Prologue
"You're pathetic"
Booker bites his lips. He could feel Quỳnh smiling behind him, prowling around him. Darkness was closing in, knot chaffing his skin as he moved his head back and forth. Suddenly he feels himself dropping.
- - - -
She left him hanging. It's a matter of seconds before he starts trashing. And the circle begins.
- - - -
How dare you
How dare you
How dare you
It's the only thing Sebastien can hear as he awakes anew and dies again. Only a few seconds to catch the words, where his cervicals lock back into place before giving up again, where his brain struggles to reach for a blood which doesn't come, where his lungs want to scream for an oxygen which doesn't drip down to them. Where he blinks into the light, or the night, and the only thing he can see is a figure sitting leisurely in front of him.
How dare you, Quỳnh keeps on saying.
The water swirls crystal clear, when she drinks.
- - - -
Nile sends a message.
Then another.
She doesn't want to let worry eat at her, but her mind wanders, to a sleep without nightmares. She feels her breath shudder, thinking back to the past few nights, where she's woken up because of the dark. Not because of a scream, not because of phantom pain behind her ribs. Because of the silence. And the dark it came with.
She thinks the others might have noticed something was up. She doesn't like to ponder on it, but she'd become accustomed, in the past months, to Quỳnh dying during her sleep. It was difficult at first, then it became a fixture in her nights, one she would wait for. It's been a week, and she still wakes up from the absence of all of it.
Her minds can't help working on what it means. For Quỳnh. For the others.
And to what it might have done to Booker.
They had called each other the first night. And Nile had said, she had said, Booker hadn't contested, that they would wait, before telling the others. In case they were wrong, in case Quỳnh wasn't dead. She couldn't be dead. It couldn't be. So they would wait. Wait and see, what the dreams would bring.
They didn't bring anything.
And Booker still wasn't answering.
- - - -
It's been almost five days now, that these dreams have stopped.
Booker doesn't reply to her anymore. She hasn't told anyone.
Nile feels a shift, in the world. Quỳnh is gone. Booker is gone too, in his own way.
She should feel free.
She even started dreaming her own dreams again, full of city streets, bars, cars. No more cold waters.
It's what breaks her.
- - - -
"We need to talk." She says to the others, when she catches them going down the stairs to the garden of their current house.
Nicky looks at her, and the phone clenched in her hand, and doesn't even question her demand. He comes to her, puts a hand on her shoulder. "Is everything alright?"
His tone is blank, void of any emotions, and Nile knows it's his way of handling the rising anxiety. "It's about Quỳnh. And Booker too."
Andy stills, her face becoming marble at the names. "Speak, Nile"
Nile breathes shakily, and she explains everything.
- - - -
She doesn't know if it's because she's told them, about the dreams, the lack of screams, but it marks for her the beginning of new things while she sleeps, overwhelmed by people speaking French, in crowded streets, dirty with road traffic.
It's raining, hitting her hard.
She wakes up screaming.
- - - -
"I don't know, I don't know" she keeps on repeating. Joe is kneeling in front of her, and Nicky is by her side, but her head is in her hands and she's muffling her cries "I need him. I need him here. Now. I don't know."
Andy is here, standing, somehow distant and lost too. She is drifting, with Quỳnh gone. She can only breathe, waiting for someone to say something.
"I need to know he's alright." Nile breaks out at last.
It's not so much a decision as a defeat. They will go seek him, wherever he is hiding. "Paris" Nile says, flashes of the Eiffel tower looming over a closely cut-up grass field "he's in Paris."
"Of course that fucker would be" Joe whispers.
So she isn't the only one aware of how much Booker hates that place. How relieving.
- - - -
She tries to sleep, but it's restless. She shakes, snapshots of uneven pavement, dirty métros and people roaming the streets, dark and cold. The worst is the voices, screeching unrelentingly in that garble language she's heard Booker use, every now and then.
She wonders how deep madness can go, when in the reflection of a métro's window, Quỳnh is looking back at her with a kind smile, light flashing dangerously in her serene eyes.
Nile wakes up with a gasp. She doesn't have time to wonder why the woman was there, wearing a red dress, before she's running to the toilets.
"We are leaving in thirty minutes" Nicky says from the doorway. "Joe just got the train tickets. We'll be in Gare du Nord by 11 am. Then we can check if Copley's managed to track down his place." He doesn't comment on her puking her guts out. Or on the fact that she's begged them to go and check on a man they still are working on forgiving. He trusts her. She hopes he isn't mistaken.
She looks back at him, sees Andy hovering behind him. She nods, tiredly. "Belleville. Line 2" she says simply, a vague memory of her dream haunting her eyelids. "I think..." she trails off, shaking herself up as she comes to a stand.
She doesn't notice, the worried glance at her back, and the doubt lingering in her friends' eyes.
- - -
Nile definitely stops trying to sleep again when she sees Booker hanging in her dream.
It's the silence, the worst thing. Because there are no words anymore, not even a scream.
And she sees him hanging.