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feel the cold, up out of my bones, sharp in my heart) but he’s just pinning the corner of the phone so he can spin it around. “Jacob definitely wouldn’t make the call,” he says, teasing, a really harsh kind of tease, but it’s about me, about how I hurt, which feels good.
    â€œNeither would Mary,” I say, which is, all in all, my counterargument, my stanchion, my sole refuge. If something’s out to conquer us, well, the conquest isn’t done. Something good remains. Mary’s still here. She hasn’t gone yet—whether you take all this as a thought experiment or not.
    â€œWho’s Mary?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow: you have friends ?
    â€œStick around,” I say, “and I’ll tell you.”
    Right then I get one more glimpse past the armor: he’s frustrated, he’s glad, he’s all knotted up, because I won’t go first, and whatever going first means, he doesn’t want to leave me to go second. He wouldn’t have to care anymore, of course. But he still cares. That’s how compassion works.
    If I had a purpose here, well, I suppose it’s done.
    â€œYou’re taking a break from work?” He closes the phone and pushes it back to me. “What’s up with that? Can I help?”
    When I go to take the phone he makes a little gesture, like he wants to take my hand, and I make a little gesture like I want him to—and between the two of us, well, we manage.
    *   *   *
    I still have the number, of course. Maybe you worry that it works. Maybe you’re afraid I’ll use it, or that Nico will, when things go bad. Things do so often go bad.
    You won’t know if I use it, of course, because then I’ll never have told you this story, and you’ll never have read it. But that’s a comfort, isn’t it? That’s enough.
    The story’s still here. We go on.

 
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    Copyright © 2015 by Seth Dickinson
    Art copyright © 2015 by Wesley Allsbrook