She took us—gagging every time we got too close to an oozing, sagging space bee corpse, which was a much more comfortable way to laugh at her than watching her mocking mouth form the word butthole—to her amazing gold-and-white room. I was almost too stressed and distracted to appreciate that awe-inspiring painting of the bangin’ cavalier holding a melon, with her necromancer friend standing on a plinth while the wind blew leaves to hide his junk. That was art. Completely worth dying for, just to see for myself.

“Hurry up. I have a letter for you,” said Ianthe.

Harrow, it was in your handwriting. She handed me a fat, bulging envelope with your handwriting, and it said To be given to Gideon Nav, and I felt—strange. Time softened as I held it, and I didn’t even care about the barely repressed mirthful scorn on the other girl’s face. It was your curt, aggravated handwriting, curter and more aggravated than ever, like you’d written it in a hurry. I’d gotten so many letters in that handwriting, calling me names or bossing me around. You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?

I peeled open the envelope—you’d sealed it up tight, though I was pretty sure that Tridentarius had busted it open in between, she was just that type—and found a little piece of flimsy with the edges still ragged from where you’d torn it. The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise—you’d kept my sunglasses.

I slid them on your face immediately. They were a little too big for you. They kept sliding down your nose. I had to bend the hooks behind your ears to make them stay. With my eyes safely hidden, I opened the paper, and it just said one thing—four stupid goddamn words. No dry Nonagesimus explanation. No instructions. No commandments. In a way, I would’ve killed for one of your lists of rules about exactly how to treat your body, how I was going to have to take showers with all your clothes on, which, by the way, I’d already planned on doing.

But I almost knew what you’d written already, so I don’t know why I was surprised.

ONE FLESH, ONE END.