Chapter 7

Pie said it like a kindness. “Your name was Nalia…”

“Don’t.” Reaper’s voice cut clean. She didn’t raise it; she didn’t have to. It had the weight of a blade being set down exactly where it would be noticed. “You don’t get to call me that.”

Pie blinked, taken aback, then bristled to cover it. “I know what I felt. It’s fleeting like a dream, but it was clear as day,” she hugged herself, the small frame getting smaller. “We traded more than names.”

“Not with you,” Reaper said, and the steadiness went brittle. “Elina called me that. Long ago, before the ash. Before I died. No one has said it since I was woke from my eternal slumber. That name is buried. You don’t deserve to dig it up.”

Something in Pie’s jaw clicked into the old, scathing gear she used on jammed constructors and stubborn math. “Deserve?” she said, acid seeping into the word. “What do I deserve, exactly? I don’t even have a name someone loved enough to give me. ‘Pioneer’ because a file needed a label. ‘Pie’ because I got tired of hearing corporate nouns out of my own mouth.”

Reaper took a breath sharp enough to hurt. “At least you didn’t have anything to lose.”

“Oh, is that the game?” Pie laughed once, but dry and with no humor. “Because from where I’m standing, you had a whole romance, a whole world, a whole rebirth. At least you were… seen. The worst day of my life was when power dipped for three hours and my plates backed up, or when the hogs were on a path and I had to wait. Sorry I didn’t have the decency to have a tragedy.”

“There.” Reaper’s head snapped to her, ears sharp. “There it is. Jealousy.”

“Yeah,” Pie shot back, and the heat in her eyes surprised them both. “I am jealous, okay? I’ve never seen another human. You are the first person who has looked at me and not been a robot in my head.” She swallowed, and then shoved the next sentence out too hard. “And even you are just another alien.”

Silence hit the clearing.

But the sentence was already in the air, already around Reaper like wire. She couldn’t reach for the shadow to protect her from this one. Through eyes that have never cried a tear, Reaper’s unfamiliar face became damp with her sadness. She was an alien, far from her home she fought so hard to protect. And now there might not even be a way back without her shadow powers.

“I’m sorry,” Pie blurted. She stepped in and wrapped her arms around Reaper. Their height difference, now reversed, was partially breached by Pie standing on borrowed tippy toes. It was like hugging a storm that had forgotten how to thunder. Pie didn’t say it would be okay. She didn’t try to fix the math of grief. She nestled her head into Reaper’s bosom and stayed as the shaking slowly subsided.

The worst of the tremors passed, not neatly but honestly. Reaper swiped at her cheeks with Pie’s sleeve that she now wore. It left smears that would make a mechanic sigh.

“I wasn’t strong enough,” she said, voice shredded. “Back then. I wasn’t fast enough. If I had been, she…” The name was a stone that would always be heavy. “Elina. If I had been better, Elina would still be…” The sentence abandoned her.

Pie tightened her arms. “You didn’t lose because you were weak,” she said to the side, her head leaning into the larger frame. “You lost because a stupid amount of bad happened at once.”

Reaper sniffed a laugh without humor. “What would you know about bad?”

“Less than you,” Pie said, honest and aching with it. “That’s the rot at the center of what I said. I was cruel because I’m lonely. I’m mad at the sky for sending me here alone and I took it out on you. I’m sorry.” She drew back enough to look her in the face. “You are not ‘just an alien.’ You are the only real person I’ve had.”

Reaper made her look back, stubborn even mid-ruin. “And you don’t get to call me…” The name snagged on the moment. The anger had nowhere to live anymore. She exhaled and let it go because it was either that or carry it alone forever. “Not unless I say.”

Pie nodded. “Deal.” She thumbed a last damp line from Reaper’s cheek. “Also, for the record, your scathing tone is terrifying.”

“It’s your voice,” Reaper said, managing the ghost of a smile.

They sat. The boards were warm from the day. Above, oil started to churn through the pipes like a heart beginning to pump again.

“Teach me shadow-step,” Pie said after a while, nudging Reaper’s boot with her own. It was the lightest kind of provocation, a bridge back to talking like people. “I’ll go back to your world and replace you, fix everything, undo every mistake, be so noble and tragic they give me a statue.”

Reaper let out a snort that was more human than any of her careful silences. She swiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffled. “You? In my world? I don’t think you could bear leaving factory management to me while you go get yourself memorialized. If I took over here, the belts would look like spilled noodles. We’d have a slew of underperforming machines and not a single item would be where it belongs.”

Pie put a hand to her chest, mock-affronted. “My precious organization. How dare you.”

“How dare you,” Reaper echoed, the words softened into a smile.

They laughed, for real this time. It felt like taking a brace off something that had healed enough to try without it.

In the comfortable silence that followed, Reaper watched the sludge water. The whispers came and went. Harvest… Witness… Harmonize… What did it all mean?