The Name That Stayed

The Godkiller’s chest kept closing behind us. Tarrow had one boot wedged in the narrowing passage and the coal clenched in his salt-white hand. The black shore waited beyond him, and my palm had begun to pull toward it again.

“Move,” Pell said. She had hold of Tarrow’s harness. “I can’t keep the ribs apart.”

Tarrow’s right arm strained toward his own chest. He pressed it against the bone, jaw tight, and the coal blackened the edge of the passage. “Get Vera through.”

The simplest answer was to leave him there. I considered it for exactly long enough to hate myself, then grabbed the front of his coat and hauled. Pell shoved from behind. The ribs scraped his shoulder as he came free, and the chest slammed shut with a noise like a vault door.

We stood on the shore again. The Godkiller waited at its far edge, whole and upright, its face turned toward us. The vast shape on the horizon had vanished. Above us, the stars shifted into unfamiliar patterns. My palm dragged toward a name carved into the smooth hollow in the wall.

Pell caught my wrist. “It’s pulling harder.”

“I noticed.”

The letters of her name stretched beneath my skin. I dug my nails into my palm, and a white crack ran up my stone thumb. Pell held on anyway.

Venn stared at the wall. The salt on his fingers had crept past the first knuckle. “The witness has to take the dead one’s name.”

“You said that already.”

“I said what the pact does. I didn’t say what it takes from the witness.” He looked at my hand, then at the Godkiller. “The memory that makes you the witness has to go.”

Pell let my wrist go. Her hand stayed close, ready to catch me if the ground shifted. “What memory?”

“The first dive,” Venn said. “The tether. The cut.”

My palm tightened around her name. I remembered the silver line snapping. Pell’s hand on the knife. The pull that had dragged the memory thing away from us. I remembered thinking she had left me there on purpose, and the later correction that had taken that belief away. Even after the correction, I had kept the event. The sound of the tether parting. The sight of her turning back.

The pact had built its witness out of that moment. It was asking for the wood beneath the nail.

“What happens if she refuses?” Tarrow asked. His voice came rough from the strain. His right fingers were spreading, reaching toward the only closed thing nearby: the fist he’d made around the coal.

Venn looked at him. “The memory keeps the name. It keeps us, too.”