Marked By Tide

Chapter 12 - Permission to Enter

Cassian's POV

Paloma comes out onto the porch at noon on the sixth day and says: "She is ready."

I am sitting in the porch chair I have been sitting in for five days. The porch chair is the chair I have lived inside since Paloma cleared us to be on the porch instead of in the front room, which she did on day three because Soren and I were taking up too much air. Soren is on the other end of the porch in the matching chair we dragged out from the storage room. He has been there since dawn. So have I.

We both stand up at the same time when Paloma says it.

Paloma sees us do it and almost smiles. She does not quite. She says: "One of you at a time. She is doing well. She is sitting up. She has eaten. Tamsin has braided her hair and not in any clever way, so it looks like it was done by a sixteen-year-old. She has been told you are both going to come in today, and she has agreed."

I say: "Both of us at the same time?"

Paloma says: "No. One at a time. She is not ready for both of you in a room together. She does not know yet that *both of you* is going to be the version of this she is going to have to learn to live inside. So you go in singly. You go in carefully. You give her exactly as much of yourself as she asks for and no more."

I say: "Who first."

Paloma says: "You. You are the one who can talk."

I look at Soren. Soren looks at me.

The twin bond carries the exchange. *Yes*, Soren says. *I know. You first. I can wait.*

*Are you sure.*

*Cassian, I am sure. I have been sure for six days. Go.*

I say to Paloma: "Where is she."

Paloma says: "In her bed. The door is closed because Tamsin closed it when she left an hour ago, and Nerida likes the door closed. You will knock. You will wait for her to say *come in*. You will let her say it before you push the door. Are we clear."

I say: "We are clear."

Paloma says: "Cassian."

I say: "Yes."

Paloma says: "She is doing well. Do not undo it."

I say: "I will not."

She moves aside.

---

I cross the porch.

I have crossed this porch hundreds of times in the last six days. I cross it now with my body suddenly remembering it has forgotten how to do this. I am a nineteen-year-old man who has been walking through doors for nineteen years and my legs are suddenly *new*. Surge is in my chest doing — I do not have a word for what Surge is doing. He has been quiet for six days. He is not quiet now. He is *vibrating*, the way a string vibrates after it has been plucked, and the plucking is the door I am about to walk through, and the bond is *humming* in a register I have not heard it hum in.

I get to the door of the front room. I push it open. I step inside.

Paloma's front room is empty. The door to the room where Nerida has been for six days is closed. I cross to it. I stop with my hand an inch from it.

*Surge*.

*Cassian*.

*Be quiet for me. Be quiet through the whole thing. Do not push. Do not surge. Whatever I am doing in there, do it with me, not in front of me.*

*Cassian. I have been quiet for six days.*

*I know.*

*I am going to be quiet for the next twenty minutes too. I do not need to be told.*

*I am telling you anyway.*

*Cassian.*

*I love you, Surge.*

*I love you, Cassian. Go.*

I knock.

I knock twice, lightly, the way Mom taught us to knock on doors when we were children. The two-knock that means *I am asking permission*, not the three-knock that means *I am announcing myself*.

There is a long beat.

A voice from inside says: "Come in."

The voice is — *hers*. I have heard her voice exactly twice. Once when she was unconscious and made the small *catch* in her breath at the table. Once through the door when I was on the porch and she said something I could not quite hear to Tamsin and they both laughed for a second. Neither of those was a sentence I could attach to a person. This is. The voice is *her*. It is hoarse and small and steady and it is the voice of a person I have been carrying in my chest for six days who has now, finally, said two words I could hear with my own ears, and the bond does something the bond has not done since the trees.

It *flares*.

Just a flicker. The bond brightens for a half-second in my chest the way it brightened in the trees the moment her eyes locked on mine. I lock my jaw. Surge holds. I do not flinch. I am, by some miracle, still standing.

I push the door open.

I step in.

---

She is sitting up.

The bed is propped behind her with three pillows. She is wearing a shirt that is too big for her — I know which shirt, it is one of the spare shirts Paloma keeps in the cabinet for patients, and it is sky blue and it is *enormous* on her. Her hair is in a braid. The braid is in fact crooked. Tamsin did it. I can see Tamsin in every line of the braid and the visual makes my throat do a thing because Tamsin has clearly been *handling* her, in the way Tamsin handles people, and the handling has included sitting on the edge of the bed and braiding hair the way Tamsin used to braid Mom's hair when she was eleven.

Her hands are folded in her lap.

Her face is — *here*. She is here. She is looking at the door, *which is me*, and her eyes are grey-green and clear and they are not the eyes of a dying body anymore. They are the eyes of a person who has decided to be in the room with me, and they are on me.

I stop in the doorway.

I cannot make my legs work.

I am — *holding*. I am holding the part of myself that wants to cross the room in three steps and put my hand on her cheek and say *you are here, you are real, the bond — the bond, the bond, the bond*. I am holding Surge, who is *not* surging but is humming in the back of my chest at a frequency that is going to undo me if I let it move. I am holding the bond, which is doing the thing the bond does when the body it is bonded to is in proximity for the first time at full awareness. I am holding all three of these things at once and the holding is the entire content of my body for the three seconds I stand in the doorway.

She sees me holding.

I do not know how she sees it. I do not know how she has the read on me to know what I am doing. But she sees it — her face does a very small thing, a small recognition that the man in her doorway has frozen because the room is bigger than he expected — and her face *softens*, a fraction, in a way that gives me back the use of my legs.

I take a breath.

I find my voice. It comes out lower than I meant it to, but it comes out.

I say: "Hi. I'm Cassian. I'm glad you're awake."

She looks at me.

She is, I see now, *evaluating* me. She is comparing the man in the doorway to whatever she has remembered of the man in the chair beside her bed and the man whose hand was almost-touching her hip through the blanket six nights ago. She is fitting the version of me she has now to the version of me she had then, and her face is doing the small careful work of confirming that they match.

I let her do it. I do not move. I let her have the time she needs.

After a moment she says: "I'm Nerida."

Her voice is, again, the voice that is *hers*. She is using it on me directly now. It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened to me in five years.

She says: "Thank you for not leaving me in the trees."

I have prepared for a great many things she might say to me. I have prepared for a question about who I am. I have prepared for a question about where she is. I have prepared for *I want to leave*. I have prepared for *don't come any closer*. I have prepared for crying, screaming, silence, panic, request to send for Paloma. I have not prepared for *thank you for not leaving me in the trees*, because the sentence is so simple and so direct and so *true* that it has gone past every defense my body had built against the conversation, and it has landed in my chest the way water lands when you have been thirsty for a long time, and I am — for a half second — not capable of speech.

I take another breath.

I say: "You are welcome."

I say it the way you say it when the *welcome* has been the only welcome you have ever wanted to say and the saying has been six days coming. I do not know if she hears that in my voice. I think she might.

She does the next thing.

She smiles.

It is small. It is tentative. It comes out for less than a second, the way a thing comes out when its owner has not let it come out in a long time and the muscles for it have forgotten the sequence. The corners of her mouth lift. The smile lands on her face. The smile dies. The smile lasts maybe one and a half seconds in total.

I will remember it for the rest of my life.

The bond does what it is going to do for the rest of the day, which is *a problem*. Surge holds. I hold Surge. The bond's flare does not become a surge — it stays a *flare*, contained, the way you keep a fire in a hearth instead of letting it onto the rug. I will manage. I have been managing for six days. I am going to keep managing.

I say: "Can I come in?"

She says: "Yes."

I come in.

---

I do not sit in the chair beside the bed.

The chair beside the bed is — *the chair*. The chair I sat in for the first night and the morning after. The chair my hand has been almost-touching her through the blanket from. The chair has, I have realized in the last six days through the things Tamsin has told me about her conversations with Nerida, become a *thing* in this room — a thing that means *the person who is in this chair is a person Nerida is letting be near her*. The chair is a category. The chair is a *gift*. The chair is not a chair I am going to sit in until she puts me in it.

I sit in Tamsin's chair instead. The smaller one. The one across the room — the one Soren sat in the first night, the one that has been Tamsin's all week. The chair is far enough away from the bed that I am not crowding her, and close enough that we can speak without raising voices.

She watches me choose the chair.

She does not say anything about it. But her face does a small thing on the way I sit down — the smallest possible *noticing*, the smallest possible read of what the chair choice means. She has clocked the chair. She has clocked that I chose the other one. She has clocked that I chose the other one *because* I was not going to take the chair beside the bed without being put there.

She files it.

I am going to be filed, in this room, a great many times over the coming weeks. I am going to be filed and re-filed and reorganized and re-noted by a woman whose entire survival has depended on filing accurately for five years, and I am going to spend the next year of my life being filed correctly. I do not mind. I would rather be filed than misread.

I settle in the chair. I rest my hands on my knees because hands on knees is the least-imposing place for hands to be in a room with a woman you are trying not to frighten.

I say: "Can I ask how you are."

She says: "I am — tired. The wounds are healing. Paloma says I am doing well. She is teaching me how to walk to the bathroom on my own using the wall."

She pauses. Then she adds, dry: "It is undignified."

I laugh.

It comes out before I can stop it — a small surprised laugh, the kind of laugh you make when a person you have just met says something funnier than you expected. Her face does the small thing again — the *noticing*, the *interesting*, *he laughs at the dry version* — and she files that too.

I say: "Paloma is, I am told, the second-most-feared person in the pack."

She says, even drier: "Tamsin gave me that ranking."

I say: "Tamsin is correct."

She says: "Who is the first."

I say: "My mother."

She nods, the way you nod at a fact that has just been confirmed. She has met Mom. She has, I am suddenly certain, already arrived at the same ranking on her own and is letting me know.

I say: "You met my mother."

She says: "Yes."

I say: "What did you think of her."

She considers.

She is quiet for a long beat. I do not push. I let her have it. Surge is *holding* and the bond is *humming* and the whole room is full of the sound of me waiting and her thinking, and I do not want to be anywhere else in the world right now.

She says, finally: "I think she is the kindest woman I have ever met. I think she is also the most careful woman I have ever met. I am not sure yet whether those two things are the same thing in her, or whether they are two different things she has decided to use at the same time."

I sit with that.

It is the most accurate description of Mom I have ever heard from a person who has spent under an hour in her company. I look at the woman in the bed — the small woman in the too-big shirt with the crooked braid and the careful evaluating eyes — and I realize, with a clarity that I am going to have to come back to later, that I have *underestimated her*. I have spent six days knowing she was clever from the fragments Paloma and Tamsin and Mom have brought back from this room, but I have not yet, until this moment, understood that she is *fast*. She is reading me. She has been reading me since I came through the door. She is reading me as easily as she just read Mom, and the reading is going to be the thing about her I love most when I am allowed to love her out loud.

I file *that* — fast, accurate, careful — in the place I have been filing the things I am collecting about her since she opened her eyes in the trees.

I say: "Both."

She says: "What?"

I say: "Both. They are the same thing in her, and they are also two different things she has decided to use at the same time. She has been working on the careful for a long time. It started as a tool. It became the shape of the kindness eventually. They are now the same."

She looks at me.

She says, after a beat: "Thank you for that."

I say: "You are welcome."

---

We talk.

We talk for maybe twenty minutes. I keep it light. I keep it slow. I do not bring up anything she did not bring up first. I tell her about the kitchen because Tamsin has told me Tamsin already told her about the kitchen and the kitchen is a safe topic. I tell her about Paloma when she asks me about Paloma. I tell her about Tamsin when she asks me about Tamsin, and I tell her my version of Tamsin which is the version where Tamsin is *the smartest one of us and the one who has been correctly handling the rest of us since she was eleven*. She almost smiles again at that — almost, not quite, the smile getting closer to the surface and not quite breaking it — and I file the *almost* with the other things I am filing.

She asks me about the pack.

She asks it carefully. She says: "Tamsin used the word *pack*. Paloma used it once too. What — what is the pack."

I have prepared for this question for six days.

I say: "The pack is the people who live in this community. It is a word we use because it is the word we have always used. It does not mean anything that is going to surprise you today. We will tell you what it means in more detail when you are stronger and have asked for more. Is that all right."

She considers.

She says: "All right. For today."

I say: "For today."

She says: "When I am stronger, will you tell me?"

I say: "Yes. I will tell you. Or my mother will. Or my father will. We will be the ones who tell you. Not anyone else."

She nods. She files it.

I see the next question forming on her face. She is going to ask about the men who carried her in. She is going to ask about the chair beside the bed. She is going to ask about something the bond is making her ask without her knowing she is being made to ask it, and I am going to have to handle it carefully, and I am — *terrified*. I have not been terrified all morning. I am terrified now. I do not show it. Surge is holding. The bond is humming.

She does not ask the next question.

She closes her eyes.

She has used up her energy. I can see it on her face the way I have seen it on her face through Tamsin's descriptions and through Mom's reports and through Paloma's clinical updates. Her body has had enough. She has spent her morning being a person in a room with a man she has not met before and the spending has cost her, and she is — *crashing*. The way Paloma told us she would.

I stand up.

I do it slowly. I do not want her to startle.

I say: "I am going to let you rest. You have done well this morning."

She opens her eyes. They are heavy. She says: "Will you come back?"

She does not know what she is asking. I do. The bond is bright in my chest at the question and Surge is *holding*. I hold it. I hold him.

I say: "Yes."

She says: "When?"

I say: "Whenever you ask. Today, tomorrow, the day after. I will come when you ask. Or — " I pause. I have to do this next part carefully. "Or my brother will come. He is on the porch. He wants to come in. He has been wanting to come in. Would it be all right if he came in for a few minutes after I leave?"

She is quiet for a beat. She is processing.

She says: "The dark-haired one."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "He was — in the room the first night. He was watching me when I woke up. He came over to my bed and crouched by my face and said something I could not hear."

I am not breathing.

I had not known she remembered that. We had assumed — Soren and I had assumed, in the conversations we have had on the porch over the last six days — that she had been too far under to remember Soren crossing the room. She had been almost-asleep. Her eyes had closed. We had been certain.

She had not been too far under.

She remembers him crouching by her face. She remembers him saying something. She does not know what he said. But she has been *holding* the memory for six days while we have been on the porch wondering what she remembers, and she has been holding it as a *real* memory of a *real* man, and the man is my brother, and my brother is on the porch, and my brother is going to walk into this room in two minutes knowing that the woman in the bed has been holding a memory of him for six days she has not told anyone she has been holding.

I say, somehow, in a voice that is steady: "That's Soren. He's my twin. He is not as easy to talk to as I am, but he is worth the trouble."

She almost smiles again. Almost. She says: "Send him in."

I say: "I will. Rest now."

She closes her eyes.

I cross the room. I stop at the door. I look back at her once. She is already asleep. Her hands are still folded in her lap. The braid is across her shoulder. The shirt is too big. She has done extraordinary work this morning and she has earned the sleep.

I go out.

I close the door behind me, quietly, the way Mom taught us.

---

I cross the front room. I push the porch door open. Soren is in the chair. He looks up. The twin bond carries the question across the space in the half-second before either of us speaks.

*How.*

*She is — Soren.*

*Tell me.*

*She remembers you crossing the room. She has been holding it for six days.*

He does not move. His face does not move. The twin bond goes very still. He is taking in the information and recalibrating around it the way Soren recalibrates, which is slowly and without external evidence of the recalibration happening.

After a beat he says, out loud: "She remembers."

I say: "She remembers. She does not know what you said. She knows you crossed the room. She knows you crouched by her face. She has been holding it."

He says: "Cassian."

I say: "I know."

He says: "She wants me to come in?"

I say: "She said *send him in*. Word for word."

He stands up.

I look at him. I take a breath. I say: "Don't ruin this."

He says: "I will try not to."

He goes past me. He pushes the front room door open. He crosses to the inner door. He stops with his hand an inch from it the way I stopped with my hand an inch from it twenty-five minutes ago, and I sit in the porch chair and I close my eyes and I let Surge surge, finally, for one long internal beat — the surge I have been holding for the entire morning — and Surge says, very quietly, very settled: *she is ours, Cassian. She is ours. She is ours.*

I say back: *I know.*

Soren knocks twice.

A small voice from inside says: "Come in."

He pushes the door open.

He steps inside.

The door closes.

I sit on the porch with my eyes closed and the bond humming in my chest and the late morning sun on my face and I think, for the first time in six days, that we might be okay.

We might be okay.

We might be okay.