Page 94 of City of Stone and Silence

“You think I don’t worry about that?” he says softly. “If you’re asking me whether I have all the answers, Tori, you know I don’t.” He shakes his head. “But nobody else does, either.”

I watch him for a moment. He pushes away from the wall, comes over to me, puts his hand on my shoulder. I want to recoil, or to fold myself against him.

“You’re half the reason they listen to me,” he says. “Everyone knows Grandma trusted you, and Hasaka and the others from the hospital trust you, too. Without you I’d be an outsider.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“No. I’m saying I need your help.” Garo takes a deep breath. “You’re right. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m not going to abandon people who’ve put their faith in me.”

“I…”

I take a half-step forward, toward him, and he puts his arms around my shoulders and pulls me in. My head presses against his solid chest, and he’s warm.

“I’ll make sure you’re safe,” he whispers. “No matter what. Even if things go … wrong.”

“That’s not the point,” I whisper back.

“I know. It’s still true.”

Eventually I pull away, wiping my eyes and sniffing. He’s staring at me, and I wonder if this is the moment for a kiss, and I feel a strange lightness and a tingle in the soles of my feet. Then I think about the bodies outside, and come crashing back to earth. He turns away.

Garo goes back to the others, to planning the revolution. I slip downstairs. There are people I need to see.

The first floor of the building is open space, unfurnished and empty. A training hall, maybe, or an interrogation cell. Now it’s been converted into an impromptu sickroom, laid out with those who were wounded in yesterday’s fighting. Several assistants from the hospital arrived during the night and, along with a few volunteers, they’re doing their best. That doesn’t amount to much. No one has gone back to the hospital to see if any supplies survived the raid and the fire, so the caretakers are working with torn linen bandages, bowls of clean water, and little else.

At one end of the hall, a curtain has been raised, cutting off a small section of the room. I walk in that direction, stepping over people crusted black with horrible burns, or whose limbs were twisted by magical force. Men and women, young and old—once unleashed, the Immortals did not discriminate. The wounded moan, plead with the caretakers, beg for water.

It’s almost a relief to push the curtain aside and step into another realm. There are twisted, broken bodies here, too, but they’re mercifully still and quiet, lined up one beside the other and covered with white sheets. Off to one side of the line of corpses, there’s a body laid out by itself, on a spare sleeping mat. It’s surrounded by small offerings—flowers, white lilies for death. White cloths knotted to resemble a burial shroud, another traditional gift for the dead. Food, plain white buns, and a few bottles of liquor.

It’s mostly appropriate. Grandma Tadeka certainly enjoyed a drink, though she never much cared for flowers.

Kosura sits in front of Grandma’s body, resting on her knees, head bowed. Someone has cut her hair with a dagger, leaving a ragged-edged, boyish mess. I’d seen her briefly last night, wrapped in a torn sheet, spattered with blood. She’s cleaned herself up since, but she still doesn’t look like the friend I remember. Her face is mottled with bruises, one eye nearly swollen shut, but her expression is peaceful. Her lips move silently in prayer. I kneel awkwardly beside her.

“I thought she’d be all right,” Kosura says, after a moment. “She survived so much, I thought for sure…”

“So did I,” I say. Grandma’s face is covered by a cloth, dressed in a snow-white funeral kizen, her hands folded neatly. I wonder who did that. “Are you—”

“At least I knew you were all right,” Kosura says.

“How?”

“Because they kept asking about you,” she says. “When they beat me, they asked me where you might go, who your friends were. Every time they did that, I knew they hadn’t gotten to you. I can’t … tell you how much that meant.”

I glance at her, trying to find some hint of sarcasm in her battered features. If it’s there, I can’t see it, and I feel guilty for looking. Kosura is a better person than I could ever be. I want to tell her I’m sorry, but to say that out loud would expose its pathetic inadequacy.

I turn back to Grandma’s body. It seems shrunken in death, too small to contain the force of personality she’d wielded. Just a frail old woman, now broken.

“What would she want us to do?” I say. “She would have hated … all of this. She never wanted us to fight.”

“Maybe.” Kosura closes her good eye again. “Grandma would say you do what you can with what you have. What she had was a hospital and a place for people to hide.” She takes a deep breath. “Maybe we have more than that.”

“Maybe.” Or maybe we’re all going to die. I struggle to my feet, knees twinging. “Is there anything you need?”

“No,” Kosura says. She bows her head, returning to prayer. As I go to leave the curtained morgue, she says, “Thank you, Tori.”

Don’t thank me. The bodies in the road outside are jeering. Monster, monster, monster.

One more visit to make.