Ithion

I surfaced slow, the way you do from the deepest, warmest sleep, and the first thing I knew was that I was held.

Yu-Yu.

The thought came before my eyes opened, soft and certain and glad. I was in his arms. Of course I was. There was the weight of him around me, the steadiness, and somewhere under everything the rocking, gentle and constant, like the world itself was breathing. I let myself believe it for one whole second. It was a nightmare. The apartment, the knock, the men at the window—a nightmare. I never ran. I never left him on the hill. I’m still up there, under the moon, in his arms, and none of the rest of it ever happened.

My heart fluttered up toward him, happy, stupid, unguarded.

“Yu-Yu…?”

And the world resolved around the wrongness one piece at a time. The rocking wasn’t a mountaintop wind. It was an engine, and bad suspension, and the hard ridged metal of a truck bed under my cheek. The dark wasn’t the blue hour before dawn—it was windowless, close, the air thick with diesel and rust. And the arms holding me were holding me the way you hold a thing you’ve decided to keep, not a person you’re afraid of losing.

I lifted my eyes to his face.

It was his face. The same impossible lines of it, the same dark eyes I’d thrown myself off a balcony to fall into.

“You’re finally awake,” he said.

And it was not his voice.

The mouth was his. The words came out in his timbre, his pitch, the exact instrument I’d spent a night by a fire learning the music of—and something else entirely was playing it. Something older than him, flatter, with no warmth in it at all, like a hand wearing a glove that used to be a man.

Everything in me recoiled. I tried to pull back, to get a palm up against that chest and shove, to put even an inch of the rattling truck bed between us—

Nothing moved.

My body lay exactly where it was, limp and heavy and obedient to a will that wasn’t mine, and there was a weight pressing down over the inside of my skull, soft and total, a hand closed gently around my thoughts. I knew that weight. I’d felt it on the street the half-second before the dark took me. It was him. Whatever was wearing his face was inside my head, holding me down from the inside, and I couldn’t so much as turn my cheek away from it.

I spent everything I had on six words.

“Who,” I forced out, “are you.”

My mind was screaming underneath them, racing, scrabbling for purchase. Was it all a lie? The balcony, the run, the fire, the kiss—was any second of it real, or was I being walked toward this truck the whole time, charmed and steered like a calf to a gate?

And then my gaze slid past his shoulder, into the far corner of the truck bed, looking for anything that wasn’t him.

There were the others. Three, four shapes braced against the swaying walls, the ones who’d come through my door and my window, faceless and silent, watching.

And in the corner, folded against the back of the truck where they’d dumped it, a shape I knew the way you know your own hand.

No.

Sasaki. Crumpled, motionless, one arm bent at an angle arms don’t bend, his head lolling with the truck’s every jolt. Not standing. Not ready. Not anything. The thing I’d brought down out of the sky to keep me safe, that nothing on this earth was supposed to be able to stop—stopped.

No. No, no, no.

The dread came up through me like cold water filling a room, and it took the last of my paralysis and turned it inside out into something the weight on my mind couldn’t quite hold down.

“WHO ARE YOU?” I screamed it this time, my voice tearing out of me, raw, breaking on him. Because his feelings had been true—I knew they had, I had felt them, the man who threw out his careful plan by a fire and looked astonished at his own heart had been real—and yet here was the truck, and here was Sasaki in the corner, and here was the cold flat violence sitting calm behind his beautiful eyes, the same eyes, looking at me like I was already his.

He didn’t answer. He only smiled—and the smile was the worst part, because it was his, the exact one from the firepit, hung now on something that had never sat by a fire in its life.

“I am Ithion,” he said.

The name meant nothing to me and everything to the cold that spread under it. I dragged the next words up out of a body that no longer took my orders.

“The council—” My tongue was thick, slow. “The council sent you?”

He laughed. Lightly. Almost fondly, the way you laugh at a child’s guess.

“No.”

The truck shuddered and stopped. Somewhere ahead, a heavy door rolled on its track.

“You’ve been eluding them so far,” he said, and there was something almost like approval in it, like I’d done well, like the running had pleased him. “This is something else.”

The back of the truck opened on grey daylight, and he gathered me up off the floor—one arm beneath my shoulders, one beneath my knees—and lifted me the way a man carries a bride across a threshold. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t do anything. As he stepped down I could see past his shoulder, back into the dark of the bed: the tall one standing to hold the door, the third-circle one, watching me go with no expression at all. And Sasaki, still folded in his corner, still wrong, getting smaller as we walked away from him.

This man. This thing. Carrying me.

Cold air hit me, and salt. The sea. We were somewhere near the sea—I could taste it, brine and rust and wet concrete—and then the daylight was gone and we were inside something vast, a warehouse the size of a cathedral, girders lost in the dark overhead, our footsteps swallowed by all that empty air.

He carried me toward the center. And as we crossed that great floor I saw what was waiting there.

Circles. Rings within rings, painted and inlaid into the concrete, drawn so wide I couldn’t take them in all at once—lines crossing lines, triangle laid over triangle, squares pinned to a wheel of smaller circles, and at intervals along them, set upright on the stone, glass prisms that caught what little light there was and threw it back broken. The whole thing nested inward, ring inside ring inside ring, drawing the eye and the body alike down toward a single small figure at the dead heart of it all.

He carried me into it.

And with every ring we crossed, the weight on my mind pressed harder.

It stopped being his. That was the thing that finally broke me—the grip on my thoughts grew firmer the deeper in we went, surer, vaster, and it was no longer coming from him at all. It was coming from the place. The circles were doing it. The geometry under us reached up through the soles of his shoes and into my skull and held, and the closer to the center we came the less of me there was left to hold down.

I wanted to cry. I couldn’t even do that. My mouth was spent, my mind dimming at the edges like a photograph held too close to flame.

Sasaki. The idea I’d had of Yuri. Shun, with his demo and his hopeful pitch. The little grey apartment. Every fragile real thing I’d built.

That was it. This was it.

I felt whatever Yuri had become lower me down—gentle, even now, always gentle—onto cold stone. An altar. Smooth and chill and waiting, at the exact center of every ring.

And the last clear thought I had, before the place finished closing its hand around me, was the worst one of all.

He knows.

This is the inner circle. He knew where it was. He knew how to build it. He knew which rings to cross and where the stone would be.

He knows it all.

He caressed my chin then, slow, one knuckle along the line of it, the way a man touches something he owns and admires.

“Yuri almost had me convinced,” he said. “Yu-Yu.”

The pet name in that wrong voice was obscene. He was mocking me with it—mocking the both of us, the girl on the altar and the man whose mouth he’d stolen.

“If only you hadn’t left.”

I trembled. The thought came up through the cold like bile: did I do this? Did I bring this down on him—on myself—by running? Yuri. Yuri, what has he done to you. What did I leave you alone with on that hill.

“Were you in love?” he asked, and smiled, and I could not answer, could not make a single sound climb out of me now. “It’s a strange thing. For all our abilities, we’ve never quite managed that one. Not with certainty.” He tilted his—Yuri’s—head, considering me like a problem of mild interest. “Fear, I can feel. Pain, easily. The false registration number on your identification card, the lie of your birth year—those I can pull out of you like coins from a pocket.” He straightened. “But love. That stays dark to us. Impossible to read.” He began, at last, to walk away. “Only you will ever know whether it was real. Take the answer with you. It’s the one thing I can’t take.”

He walked backward, watching me, leaving me on the cold stone at the heart of all those rings.

And the hall began to hum.

Low. Sourceless. A deep ominous resonance that came up through the altar and into my spine, and I felt my life start to go with it—not bleed, not break, just drain, my senses already caged, my edges already slipping into the dark. With the very last of what was mine to spend, I turned my head.

Lights stuttered along the floor like sparks struck off flint, racing the painted lines, pooling at the foot of each upright prism. Far off, by the truck, the still figures waited. And Sasaki, broken in his corner. And Yuri—walking away from me, almost to the outermost ring.

This is the end.

Then Yuri stopped.

A mist had been rising. None of us had seen it come—it was simply there now, low and white and thickening, and it was wrong, it belonged to no part of whatever this Ithion had built, because the thing wearing Yuri turned to look at it the way you look at a sound that shouldn’t exist. The mist climbed. It swallowed the prisms one by one.

Something moved behind the truck.

And a light brighter than any sun tore the dark open—blind-white, total, gone in a heartbeat and leaving me blind a heartbeat longer. In that single flash I saw the thing that had overpowered Sasaki, a long-haired white shape, too large to be a man, catch fire all at once—a running torch, a screaming silhouette—before the mist closed over the distance and took the whole world from view.

Then the screaming started in earnest.

A sound came ringing through the white, silver and bright and terrible, and something was in the mist cutting the men who’d broken down my door. I couldn’t see it. I only heard what it did. A bolt of blue light lanced out of the fog and struck the prisms, and they burst—glass and energy blowing apart—and the instant they did the weight on my mind eased, just enough, and I coughed, air scraping back into me. Through the murk I caught Yuri down on one knee, on one leg, the geometry coming apart around him.

Bodies came flying out of the mist. The henchmen—thrown like wet rags, limbs loose, hurled across the broken circles by nothing I could see. More bolts. More prisms shattering. The fog rolled inward, closing on me, on him, and out of it rang that silver note again—a blade, I understood now, a single blade, turning in the white, dark and light at once—

And a scream. Yuri’s voice. Yuri’s, but not his.

Because the blade came through his chest.

It went in from behind and out clean through the front, and on the other end of it, stepping out of the mist, was a boy. Barely a teen. Dark military dress, a stillness too old for the small body wearing it, and eyes—eyes like an ancient light, lit from somewhere underneath the world. He had run his sword straight through the man I loved.

I wanted to scream. It was irrational and I didn’t care. Nothing came.

A last bolt struck Yuri’s other foot and he came down—folded, crumbled, dropped to the cold stone—and turned his head toward me as he fell.

And his eyes were his again.

The wrong thing had gone out of them. The flatness, the ancient cold, the borrowed cruelty—gone, drained out with the blood already spreading dark beneath his chest. What was left looking at me across the broken circle was only Yuri. Only him. My Yuri. My Yu-Yu.

He smiled.

A pool of red bloomed under him and reached toward the rings. And his hand lifted off the stone and stretched out toward me—the same hand, the same reach, the same gesture as that night below the balcony, jump, I’ll catch you—and held there, trembling, an arm’s length of cold floor and an entire dying world between us.

Then it lowered. Came to rest on the ground.

Out of the thinning mist, three figures stepped into the light: three young people, the boy with the silver blade among them, ringed in the last drifting white.

And I saw, at last and once more, the eyes of the man I loved.

And then never again.