“Why, exactly?”
I stared at him, not wanting to speak all the thoughts racing through my head. Because weknowthere’s a scent. We just don’t want others to smell it. It’s just part of the package and we deal with it, but we still try to be as hygienic as possible. Had I not been? Taking a moment, I breathed in deeply to calm myself. “It’s difficult to explain.”
It was the vague way of saying I was embarrassed. Sure, periods were normal. Yes, it was completely natural to have one. But something about it just made me feel icky knowing Damon could smell it.
“Periods are natural,” he said, echoing my exact thoughts. “It’s okay. It’s just a little blood.”
I blinked rapidly. “Are you trying to mansplain a period to me?”
He chuckled. “I suppose I am. Look, I’m not trying to be a dick here. How about I stop talking and wait until you tell me what I should do.”
“You sound like Atlas right now,” I said, crossing my arms and suddenly feeling a longing for my family. Atlas was always the voice of reason. The calmest of them all. Maybe it came with being the firstborn. I don’t know. But something about Damon’s demeanor and the composure of his voice reminded me of my big brother. Realizing that, I lost some of the stiffness in my shoulders.
He pressed his lips into a smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” I looked at him curious and he answered, “Sadie told me about your family, when she wasn’t griping at me for existing.”
“Ah.” I sniffed, feeling awkward and not knowing what to say next. “It is a compliment, I guess. He’s a born leader. Level-headed.” I smiled, tilting my head to Damon. “Very much not a dick, most of the time. Not to me at least.”
“Sorry I made you uncomfortable. We don’t have to talk about it. Forget I said anything.” I waved him off, letting him know it was fine. We packed our things up in silence and cleaned up the mess we made. “Can we circle back to what you said, though?”
I groaned. “Which part and why?”
“You said you could track time.” Damon put his hands on his hips and craned his neck back, looking at the sky. The two moons glowed, beaming down on us and illuminating the landscape of Evorsus. He then looked down, pointing to a bush of the blue flowers we followed. “I haven’t been able to. We’re headed north. I know that much. But I haven’t been able to find a way to track time at all. We eat and sleep based on our body’s needs and instincts here, and the best I’d hoped for is that we were following some type of pattern similar to life in our realms. But time moves so differently here, that was the best I have come up with and it’s nowhere close to your estimate.”
My hackles rose instantly in slight defense. “Are you saying you think I’m wrong?”
He held his hands up in surrender. “The opposite actually. I trust your ability to read your own body better than my ability to guess how much time has passed based on how much I sleep and eat.”
“Sorry. I made an assumption there.” I huffed a laugh and started to head north. Despite being able to dream walk with Vareck, wherever he was in Eversus, we weren’t sleeping at the same time. I hadn’t seen him, and my heart ached because of it. I was tired all the time, but sleeping all the time was also counterproductive. “How many days did you think had passed? I don’t think I even paid attention to that. Hunger has just been weird. I know I need to eat, but I just don’t want to.”
“Might have something to do with the quality of our meals.” He sighed, walking beside me. “I thought we’d been here about two weeks.”
“I had to ask Corvo for pads and some wet wipes about a week ago, give or take,” I mumbled. “I had a few in my bag, but my emergency backpack wasn’t meant for a long-term hiking trip through the jungles of hell.”
“He brought them to you? I’m shocked.”
I snorted, thinking about Corvo’s reaction when I asked. “Well, he wasn’t thrilled about it. He told me he wasn’t a general store. Or a pharmacy. And then he brought me pads that may as well have been pillows. So I had to beg him, open a can of tuna he brought me, and then he finally gave me what I asked for.” I pointed at Damon’s pants. “He brought us clean underwear. It’s not that shocking, is it?”
“Cats are very transactional. Especially Corvo.”
“Well, he was adamant that he wasn’t a trash can either so there was no transaction I could make there for garbagedisposal. I’ve just been burying my trash whenever I have to stop.”
“We do what we have to do here.”
Yeah, we did. Still felt like littering which is an asshole thing to do but I wasn’t carrying around used feminine products and food wrappers.
A thought occurred to me. “Do you think it's been three weeks for them as well?”
“For Sadie and Vareck?” Damon asked.
“You and Corvo said that time isn't the same here on each side. So three weeks have passed here, that's three weeks in our realms based on my body’s cycle. But time moves differently in Eversus from Evorsus. Do you think that they've been there for three weeks too?”
“I think your question can't be answered,” Damin sighed, not in annoyance but at the impossibility of it all. “The way that you're describing time is in reference to how time passes in Faerie or on Earth. That time is linear. Eversus and Evorsus don't move with the rules or laws of time and space that we're accustomed to. If three weeks’ time have passed for us, then three weeks Earth and Faerie time have also passed for Vareck and Sadie. How they’ve spent it and what it feels like is probably very different from us. I wouldn’t be surprised if to them it’s only been a few days, or even months. It’s impossible to know without talking to them.”
“This place really is hell in every which way,” I grumbled.
“It’s possible that’s why you haven’t been able to sync up when you’re dreaming,” Damon said a few minutes later. “We know the realm was trying to separate you from him, and it’s also very likely to be interfering with whatever magic lets you share dreams. If you’re on radically different timelines, one person would be dreaming for the equivalent of minutes to the other person’s hours.”
“That’s better than the alternative I suppose.”
