Page 69 of Where Light Cannot Follow

She's searching. Closing in. And for a specific purpose.

She searches on his behalf.

We have to cross this river. We can't stall here. I hadn't noticed during our descent, but the valley has narrowed around us, the only path back up through a single passage. If Constance planned to corner us, she couldn't have chosen better ground.

She'd known. She'd known we were heading this direction and waited for us to reach the bottleneck.

Her chilling laughter echoes through my mind again, triumphant and patient.

Virgil frowns, reacting to something in his own head, perhaps. Her voice in his mind as well.

"He would not look kindly upon me ferrying this soul." Charon switches back to English, speaking like a creaking door, each word reluctant. “All know he hunts for you both.”

Virgil glances back at me, desperation flickering in his gaze. "This was foolish," he whispers. "We should turn back, but⁠—"

He looks up the path.

No one is there. Yet.

But I understand what his silence implies. Constance waits above, ready to catch us like fish driven into a net.

A realization settles on me. Perhaps I regret the life I lived. But Virgil said no experience is truly wasted. And there is one skill I've mastered.

"If you had no interest in negotiating," I say, stepping toward Charon, "you wouldn't still be talking."

He turns that bone-and-shredded-flesh face toward me. I force myself not to react.

I continue, “You're drawing out this exchange to increase the perceived value. Standard tactic. We're already committed, and you know we need to cross. Name your price."

Charon goes very still.

For a moment, I think I've misjudged him. Mistaken silence for calculation, calculation for interest. The river laps against the hull of his boat, thick and sluggish, carrying bone fragments and debris past us like refuse in a current that has never known mercy.

Then the ferryman laughs.

"A unique soul, this one." He addresses Virgil, not me, though his empty sockets seem fixed in my direction. "Wherever didst thou find him?"

"Our time is limited," Virgil states.

"An interesting concept, time." Charon wraps those ragged, mostly-bone fingers around his oar. "Very well. Thou knowest what I desire."

"No." It's the first time I've heard Virgil sound entirely immovable. Whatever price Charon asks must be tremendous.

"Then ‘tis my reply as well."

Virgil's jaw tightens. His fingers curl into fists at his sides. I lean toward him and lower my voice. "What does he want?"

Virgil stares down at the pebble-littered mud beneath his stained sneakers. When he speaks, his voice is barely audible. "He wants Musa."

"I thought Musa wasn't here."

"He wants a memory of him." Virgil lifts his face, and the expression there is a knife slipped between ribs, precise and devastating. "My few good memories are all I have to survive this place, Dante. They're all that keeps me—" He stops. Shakes his head. "I cannot."

"I understand," I say.

Because I do. If I'd spent two thousand years in this decay and possessed only a handful of recollections filled with warmth and light, I would clutch them like a drowning man grips driftwood. He'd told me himself that he longed to live again solely to gather more memories, to carry more light into this darkness.

I won't ask him to surrender what little light remains.