The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

She didn’t look at him. No, she wanted to say. No, it’s not real, whatever this is. Good things don’t grow in this rotten earth. Jones huffed. “I can almost hear you being dramatic and you haven’t said a word.”

“And afterward, Wilfred, you will tell me at last about the darkness, and how you came to love that man.”

His eyes were blind with devotion, while Pim’s had been empty with rage. Christ, was anyone sane?

She’d had years of schooling in the hardest, coldest reality—and she recognized the look on Pim’s face. It was the look a wounded man got sometimes, a man who was not mortally wounded, perhaps, but who had simply had enough. Who meant to leave the world behind.

Freddie knew what she was doing. He felt a surge of jealousy. He’d chosen the new world, chosen Winter, chosen Laura, chosen the wasteland of his life, with whatever green shoots he could coax out of the parched terrain of his soul. He saw that the woman had made the other choice, to go into the dark with the stranger, and allow herself oblivion.

“That there’s no such thing as a coward, or a brave man—not out there. There’s no man’s will stronger than the war. He might as well have called you an angel as call you a coward, the—distinction—is just as valuable. That is to say, not at all. And of course the world ended. But it went on too.”

We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost?