She didn’t finesse the question. She just asked it outright, standing on his threshold with all his silver instruments pointing at her. “What would it take for you to let me borrow your boat?”
He looked up from his notebook, where he’d been scribbling in the margins of the page with his tracing of the Fount piece. Slowly, he closed it. “To get to the Fount?”
“No, to host a party.” She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Raihan, to get to the Fount.”
His mouth twisted to the side. “That would be less borrowing and more taking indefinitely.”
Lore shifted on her feet. The rest of the thought hungunspoken—if she took the boat, it meant no more ferrying prisoners from the Isles. “This is bigger than that,” she said, as if he’d spoken it aloud. “This is…” She made a hoarse noise, not a laugh, and echoed Dani. “This is saving the world.”
Raihan just looked at her, mouth still pursed, trying to fit something into language. “Is that what you think repairing the Fount will do? Save the world?”
She gave him a withering look. “I think it’d be a start.”
“And what if I think the world is beyond saving?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a nihilist, too. I can only take one.”
“Not a nihilist,” Raihan said. “But I am of the opinion that the world can only be as good as the people in it.”
Lore slumped into the chair by his piles of books. “The world is fucking doomed, then.”
“Now you sound like the nihilist.” Raihan poked at one of the sliver instruments, sending it spinning before it settled on Lore again. “Taking away a material good—a means for people to escape the mines—for something that might eventually be good, someday, seems like boarding up a well because you’re hoping for rain.”
Lore didn’t have a rebuttal. She chewed her lip.
“You should fix the Fount,” Raihan said after a stretch of quiet. “And maybe that will start the process of making things better. But as long as there are people on the earth,fixing thingswon’t be a onetime occurrence.”
“So it’s pointless.”
“Not pointless. But harder than fixing a Fount.” He shrugged. “There are no absolutes, Lore. We won’t ever reach some worldwide utopia where nothing bad happens again. Living is work. Goodness is work.”
He was right, but she didn’t like it. Didn’t like the idea that she couldn’t somehow fix everything and keep it that way. What was the point of power, if the universe couldn’t be forced intogoodness? If there wasn’t a terminus that could be reached and maintained, damn the costs?
In the back of her mind, that place where Nyxara used to be, something nudged. The ghost of a glimmer, there and then gone.
“You can take the boat, if you want it,” Raihan said finally. “It’s still at the dock.”
Lore looked up from the floor. “Come with us.”
It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment to ask, but now that she did, it made perfect sense. She could prove to Raihan that she could make the world be good. She needed someone to think she was capable of fixing something, that she alone could force the world to be what she wanted. She needed someone to believe in her.
A glimmer in her mind again, like sunlight cutting through clouds.
He looked at her with his brows drawn down, shadows cast over the planes of his face. The moment hung, expectant, a convict in the seconds before the gallows rope hauled them skyward.
“No,” Raihan said.
She threw up her hands. “Why not? You’re too smart to spend the rest of your life rotting away here. You said yourself that there’s no way to safely navigate to the mainland; the Mount-finders only help on the Isles. So you’re just going to stay here and breathe in ash until you die?”
“Everyone in the Harbor relies on one another. I have shifts to till the fields, turns to pull in the fish nets. I can’t just abandon them.” He paused, resting his elbows on the table. “And it doesn’t… feel right, to leave. It feels like my place is here. For whatever comes next.”
Lore didn’t press him further. Intuition, that bitch, driving them all. Part of her wondered if Raihan felt like she had at the beginning of the summer, strung along on star-lines, played like a puppet by something bigger. She doubted he would tell her, even if she asked.
She also doubted she would see him again. Dani wouldn’t want to linger, and Lore didn’t, either. She wouldn’t be able to fix the Fount until Alie and Gabe somehow found the other pieces, and somehow managed to get them to the Golden Mount. But surely, if she’d come this far, they would, too. Surely their puppet strings would play them in the right direction, bound like insects in spiderwebs.
“Thank you,” she said. “For helping me.”
Raihan nodded. He knew this was goodbye, too. “Good luck, Lore.”
