The Game of Love and Death (30 page)

H
ENRY
and James arrived at the airstrip as Flora boarded her plane with someone who looked exactly like Henry. Death had stolen his guise, from his rampant curls to his scuffed shoes. Henry yelled after her, but she did not hear. The pair climbed into the plane. Henry ran toward them, holding a hand up against his face to block the wind from the propellers. But Flora did not see him over her tail wheel, and soon, the plane was airborne, growing ever smaller as it climbed.

Henry stopped running. He turned to look back at James. Words would not come. His body felt scorched from the inside out. Exhausted. Wasted. As though it would never quite be right again.

“Why couldn’t it have been me?” he said at last.

He stood there, staring at James, whose face was tipped toward the sky as his hands hung at his sides. After what seemed like an age, James turned to Henry. He shrugged. Then he disappeared.

Henry stood under the perfect blue sky, alone.

When he had most needed Love, Love had forsaken him. The feeling struck him like a cold wave. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and did not know how he could go on living in the face of it. He fell to his knees, not even noticing when the gravel tore his pants and cut his flesh.

Then he stood and looked to the sky. He didn’t want to watch, but he could not bear for Flora to leave the world unseen. And so he waited. For what, he did not know. But he trusted this instinct, and he sent his love outward and upward, so that she might know he was there, answering her call, unto the end.

O
NE
moment, the figure next to her in the plane was Henry. The next moment, it was not, and suddenly, Henry’s strange behavior at the airfield made sense. It wasn’t that he was angry with her, or fearing the flight. Rather, it wasn’t Henry at all.

The figure sitting next to her, a woman of indeterminate age, was someone she’d never met. But Flora knew her. She knew her deep in her bones.

This was the woman who’d worn Helen’s face. The one who’d chosen Flora for suffering when she was but a sleeping infant. The gloves this woman wore now, the ones Flora thought had been her mother’s — they had belonged to this woman, this monster, all along. They were a small thing, the gloves. But sometimes the smallest thing is everything. Flora had believed these gloves brought her closer to her mother, that in wearing them, she was being blessed by her mother’s touch.

Flora knew now this was nothing but a beautiful lie. The gloves hadn’t protected her. They’d kept her from feeling the world. They’d kept her from living.

In that moment that Death came for her, Flora understood all of this. She understood the lessons Death had to teach. And she understood one last, worst thing: that these lessons had come too late. Had she known in time, Flora would have chosen differently. This is true for almost every human. Death is the finest teacher. The finest, and the most cruel.

She reached for Flora, who twisted away. First, Flora had to land the plane. She’d surrender afterward. To crash the plane would take the lives of innocents, and this she could not do. She banked and began to descend, determined to cheat Death out of everything she could. But Death unbuckled herself and moved in.

“NO!” Flora twisted out of reach.
Be brave
, she told herself.
Land the plane.

They were speeding now toward the runway, faster than she would have liked. Her hands shook, and she wondered if there was any sort of deal she might make. She leaned as far away as she could while still keeping control of the yoke.

Death grabbed Flora’s hand. The horizon tilted. The color of the sky changed, and the plane itself seemed to shudder, as if it were a body losing its hold on life. Her fingers froze, and the heat drained out of the rest of her. In a way, she was glad. It numbed her to what she knew would follow.

Then something cracked inside of her. Her fingers and toes hummed. A different feeling crept up her arms, up her legs. It was as if she were being filled with some substance other than blood. The feeling reached her chest, her neck, her face. She could not move. There was a shock, a moment of confusion, a transformation. Her body was no longer her own, not entirely.

But it was strange. It did not feel like death, or at least what she’d expected death to feel like. Death was an absence, a coldness. It was the bodies of her parents being covered by snow, erased by whiteness.

This was heat. It was fullness. And once she gave in to it, it was strength.

Flora
, a voice said from somewhere so close it filled her skull.

The voice she had not yet heard, but knew nonetheless.

She responded.
What now?

That’s the thing
, Love said.
I can’t tell you the answer. I can only be here with you when you need me.

Flora wanted to laugh.
Where were you before? Haven’t I always needed you?

It’s true that I did not choose you as my player. I chose the best heart I could, knowing that Death was choosing the strongest player she could. But you were born of love, Flora. Your grandmother loved you. Your parents. Henry. In that way, I was with you all along.

The truth of it struck Flora like a blow.

There’s no time to waste on regrets
, Love said.
There is only time to live the way you would have, had you known the stakes from the start.

What difference will that make?
The plane’s engine cut out.

All of the difference. The only difference.

I don’t believe you!
They were falling now, and the view through the windshield had changed. No longer did she see the sky of day, but the one of night. A night without moon or stars, terrifying in its emptiness. Was she dead already?

I cannot make you believe in anything. The choice is yours. I am here. I am within you. You and I are one. What do you want your last moments to be?

Flora knew. As she understood what it took to lift a plane off the ground, as she understood how to bend her voice around notes to lift them off of a page of music and into someone’s heart, she knew what Love was asking of her. Not to act only if it would change the inevitable, but to act because it was the most courageous thing she could do.

The end, for everyone, was the same.

It was the choices made in the face of that, the ones made with a full heart, that could and did live on.

Flora opened herself fully to Love’s presence, feeling him turn her into everything she’d feared becoming: someone no longer in control, no longer protected, no longer safe. Light and heat rose from her chest. They filled the cockpit with flame and bathed the windshield with brightness.

Death turned, a look of astonishment on her face.

And then it was not the sky around them that had changed but the airplane too. They were no longer in it, bending toward earth.

The plane
, Flora asked.
What’s happened to it?

Death has stopped time. She’s taken us out of it. We’re elsewhere.

It took Flora a moment to take in what spread before them: a view of the world from a great distance. Galaxies unfurled like living watercolors, sending shades of blue and tan and green into the infinite black. She was unimaginably far from everything she knew.

Flora turned and saw Death as Love did. She saw the unrelenting loneliness of being the only one of her kind, the one everyone feared. She also saw the one who secretly loved every soul she devoured, keeping each one safe in the endless expanse of her memory. Flora saw her, and she could not hate her.

“Too late,” Death said. “The Game is over. You lost. She’s mine to take.”

Love’s thoughts rose through Flora’s mind like air currents.

May I?
He was asking if he might use her body to speak.

Yes.

“But she chose him. Moments too late, but she chose him. This victory should not make you feel proud.” Love’s voice felt like music in her mouth, and as strange as it was to have someone speak through her, she also loved the sound and feel of it. With so little time left, it was a final pleasure to cherish.

“I am entitled.” Death’s face was pale and her hands shook.

“That may be. But you can’t take her,” Love said. “Not as long as I’m here.”

“She’s mortal,” Death said. “I can wait.”

“You’re a terrible liar. Look at your hands.”

Anger twisted Death’s face, and black tears welled and fell. “What do you know of suffering? I am the most hated figure in existence. I bring nothing to humanity. All I do is take. I’m a curse. Unlike you, the thing I feed on despises me. And so I’ll take my solace. I will!”

She grabbed Flora by the throat.

Why aren’t you saving me?
Flora pushed the thought at Love urgently.

I can’t. I’ll only prolong your suffering.
We lost. And now, we must let go.
Flora felt him depart her body. Her flesh grew cold. She could not see what surrounded her, only faces, the faces of everyone she’d known and loved. She heard music and saw the blue sky. She felt hands on her body. Lips on her lips.
Henry.
These memories, especially of him, filled her mind, as vividly as photographs but in full color, enriched with the full depth of her senses. The dampness of sweat on his forehead in the heat of a performance. His hand on her back as they danced on a rooftop. The scent and touch and sound of him as she listened to his living, beating heart. Her life, every moment of it, was being pulled away as she watched.

Seeing it again, she understood what she’d failed to see earlier. Someday. Just as it wasn’t only something to be afraid of, it also was not something that existed only in the future. She and Henry had their someday moments. To see them all again, to hear them, to feel them without the blunting filter of fear: It was like nothing Flora could have imagined.

To die was not the worst thing that could have happened. The worst thing was that she’d almost missed the wonder of love.

She could not speak, not with Death’s hands crushing her throat, the source of her song. She sent Death a thought, one she hoped would be her final gift.
The Game means something only because we lose. That is your gift to humans. So thank you.

Death’s hands faltered. Flora took in a deep, painful breath. She swayed, and then Love was standing behind her, holding her up.

“If life didn’t end,” he said, “there would be no need for me. To choose love in the face of death is the ultimate act of courage. I am the joy, but you are the meaning. Together, we make humanity more than it otherwise might have been.”

Death stepped away. Her shoulders heaved, and tears striped her face. She removed an envelope from her pocket. She opened it and removed a piece of paper. When she destroyed it, both players would be lost.

“No,” Love said. “Please. Wait.”

“It’s not what you think,” Death said. “Trust me. It’s just that I cannot do this without you.” She pressed the paper against her heart. Two names, Flora’s and Henry’s, had been written on it.

Death handed the paper to Love. “Keep it safe for me. Keep them safe.”

“For how long?” he said.

Flora did not hear Death’s answer.

And then she was gone from that space, and back inside the airplane, and it was burning. The heat and the smoke were more than she could endure. She struggled to free herself. And then she felt two pairs of hands and arms closing around her. She’d given herself to love, and then she’d given herself to death, marveling that both forms of surrender felt like deliverance. These beings who carried her, immortal both, held her to the sky for one last flight, during which her skin was soothed and made whole by a wash of blue air, air as cool as the sea under a full moon.

She felt herself being laid on the ground.

She opened her eyes as an explosion filled her ears.

H
ENRY
reached Flora just as the Staggerwing blew up. He covered her body with his, stunned at what he’d seen: the plane dropping from the sky, slamming into the runway, tearing a smoking black streak into the earth. He’d run to save her, but she’d somehow been thrown free and had materialized on the gravel about twenty yards clear of the burning wreckage. He thought he might be hallucinating, but then she shifted beneath him, and he realized it did not matter what had happened or what he’d seen. All that mattered was she was there with him.

He looked down at her, beautiful and uninjured, as though she’d been made of something unbreakable.

She blinked and focused. “Henry?”

“Flora.” Her name was fire and music in his mouth. A weight flew from his shoulders, the one he’d felt on them his entire life. “The Game. Is it over?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat, and she brushed bits of glass from his shoulders, looking at him as if the world contained nothing else. He stood, and held out a hand. She took it, and they were side by side, watching the plane turn to ash. She shook her head at him and laughed. And then she was kissing him, the sort of kiss that they both might have thought existed only in the lyrics of songs.

The kiss: It felt like light rising through them. It was a memory and it was a promise, an enigma and a wonder. It was music. A conversation. A flight. A true story. And it was theirs.