Page 108 of Deathless
I turned his face toward mine with my fingers on his chin. "I don't know how to build a house. I don't know how to plant a garden. I'd probably kill everything in it." I kissed him. He tasted like sulfur and salt. "But yeah. Give your mother her kitchen. I'll be there."
He kissed me back slowly. The steam rose around us.
We stayed in the water until our fingers pruned and the lamp burned low. Then we climbed out into the cool air and dressed slowly, trading clothes back and forth because we'd mixed them up and neither of us cared.
Diego held my hand all the way back through the compound in the dark, the cool air sharp against wet skin. We didn’t talk, but the silence was nice for once. Comforting.
Diego eased open the door to our room and stopped.
Mila was asleep in the center of the bed, a stuffed bear tucked under one arm and flour still dusting her hair. Carmen had left a plate of cookies on the nightstand with a note in Spanish.
"What does it say?" I whispered.
Diego cleared his throat. "She says the cookies are for breakfast, and if we eat them tonight, she'll know, and there will be consequences."
"I believe her."
"You should."
Mila had arranged the pillows around herself like walls. Her face was smooth, her breathing even. One sock had come off, and her bare foot stuck out from under the blanket.
Diego pulled back the covers and climbed in carefully. Mila stirred and grabbed a fistful of his shirt without waking. He curved around her, his body between her and the door, and looked up at me.
"Coming?" he whispered.
I got in on the other side. The bed was narrow for three, but we made it work the way we'd been making everything work since Brussels. Mila's back pressed warmly against my chest. Diego reached across her and held onto my hand.
The room smelled like flour and sulfur and Diego's skin against mine.
Family. It smelled like our family.
I waited until his breathing evened out. Then I reached over to the nightstand, picked up one of Carmen's cookies, and ate it in two bites because a lot had changed, but I was still a man who liked to live dangerously.
The nail went incrooked on the third hit because Alonzo told a joke and I laughed too hard to aim.
"Hold it straight this time," he called up from the ground. "You're the clan leader. Set an example."
"I'm setting an example of what happens when you run your mouth while I'm on a ladder." I yanked the nail out with the claw end and lined up a fresh one. The morning sun had the valley lit up gold, the kind of light that made even a half-finished schoolhouse look like something worth building. "Tell the punchline after I'm done with the framing."
"The punchline is that you've been up there since six and you still haven't finished that wall."
"The punchline is that you're holding my water bottle and not handing it up."
He tossed it. I caught it one-handed and drank half of it in one go. The water had gone warm from sitting in the sun, but sawdust coated my throat and I'd stopped being picky about temperature around hour three.
Below me, the site hummed. Beni had the younger kids running lumber from the supply pile in relay lines that turned into a competition around mid-morning, because everything turned into a competition when you put teenagers and building materials in the same field. Rafa worked the east wall, unhurried, setting joists at a pace that made the rest of us look like amateurs. Two of the elders sat in the shade of the old oak, drinking coffee and supervising, which mostly meant arguing about whether the windows should face east or south.
My abuela would have loved this. She'd have been in that shade with her own coffee, telling everyone exactly where the windows should go, and she'd have been right.
I sank the nail clean this time, then three more. The frame had started to look like a building, and by next month the kids in this valley would have a proper one with a roof, desks, and a door that locked. I'd promised that when the families voted me in, and I intended to deliver.
From that same shade where the elders argued about windows, Alonzo scheduled relay routes across borders the EU pretended were open. Five centuries of survival ran on things that worked on two levels at once. A schoolhouse was just the latest version.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I cursed.
"Gotta go," I called down, already climbing. "Mila gets out in twenty."
"Take the south road," Alonzo said. "They're repaving the bridge on the main route."
