Movement Ten — "You Know Spying Is Bad, Right?"

There is a border to this place, thin in certain hours, thick in others, and I have learned, across however many centuries I've spent testing it, precisely where it thins enough to let me see through, if only for a moment, into whatever lies on the other side.

I was there again, not long ago as this place measures time, which is to say I have no honest way of telling you how long ago it actually was. I had found the thin place, the particular seam in the burning where the warmth of the other half — his half, the gold, gentle half none of us were ever meant to cross into — bled faintly through, close enough to feel without ever being close enough to reach.

"Girl," a voice said, unhurried, entirely unbothered by whatever it had just caught me doing, "you know spying is bad, right?"

I didn't answer. I want to be honest that I couldn't have, even if I'd wanted to — whatever voice this was, sleepy and gold-eyed and considerably more amused than alarmed by what she'd found, had caught me in a position I had no proper defense prepared for, and silence seemed, in that moment, the only dignity still available to me.

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It didn't matter, in the end, whether I answered or not. If I could come and go at the mercy of this place at all — and I can, within limits, the border allowing what little movement it allows for reasons I've never fully understood — it meant, I've come to believe, that I would have to earn something from it. Its trust, perhaps, if a place like this can even be said to hold trust. If I ever wanted to leave.

My idol paid me no attention at all, that particular hour, occupied instead with whatever business had brought him briefly near enough to that thinning border for me to catch sight of him. I found I minded that less than I might have expected. Whatever had once passed for a beloved in my old life — the husband I will not name, the man whose ambition first led all eight of us into that terrible, entertaining game — had already become, by then, something I'd mostly stopped thinking about. Past was past. I wanted, somewhere in the burning centuries since, to find ways of erasing him entirely from whatever remains of my memory, the way you'd want to erase a stain from something you once thought was clean. But that particular work, I told myself, was for later. There was only one option left to me, in that thinning, borrowed moment — the girl who sometimes walked near that border, the one with the sleepy gold eyes and the voice that had already caught me once and would, I suspected, catch me again.