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Shit hit the fan somewhere in the Tomb. Corona could hear the very distant sounds of bickering, shouting, and the drawing of swords. She thought about royal duties abdicated. She thought about a Blood of Eden chain of command that held no sway in a Ninth House catacomb. The raised voices were nothing more than lingering murmurs once they reached her. Putting it firmly out of her mind, she huffed and shut the door.
She had been shown to a Ninth House bedroom in the lower levels of whatever part of the Ninth House they’d wound up in. It was no set of royal chambers. It wasn’t even much of a guest suite. It was little above a prison cell, but it would have to do.
The bed was hard. Honestly, it wasn’t much more than blankets thrown over a slab of stone. Ninth House hospitality, she figured, but at least it wasn’t a spot in a crypt. The bed was wider than she would’ve expected, accommodating enough for one and a half adults, or else three half-starved children. She wondered idly about Ninth House children, their numbers and their proclivities, and what weird little bone rituals they might be taught from birth. The thought was like smoke on a breeze, insubstantial and gone quickly, preoccupied as she was by matters at hand.
The Captain – Judith – Jody – lay on the stone slab some maniacal nun had once deemed worthy of the title of ‘bed’. Corona had found herself calling Jody ‘the Captain’ in her head; something carried over from spending time with Nona. No-No-Nona, she’d used to call her. She would’ve given a brief prayer of hope that all was alright in the Tomb only she’d renounced religion a few months ago and it would’ve been passé to pray. She ignored the instinct and focused on the scene in front of her.
Jody was slumped on the floor, completely, utterly, frighteningly unconscious. She hadn’t roused since their arrival on the Ninth. She hadn’t roused much at all since they’d left the city and traversed through the River. But her chest rose and fell so she was alive, and that meant Coronabeth had a job to do.
She addressed her unconscious companion. “You’re a real pain in my ass, you know that?”
The words were hollow as they came out of her mouth. All her bravado, all her cruel, cutting, biting remarks were only satisfying when they fell on attentive ears. She had used to needle Judith constantly, baiting her into arguments and teasing her about her impending death. Not exactly romantic, but how else was she supposed to communicate with someone so thoroughly unmoved by her company?
Corona sighed and put the question out of her mind. Crouching down, she snaked one arm under Judith’s shoulders and one under her knees. Engaging her core and lifting with her legs – (the Ninth cav wasn’t the only one who knew squats from deadlifts! RIP) – she rose with the comatose necromancer in her arms.
It would’ve been concerning to feel how light Jody was if Corona hadn’t been watching her wither for weeks. Pivoting, she stepped forward and laid Jody down on the bed. The mess of blankets and covers looked fit to be the long-discarded robes of passed-away nuns, but in their current predicament, Corona supposed she couldn’t afford to be choosey. The apocalypse was nigh, after all.
She laid the Captain’s body down as gently as she could. Judith groaned. Corona knelt down hurriedly, reaching for her hand.
“Jody?”
But the moment had passed. Judith went silent.
Sighing again, Corona pushed herself up and took stock of the room. It was empty aside from the bed and a small alcove with a sink, basin, and mirror. Homey, she thought to herself dryly. Homey and entirely without another place to sit.
She spared another glance for Judith. The Captain was gaunt and ashy, a shell of the Cohort officer Corona had known for years. Moving slowly, she tucked a loose strand of hair behind Jody’s ear. She could’ve said she’d done it without thinking, but that would’ve been a lie. She did it deliberately, with feeling, come what may.
It was an anticlimactic gesture. Judith didn’t stir, not even to flinch away.
Resigning herself to a night spent in her own personal, solitary brand of misery, Coronabeth sat down on the floor. She leaned against the door and let her head fall backward. It hit the door with a dull thud that echoed down her spine.
“Sweet dreams, Jody,” she murmured. Despite all the misery, she was asleep in minutes.
Being in a glorified prison cell, Coronabeth wasn’t sure what time it was when she jolted awake. With no way to record the passing of the hours except whatever she felt in her internal clock – which she did not trust – she felt like maybe she’d been asleep for an hour at most. Light crept in from under the door but otherwise the room was shrouded in darkness.
Judith was coughing – that was what had awoken her. Pushing herself up, Coronabeth rushed to the bedside and called Jody’s name. The Captain’s eyes were squeezed shut and her eyebrows were furrowed. She seemed on the edge of waking, but she didn’t respond to Corona’s voice. Coronabeth reached for Jody’s hand but the other woman swatted it away.
If Judith had been awake, Corona would’ve smiled. Instead, she only felt the further wilting of her heart.
When the coughing fit passed, Judith rolled over. She shuffled her tiny body right up against the wall, her nose practically smooshed against the stone. She shivered, and Corona pulled one of the covers up over her shoulder without thinking. Then, before she could start thinking, she got into the bed.
She was the one adult. Judith was the half. The smaller woman was attempting to fuse with the wall, so Corona had a completely normal amount of room. Still, she shimmied over to the edge of the bed, putting as much space between her and Jody as possible. She hadn’t climbed into the bed with the intention of doing anything untoward. She had only wanted to be closer to a woman who’d never wanted her in return, and who might be dead by morning anyways.
Her bed made and laid in, she willed herself to drift off with the same ease she had before, but her body rebelled. She was awake from the depths of her brain right down to every ending of every nerve. As her eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, she made a game out of trying to count the cracks on the ceiling. She gave up after thirty-three and rolled onto her side. That turned out to be a huge mistake.
There was nothing overly notable about Jody’s back, except that it belonged to her. Her shoulders, always appearing so broad in her Cohort uniform, were narrow and slight, made thin by her illness. Despite Corona’s best efforts, the raggedy covers had slipped off her shoulder, exposing Judith’s sickness-stained tank top and dark, shrinking arms. She had been dying for weeks, the slowest descent into ghosthood that Corona had ever known. But she was still Jody. Her body’s condition belied the strength of her spirit.
At least, that’s what Corona wanted to believe.
Jody’s hair was in disarray and had been for a while. It was up in a bun that had at some point been contained but now had tight coils sticking out at all angles. Baby hairs that could no longer be corralled into the main event hung in wispy strands at the base of her neck. Corona reached her hand forward to swipe them aside and only caught herself at the last moment before making contact. Fleeting touch was defensible. It felt like something else altogether to reach out while lying next to her in bed. Jody was asleep, and her rejection had been clear.
“What throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me down?” Corona had asked.
And Judith had said, “Thank you for the offer, Your Highness, but not in this life or the next.”
Corona withdrew her hand and clenched it into a fist. She tucked that fist against her chest, under her chin, and told herself to get a grip.
It was easier said than done. Judith breathed slowly. When she inhaled, Corona could imagine the vertebrae of her spine pressing back against her shirt, a mountain range rising and falling with each breath. If she’d been an adept, she could’ve sensed the beating of her heart. As it was, she imagined she could feel it murmuring across the stone slab of a mattress, a consistent reminder that Jody was still alive.
The fist clenched to her breast was a traitorous thing. It fought to reach out and brush her fingertips along those weakened shoulders. She wanted to pull the covers up over Jody’s body – no, she wanted to pull them down further. She wanted to reveal more of that body that had been bedridden for weeks. Inspect it for injuries. Make sure that her captain was all in one piece. She wanted to run her fingers over the places BOE needles had pricked and stitches had been knit and find wounds well on their way to healing with no scars left behind.
She saw herself reaching out and drawing shapes across the expanse of Jody’s back. Lazy patterns that snagged on the fabric of her shirt; lines drawn in sand, permanent for a heartbeat. She could trace her fingers along the edge of Jody’s spine and dip them beneath the hem of her filthy tank top. She could pull the fabric up to let her skin, sweat-soaked from illness, breathe in the night.
From there, she might press the palm of her hand against Jody’s shoulder blades. Shift its pressure outward to her fingertips and then to her nails, pulling her fingers inward and outward like a cat kneading its claws.
She had watched Jody from a distance for over a decade. Touch had been evanescent, more spectacle than sincere. Flimsy flowers and lavish bouquets and an annual birthday party were bouts of rain in an endless drought. But now Corona stood on the edge of high tide. The palm of her hand itched. It would be easy to reach out.
Judith stirred. Corona flinched. She shook her head to herself as violently as possible without disturbing the other woman. Judith had been clear in her rejection. A decade of wanting had amounted to nothing in her eyes. Maybe it would’ve meant more if Corona had ever spoken about it out loud. Instead, she had let herself love from a distance. Her love was that of two ships passing in the night.
She could practically hear Ianthe sneering in her head at that. Letting out a defeated huff, Corona pressed her cheek into the balled-up blankets and screwed her eyes shut. There was a universe, somewhere, where she lay in that bed with Jody pressed against her. Where the point of Jody’s chin rested in the crook of her collarbones, and where the sting of rejection was replaced by the warmth of devotion. But it wasn’t this one.
Coronabeth came to her senses groggily. It was the middle of the night, she was sure. Her mind was foggy with deep sleep and she wanted to roll over and succumb to its weight once again. Something stopped her, however. The same thing that had woken her, perhaps.
Jody had rolled away from the wall in the night. She faced Corona, her chin tucked into herself, breathing with the slow evenness of sleep. Her right hand was outstretched. At its terminus, she had wrapped her fingers around three fingers of Corona’s left hand. Coronabeth stared at them stupidly, taken aback.
When it was clear she wasn’t hallucinating, she let her mouth slip into a small grin. It didn’t mean anything, really, that Jody had reached for her hand. Come morning, it would change nothing. But meaningless or not, it had happened. Corona committed the moment to memory. She memorized the feel of Jody’s fingers draped over hers and the texture of her skin where her callouses were shrinking. She memorized the feel of the blankets bunched around them, the darkness above them, and the unforgiving solidity of the bed beneath them. Every sensation was burned into the back of her mind.
Then, out of respect for a woman who had made it clear she didn’t want her, Corona did the most reasonable thing she could: she pulled her hand free, rolled over, and went back to sleep.