Chapter 23: Two Bodies

Tamsin had hung her green scarf on the temple door as a sign that nobody was to come in.

Gravel lay across the threshold outside it, the size of a cart horse.

His chin was on his paws, and one stone ear was turned toward the altar.

Inside, the candles were lit.

Wes stood by the cracked stone in his plain coat.

In Chicago his real body lay in a rehab bed with a cane beside it, and a physical therapist who called him a coward on Thursdays.

The board's new safe rig had put him back in the game that afternoon, with a nurse watching the monitors.

Here his legs worked, and he meant to enjoy that.

"You're early," Sera said from behind the altar.

"The board's lawyer called again," Wes said. "They're paying the forty thousand, and the hospital bills. Locke was arraigned this morning."

"Good. I don't want to talk about him in here."

She stepped out into the candlelight.

She had no light around her this time.

She was a woman in a linen shirt and soft trousers, tall and broad in the shoulder.

A white-gold braid hung over one shoulder, and her eyes were grey.

He had worn that body for a month, and he had never once seen it walk toward him.

"How do I look?" she said.

"Like you."

"Do I?"

"Your hands are different." He took them. "You hold them like you've got a lot to say."

She laughed, and it was her own laugh, the one he'd heard rasp in the hospital bed.

"Say it out loud," she said. "What you've been thinking since you logged in."

"I'm trying not to say anything stupid."

"Try harder."

"Sera, I've been inside you for weeks. I know what it's like to have your pulse, and I'd never seen you across a room."

"Oh," she said. "That's very good, actually."

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