barely had time to process it. She’d been so… spun by her own paralyzed terror, and what she was now thinking of as “the abyss’s mad gawk.”
Karou gave a hard exhale. “That is why we’re here.” On here, she made a quick scan of the room and added, “Strange as it is.”
And Zuzana felt even more out of her depth, trying to imagine what it meant to her friend, being back here. She couldn’t, of course. This was the site of a massacre. Maybe it was the echo of the abyss that brought it on, but she imagined walking up to her own family’s house and finding it deserted, the beds decayed and no one there to greet her—ever—and she sucked in a little breath.
“Are you all right?” Karou asked her.
“I’m fine. More to the point, are you all right?”
Karou nodded, smiled a little. “Yeah, I am, actually.” She raised her torch and looked around. “It’s weird. When I lived here, it was the world. I didn’t know that everyone didn’t live inside mountains.”
“It’s pretty amazing,” Zuzana said.
“It is. And you haven’t even seen the best part yet.” Karou looked sly.
“Ooh, what? Please tell me it’s a cave where cupcakes grow like mushrooms.”
Score another laugh for Zuzana.
“No,” said Karou. “And I don’t have any cake, either, and I’m afraid the bed situation can’t be helped, but…” She paused, waiting for Zuzana to figure it out.
Zuzana did. Could it be? “Don’t tease me.”
Karou’s smile was pure; she was happy to give happiness. “Come on. I think we can spare a few minutes.”
23
THE WHOLE POINT
The thermal pools were as Karou remembered, but also not at all as she remembered, because in her memories, there were Kirin here. Whole families, bathing together. Old women gossiping. Children splashing. She could feel her mother’s hands working selen root into a lather on her head, and she even remembered its herbal smell, mingling with the sulfur odor of the springs.
“It’s beautiful,” said Mik, and it was: the water a chalky pale green, the rocks like pastel drawings, rose and sea foam. It was intimate but not small, not one pool but a cluster of joined baths fed by a gentle cascade, and the ceiling seemed to ripple, ashimmer with growths of crystal and curtains of pale pink darkmoss, so named because it grew in the dark, not because it was.
“Look over here,” said Karou, and held out her torch, leading the way to the place where the cavern wall was pure, polished hematite. A mirror.
“Wow,” breathed Zuzana, and the three regarded their reflections, side by side. They looked bedraggled and reverent. The curved surface warped them, and Karou had to move around to gauge what of the distortion of her face was from the funhouse mirror effect, and what was left over from her beating. The attack seemed ages ago, but her body knew differently. It had been two days, and her face was not recovered. Her psyche wasn’t, either. In fact, the mirror distortion struck her as fitting: an outward manifestation of the inner warp she was trying to keep hidden.
They peeled off their clothes and slipped into the water, which was hot and very soft, so that within seconds of immersion, their limbs felt as smooth as doll porcelain, their hair like swansdown. Karou’s and Zuzana’s drifted like mermaid coils on the eddying surface.
Karou closed her eyes and sank beneath the surface, head and all, and let the moving water draw the tension out of her. If she were to play Three Wishes honestly, she might wish she could drift off as if this were Lethe, the river of oblivion, and take a nice long break from armies and doom. Instead, she washed and rinsed and climbed out. Mik politely faced away as she dressed in clean clothes. “Clean,” that is, if dipped in a Moroccan river and dried on a dusty rooftop counted as clean.
“You probably have an hour on the torch,” she told her friends, leaving them one and taking the other. “Can you find your way back?”
They said they could, so Karou left the pair to their perfect, uncomplicated enjoyment of each other, and tried not to be too jealous as her feet carried her back up toward the humming enmity of the armies.
“There you are.”
She’d rounded a bend, nearing the hivelike center of the village, and there was Thiago. Ziri. When they saw each other, a flash of feeling transfigured him. He hid it quickly, but she saw it, and