The sun had not yet set. She stood under a veil of shade, as if daring the light to touch her.
I sat down nearby and she raised brows at me. “If it isn’t Ari. So the dead walketh again. Or in your case, flyeth.”
I folded my owl-tinged wings around myself. “You are the second person in the last twelve hours to accuse me of acting like I’m still dead.”
She lifted palms in gentle protest. “Accuse? Nay. Who the fuck am I to disparage being dead? My best friends are ghosts.”
Heh. They would be.
I had first crossed her path accidentally. Her role in the city did not require her to interact with me or Kadzuhikhan very often. She didn’t seem to make trade with the sex workers, or have any regular need to seek out a dove-soul healer. But I’d wandered to the gates to stare down at Ancestor Rock one night, and she had been there. Counting stones and gazing out at the stars.
“What are you doing?” I had asked.
Her shrug had been almost invisible. “Remembering.”
Somehow that had stuck in me, gathering gravity. So she had things to remember. “May I ask what you’re remembering?”
She’d flashed a cool grin. “I believe you just did.” The flex of her wings had been like the stretch before a yawn. “Remembering deaths.”
“Oh.” That had such finality to it that it’d seemed like a close to what was barely a conversation. “Mind if I stay?”
Her laugh was like a cat’s tongue. “No.”
“All right.” I sniffed, waited a few minutes. “Will it bother you if I talk?”
The laughter bubbled over. “No.”
So it began. Some nights, some wayward evenings when I couldn’t sleep and would rather face the sun than my dreams, I’d find her roosting somewhere and would talk. Eventually, she began talking back.
Tamueji’s non-judgmental presence taught me something. I craved friendship. My relationship with Kadzuhikhan was too complicated, too wrapped up with obligations and Umber and Kadzuhikhan’s strange brotherly authority. Tamueji was simpler. She only talked or listened. When she was done, she flew away.
And she remembered things. I envied that. But she was not my friend. We weren’t that close.
I wished someone was. I wished someone remembered me.
The face of Hei, the boy I’d caught, flashed in my mind now as I came back to the present. “You said once you would count deaths. Whose deaths were they? The people who died trying to become immortal?”
It may have been a step too far to ask. She didn’t always answer when I questioned her, but her silence was like a cowl of timeless patience. Not angry that I asked, but not lifting simply because of it. She would speak when she wished to. The Watcher of Shadows was like the eye of the city, scribing the business of the skies into Serenity’s memories. Perhaps the only way she could be at peace with such a flow of knowledge was to keep it submerged in silence.
So I assumed she wouldn’t answer. It surprised me when her gaze tilted toward me, growing solemn. “Yes. The deaths of pilgrims. The deaths of amnesia-seekers. Traders, lost souls. The deaths that lead to every ghost that fills this city. Deaths I haven’t seen. Deaths I have.”
Such a task made her seem godlike, omniscient. “Why?”
Her silence fell again, cool and familiar, before parting once more. “Years are measured by the sun, yes? Seasons. Here, the sun means far less to us. And years pile up, too many to count. So I measure time by the deaths. Deaths are what give this city life. Ghosts move its gates, light up its walls. Living-again rule Serenity. Death may as well be birth.”
She said this with a flicker of warmth, as if the concept amused her. But it did something else to me. It was shockingly touching to hear her call ghosts a form of life. To suggest that even my presence was something that made the city warmer.
Then, without warning, she turned and sat facing me, wings draped at her side. “What would you be, if you weren’t a dove-soul? If you could have risen as something else?”
Uh. I frowned, considered. “That’s a question. Hm.” I recalled Hei soaring to the earth, certain that he’d be caught. To feel certain of anything again. “Once I probably would have said cat-soul. The cat-step is a hard virtue not to envy. Being able to transport yourself anywhere instantly? Yes, please. Now, I don’t know. I like having wings.” I liked that I could catch Hei and give him his angel’s flight. “What about you?”
Her eyes drifted, as if searching for her thoughts. “I would choose to be a ghost. It sounds grim, but stay with me. The trouble with being a ghost is that you start your afterlife with a curse—with a chain. But you can purify a curse. Most of the ghosts that control the gates are chained to it, but I think that’s only because they aren’t ready to let go of their curses. The pieces of life that still weigh on them. But once those chains are broken? No one is more free. A liberated ghost can go anywhere. See anyone, be anywhere. I would choose that over being a living-again any day.”
Another of her subtly revealing bits of insight. “I didn’t realize coming back as a ghost was an option. All right. Do you think ghosts always remember their lives? They don’t have blood. Lord Umber can’t buy their memories. Maybe if one of us died again and became a ghost, we’d get our memories back.”
Her expression was complex, half shrouded. “Maybe.”
“I change my answer.” I cleared my throat. “If we’re going back in time and completely rewriting how our deaths went, I’d actually choose to not die. I must have been in the middle of a life. I want to at least know what it was.”
She paused so long that I began to think again that this was the end of the conversation. Then, “Maybe your death spared you things that are better not to have faced.”
Of course I’d considered that. “All right. Then I want to rewrite time so that I never gave up my memories. I don’t think I mind being living-again. But I want to know who I was. I have no idea why I would have sold them, but even without knowing, I regret it.”
The phantasm of a smile traced across her lips. “Why? What do you think it would change to remember?”
I had thought so much about this answer, and even now I had to stop and give it more time. “I think for something to be real to us, it has to matter to us. There are mountains on the other side of the world that may as well be dreams, because they don’t mean anything to me. They have no effect on my life, on my mind, on what I want. So as far as I am concerned, this is the only mountain that’s real. But if I remembered another mountain? If I remembered the life the mortal Ari lived? It would mean something to me. The place he lived would mean something. It would be real. If I remembered who I was, there would be a world that was real that I could go to. You said you wanted to be a ghost so you could be free, free as air. That’s the same reason I want to remember. The strongest wings in the world can’t take me to a place that isn’t real. It isn’t real because nothing in it still matters to me.”