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“What did you do ?” Adam repeated, thundering.

“You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t know that already,” I said tiredly, daintily retrieving Rowan’s last cigarette and striking the final match from the box he’d kept, the pornographic label lost under a crust of gore.

I lit the thing as Adam went down to a knee, slumping under the weight of his own death.

His eyes were bluer than ever as the skin along his cheeks blackened, his bones hollowing.

Then he laughed, a sudden ripple of sound that had my skin crawling despite everything we’d seen. “Ah. So that’s why you kissed me.”

When he laughed, it was in Sullivan’s voice but when he smiled at me, it was Portia’s smile beaming out of his decaying jaw. His teeth shone unsettlingly white; I thought of Rowan standing over the pyre of my old roommate’s corpse and how pale Ford’s bones had looked when Minji flensed him.

I took a drag from the cigarette, sagging onto the floor, wincing.

It was good. I hated that it was good. I didn’t like allowing myself vices.

Too much risk. People have a habit of lionizing the human condition, describing us as exalted: creatures who can transcend our base instincts and ignore impulse in favor of community.

I’ve always called bullshit on that. Even the best of us beg for our mothers when we’re bleeding out.

Point is, though, I’ve never trusted my body not to betray me when it wanted something badly enough, and the thought of being compromised because I was craving a smoke, because I so badly needed to have a drink, or a person; the thought of being sublimated by petty desire outraged me. Still did.

But given everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

“What did you do, Li?”

“Law of contagion,” I said after my third puff. “Once in contact, always in contact. Do you remember that?”

Adam said nothing but watched me with those celadon eyes of his, now lashless, like polished stones set in the sockets of a holy skeleton. His breathing was tectonically slow.

I ashed my cigarette on the floor, the once gorgeous tiles scummed with dried gore.

I couldn’t tell any longer what had been blood, what was once organ: it was all the same reeking inkblot of clotted stringy black.

“My saliva is in you now. I don’t really know how it works.

But some of me is in you, that’s all I needed. ”

“Hot.” Rowan’s irreverence, Rowan’s actual voice, coming out of Adam’s ruined mouth.

“And a lot of Rowan is in me.”

“Always liked a good threesome.”

I didn’t laugh, although Adam did in wheezing gusts, each exhalation causing more of him to flake away. Embers floated up through the late light prisming through the stained glass, and the air glittered gold where it wasn’t a blood-tinged mirage of reflected saints.

“I can’t take you apart for good because your daddy’s the fucking devil. Gods know I’ve tried before. Do you remember when I blew up your hand?”

“Mhm. It’s why Gracelynn died.”

I didn’t flinch. I’m proud of that, will die proud of my poker face then.

“You heal. You keep healing. So long as you’re alive, you’re going to heal from whatever I do to you.” I wafted my cigarette over where the last of his intestines drooled from his belly, his abdomen mostly hollow now. His spine winked from what was left.

“Entirely.” And this he said in his own voice, thank every god named by a desperate soul. I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise.

“But deathworkers,” I said. “They’re something else.”

“Oh, Li, you didn’t. ”

“You probably know about rabies and why you should avoid touching woodland animals even if they seem harmless. If you get bitten by a rabid squirrel, you can, of course, take a vaccine and be assured that it has a one hundred percent success rate. But you have to take it within ten days. You have to be pumped full of it before the symptoms show up. Otherwise, that’s it.

Nothing to do then but keep you sedated and comfortable until you die horribly, sorry, good luck with your next life.

” This close, I could feel it: the nuclear reactor compacted into the very heart of him, the godlike power that would let him burn and burn and burn with life eternal until whatever destiny he’d been promised came to wed him.

The thought made me faintly nauseous. “Any kind of skin-to-skin contact is the equivalent of being exposed to immediately symptomatic super-rabies.”

“You killed us both.”

His expression unwound from me the first real laugh I’d laughed in a year, and the sound tightened over the nacreous emptiness like a noose.

Adam stared at me like a man who’d been expecting a birthday party but arrived instead at his own funeral.

It only made me guffaw harder, which wasn’t without its costs.

I spat blood onto the ground when I was done, mopping the corner of my mouth with the knuckle of my right thumb; it left a cherry-red streak over the back of my hand.

Time can teach you such a fortune of things.

Like a broken heart. Like rage. Sadly, it wasn’t something I could sustain forever.

Death was as hungry as grief and I was still human.

With every passing second it seemed like there was more of it and less of me.

I’d have to cede extremities soon—tracts of skin, whatever was extraneous—to this last furious Hail Mary I was making.

“Oh, come on, Adam, we’re mortal. At least, I am.

” What good was all this if I couldn’t gloat a little?

“I’ve been dying for a while. And I know you’ll die too because everything dies.

If you don’t, though, I’m counting on it being such a problem for you that you won’t have the mental capacity to do more than keep it at bay—making you easy prey. Point is: either way, I win. ”

The last I couldn’t help but snarl before the world erupted again in immolating white, a killing heat convulsing toward me.

But it didn’t get far. I suffocated that torrential flame with the marrow from Adam’s bones, wrapping him in spongy curtains of pink and fatty yellow until at last he yielded and the light spluttered out.

Sweat drenched me. I tasted salt on my lips, although that could have been more from the internal bleeding.

When the glare died completely away, Adam said:

“I still don’t get it, Li.”

“Don’t get what?”

“Your self-righteous act,” he said. Adam seemed further diminished, no longer even an effigy of himself, but a shadow teased out in pen strokes. Only his eyes were unchanged, blue and lustrous as glazed ceramic.

“We’re alike, you and I. We’re both real monsters.

There’s a universe where we make that worthwhile.

” He laughed and now it was Gracelynn’s soft, gauzy chuckle that wafted out of him.

Even though it was crawling out of Adam’s throat, it sounded as it always did: kind.

If I hadn’t loathed him before, I would have learned to hate him then.

Our dead deserved more than this scavenging.

“You and I, carving out a world together.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Oh?”

I finished my cigarette, flicking the stub into the bruise-yellow gloom, the amber like that of a contusion only beginning to heal.

It was getting harder now to maintain my cavalier facade.

An ache nuzzled through the bones of my fingers, up my arms, fanning downward over shoulder blades and spine to pool in my hips; it felt like what I’d always imagined arthritis to feel like, a dull yet consuming agony.

This is what old must feel like, I thought.

And then: I will never know for sure.

“We are both real monsters, yes,” I said, resenting his phrasing, the pride slicking the words. “But we’re not the same kind of monsters. You do it because you love that bloody work. Because it makes you feel powerful.”

“And it doesn’t make you feel the same?”

I recalled vividly then how Ford had screamed when Adam fished the guts out from the man’s belly: that high-pitched, panting, piggish shriek that went on even as he choked on his own blood.

It had reminded me of my stepfather and how he’d wailed all those years ago as I broke him like a wishbone, my fantasy fulfilled in lieu of his own.

Had I felt powerful then? Had I felt powerful each time after?

There’d certainly been a kind of rightness, a sense that what was happening was somehow good and just: a fulfillment of some primordial promise, one made long before even the first microbe appeared in the first oceans.

It was something you could stitch a life from.

“No.”

“Then why do you do it? Why—” He gagged on the remnants of that sentence, ichor dribbling through his teeth, a viscid blackness that held clumps of what I knew to be tissue matter, bile and dark sticky bubbles of venous blood.

Ford’s prophecy from so long ago drifted through my head. I got what I wanted. But it definitely wasn’t what any of them deserved.

I stood with considerable difficulty, my right leg having gone numb in a way that suggested the nerves were mostly rotted away, a needling chill trespassing up my side.

I didn’t have much time left, which I somewhat resented, but I had no one to blame but myself.

This was the gamble I’d chosen and the cards I’d played.

“I think mostly it’s because I’ve spent my whole life with this little voice in my head telling me that I never had any agency in the first place, that I’m collared and leashed to a hundred people, none of whom have even thought about offering compensation for partial ownership of me.

And I hate it. You can’t imagine how much. ”

Adam didn’t answer, racked by sudden paroxysms, eyes rolling to whites. As he bucked and writhed, fire sheeted over his body in brilliant waves, like it was trying to burn out the infection, this death of mine I’d shared with him.