Cost

The way out was not what he had expected.

He had pictured something grand: a column of light, a door in the sky, a trumpet. Instead, Matteo took his hand in the Core, and said, "Close your eyes," and Archie closed them, and there was a feeling of falling very slowly through a warm dark. He felt nothing as he fell. He felt only a great tiredness, and under it, like a stone at the bottom of a well, the knowledge of what he had done.

Then someone said, "Pulse is steady," and he opened his eyes.

…

The ceiling was white.

It was the ceiling of the recovery ward at the Institute: the panels, the tube, the little black dome of a camera in the corner. A mask lay across his mouth. A drip ran into the back of his hand. He lay under a thin blanket in a narrow bed, in a pale blue gown, and a hand was gripping his, hard, in a grip so tight that his fingers had gone numb.

He turned his head.

It was Venn.

He sat on a stool beside the bed with his knees apart and his shoulders hunched, in a matching gown, with a drip of his own taped to his arm. His face was gray with exhaustion. His eyes were red. He had a stubble like pencil lead. But he was grinning, widely, helplessly, and tears were running down his face and dripping off his chin.

"Hey, Architect," he said.

"Hey."

"You look like hell."

"You should see yourself."

"I can. I've got a mirror." Venn laughed and sobbed at once. "Do you know what it's like? Do you have any idea? I can feel my toes. I've got ten of them. I counted. Twice."

Archie tried to laugh. It turned into a cough, and the cough was deep, and wet, and clean. There was no rattle in it. There was no knife. It was only a cough, the ordinary cough of a man who has breathed too hard, and it ended, and he lay looking at the white ceiling with his chest rising and falling like a bellows.

His lungs were clear.

He put his free hand flat on his breastbone. There was no weight there. There was no darkness. Under his palm, the ribs lifted and fell, strong and light, as they had last done when he was a boy. He closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"I don't know. All of it."

"Shut up," said Venn, gently. "You absolute lunatic. Shut up. We made it."

…

Jin was awake in the next bed.

He lay on his back with his glasses off and his hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling. He did not turn his head when Archie looked at him. When Archie said his name, he moved one hand, in a slow, small, dazed wave, and then went still.

"Is he okay?" said Archie.

"He's rebooting," said Venn.

"He'll be fine."

"I'll be fine," agreed Jin, in a thread of a voice. "I would like to say that in the sum of my experience, that was the single most unpleasant user experience I have ever sat through, and I once did a month of tech support."

Venn burst out laughing.

He laughed until he wheezed. He bent over his knees and slapped his thigh, his real, whole, unmarked thigh, and laughed until the tears came, and then laughed some more. The sound went up in the quiet ward like a flock of startled birds. Jin turned his head at last. He looked at Venn, and Archie, and the three of them lay and sat there, helpless, wheezing, alive.

It lasted a long time.

When it was over Archie lay with his hand on his chest and a smile on his face that he could not have wiped off if he'd tried. It was the best moment of his life.

He did not think about the other bed until it was nearly over.

…

It stood against the far wall, behind a screen.

It was a narrow one, like his own, with a pale blue blanket and a white pillow. A nurse in green scrubs was standing at the foot, with a clipboard. A monitor hummed beside it. There was a person in it, a small shape under the blanket, quite still.

"Zoe," said Archie.

The word came out of him like something knocked loose.

"She's here," said Venn quickly. "She's, hey, she's fine. She's breathing. They checked her three times. She came out of it before you did. She's just," he stopped.

"Just what?"

"Asleep."

"For how long?"

"Since this morning. They say," Venn swallowed, "they say she might need to rest. That it was a, it was a rough transfer."

Archie was on his feet.

He did not remember getting up. One moment he was lying in the bed; the next, his bare feet were on the cold linoleum and the drip stand was clanging over, and he was moving. His legs did not seem to belong to him. They were long and quick and strange. He crossed the ward in six strides, past the screen, and stopped at the foot of the narrow bed.

She lay on her side, with her cheek on her palm.

Her face was very white. A tuft of dark hair had fallen across her forehead. The mark on her throat, the long pale scar that had always been there, was gone. There was only clear skin, smooth and unblemished, and the line of the collarbone, and a small silver teardrop on a chain, lying quiet in the hollow.

She was so young. He had not realized. In the Dimensions she had seemed old, in the way of people who have had to be; here, in the white light, she looked about nineteen.

"Zoe," he said.

Her eyelids moved.

…

He would remember the next ten seconds for the rest of his life.

She opened her eyes. They were dark, and clear, and a little unfocused, like the eyes of someone coming up from a very deep sleep. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the nurse. She looked at the screen and the monitor and the drip in her arm, and a small line of puzzlement appeared between her brows.

Then she turned her head and saw him.

"Zoe," said Archie. His voice broke. "Zoe, it's me."

She looked at him.

He saw the look. He watched it travel over his face with an unhurried, friendly curiosity: his hair, his unshaven jaw, the pale blue gown. She did not smile. She did not frown. She simply looked at him with polite, bright, uncomprehending interest, as one looks at a stranger who has stopped at a bus stop and said something kindly.

"Hello," she said.

"It's Archie."

"Archie."

"Yes."

She said the name aloud, carefully, trying it. It meant nothing. He could see that it meant nothing. It lay in her mouth like a foreign word, a syllable out of a dictionary, and she shook her head slowly.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Do I know you?"

"We were—"

"Are you one of the doctors?"

"No."

"Oh." A small apologetic smile. "I'm sorry. I'm a bit foggy. They said that it would pass." She put a hand to her forehead. "Where am I? Is this the, am I in New Hampshire? I remember a flyer. I remember getting a plane." She frowned. "And a man giving a speech. And then it's, then it's just gone. Isn't that funny?"

"Zoe."

"I'm sorry. I keep saying that."

"Don't be."

He could not stop staring. He knew he was doing it. He knew it was frightening her, a little; he saw her eyes flicker toward the nurse. But he could not look away. He stood at the foot of the bed in his blue gown with his hands hanging, and it seemed to him that he had been struck from behind by something very large and quite silent.

She doesn't know me.

She doesn't know me.

I put her away from me, in a closet, in a dead world, with a lamp. I took the one thing she had, her trust, and I counted its fingers. And she went out of the room, and went on without me, and something happened to her, alone. And now she doesn't know my name.

"What happened?" he said to the nurse.

"Mr. Moran, you should be in bed," said the nurse.

"What happened?"

…

Luca told him in the corridor.

He looked a hundred years old. He stood at the end of the white passage with his hands in his coat pockets, and his hair on end, and a face wrecked by sleeplessness and joy. He had been to the other ward. He had held his brother's hand for three hours. He had been crying so much that his eyes were swollen to slits. But when he turned to Archie his gaze was grave and clear.

"It was the transfer," he said.

"I know that."

"It was not clean. When you made your, when the system re-anchored." He chose the word with care. "There was a surge. A shock wave. It went through the whole lattice at once. Everyone who was in transit at that moment took some damage."

"Zoe wasn't in the Core."

"No. She was in the Mirror World." Luca's voice was gentle. "She had gone out ahead. She had crossed alone, from the bridge. She was in the middle of the passage when the surge came through. Your friends were already past it. You were already anchored. She," he spread his hands, "she was caught."

"What does that mean?"

"She came home. Her mind is whole. Her body is whole. She is strong, and well, and I think she will be happier than she has ever been." He hesitated. "But the part of her that lived in the Dimensions did not come with her. The month. The people. All of it. The surge took it."

"All of it?"

"I am afraid so."

"Me?"

The doctor looked at him.

"Archie," he said quietly, "I am so very sorry."

Archie stood in the corridor.

He did not speak. He did not move. He leaned back against the cold white wall and slid down it until he was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up. The strip light buzzed above him. A janitor went by with a mop and did not look at him. Somewhere a door opened, and a cry of joy rose and fell, a woman's voice, and a man's voice answering it in Italian.

Matteo, he thought. And Luca.

They got him back.

They got everybody back.

He put his face in his hands. He did not cry. He had not the strength. He only sat there, a tall man in a pale blue gown on the floor of a hospital corridor, with a clean pair of lungs and a friend with ten toes, and the whole of his hope draining out through the soles of his feet like water through sand.

I did this.

I could have crossed a bridge.

I could have crossed a bridge.

Down the hall, Zoe's voice rose, light and clear and puzzled, asking the nurse to tell her what day it was.