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"Hello," she said Her gaze dropped to the floor as a blush crept up her cheeks, and Akiva’s battle against hope was lost

She was blushing If she was blushing…

Godstars, she’s beautiful

"Hello," he said, low and raw, and now his hope exceeded itself Say it again, he willed her If she did, maybe she remembered the temple of Ellai, when they’d removed their festival masks and seen each other’s faces for the first time since the battlefield at Bullfinch

Hello, they’d said then, like a whispered incantation Hello, like a promise Hello, breath to breath

The last breath before their first kiss

"Ulance up toeven deeper "Hi"

Close enough, Akiva thought, a buoyancy cautiously rising in him as he watched her take a step and then another into this room he’d claimed for himself They were alone, finally They could talk, free of the watchful eyes of all their co And with the blaze of the look they’d shared in the cavern, he couldn’t help but hope that ithi the rope in her hands She could annihilate hih there wasn’tstone slab in its center and a few ledges holding very old candles The slab was, Akiva supposed, unusual It was cut more precisely than the rest of the rock surfaces here It was smooth, its hard corners rare in a world of curves

"I remember this room," Karou said in a remote voice "This is where the dead were prepared for burial"

That was vaguely unsettling Hours Akiva had lain here in his drea, in the place inside his pain He had lain here like a corpse, where how many corpses had lain before hi it wasn’t offensive, hiertips over the slab She was faced away from him, and he watched her shoulders rise and fall with her breathing Her hair hung in a braid, blue as the heart of a flame It wasn’t neat The soft hairs at her nape had all coer loose strands of blue were tucked behind her ears, all except one stray that lay curved against her cheek

Akiva felt, in his fingers, the desire to brush it back for her To brush it back and linger, and feel the warmth of her neck

"We’d dare one another to come in and lie here," Karou said "The kids, Ito face him from the far side of it so it made a kind of barrier between the to a peak and funneling to a shaft in the center, like a chimney "That’s for the souls," she told him "To release them to the sky so they wouldn’t be trapped in the mountain We used to say that if you fell asleep in here, your soul would think you were dead, and up it would go" Akiva heard the smile in her voice just before he saw it flicker over her face, fleet and fond "So I pretended to fall asleep one time, and I acted like I lost my soul and I made all the other kids help me look for it All day, all over the peaks" She let the sht an air ele What a little savage I was"

Her face, this face, Akiva realized, was still a er

If he’d known Madrigal for a hts? Or was it really one, through much of which he’d slept, and two days in scattered pieces? Their few fraught e, her devastation, her fear

This was so, she was as radiant as moonstone

It struck him with force that he didn’t really know her It wasn’t just her new face He kept thinking of her as though she were Madrigal in a different body, but she was more than that She’d lived another life since he knew her--in another world, no less How ed her? He couldn’t know

But he could learn

The pain of longing felt like a hole in the center of his chest There was nothing in the worlds he wantedand fall in love with Karou all over again

"That was a good day," she said, still lost in her long-ago memory

"How do you act like you’ve lost your soul?" Akiva asked He aht, Who knows better than I?

You betray everything you believe in You drown your grief in vengeance You kill and keep killing until there’s no one left

His expression hts, because Karou’s s his look Akiva had a lot to learn about her eyes, too Madrigal’s had been warm brown Summer and earth Karou’s were black They were sky-dark and star-bright, and when she looked at hi, they see

She said, "I can tell you how you act when you get your soul back," and he knew she wasn’t talking about a gaain" Her voice dropped to a wisp "You forgive"

Silence Held breath Beating hearts Was… was she talking about hi to tip hih that were the only state of rest, and every other action andit

She looked down, shy again "But you know better than I do I’"

"You? You never lost your soul"

"I lost soThe sa, but I couldn’t see it…"

"It’s grief," said Akiva "It’s rage It ht, And I was the thing you despised A our people have done to each other since the beginning That’s what makes peace see to kill the killer of their loved ones? How can you fault people for what they do in grief?"

As soon as he spoke the words, Akiva realized it sounded like he was excusing his own vicious grief spiral and its terrible toll on her people Shame seized him "I don’t mean… I don’t mean me What I did, Karou, I know I can never atone for"

"Do you really believe that?" she asked Her look was sharp, as though she were seeking through his shame for the truth

Did he really believe it? Or was he just too guilt-ridden to admit he hoped that someday, somehow, he could atone? That soood than evil, and that by living he hadn’t brought his world lower than if he’d never been Was that atonement, the tilt of the scales at the end of life?

If it was, then it ht, if he lived , save more lives than he had destroyed