“Slowly, friend. Come back to us slowly.”
It was Plum, coaxing him back to consciousness.
X felt himself slip back into his skin, like it was a suit laid out for him. His arms became his again, then his legs and feet.
Then he noticed the pain. It’d been there all along, waiting for him to wake. His body felt broken. His lungs burned when he inhaled, like a furnace lighting up.
He opened his eyes.
Plum stared down worriedly. He’d spread X’s coat like a blanket beneath him. X was moved by that and by the already familiar sight of his friend’s fluttering hands. Soft, kind Plum: it was good to see him.
Every soul within a hundred feet was staring at X, and murmuring. Whatever had transpired after he’d passed out on the altar had set everyone abuzz.
X didn’t know if he could speak, but he had to know if his heart held sins as he feared.
He attempted a single word.
“What,” he said.
“Don’t try to speak,” said Plum. “Not yet.”
“What,” X said again. “Happened.”
“Ah, yes,” said Plum. “I will tell you everything, but only if you swear you won’t try to speak.” He paused, adding quickly, “Swear to me with your eyes, not your voice.”
X blinked.
“Very good,” said Plum. “Now, I don’t know how much you were aware of before you lost consciousness.” Plum hurriedly put up a hand. “That was not an invitation to tell me. I will choose a starting point myself. All right? All right.” He sat quietly, considering. “I was meditating. It’s not that I don’t let any thoughts or noises into my mind—I do—but I pretend they’re soap bubbles, and I prick each one as it floats by.”
“Skip,” said X, “this part.”
Plum made a wounded face, then grinned.
“If you speak again,” he said, “I will talk even slower. We Buddhists have more patience than you can imagine—Buddha once sat beneath a tree for seven days, and I think he was just trying to decide if it was a good place to sit. Anyway, I managed to shut out Shiloh’s screaming, but then I heard your voice: ‘It is me you want!’ I was stunned—and cross with you. I trudged up the hill with no plan at all. You were thrashing on the altar—lifting your head, then banging it back down. It struck me that unlike every other soul on this hill, myself included …” Plum paused, and struggled with feeling. “Forgive me. It struck me that you—my new friend and my only friend, if I’m being honest—could die up there. Truly die. I don’t mind saying that if you died … Well, I’d be angry with you for a little while, but then I would miss you.”
X would have smiled if he weren’t in such pain. Zoe and Ripper had taught him how to let kindness in.
“I hiked closer,” Plum went on. “I kept stumbling. I am not in peak condition, as we’ve discussed. Yes, I know I’m babbling. I’m just so excited that you’re awake. Anyway, everyone on the hill was watching the ceiling and waiting. You’d gone limp. Your hands hung off the altar. It was awful.”
“Sins?” X demanded—or tried to demand. The word came out like a whisper. “Sins.”
Plum was surprised by the question.
“What do you mean, ‘sins’?” he said.
“Have I,” said X. “Sins?”
“My god, you’re crying,” said Plum. “Of course you have no sins! I thought you knew that—you told me yourself that you were born here! I promise you, the ceiling was so white it made us all glow. The light warmed our faces! It was like nothing anyone of us had ever seen. All right? All right.”
X felt Plum’s hand on his shoulder. It hurt to be touched, but again, he allowed the kindness in.
“The Countess was livid,” Plum continued. “You’d promised her great sins. She expected a feast! She pressed the knife to your cheek, but before she could do anything else, she had a seizure of some sort. She tore open the collar of her dress. It turns out that she wears a gold band beneath it. She grabbed the thing like it was choking her—like she wanted to rip it from her neck. It was as if the band itself knew you were innocent, and refused to let her punish you.”
X knew it was not actually the gold band, but the Higher Power that ruled the Lowlands acting through it.
Plum resumed his account.
“The Countess shoved you off the altar,” he said. “You fell like a deadweight and your bones made a loud crack. Sorry—is that too vivid? I raced forward to pick you up. You don’t need to thank me. I failed. You are quite heavy. Shiloh? The soldier? He was still flabbergasted by what you’d done for him, so he tried to help me lift you, but since the Countess had shredded his foot he could barely walk himself. It was actually the knight who carried you here. He’s quite a fan of yours now. I think he’d follow you into battle with what little armor he has left. As for me, I did manage to at least carry your coat.”
When Plum finally finished, he let X rest, though X could sense his worried friend checking on him regularly. X still felt a pain so widespread in his body that it seemed to have replaced his bones. But he felt a contradictory sense of relief now, too: taking souls as a bounty hunter had not blackened his heart. Zoe would say she wasn’t surprised in the least. She’d pretend that she had never questioned that he was, as the Ukrainian had said of Plum, “good at bottom.” But then … Then she would pull him to her and hold him so fiercely that he would know she was secretly relieved, grateful, proud. “I knew all along, you dork,” she’d say. “Of course I knew. But you needed to know.”
It was true. He did.
X stared up at the black dome of the ceiling. He couldn’t remember everything that had happened on the altar. But one memory lingered. It was something the Countess had said. X struggled to call it forth, like someone trying to coax back a dream.
Finally, the memory X had been tugging at came loose.
“Take the foil packet from my coat and give it to me, if you would?” he told Plum.
“Can it wait until you’ve rested?” said Plum. “You’ve had a shock.”
“It cannot,” said X. “I have hold of a thought, and fear losing it.”
He rolled onto his side so Plum could fish the packet out of the coat, which lay beneath him, and asked him to show him the broken bracelet that read Vesuvius.
“You’ve seen the bracelet a thousand times,” said Plum. “There’s nothing different about it now. This absolutely could have waited. You are a very irritating patient.”
X only half-listened.
The Countess’s words echoed in his head: If that damnable feline erupts again, the Countess shall stop its breath. Would that the creature had been named for something mute, like a statue or the wind.
X ran his thumb over the lettering on the bracelet.
“You said Vesuvius was a volcano,” he said. “A legendary one.”
“Yes,” said Plum. “Can I put the bracelet back now, please?”
If that damnable feline erupts again … Would that the creature had been named for something mute …
X looked at Plum, who was staring at him with an unconvincing approximation of sternness.
“I don’t believe this is a bracelet at all,” said X. “I believe it is a collar.”
He didn’t pause for Plum to absorb this, but rather hurried on. He had to get the words out.
“And I believe Vesuvius is a cat.”