Page 13 of Property of Prophet

“It’s most of what I have,” he says. “Attention. And you?” he says the last of it lightly, as if it costs him nothing, and looks out across the ice so I don’t have to decide what to do with my face.

I wake at three.

I know it is three without looking. You learn the hours in a life pared down to rhythm. The stove has burned low. The cabin holds that deep dark blue that only comes in the small hours, and he is at the window.

He stands with his back to me. Still. Looking out at the tree line. Not restless, not pacing, just watching, with the same focus he gives the axe and the ice. It’s the focus of a thing that does one thing at a time and does it all the way.

Something is out there.

I feel it before I see it. The dark beyond the glass has a weight to it, an attention, the same crawling wrongness I felt the night the sky tore open. Bear is awake by the door, hackles up, making no sound. That is what frightens me. Not a growl, just silence. Bear has decided that whatever stands at the tree line is not a thing you bark at.

My hand finds the rifle before I consciously reach for it. The stock is cold beneath my palm, the weight familiar as I rise.

“It’s not dangerous,” Prophet says. He doesn’t turn, but his voice is low and even, almost gentle. It’s the voice you use to keep someone calm. “Not yet.”

Not yet. Two words, and they undo whatever comfort the first three were meant to carry.

“What is it?” I ask.

He is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know its name,” he says. “But it knows mine.”

I keep the rifle, not setting it down. I don’t lean it back against the wall and take his calm for both of us. He fell out of the sky with wings burned into the earth, and now something stands at my tree line that knows him. Something in this world knew where he was.

The three of us keep our separate watches.

He stays at the window. I stay with the rifle. Bear stays silent by the door. The three of us keep our separate watches until an hour on, maybe more, and the weight beyond the glass lifts. The dark goes back to being only dark. Whatever came to look at him in the night turns and moves away.

He lets out a slow breath, and only then does he turn to me. “You should sleep,” he says. “I’ll watch.”

I don’t sleep. But I don’t make him stop watching, either. And somewhere in the long, cold hours before the late, grudging light, I finally understand the thing I have been refusing to learn all week. The life I built, the careful one, the one with no margin for anything I could not control, ended the night I climbed down into that crater.

I just hadn’t finished noticing until now.

Chapter Five

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Lily

This life was built around one simple truth—hope costs more than most people can afford, and mine had already been paid for in full, with interest, in a currency I’m not willing to discuss even with myself.

Out here, that premise has served me well, because when you expect nothing, nothing can be taken away from you. Somewhere along the way, I came to understand that the gray was not despair but something steadier and far more trustworthy. Things do not get better, they only ever get survived. I did not come to Alaska to heal. I came here to stop bleeding, and I had very nearly managed it before the sky tore itself open and dropped its complication into my snow.

And then a man fell out of the heavens and began, without my permission and seemingly without any intention of his own, to make me feel as though the world might be manageable, after all.

That is the part I cannot forgive him for, and it has remarkably little to do with the falling. The impossible things I can file under the broad heading of the inexplicable and learn, in time, to live alongside. What I cannot file, and can’t forgive, is the warmth.

Because there is a warmth that comes off him that is not the simple animal heat of his too-warm skin. It is something quieter and far more dangerous than body heat, a kind of ease that fills a room until you don’t notice it anymore, only its absence. When he is near, the knot that has lived at the base of my spine for five years loosens by some small degree. I stop listening for all the ways this place might kill me.

I am not safe, nothing out here is ever safe, and I know that as surely as I know the sound of my own breathing, which is exactly why I am so angry, genuinely, coldly, thoroughly angry, in a way I have not allowed myself to be about anything in years—that the mere fact of his presence under my roof is enough to coax me into forgetting it.

I have begun keeping a second ledger, the one I do not write down anywhere, the one that lives behind my sternum where the supply book can never reach it. Into that one I have been entering the symptoms, because symptoms are precisely what they are, the early, presenting signs of a condition I have every reason in the world to dread.

I sleep better when he is in the room, and that is the first of them and very nearly the worst. For five years, my sleep has been thin and watchful. Yet on the nights he is here, breathing slow and even on the far side of the stove, I go down into a sleep so deep and so entirely unguarded that I wake out of it disoriented and almost afraid.

The cabin itself has changed, too, although not a single board of it has been moved. For five years, it has been a holding pattern rather than a home. Lately, treacherously, it has begun instead to feel like a place I might choose to be rather than merely endure.

And then, this morning came the symptom that finally frightened me in earnest, because this morning, I caught myself setting the table for two before any part of me that I would recognize as the deciding part had decided anything at all. My hands had already laid out the second cup and spoon, had already left the chair across from mine drawn out and waiting. My body had gone ahead and chosen for me, quietly building a life around the simple fact of him while the rest of me was still deciding whether I wanted one.