Shards and Ashes

“At all? Ever?”

She shakes her head. “Maybe if you have some water. I sometimes pour a little in. See, like this?”

She fills her glass with water, splashing wine inside. It turns red, not so red as blood, only a faint red, the color of a spilled pomegranate.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I like to feel—like myself.” I’m scared. She doesn’t say that, but I hear it.

I shake my head. “Not me. I like to feel drunk.”

She laughs at me, but her eyes aren’t smiling. They’re big and dark and staring at me, as if she isn’t even thinking or talking about wine at all.

“My brother dropped.”

I try to act surprised. It only seems polite.

“When?”

“I don’t know. I have his dropletter—I mean, had it. I burned it, most of it. It wasn’t dated.” She shakes a little, bringing the water to her lips.

I nod. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It’s what we say. I eye her closely. “Did you . . . know?”

She puts down the glass of red water.

“Yes. No. I’m not surprised. But I miss him. He was everything, all I had left of my family.” Her voice catches on the last word.

“I understand.”

“Tell me what it’s like.”

“What?”

“This. To live. To be at the end, like you are. Like Rama.”

“The last drop?”

She shakes her head. “Not that.” She looks at me more closely. “This.”

“Before. You mean, the end of the necklace?”

She nods. “The necklace of raindrops.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“In my family. It’s what we always did. Even my grandfather.”

“It’s hard to imagine your grandfather was a poet.”

“It was from a story.”

I hold up my wrist. On it is a twist of brown string, weathered to the point where it looks like frayed twine. A single clear bead shines from where it is caught in a single loop. I shake my arm in the air between us, rattling it.

“There it is. My whole life, all I have.”

“You just wear it like that? Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind?”

“Nope.”

“What if something happens to it? What about you?”

“If it goes, it goes. If I go, I go.” It really is that simple. Each drop of the necklace controls a corresponding nanograin of encapsulated biotoxin, swimming silently in my bloodstream. We get the poison injection when we get the necklace. When a drop’s signal dies, whether by command or by being destroyed or lost, the capsule dissolves, and we grow one step closer to the end.

Drop by drop.

One by one by one—until there are none.

When that happens, we die. It’s only a matter of time. They’re finite and irreplaceable, the drops. They could never be made.

Not by us, anyway,

Only Jai’s grandfather and his coworkers—the other gods of the Shenzen Life Calculus—could do that.

Jai knows it. She just doesn’t want to hear it.

Her eyes flash dark. “I don’t understand you, people like you. Even Rama. Why do you want to leave? Why do you want to go from something to nothing? No matter how bad something is, isn’t something enough?”

“You know what your problem is?”

“I have a problem?” She looks irritated.

I nod. “You don’t know what everything feels like.”

“I don’t?”

“You don’t know what everything tastes like. The flavor it has, the sound of it. The particular sharpness it brings. The colors.” My voice sounds like I am in a dream, and I wonder if I am.

Her breath seems to catch as she looks at me. “What’s that? Everything?”

I lean closer, hanging over her upturned face. “It feels like sunlight on the water, shuddering in a breeze that ripples everything, even things it shouldn’t.”

I slip my arms around her, gently pulling her toward me on the blanket.

“The way it moves the leaves in and out of all colors of green—uncurls the sky in all colors of blue.”

She leans against me.

“The way the water can cut through trees and shadows like thick sections of chocolate cake that catch in the back of your throat.”

She closes her eyes, settling against my chest. I feel her heart pounding, just over mine.

I don’t stop.

I lower my hand to her neck, my mouth to the edge of her jaw. My words become a whisper between us.

“The way a single word, a tiny sound can drift over and around the smallest blade of grass between you and the horizon.”

I pull a curl of hair loose from her clipped, black braid.

“The way that glass of wine, right there, can taste like everything you’re seeing and nothing at all.”

“Water,” she says, looking up at me. “It’s only—”

Then she says nothing at all, because our lips no longer feel like talking, and there are no more words on our tongues.

It is you, I think.

It was always you.

I could tell her about the deserts I have walked or the mountains I have climbed. I could tell her about the crowded marketplaces and the tents stitched from scarves. I could tell her about beetles that taste like saffron, about creatures that fly when they should swim, swim when they should fly.

The men who ring bells. The bells that bow men.

I tell her nothing, because none of it matters.

I know that now.

It wasn’t life.

Not for me.

My pathway, that pathway, led only to her. To an empty cubicle on a crowded street in Pinminku. To the worst job of my life, and to her.

Jai.

One Nine Six Seven.

She kisses me. I kiss her.

We are a circle of pathways and arms and eventualities, stitched together with scarves and bells and saffron.

We are more than eight numbers, more than beads in a drawer.

We kiss and I feel my life begin, and the joke is on me, because I suddenly, desperately, want nothing more than to live.

For the first time in my hard-worn life.

I don’t tell her that.

I pull her closer, letting her twist in my arms, letting myself twist in hers, until we are swimming in water