Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine

Author:Sunny Moraine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

19

“So your place is like this one?”

Ellis has a deck. It’s a small one, and like the inside of the house it’s plain and comfortable. Couple of chairs, a table with an umbrella. The canvas-covered hulk of what must be a grill. They’re sitting on it, both with blinders on now, gazing through the trees at a brilliant sunset visible only as a dull, sullen glow. The evening is warm, and the can of beer is sweating into Riley’s hand, its hoppy bitterness sharp on her tongue. There is still beer. Somehow, there is still beer, just as somehow there are still many things from Before.

Once she would have enjoyed this immensely. Now she’s not certain what she feels.

“Mostly.” She shrugs—which might or might not be visible—and takes another swallow. “The inside isn’t as nice. I don’t have a deck.”

“Well, you can use this one if you want. Just give me a heads-up.”

“How? I don’t have a phone.”

Ellis laughs quietly. “Smoke signals? Maybe you can make a really loud noise. Do you have an air horn or something?”

It sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a pretty good idea. Riley’s brow furrows as she combs through what vague inventory of her belongings she carries around with her. “I’m not sure. Let me dig through the basement. There’s all kinds of crap down there.”

“I’d like to see your place sometime. Deck or no deck.”

It’s said offhand, casual, in the way that someone tosses something out there without any expectation that it’ll be picked up. But Riley stiffens, her eyes darting in Ellis’s direction although Ellis isn’t any less of a shapeless hulk than the grill. Why should that suggestion get this kind of reaction out of her? Ellis has been perfectly hospitable. Why shouldn’t Riley reciprocate? How would that not be the most basic courtesy?

And yet.

You’ve been alone for such a long time. Of course you’re balking. It’s okay.

“Yeah,” she says, sounding appropriately noncommittal. In times Before, there were any number of excuses she might have come up with to not have people over. A bathroom in which she’d been endlessly postponing doing a deep clean. An infestation of ants. A broken AC. The lack of those excuses is a kind of troubling defenselessness. “Sometime, sure.”

There’s a wide, unmissable bloodstain on her floor.

Of course, Ellis might see it and simply never remark.

These days, it may even be unremarkable.

A movement against the lighter sky—a beer lifted in a toast. “To sometime,” Ellis says, and it sounds only a little bit like mockery.

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