? With my parents and work and Angela moving away?”
“But that’s all true, kinda,” Linus said, gently. “Don’t pretend things aren’t–”
“Yeah, but they’re not the only things that are true. There’s so much more that’s also true.” He still turned the rose around and around. “You sure you won’t take this?”
“Feels like it’s kind of overweighted with meaning now. That’s an awful lot to put on one rose.”
“Probably.”
“Here’s the thing, Adam. I know what I want. Not all of it, but the right amount. I want you, but not at any price. I want t
o get through my senior year with friends and I want you to be one of them and I want you lying in my bed and I want you naked in my shower and I want us to laugh and I want you to actually be there. All of you. Not seventy per cent with the rest still wondering if Enzo is ever going to come back after burrowing so far into the closet it’s like he’s looking for straight Narnia.”
Adam laughed a little at this, but Linus’s face continued serious. “Do you know what you want, Adam?” he asked. “You want out, I know that, but there are lots of ways out. Do you just want that one?”
He waited. Adam still spun the rose, the rose that seemed destined now to be given to no one, the rose bought on the spur of the moment after he’d pricked his thumb. He put a thorn back to the wound again, idly pricking himself once more, just wanting to feel the pain for a second–
–and saw it again, an entire world, fast as a gasped breath, of trees and green, of water and woods, of a figure that followed, dark, in the background, of mistakes made, of loss, of grief, of a world ending, ending, ending–
He blinked and put his bloody thumb to his lips like he had at the beginning of this eternal, pivotal day. Here at the end of it, there was only the coppery taste of blood on his tongue.
He knew what to say.
“I want to take you back to the party, Linus,” he said, low, like he was asking for a permission he was terrified of not getting. “I want to kiss you in front of everyone there. I want everyone to know.” Raising his eyes to look directly into Linus’s face was maybe the scariest thing he’d had to do all day long, but it was only the free-falling terror that always accompanied hope.
“I want to love you,” Adam said. “If you’ll let me.”
“I do not know how to let her go,” the Queen says, directly to the faun, and this, too, shows the terrifying diminution of her power. Not just admitting to a lack of knowledge, but the implicit request to an underling of the court for help.
“Does she know how to let you go, my lady?” he asks, trying to stay calm. “It was her spirit who first caught yours.”
“It was not,” the Queen says, as if admitting an embarrassment. “I saw her there. I was curious. There was a loss, an unanswered question. And now–”
“The binds of the world are coming loose, my lady. We have until the sun sets. That’s all the time given to a spirit to wander. You know this. She will die, and if you die with her–”
“We are too entwined.” There is fear in her voice now, and this shakes the faun more than any of the other cataclysms this day has contained. “I do not know where she ends and I begin.”
“Time will finish, my lady. This world–”
“This world’s walls will dissolve. And this world along with it.”
“And ours.”
She looks up to him, a regal set to her jaw that gives him hope, a resignation in her eyes that contradicts this–
–and there is a moment where she seems to vanish, to become as insubstantial as a breath of air, and she sees their home again, not just the lake, but this world entire, all the souls beating within it, all the longings and the lonelinesses, the spirit wrapped to her, the spirits who circle out from that one, the spirits spinning out from those and beyond and beyond and beyond, this world that thrums with a life constantly consuming itself and regenerating anew, this world she has been Queen of since before the memories of all but herself, she sees it all, past and forever, every soul that lives and could, the ones she killed, the ones she saved, and this soul, this soul, this spirit bound to her and of her and with her and in her, this spirit who pardoned her own murderer, this spirit who said no to that chain of destruction these creatures so regularly set themselves upon, and at the end, she sees herself, all of herself, in a single drop of blood, a single drop of blood on a day where destinies changed, a single drop of blood that started this all–
–she knows what to do. The only option left to her.
“Let us return to our home,” she says, certain that this is right. “Let us greet the end there.”
“My Queen–”
“I am your Queen,” she agrees. “And this is my wish.”
Time is so short that for a vertiginous moment, the faun considers arguing with her, demanding that she try harder, try to see all that is at stake–
“Will you take my hand?” she asks.
An offer never made in all the eternities he has served her.
It really is the end.
“Yes, my lady,” he says. “Let us return to our world and greet the end there.”
He takes her hand.
RELEASE
“So what’s going to happen?” Angela said, as they dipped their feet into the lake at the end of a small pier the party had expanded to accommodate.
“Always a million-dollar question,” Linus said on the other side of Adam. Little fish darted around in the frankly freezing water, even in late August. Frome wasn’t a town where a lot of open-air swimming got done.
“Which part?” Adam said. He was still holding the rose, had held it when he kissed Linus in the middle of the party, held it when the party kept spinning and the world didn’t end. He hadn’t even tried to catch Enzo’s eye, and that felt right, too.
“With your parents first,” Angela said. “You can always stay with mine if things get black. Always.”
“I know,” Adam said. “And I might. I’ll have to see. Maybe Marty will keep his word and be on my side.”
“Maybe he got an eyeful of what being the Prodigal Son actually looks like,” Linus said.
“But you’ve always got a place,” Angela repeated. “I mean it.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“What about the rest?” Linus asked.
“Well,” Adam said. “What have I got? I’ve got a few hours until I have to go home and face that mess. I’ve got a few days until I’m supposed to go back to work if I’m not fired. And I’ve got a week before Angela goes to Europe. Those aren’t the worst slots of time to live in, are they?”
“How about right now?” Linus said, nodding at the sun, setting on the horizon in front of them. “We’ve got a few minutes until the sun goes down.”
“And this day is over,” Adam said.
“And something new can begin?” Angela said, sceptical. “Am I the only one here who doesn’t live in a Mickey Mouse Club song?”
“Sometimes, Ange,” Adam said, “you just got to eat the corn and enjoy it.” He pulled his feet out of the water and stood up between them. “Anyone want anything? Cold pizza? More beer?”
“I kinda want a water,” Angela said.
“That sounds good,” Linus agreed.
“Look at us,” Adam said. “Teen party animals.”
“I think we’re pretty typical,” Angela said, nodding back to the party. Adam looked, too. Small groups of people talking, an odd sense of relief gently misting through everyone that the party was a friendly one, no one going over the top, or at least not in any way that didn’t seem right. He saw Renee and Karen talking to JD McLaren and laughing in an unguarded way. Enzo, in fact, was the only one who’d drunk too much and was looking miserable next to Nat as she, possibly with purposeful obliviousness, laughed with what Adam guessed were friends of hers.
“Wow,” Linus said, also looking. “Am I the only one who thinks Enzo’s new girlfriend–”
“I know,” Angela said. “Creepy, huh?”
Linus shrugged. “Maybe he’s just lost. Maybe we should feel sorry for him.”
“Or maybe he’s a liar and a coward,” Angela said.
“I don’t even know,” Adam said. “And I’m kind of okay with that.”
He started walking back down the pier to get his friends some water.
“Hey,” Angela called after him. “You coming back?”
He turned to them and smiled. “Always,” he said. “Until the end of the world.”
The faun leads her to the water. Her hand feels warm, soft, like a human hand, not the hand of his Queen, ye
t it is indubitably that as well. He can feel the power of her, even entwined in the spirit.
They reach the water’s edge. She hesitates.
“This is where I left the lake,” she says.
“I know, my Queen.”
“This is where I began to die.”
“Not all of you.”
She looks him in the eye. “This is where I shall die now.”
He has no answer for that. She still holds his hand. “The spirit wishes to leave me. She does not know how. I do not know how to release her. We are bound.”
She looks to him, seeing him, her servant since time immemorial. She peers beyond his eyes, past the shape of the faun, to the spirit-shape that has always attended her.
“You have followed me,” she says. “You have been at my side even when I couldn’t see you.”
“Yes, my Queen.”
“You followed me when I was not your Queen.”
“My Queen was always there. I followed her, as is my duty. And my will.”
“Your will.”
“Yes, my Queen.”
She regards the hand she still holds. “You searched for me when I was lost.”
“A Queen is never lost. She is always exactly where she needs to be.”
She glances up at this and he can see a glimmer of the playful smile every Queen holds in reserve, the smile that is the doorway to her private self, the one who wears the role of Queen.
He feels a pressure on his hand and is astonished to realize she is pulling him closer, compounding the crime of contact with one of a proximity no spirit is ever allowed. “Is it not a shame,” she says, “that we must wait until the end of the world for all boundaries to fall?”
“My Queen?” he asks, for the desire to move into her embrace is overwhelming to the point of extinguishment. He will perish there, but the perishing will be a bliss he has never even–
“Oh, hello,” says a voice. “I didn’t know anyone was on these paths.”
