Page 70 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“You are always the reason I lay awake,” Maison replies, and his face pinches off, like he didn’t mean to reveal so much. “Gurlien has his theories, I think they’re bullshit, he’s pulling the rank of actually talking to someone who’s been raised before, I think a sample size of two isn’t nearly enough.”

That sounds like him, at least.

“What does he think?”

Maison’s lips thin. “That my mind is unsure how to deal with the fact that I died for a bit so it doesn’t want to sleep.”

“So like…trauma?” Delina hazards, and he scowls at her. “I dunno, dying is traumatic, it has to be.”

“I’m not traumatized,” Maison protests, which is absolutely something someone dealing with shit would say. “He thinks it’s physiological, not psychology.”

“That’s still trauma,” Delina says, then slowly removes her hand and glancing back at the misty road. “Tell me if things start to feel like they’re falling apart.”

He obviously bites back a reply to that, like she’s said something wrong, before he nods. “I will.”

She coasts the car back to driving, merging back onto the empty highway.

“You’re doing well with the scanning,” Maison says after a few minutes of driving through the mist. “It must be natural for Necromancers.”

“Can you do it?” Delina asks, and it’s an opportunity to talk, to not be so awkward.

“Not like that, what you’re doing is far out of my skill set. I can, at most, tell how much energy you’ve used and if you’re close to empty.” Out of the corner of her eye, in the way she’s not supposed to look while driving, she sees him shrug. “It’s useful in battle.”

There’s a strange charm to him talking about things he does as battle. Completely out of her image of him as a mild-mannered artist, but somehow completely fitting into the seriousness he sometimes falls into.

Like this is the missing part of him, as well, and now she gets to see it.

And, of course, now that they are completely complicated and broken up but still acting like this.

“You had promised ridiculous stories,” Delina says, after they pass the nearest other inhabited house, a small trailer nestled in the woods, a rusted-out car in front.

“Gurlien was right, I was just trying to charm you,” Maison says, instead.

“Does that mean you don’t have them?”

He’s quiet for a few more minutes, until they pass an actual neighborhood of three houses, clustered around what looks like a Christmas tree farm. The paint peels off the sidings of the house and there’s tires in the driveway, but the rows of trees are pristine and perfect.

“Do you remember our trip to Phoenix, the time when we got hit by the monsoons and the road back flooded out?” he starts, leaning his head against the window.

Of course she does, it was a pain in the ass, and she missed two days of work before they repaired highway 89.

“Your mother had just lost control of the Terese project, and we didn’t know anything, so I was told to take you back to the base—back to home—in no uncertain terms. They could not grasp the idea that a flooded road would prevent it.”

He had seemed stressed the entire time, beyond the normal lack of home, and he had paced a line in the carpet of the crappy hotel they ended up stuck in.

“The Terese project pissed off…a lot of people, and whenever that happened, someone almost always sent someone to try to hurt you.” It’s not where she thought the story was going, so she perks up. “You desperately wanted to go out and have fun in Phoenix, but there was an actual sniper in town, so I had to balance trying to get home over flooded road, my bosses texting me every half hour with either demands to get you someplaceelse or updates on people your mom pissed off, and you wanting to go to the club. That was ridiculous.”

In the end, they had gone to a dive bar after poking their heads into half a dozen lounges, before Maison found one he liked, and he ended up getting trashed on a much too strong margarita that neither of them anticipated, and she had loved it. They had gotten back the next day and it took him a day after that before his hangover was gone.

“Crazy that there was a sniper there,” Delina muses, instead of the strange wistfulness of a happy memory of hers being so stressful to him. “That has to be why you picked the bar with no windows.”

“Yup,” he says, popping the p sound. “And I really didn’t mean to get drunk, and you were so pretty in the neon lights and there was a fucking sniper in town searching for you.”

He sounds…resigned. Delina hates it.

The pitted highway smoothes out, as they pass a school and an actual grocery store, before cruising into something that approaches a downtown. Flags hang in every storefront, and a few people scurry between stores.

“Considering how I was never sniped, I think you did a good job,” Delina says, pulling into a parking space in front of one of the grocery stores.

---