You won't die.
He could hear her.
The voice was far away — muffled, like hearing something through a closed door — but he could hear it. Lilith's voice. The same three words, over and over, low and certain and broken all at the same time.
You won't die. You won't die. You won't die.
Lysander tried to go toward it.
He couldn't move.
Not in a scary way — not like being held down or trapped, nothing was stopping him that he could see or feel. He just — couldn't. Like the part of him that knew how to move had forgotten how, or like the connection between wanting to go somewhere and actually going there had come loose somehow.
He tried again.
Nothing.
He stood still and thought about this.
The last thing he remembered was the library. The book. He'd been trying to finish the last page — the one with the three figures holding hands — and then something had come through the wall and it had been very loud and very sudden and then there was Lilith's face above him and her hands were shaking and everything had hurt quite a lot.
And then it hadn't hurt.
And then he'd heard her voice.
You won't die.
He thought about Lilith's face. The way it had looked when she'd seen the book — the way something in it had changed, gone different, gone somewhere he didn't have a word for. He'd seen that face before. Not on Lilith.
He'd seen it on himself.
In the reflection of a window, a long time ago, when the sisters at a different place had come to tell him something and their faces had been soft and careful the way adult faces went soft and careful when they were about to say something they didn't want to say.
His parents.
He remembered making that face.
He stood very still and thought about that for a moment.
Oh, he thought.
The thought was simple and enormous and he turned it over the way he turned things over when he was working something out — carefully, from all sides, giving it the attention it deserved.
Am I dead?
He sat with the question.
He didn't know what to do with it. It was too big. It was the biggest question he'd ever had and he'd had quite a lot of questions in his six years and none of them had been anything like this one. He turned it over again and it kept being the same size no matter which way he looked at it and there was no answer that came, nothing that told him yes or no or something else entirely.
He just stood there, not moving, not knowing, with Lilith's voice coming faint and far away through whatever was between them now.
You won't die. You won't die.
He really wanted to go toward it.
He really couldn't move.
And then — between one moment and the next, with no transition he could point to — he wasn't in the nowhere place anymore.
He didn't know what it was.
He had never seen anything like it in his entire life — which was six years long and had contained quite a lot of things, but not this. Not the wide flat stretch of something pale and soft under his feet, not the enormous moving grey-green expanse that went all the way to where the sky started, not the sound of it, steady and rhythmic, coming in and pulling back and coming in again like the world was breathing.
He stood at the edge of where the pale soft ground met the moving water and stared.
It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and he did not have a single word for any part of it.
What is that, he thought, about the water. What is all of that.
He was still staring at it when he noticed the woman.
She was sitting a little way along the pale ground, facing the enormous water, her back partly toward him. Her hair moved in the wind that came off the water — there was wind here, he realized, warm and gentle and smelling of something he'd never smelled before. She was very still. The kind of still that wasn't waiting for something, just — being somewhere, completely.
Lysander looked at her.
Her face, when she turned slightly, was beautiful. Very beautiful. But there was something about it that he couldn't look at directly for too long, something that slipped sideways when he tried to focus on it, like trying to look at something bright. Not scary. Just — something.
He walked toward her, because she was there and he was here and he didn't know where here was and she seemed like someone who might.
She heard him coming. She turned fully, and she looked at him, and she didn't look surprised.
"Excuse me," Lysander said politely, because Sister Mercy had always said you started with excuse me. "Where am I?"
The woman looked at him.
Then she smiled. It was a real smile — he could tell the difference, he'd had a lot of practice — and it did something warm to the parts of her face that hadn't been quite right to look at before.
"A special place," she said.
Lysander looked around. At the moving water. At the pale ground. At the enormous sky that went on much further than skies usually went.
"It's very nice," he said, because it was and that seemed important to mention. "What's that?" He pointed at the water.
"That," she said, with the particular amusement of someone who found a question genuinely delightful, "is the sea."
"Oh." He looked at it again. "I've never seen a sea before."
"I know."
He turned back to her. She was still smiling, watching him with an expression he couldn't fully read, which was unusual because Lysander was generally quite good at reading expressions. This one had too many things in it at the same time.
He thought about the nowhere place. About not being able to move. About Lilith's voice going small and far away.
His face went less certain.
"Am I—" He stopped. Started again. "Is this because I'm—"
The woman waited.
"Am I dead?" he asked.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she tilted her head very slightly, the way people did when an answer was more complicated than yes or no, and said: "You are in a special place."
Which wasn't an answer, but also sort of was.
Lysander thought about this seriously for a moment, looking at the sea, listening to the sound of it coming in and going out and coming in again.
"Can I go back?" he asked. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "I want to see Lilith and Eve again." A pause. "I didn't get to give them the book properly. And Lilith looked really sad and I don't like it when she looks sad and Eve was going to learn the spin part of the jumping game and I don't think she learned it yet and—"
He stopped himself, because he could feel his voice doing the thing it did sometimes when he was trying very hard not to cry, the wobbling thing, and he pressed his lips together and waited for it to pass.
The woman had gone very still while he was talking.
She looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way very few people looked at six-year-olds, like what he'd said mattered and she was taking all of it seriously. Then she stood up, and she was tall, and she moved in front of him and crouched down until she was at his level.
Her eyes, up close, were also something he couldn't look at directly for too long.
"If you go back," she said, quietly and carefully, "will you protect Lilith?"
Lysander looked at her.
He thought about Lilith's face in the library. Her shaking hands. The sound of her voice saying the same thing over and over like if she said it enough times it would become true.
His own face, which had been uncertain and a little wobbling, went still.
"Yes," he said.
No hesitation. Just the word, plain and certain, the same way he'd said Promise in the orphanage room with the afternoon light coming through the window.
The woman looked at him for one more moment.
Then she smiled — different from before, deeper, with something in it that he couldn't name but that felt important in the way that some things just felt important without being able to explain why.
"Good," she said.
She reached beside her — he didn't see where it came from, it was simply there the way things in this place seemed to simply be there — and held out a cup.
It was gold. Very gold. The kind of gold that was its own light source, almost. And inside it was a liquid the color of the light that sometimes came through the library windows in the afternoon, deep and red and catching the light from the sea.
"Drink this," she said. "And do not break your promise." A small pause, and her voice took on the particular tone of someone who was not joking even a little bit. "Because I will be very mad."
Lysander looked at the cup.
He looked at the liquid inside it. It smelled strange — sweet and sharp and warm all at once, like nothing he'd smelled before.
He looked back at her.
She was waiting, calm and certain and patient, with the expression of someone who had already decided how this ended and was simply giving him the time to arrive there himself.
Lysander took the cup with both hands because it was the polite way to accept something.
He looked at the liquid one more time.
Lilith, he thought. Eve. I'm coming back!
He drank it.
It was warm all the way down, warmer than anything he'd ever swallowed, and it spread through him from the inside out in a way he didn't have words for yet and probably wouldn't for a long time. He lowered the cup and looked at the sea one last time — at the enormous moving grey-green of it, at the light on it, at the way it came in and went out and came in again without ever stopping — and he thought that he would like to come back here someday, when he was older, and stand here for a long time and just listen to it.
Then everything went dark.