Page 40 of Where Light Cannot Follow

Instead, I stand and watch, listen to the woman's drowning struggles, her screams muffled by water filling her mouth.

"Virgil." Dante's voice snaps. Then he stops and stares at me. "This is desperate. She is drowning. How can you not help her?"

"She cannot drown," I say. "She's dead."

Dante's brow furrows. He turns and yanks the branch free with a grunt.

"She's in the swamp, Dante. You can't help her at this point. She'll drag you in with her."

"You helped me out of there,” he replies, heated.

"No," I whisper, more to myself than to him. "You helped yourself."

But I don't interfere. I spent what I imagine were centuries trying to extract people from these waters. My inability to physically interact probably saved me from drowning alongside them. I step forward, watchful. I trust Dante's sense of self-preservation, but if he pulled himself out of his own drowning only to join someone else's, I'm not certain I would recover from it.

He throws the branch out to the woman. "Here, take hold!"

She thrashes uselessly. Strikes the log with such fervor that it jostles Dante backward. "Grab on, damn it," he shouts.

She does.

My lips part in surprise. I hadn't expected that much. Dante heaves her forward, and she grasps at him with hungry, desperate fingers.

"Dante," I warn—but a moment too late.

She catapults them both backward, pulls him in with her. He hits his knees in the water but perceives himself as strong enough to stop the momentum of her weight dragging him down.

I rush to the water's edge, but helplessness clings to my body harder than the woman ripping her nails into his shirt.

I cannot interact with this world. If I could, I would of course have fruitlessly helped him haul that branch to the water and attempt to save someone drowning in herself, even if only to make him happy.

“Shed your shirt," I shout.

Dante grabs the fabric between the woman's frantic, clawing hands and rips. Buttons scatter. Fabric tears. With a thrust, he pushes himself back up beside me, breathing hard, staring down at the woman thrashing with the branch and his ruined shirt now clutched in her embrace. She's not using them to stay afloat, though, more like she’s engaging them in a silent ballet of destruction, bent on annihilating both.

"What," Dante says through heaving breaths, "is wrong with her?"

"She's drowning in a loop, Dante."

"Is that... is that what I was like?"

I shake my head. "No. You were much more... contained. But drowning just the same."

He waves his hands toward her in a desperate sort of gesture, and I try very hard not to think about the firm curves of his arms, the sculpted abdomen that would make Apollo himself envious. I've never felt attracted to one of the souls I've guided. Admired beauty, certainly. But nothing like this.

"How do we help her?" he asks, voice scraping his throat in a way that's only possible because he's imagining himself hoarse.

"We cannot. Not at this point. She must break the loop on her own. She's crafted a fantasy, and she's more attached to the story than the reality, more attached to her denial than to facing her own pain and complicity."

"My god," Dante says again, his eyes flat with horror as he stares at the woman still thrashing in the water.

She continues her fruitless fight for a few more moments, then slips beneath the mud-dark surface. A few bubbles pop in her wake. The water stills.

"Is she—is she gone?" Dante asks.

"No. She'll reemerge at some point. Then drown again. And repeat until she breaks her loop."

The sharp lines of his face are etched like stained glass, unyielding as he stares unblinking into the swamp. "And if she never breaks it?"