Because She Knew Me - 10

I stare through the barricade.

The curtain lies between us, but the gap beside the table still holds a narrow piece of the outer room: black floor, the lower edge of a green wing, one bare foot placed beyond the line I scratched.

Jamie shifts beneath the two wings I have folded over him. His sleeve brushes my wrist as I look down at his face. For a moment, I imagine if he said: “Stop calling me Jamie. He was just your brother. I only woke up in his body.”

My fingers close around his upper arm. The movement is hard enough to find bone beneath the raincoat. My stomach drops, and one wing slips between his face and mine before I can see the imagined mouth move again.

Jamie twists. “What the heck are you doing?”

I lift the wing. He is still himself beneath it: hair flattened on the left side, one eyebrow raised higher than the other, irritation already replacing surprise. His mouth belongs around his voice. His face does not make the thought impossible. I loosen my hand but do not let him go.

“Sorry.”

On the other side of the curtain, the woman has not moved. My upper wings lower from the barricade. The right one that kept aiming itself toward the woman hangs uncertainly beside me, then folds across Jamie with the others. It does not turn back to her.

Lyra’s mouth—my mouth, has called her the woman . Lyra’s wings still remember where she stands even while I force them away. If Jamie’s face could complain in the correct voice and even call me Aspy—and still tell me Jamie was gone—forgetting me might hurt less.

Maybe she’s been looking at some version of that every time she looks at me.

No, I knew this from the start—

A sound comes out embarrassingly loud inside the closed room.

My stomach contracts so hard that I fold around it. All four roots tighten. There’s no way.

Jamie side-eyes me. “Wow. Was that you?”

“No.” Another cramp climbs beneath my ribs. “Not at all.”

The green wing outside shifts. “Are you hun—”

“Yes.”

My hands have started shaking. I press one against the floor, and the trembling travels up the pale fingers into the arm. My wings buzz quietly.

The woman moves nearer to the curtain. Not across it. “When did you last take sap? You did bleed some from your wings.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ever eat what I brought?”

I look toward the old bowl wedged beneath the lifted leg of the stool. The pale thing she carried in with it is somewhere inside the barricade or crushed behind the table.

“No.”

Her breath leaves through her nose. “How long were you awake before I came?”

“Uh, I don’t know. Not long. But… I was hovering before I woke up here.”

“Hm.” The visible part of her wing draws close to her leg. “You need sap.”

I hate how quickly this body believes her. The inside of my mouth tightens around a taste that is not present. Warm, mineral sweetness. The thought of it produces another hollow pull beneath my sternum.

“Are you going to drug me?”

Jamie turns toward the gap. “Why would she do that?”

“I’ll eat from the same piece before I bring it,” she says to me.

No. She wants me unconscious? Wait, why would she want that? No—think about it. She wants Lyra back. She can’t get Lyra back while I’m awake. It makes sense. I barely know her, she has no reason to be nice to me. Even if she only feels neutral about me, or if she’s only holding herself back. She wants me unconscious because I’m in Lyra’s body and if I’m in Lyra’s body—

“When the same thought comes back,” the woman says, “don’t answer it twice.”

I look at the strip of outer room. “What?”

“You asked whether I meant to harm you. I answered. If the question returns exactly as it was, leave it unanswered.”

“When does that ever work?”

“The second asking is your hunger.”

My stomach tightens again, and the question comes with it: How do I know the second asking isn’t the one that notices the truth? I almost say it.

“But why is it so sudden?”

“When have you had time to rest today?”

Ah.

The woman’s foot turns away. “I’m getting food. I won’t bring anyone with me.”

“Wait.”

The green wing pauses at the edge of the gap. I do not know what I meant to stop her for. I cannot ask her to stay and will not let her enter. Jamie is here. Jamie is home. She cannot see him. Hierophant saw less than that; he could see my body and still asked where I was. The woman can see the part of me that belongs to Lyra and not the person underneath it. I am in Lyra’s body, so she cannot look at me. She cannot look at me because I am in Lyra’s body, and if she cannot look at me, then nobody here can—

Oh shit. I close my mouth.

After a moment, the wing disappears. Her steps pass into the next room. Three curtain weights tap black wood, and then even the sound of her is gone, taken by a short pressure of air.

Jamie crawls out from beneath my wings before I can tell him not to. “What do you think she’s gonna bring?”

“Food.”

“Bug food?” He tilts his head.

“They’re not bugs.”

He glances pointedly at the orange wing still stretched along the floor behind me.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

The stupid kid has already reached toward the nearest glowing mushroom cap. I catch the back of his raincoat and pull him away. The mushroom does not turn toward his fingers. Its cup stays angled at me, aqua gathered deep between the gills, as though Jamie’s hand is no more relevant than the darkness passing over it.

“I wasn’t touching it.” He sits back on his heels and pushes both hands into his sleeves. I watch the cuffs swallow them. The movement has no purpose except making it harder for him to use his hands, and he does it anyway.

The woman is coming back. She will stop outside. She will see Lyra through the slit. She will not see me—

“How should I stop constant thoughts?”

He shrugs. “Can’t you just… stop thinking?”

“I wasn’t good at that even normally. Idiot.”

The barricade still cuts the rooms in two. It kept Hierophant outside. It also kept the woman outside after I gave her permission to stay.

She could have moved the table farther when she was here. She had already shifted it once. She stopped when my wings opened. She left alone because I asked, and she is coming back alone because she said she would.

Moving the table does not mean she can enter, it means I can decide again when she returns. A gap wide enough for her body is not the same thing as permission. I like that.

I stand. “Wanna help me move this?”

Jamie stands immediately. “Which part?”

“The table. Not the tray. If the tray falls, the stool might—just push where I push.”

I crouch beside one end. Jamie plants both covered hands beside mine, realizes the sleeves are useless, and pulls them back. The sight is so ordinary that I have to look away.

“Ready?” I ask.

“I’ve been ready.”

We push. The table grinds across the heartwood. Its resistance travels into both my palms and nowhere else. Jamie’s elbows lock. His face tightens. He makes the small breathy grunt he always makes when lifting something he has already been told is too heavy, but the table does not become lighter beneath my hands. When I stop, it stops. When Jamie keeps pushing, nothing enters the wood.

“Hey, I’m still pushing,” he says.

Don’t. Don’t think about that. The question rises before the table moves again. Are you—why? When did hunger do this? Not now. I am tired of methods that can take a person apart without putting anything back. Haven’t I already thought that?

Random thoughts. Red pen. Water bottle. Popcorn cups. Curtains green.

Oh.

Blue-green. It clicks, or it should click—until the thought cycles again. We move the table only a hand-width. I pull the stool sideways until the bowl slips free and rolls once along the curved floor. My jaw aches near the hinge. The bowl still has an old something in it. I knew that. It’s food—I can see it, alien food but still food, still something to be consumed.

Stillsomethingtobeconsumed

My chin is a little stained.

Jamie says nothing. The thoughts have quieted, if only a little.

The tray remains wedged, and the silk still blinds most of the opening, but a person could turn sideways through the new space if I moved back and allowed it. I test the table with both hands. It will not fall on its own.

The outer curtain weights tap before I answer. Air moves through the main room, carrying mineral damp, hot wood, and the wet metallic edge of blood. I cannot find the woman inside any of it. Her steps reach the inner curtain and stop.

“I’m back.”

I gesture for Jamie to move back and love that the action is already automatic. “I, uh, moved some of it. There’s enough room now.”

Nothing enters. “For you,” I add. “I mean, you can come in if you want. We could… talk.”

Her shadow changes against the narrow gap. For a moment I expect the curtain to lift. Instead, wood touches wood softly on the other side, a tray being set down.

“I can talk to you,” she says. “I cannot do that while I’m looking at her. Not anymore.”

My first breath tries to put teeth around whatever I say next. The hollow beneath my sternum widens into the same place hunger has been pulling. I look at the gap I made for her and then at Jamie, who is trying to see around my shifting wings.

“Okay,” I say. The new gap stays empty.

A fresh tray slides beneath the curtain. I kneel to catch it before the cup slides. Our hands remain on opposite ends until the whole tray is inside the bedroom, and then hers withdraws.

There are two pale wedges on a broad dark leaf. They look layered, but no layer continues all the way through. Short translucent fibers cross and knot around thousands of tiny chambers, giving each piece the slight spring of packed pith rather than bread. One wedge has a ragged corner missing. The chambers along that edge have already contracted and gone dry.

Warm aqua sap shines inside the untouched pockets. When I tear a corner from the whole wedge, the broken chambers tighten one after another. Beads withdraw through the fibers, passing deeper into the piece until the exposed edge holds almost nothing wet. The smell reaches me anyway: wet stone, burnt sugar, and the green sting of a snapped stem. This body knows it as food so completely that saliva floods beneath my tongue.

Jamie stares at my dirty chin. I set the piece back down.

“I was hungry,” I say.

On the other side of the curtain, the woman shifts her weight. The tips of two green wings are visible through the gap now, folded so tightly together that one edge presses a shallow line into the other.

“You shouldn’t stay on the floor,” she says.

I look around the bedroom. “I don’t exactly see a bed.”

Silence.

“The cocoon,” she says at last.

“The what?”

Her next breath catches in a way that makes me wish I had pretended to understand. “If you are near the curtain, then look a little above you, to the left. There is a fold in the wall. By that… ‘moth.’”

I look where she tells me. Black grain curves over a shallow rise in the wood, no wider than my forearm. I have looked past it every time I looked at the gray moth. It looks like two layers of bark grew over each other and then forgot to finish.

“I see it.”

“Another is diagonal from it, across the room.”

The second takes longer. Aqua light reflects against a slight hollow high on the opposite wall. From one angle it is a cup. When I move my head, its edge disappears into the grain and leaves only a dark interruption.

“The third is ulward on the other end, where the wall meets the floor.”

I see it exactly across from the second. It sits beside my toes, a blunt stick-like thing that lies flush in the curve, grain traveling over it without a seam. The three places hold nothing in common until I see their positions. Two parallel, both diagonal from the one that rests by the gray moth: an inverted triangle. They even figured that out. Nothing is safe.

“Turn the third one away from the other two,” the woman says. “Toward the curtain.”

Right. Calm down. I crouch and put my fingers around the stick. It feels rooted. I pull, then push. Nothing happens.

“Uh, it’s not moving.”

“Oh, right. Push it down, and then turn it.”

Should’ve known. The growth sinks into the wood and finally yields beneath my palm. I turn it to the curtain and… nothing happens.

No opening appears. Instead, the patch beneath the moth stops being the nearest part of the wall. One line of grain slips behind another. The shallow fold I took for overlapping bark rotates outward and reveals itself as a narrow rib, still rooted at both ends. A second rib crosses it from the opposite direction. A third rises between them from a wall that had looked thinner than any one of the three.

Pale silk comes with the ribs. It was not packed behind them. Each strip appears to have belonged to a different surface: one peels away from the grain, another threads through a wooden loop, and a third passes behind the first rib before returning in front of the second. As the ribs spread, the strips pull taut and assemble depth in front of the wall.

When the movement stops, a narrow web hangs sideways against the heartwood. A central sling curves where a torso would rest, tilted upward rather than lying flat. Four compressed sleeves branch from it at the heights of the wing roots, two high and two low. One begins on the surface nearest me, passes through a rib, and reappears behind the central sling. Beneath them, a broader loop waits for the hips while two wooden notches hold the feet at unequal heights.

Nothing supports an entire body at once. The structure expects to receive its weight in pieces, one part making room for the next. Behind me, the lower right wing turns toward the nearest low channel. I stop it. My heel has already lifted, toes searching along the wall until they find a notch I did not see. The upper roots loosen one after the other, preparing to let the ribs take their weight.

Jamie has come beside me. “That’s a bed?”

He presses one hand against the hanging silk. Nothing changes. When I put two fingers beside his, a channel widens near my shoulder rather than beneath my hand. Another draws tight around the place my upper wing is approaching. Jamie leans more of himself onto it.

“It feels weird,” he says. It does not feel him at all.

I pull my hand away and the silk returns to how it was before. “I’m not sleeping in that.” I ignore what my body says.

The woman’s wing shifts beyond the curtain. “Did it hurt you?”

“No.” I step back. My wings keep the entry sequence for another second. I force each of them back. “I’m just used to something else.”

“It adjusts.”

“Uh, that’s… not much better.”

She says nothing. I walk back to the stick and turn it back toward the others. The ribs do not fold in the order they opened. One enters what I thought was the wall from the side. Silk passes through a wooden loop, pulls another depth over itself, and becomes black grain wherever the final surface covers it. By the time the three points face one another again, there is no cocoon. There are only three unrelated interruptions in the room.

Never want to think about that again.

I pull the silk from the barricade instead. Orange dust loosens over my hands. The heel-shaped hollow the woman preserved when she folded it has survived being crushed into the gap, though its edges are softer now. Removing it opens a slit beside the tray wide enough for the room beyond to show through. The woman does not use it.

I spread the silk across the floor. Jamie sits before I finish. When I lower myself beside him, the layers draw around my hip. Four wings fold over both of us, and as long as I do not look at the silk beneath his legs, I can believe it holds us together.

The tray waits outside the circle, and the woman waits outside the curtain. I look at the narrow hand I used to open the cocoon. Blue-green veins show beneath the skin. The fingers are trembling hard enough that the dirty nails click once against my knee.

“I’m sorry I’m…”

If I say I am sorry I am here, I make this place the mistake. Calling myself her would claim too much. This could mean the body, Jamie, the blood, the impossible place I scratched into Lyra’s floor. The woman does not help me choose.

“I’m sorry I am-sh in her body.”

I don't fully know what that means, but it feels right. I’ve dirtied her hands.

But I shouldn’t care—I wouldn’t. It wasn't my choice. Do I only care now because the thoughts won’t stop?

Silence holds beyond the curtain long enough that I wonder if she heard. I am about to repeat it when her breath enters unevenly and leaves with no word attached.

“Something happened to me before this,” I say.

Jamie’s head turns. That phrasing places me on one side and the thing on the other. Maybe that’s right. I don’t care—don’t think.

“I mean, I kept losing time.”

The woman does not move. I rub my thumb across the smooth place on my index finger where the cut should be. “I lost time. Did I say that? At first it was nothing. I’d be somewhere and feel like I’d already done it. Then there were parts I couldn’t remember. A few seconds, I thought. Except people would answer things I didn’t know I’d said, or Jamie would be standing somewhere else, and nobody acted like I’d gone anywhere.”

Jamie stops worrying the edge of his cuff. I wait for him to interrupt, to be shocked that his sister is admitting something was taking her fucking memories. He looks down and resumes pulling one loose fiber through the fabric.

Stop thinking. Stop thinking. Don’t hear the thoughts. There are no thoughts.

Beyond the barricade, the woman says, “...What?” I had almost forgotten she could hear me.

I should’ve eaten more. “My body kept doing things,” I say. “Even when I wasn’t—when I didn’t have any of it afterward. It knew how I talked. It knew where I was going. Most of the time nobody noticed.”

“How could you not notice?”

The question comes out sharp. I feel her regret in the breath that follows, but I cannot answer the softer version either.

“Because I wasn’t there to notice.”

My stomach folds again. The certainty returns with it. If something could live my life without me, maybe it came here in the same way. Maybe I only think I woke in Lyra because this is the first moment I was allowed to own. The idea is familiar. It still arrives wearing the pressure of discovery. What are the conditions? Why?

“There was a night,” I continue with a thousand buzzing thoughts and I will not eat the food. “Recently, I think. It wasn’t yesterday. What day was it? I looked at a clock and it was eleven fifty-nine.”

Jamie stops moving his cuff. His eyes should widen. He should ask which day. He should tell me I was there, because he was there and he would know. Instead, his mouth closes. His gaze drops once to the silk and comes back without searching my face for the rest of the explanation. His hands remain hidden in yellow sleeves. He just gives me a sad smile.

What the fuck?

“What is a clock? Eleven fifty-nine?” the woman asks.

I keep looking at Jamie. “It was his birthday.”

He looks back at me. “I wasn’t there,” I say. “He thought I was the entire time.” Where is your expression, Jamie?

“Did you know?” I ask him.

His detective eyebrow rises, but this time it cannot make me laugh. The loose fiber lies stretched between his covered hands. He does not say yes. He does not ask what I mean.

The woman speaks through the curtain, so quietly I almost mistake her for the room settling. “Who is ‘he’?”

“My brother.” I look at him. “I don’t know.”

“Are you fiet·sar?”

Fiet means nothing to me. The ending almost does. It turns the question inward. Maybe she’s asking whether I’m okay—if I'm okay right now. If I... feel okay. That’s funny. I’m just hungry.

“There’s nothing inside my head except me.” Jamie is beside me, close enough that his raincoat touches my leg, and Emperor still finds him only beneath my skin. I do not say that part. “Just me.”

The green wings barely visible through the gap draw inward. There is no promise I can make that would put Lyra back in the room. I cannot say I will leave this body when I do not know how I entered it. I cannot promise the voice will never sound like hers or the wings will never turn toward the person they remember. The cocoon accepted me with a knowledge I did not earn. Even standing still can be something Lyra taught.

“Sorry. I won’t try to make you think I’m her,” I say.

The last word reaches the curtain and receives no answer.

Acting unlike Lyra will hurt her too. I understand that now. I always knew. But like she said, when have I ever had time to rest? It’s not my fault. Every refusal I force through the body proves the difference by destroying something she recognizes. The promise cannot comfort either of us. It only tells her I will not counterfeit the missing person on purpose.

At first I think the woman is breathing through her mouth because of the way I kicked her nose. That doesn’t make sense. Then a wet sound catches high in her throat. She stops it. Another makes it farther before breaking. Oh.

I look toward the gap. The visible strip contains part of her hand, the edge of a wing, black floor. No face. I try to reach beyond my skin the way I reached into the forest, the crowd, the arrangement of bodies around the terrace. Emperor will not pass my skin, and I cannot smell her. Her crying could be near my shoulder or across the hollow. I smell mushroom damp, warmed wood, the mineral trace of blood, the food on the tray. No identity opens inside any of it.

She is there anyway. The fact has to remain true without entering me far enough to prove itself.

I search for something to say. Another apology would ask her to accept too much. Telling her Lyra loved her would steal knowledge from the way the wing reached. Saying she might come back would turn ignorance into medicine and make her swallow it. I have no sentence that does not use Lyra again.

My hand moves toward the tray before I realize it. I catch it halfway.

Right, I’m hungry.

The woman is crying because the person who owned this hand is gone, and the hand is trembling toward food.

Jamie watches my fingers hang over the boundary of the circle. Then he looks toward the curtain, and finally glances at my chin. “It’s okay. You should eat.”

The woman hears only the silence after him. “Did you touch the food at all?”

I do not move. “Please.” Her voice rubs raw against the word. “If you wanted to talk to me, then why do it like this? Eat before your thoughts fold again.”

Oh god. I reach across the carved line. My fingers close around the pale wedge and tear off too much. Sap runs away from the new edge, retreating through its tiny chambers, but my mouth is already open. The first bite collapses between my teeth with almost no resistance. Warm aqua bursts from the pockets that survived the tear. Sweetness comes first, then a mineral bitterness that catches along both sides of my tongue. My throat swallows before I decide whether I can stand it.

The next piece is in my hand immediately. I resent the speed of it. I resent the clean pleasure that travels from my stomach through the four roots. I eat until the shaking becomes small enough to belong to cold.

The thought comes clean: Blue-green. The color of the sap. The sap in the body.

Returning wants, or something close enough.

I grab the cup on the tray. The sap inside it carries a low aqua shine. After one swallow, the wet mineral smell at the back of my nose becomes stronger. I breathe more deliberately. Delicious.

The woman’s crying stops between breaths. “Are you trying to find my scent?”

I lower the cup without speaking.

“You won’t find·sin me that way.”

“Why?”

Her hand disappears from the strip of floor. “There is no scent to find. I am an Ainmlost.”

“...Are you saying you don’t have a na—Ainm?”

“I have one. It simply didn’t return through anyone.”

“Through anyone?”

“Most receive an Ainm by their sixth month of life. Kin must understand kin before the parent may choose the child's Ainm.” She pauses. “If the parent is not around by then, what can be done?”

It takes a few seconds before I speak. “Then… who gave you yours?”

“The Rooci gave·sat me my Ainm.”

Gave? “You spoke to them?”

“No.” Something shifts on her end. “I simply took·sut the tail end of their thoughts.”

She lets the correction remain between us for several breaths.

“I saw·sin my Ainm in the sap,” she says. “Written there right in a bowl I had to bring to Lyra. It repeated five times until I understood it.”

The cup shifts in my hand and knocks softly against the tray.

A thought can have a tail. The tail can remain inside sap. An Ainm can repeat before anybody has spoken it, and the person looking can somehow know that the repetitions belong to her. Each statement survives by itself. Together they refuse to become one thing I understand.

“You found yourself in a bowl?”

“My Ainm.”

“How did you know it was yours?”

“I didn’t. Not for the first four times.”

The hell?

I drink slowly. Warmth spreads into my chest, recognizable now as something the body has needed rather than something being done to it. The distinction should make me feel better. Instead it makes the body seem more capable of continuing here.

“Are you not curious why I am the only one who can call Lyra'nim?”

“It’s not because you’re close?”

The woman shifts farther from the barricade. Her face still does not enter the slit. “An office stands between a Council member and almost everyone who addresses them. The others may call only Hermit'to. Lyra'nim was…” She sighs. “She answered me before the office stood between us.”

“Because you knew her before she was Hermit?”

“Because she knew me.”

The correction leaves no room for me to turn the rule into age or permission.

“That is the one privilege the Ainmlost are given. We may call through an office that once answered us.”

I look at Jamie. He calls me Aspy no matter what. It finds me because he does.

“But why are you telling me this?”

For a long time, the woman gives me only the sound of her breathing. The barricade divides that breath from mine. Jamie sits beneath my lower wings without bending the silk.

“I was going to ask if I could still call you Lyra'nim.”

My fingers tighten around the cup.

“If you could just…” The words narrow. “Not answer when I do.”

The silence grows until I can hear sap moving faintly through the walls.

“Is that pathetic?” she asks.

I look down at my—Lyra’s dirty hands. “I don’t know.”

“You said your Ainm was Aspen,” the woman says. “Even if I won’t call you that. You should know that mine is Raine.”