Every eye in the room that did not fix on the Shadow immediately went to Hawk. She stood completely frozen. There were ice slabs in that damned room of Illyris that weren’t as stiff as Hawk felt. Mulligan looked from person to person rapidly, now Shadow, now Hawk, now Shadow. Spectre’s lips folded together tightly and Emile…Em stood off to one side. Hawk didn’t know when they’d arrived or how, but her enby friend was looking at Shadow with horror and chagrin. And Hawk…what was she feeling right now? Her head was spinning, her gut felt clammy and wrong. It was a plunge to free-fall and she didn’t know why. It was an emotion so large it had blotted out the sun.

  “You want us to…use it,” Spectre was the first to speak.

  “Would it not be for the best?” Shadow said. “I am little more than a wreck, gods-eaten, broken and filled with nothing but rage. I would think that Alex West was a more worthy person than I. He was loved. He is missed. I…there is no one true but Mattias, and he deserves better lives and better friends than what I can provide.”

  Hawk felt like an engine missing a piston. She scraped the walls of her mind for something, anything. “Henry.” She said. “What about Henry? We have the fragment you gave us. We can’t use it without you.” And I can’t take it without you.

  Oh.

  Oh, dear.

  “I would not abandon your friend. He will be restored…and then your Alex will be.”

  “But—” she tried to reach for something else.

  “I want to be the sort of man no one fears. I want the warmth you feel when you speak of Alex. I want to be worthy of you. Why are these things so wrong?”

  She was a broken mess. She was shattered across every plane of existence. Her world was as ashen as Glass, as Argon’s fire. She might actually have a concussion. All ways to avoid saying “I love you” to the Shadow. It felt disrespectful. It felt wrong. But she couldn’t work out the whys of it all. These were the scattered fragments of something greater, something that she could almost feel, almost touch. But almost had no place here. Not in this room.

  “Call it my surrender. What Argon and Kali’Mar and Nasheth all dreamed of for centuries. Me, disabled. Brought to my knees. You have done that, Hawk. You have shattered me as profoundly as any Orb could be. It began when I first saw you and continued until now. Your bravery. Your compassion. Even if I have fouled the memory of your husband—”

  “Don’t,” she said, softly.

  “—I would still rather be him, bereft and alone, than I would be this wreckage you see before you.”

  But you’re perfect! Hawk thought. But she couldn’t say it. Words caught on her tongue like flies in a web. She couldn’t escape the pull of her own self-doubt to speak against his. “Shadow, you can’t—”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Because I love you,” she said, and flushed beet-red immediately. The flame on her cheeks could have out-done Argon’s embers, if there was a comparison.

  “You love,” he said, in measured tones, “A ghost. A man who exists in two places: your memory, and that vial. I don’t blame you for wanting him. He must have been a very great, very good man to be someone you admire so, someone you would risk your life for. Because you, Hawk, are great and good yourself.”

  “But!” She said, and her mind vapor-locked. Because but filled everything she wanted to say. But I’m not that! and He’s not that, either! echoed through the hallowed halls of her mind. Goddamn it, why weren’t the right words coming? Why couldn’t she talk him out of this?

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  “But what? Why should I not want to be someone whole? Someone unblemished by centuries of life and war. He was so young when his life ended. He hadn’t even seen the right side of fifty. To be that young…to carry so few years with so few burdens. Why is that not enviable?”

  “But! But you…”

  “But I think I am in love with you. I admire you. I want you, desperately. And there is little I can give you. I have no palaces, no great estates. Not even the forts I held when I did war against the Gods; those are naught but ashes now. I have power, but the price of using it is too great. And I have pity, such as it is. I would not give that to you, for all the gold and radiance in the world. I would ask so much of you, Hawk. I would have your love and your mind and your flesh, the entirety of you, and I can give you nothing in return.” He pointed at the vial. “Nothing but that. But him.”

  And whatever eloquence she could have summoned was shattered by those words. He loved her? Alex’s love had been assured, a rock immobile and inviolate. She had experienced its sundering at Kaiser’s hand, and had wept bitterly over the pieces. The Shadow’s love…that was something else entirely.

  And then came the wave of guilt and shame. How could she be so cold, so callous? How could she discard her husband, the man she’d survived so much with, in exchange for this stranger? She didn’t know anything about him. Not really. She knew Alex like the back of her hand, a learning that had taken time and energy and hope and shame, and above all work. She had worked so hard to love Alex, the same way she would work hard to love anyone. And she felt a terror now that she was about to discard the person that had mattered most to her for what might just be infatuation. Because his course of thought was logical. He was not Alex. They both could agree on that. Alex lay in the bottle now, a reset of thought and time. The loyal, right, and just thing to do would be to use it. If she didn’t, she was discarding Alex.

  But if you do, you’re discarding the Shadow, and that thought hurt more.

  She needed to say something, now. Something great and profound and capable of ripping this veneer of self-sacrifice off the wound so they could actually get to the cold, sticky mess inside. Broken dreams, broken hearts, futures ripped bare and emotions flayed down to bone. She understood the urge to run away from it all. But she needed a reason not to do that, and she couldn’t find one. Not because they didn’t exist, but because they kept slipping through her fingers when she tried to take a good grip. She was helpless. She was drowning. She was starting to grieve all over again, and every half-healed wound was now ripped open and hemorrhaging. She couldn’t even cry.

  “What about whatever is wrong with Mattias?” Emile said, very dry, and every eye in the room turned upon them. Spectre cursed. Several of the medics looked suddenly anxious, which was justified by a spike across every monitor attached to the Shadow’s body.

  “What?”

  Mulligan gained a smile, and not a pretty one. “The medics wanted us to sit on it until you were better. And then you go haring off on a theme of suicidal ideation and it just kind of slipped my mind. He’s been Henry Dyson for a while. No seizures, no switching between the two…and that’s got Henry up the wall. He says this stuff, this Mentaphen, isn’t supposed to work like this.”

  Hawk seized on this emergency like a swimmer for a life-line. “He’s not fading? He said he was supposed to fade.”

  “Right. And the symptoms of the fade are there—fewer seizures, for one, and longer terms of coherency—but it’s Henry, not Mattias, that seems to be dominating the conversation.”

  The Shadow sat up, and the monitors squealed. He began batting the newly-placed monitors off his body as if they were annoying insects. “Take me to him,” Shadow said.

  “You’re badly injured and fresh off from brain surgery,” the head medic said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Oh hang what I ought to do. I would rather drown than ignore a friend.” He pulled his arm free and stepped from the bed to the floor. His medical gown swirled around him, making it clear he was absolutely naked underneath. A rather nice view that Hawk was not in any way capable of appreciating right now. She was wretchedly tired, grieving, and sick to death of it.

  Everyone else in the room looked to her. She was caught by their gaze. Pinned, really. “What?” she said.

  And that was when April Rayne returned.

  Her mother had a large armload of food. It looked like baskets of fried chicken and French fries. “I hope you two don’t mind. I went down to the mess hall and they were having the most lovely fried…” She trailed off. “Oh, dear. I see so many important people. What has my daughter done now?”

  “Let the man she loves spout off suicidal ideation like she doesn’t have a clue.” Emile said, and spun on heel. “I’ll field the bastard while you screw your head back on straight.”

  “Will someone please explain what’s going on here?” April said.

  “Alex isn’t Alex,” Em said, over their shoulder. “And he hasn’t figured out that he doesn’t want to be Alex, yet. You coming, Hawk?”

  Mute, distraught, and flailing, Hawk trailed after her friend.