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“There are two thrones on that dais. You and me, Alina, the way it should be.”
“I will never love you, Aleksander, not even if we were the last two people on this earth.”
She turns away before the raw hurt on his face can make her feel guilty.
She ignores the little voice in the back of her mind telling her that her words are false.
She firmly shuts the door on the tether between them.
Three hundred years later
People have preached about the apocalypse coming since before Alina was born.
Over the centuries, the warnings have varied.
The wrath of the saints. The dead walking. Anarchy. A natural disaster. A meteor strike. A deadly virus. Robots rising up. Nuclear war.
Countless prophets have given countless apocalyptic prophecies.
In the end, it seems they’re all wrong. Possibly, anyway.
The apocalypse comes, but no one knows what causes it.
People just die. Quickly, and in great numbers. With no discernible sickness or wounds. A week is all it takes for the population of earth to be reduced to single digits.
Two people, in fact.
Although it takes Alina a while to realise that.
Alina is in Shu Han when it happens.
These days, she drifts, never really putting down roots.
It’s tricky, trying to stay in one place for more than fifteen years. Easier in a city, where the population is high and she can jump around jobs. Even easier when she can let people assume plastic surgery keeps her young. But it’s still difficult, trying to keep up with the appropriate identity cards and manage in an increasingly technological society.
She finds it hard to make friends, knowing she’ll eventually lose them – she’ll either have to cut off contact before they realise she’s not ageing, or she’ll lose them to death.
Sometimes, she thinks of Aleksander, and how it might not feel so lonely if she had someone she could truly be herself with. But she never lets herself think of him for too long – it stirs up unpleasant emotions inside her.
She is in Shu Han, where she has been living in an apartment in Ahmrat Jen for the last three years.
It’s a Saturday and she’s on a tour of the Taban Palace. She’s been on more than a dozen such tours in her lifetime, since the empresses of her younger days made way for parliaments and prime ministers (although seven of those prime ministers have been female descendants of the royal family).
When someone falls to the ground, Alina doesn’t think much of it apart from general, fleeting concern. It’s a hot day and it isn’t uncommon for people to faint on tours of the long, winding corridors of the palace.
Another person falls, though. And another. And another.
Alarm ripples through the crowd. People shout for someone to call an ambulance. A woman yells about chemical warfare and a man about the end times coming.
The screaming starts and it doesn’t stop until there’s no one left alive at the palace.
----------
The news is full of it for a day, confirming that this is a worldwide phenomenon.
Boats sinking. Planes falling out of the sky. Cars and trains crashing. Catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.
There are warnings and panic, no comfort to be given.
Then, the remaining newsroom staff fall victim too and there is nothing but silence on the television and radio.
Alina packs a rucksack.
She is practical for the most part, well-practiced in having to travel light and leave at short notice.
The only sentimental items she keeps are a few remnants from her early life that she has managed to hold on to through the centuries. A wooden ring her papa had carved for her mama. A well-worn book of Shu fairytales that mama had brought from Shu Han. A gold and sapphire pendant that Genya had given her. The smooth, durast-made onyx and gold ring that had been wrapped in a scrap of silk and addressed to her, found amongst Aleksander’s possessions in the Little Palace when he vanished after she destroyed the Fold, and which she had been unable to part with despite her better judgement.
There is no need to turn off the lights or check the oven isn’t on.
The power grid failed a few hours ago and she doubts it will ever be fixed.
Alina has lived for a long time with modern luxuries. Thankfully, though, she still remembers how to do without them.
A good thing too, because life is never going to be the same again.
As she travels through Shu Han towards the Ravkan border, Alina mostly sees bodies.
Occasionally, she comes across small groups of survivors, although never more than half a dozen at a time.
The first group, she stays with for an hour before they too succumb to whatever horror is sweeping the world.
The second group are hostile immediately. They wield knives and baseball bats and guns. Alina summons instinctively to protect herself and then flees. When she looks back, she sees only bodies.
After that, she keeps well away from other survivors.
She makes her way across Shu Han in a succession of cars, driving each until they run out of petrol, navigating using built-in SatNavs when the cars have then, or the worn road atlas she finds in one of the cars.
Alina is hardy. She has learned this over the years. Grisha don’t generally get ill, unless it’s Wasting Sickness, but it’s more than that – she heals quicker from injuries, has three times survived a car crash that probably should have killed her, and can last in frigid waters far longer than a normal human should.
This, she supposes, is how Aleksander was able to live so long, despite the many wars he participated in and the dangers that the Grisha faced.
By the time she reaches the Shu Han-Ravkan border, she hasn’t seen another survivor in two days.
Time passes.
Sometimes, Alina wonders if humanity has survived elsewhere in the world.
She stays within the combined borders of Ravka, Shu Han and Fjerda, unwilling to risk crossing the True Sea alone. She has not seen another human in years.
Whatever it was that destroyed humanity, it at least seems to have bypassed animals, for the most part.
Some species start to die off, while others thrive.
Alina keeps a safe, wary distance from the predators. Although she can wield her light with brutal efficiency, she prefers not to start a fight.
It’s a good thing that her Small Science remains as strong as ever. She is never cold with her light to warm her. And the Cut makes an effective hunting tool considering she’s never been very good with normal weapons.
More and more often, she thinks of Aleksander, surely the only other person who could survive a catastrophe like this.
Maybe we’re both cockroaches, she thinks, still here in spite of the apocalypse.
Alina stubbornly tells herself that she’s just curious about his fate. She doesn’t care about him at all.
“I will never love you, Aleksander, not even if we were the last two people on this earth.”
She meant it. Really.
Over the years, Alina has learned the sounds of the animals that roam near the spots she chooses to make her home.
This noise is nothing like any of them.
It sounds like … like footsteps … like heavy boots on the ground.
There is an orb of light glowing in her hands in a matter of seconds.
She watched the zombie movies everyone else did, back when humanity still thrived. She might never have seen the dead walking before now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a possibility.
When a figure steps into view, however, Alina’s light vanishes in a moment.
For a few seconds, they simply stare at each other, eyes wide.
“Aleksander,” she whispers, and she suddenly realises that there are tears dripping down her cheeks.
It has been over three centuries since she has seen him.
It has been nearly a decade and a half – as far as she can tell – since she has seen any human.
All this time, if anyone had ever asked, Alina would have maintained that she hated the man in front of her, that she would never forgive him for what he had done.
Now, though, looking at him, she realises something.
She doesn’t hate him.
Maybe she never really had.
----------
His hair is longer and his beard thicker. He isn’t wearing a kefta anymore, although his outfit is – naturally – all black, with a few patches that might be the remnants of corecloth.
In all other respects, his appearance is the same as it was when she saw him last, on the sands where the Shadow Fold once stood.
Dark eyes intensely focused on her. Nasty scars criss-crossing his face. Painfully handsome.
“Alina.”
“I …”
She trails off, entirely lost for words.
Over the centuries, she’s imagined so many things she would say to him if she ever met him again. Angry rants. Spiteful reminders of all they could have had if things had been different. Weeping remonstrations. Indifferent dismissals.
“It’s been a very long time, my Alina.”
Not yours, she thinks instinctively. Except, that’s not completely true. She’s always been his Alina, just like he’s always been her Aleksander.
She opens her mouth, trying to think of something to say.
All that comes out is his name, “Aleksander.”
His face contorts, an almost pained hope there.
“Say it again,” he whispers, voice suddenly hoarse, “please, say my name again.”
“Aleksander.”
He strides forward and she doesn’t stop him as he cups her face in his hands.
She should push him away, she thinks. And yet, she doesn’t. She lets him duck his head and press his forehead to hers, holding her like she is the most precious thing in the world.
She hasn’t been touched or heard a human voice in so long.
Even the lightest brush of his fingers on her face sends sparks through her body that have nothing to do with their Small Science.
“Alina,” he murmurs her name against her skin, “AlinaAlinaAlina.”
She’s still crying. And so, she realises, is he.
----------
“You never opened the tether back up.”
Once, that sentence would have been accusatory and angry and hurt. Now, it’s just tired and sad.
“I was scared,” she says.
It’s easy now to be honest. It’s just the two of them and everything that came before somehow seems petty. She wishes she’d realised that earlier.
“I knew that if I opened that door, even just a little bit, then you’d worm your way back into my life.”
And back into my heart, she adds in the privacy of her own mind.
Attraction had never been their problem. They were tied together by the Making, something far beyond mortal concerns. And they had both wanted what was best for Grisha and Ravka – it’s just that their ideas about how to achieve that were very different.
Over the centuries, Alina has come to realise that Aleksander was right about a lot of things. Not necessarily with how he handled her – the incident with Morozov’s Stag still haunts her even now – but with a lot of other things. She’s older now, can understand him better.
“But you didn’t try, even after everyone …”
“Died,” she says, flat and matter-of-fact, “everyone died, Aleksander. Everyone but us.”
“I never imagined it would end this way,” he tells her, subdued now, “whenever I pictured eternity, it was never like this.”
“Neither did I,” she admits, “there were so many films, books, tv shows and theories about the apocalypse, but I never really thought …”
“Is there really no one else?” she asks after a few moments of silence.
“None that I’ve seen,” he tells her, “they just died, all of them, within a week. I don’t know what happened across the True Sea, but I can’t imagine something of this scale was limited to this continent.”
“Where were you?” she asks.
She’s suddenly desperate for another survivor story, to hear his account of the chaotic first days, to know what he’s been doing since the world fell apart.
“I was in Keramzin, actually,” he admits, pale cheeks ever so slightly flushed with a faint blush.
“Keramzin?”
“I visit, periodically. I have done ever since you destroyed the Fold. I suppose … I suppose I thought you might go back there one day.”
She never has. She’s always thought that if she did, she’d simply break down and never get up again.
“Where have you been since?” she asks, not wanting to talk about Keramzin anymore.
His answer, as it turns out, is similar to the one she gives when he poses the same question. They’ve both travelled throughout Ravka, Shu Han and Fjerda over the years, but they’ve not run into each other – that’s not a surprise, really, considering the size of the countries and their limited transportation options.
“We might have wandered for centuries without realising there was someone else out there,” Aleksander muses.
Alina agrees. Honestly, it’s something of a miracle that it only took a decade and a half for one of them to come across the other. The work of the Making, perhaps, their tether pulling them together like the red thread of fate her mama had talked about.
“And before?” she asks him, once they’ve finished talking about a world with no other humans in it and how they’ve fared without technology and all they’ve learned about the way flora and fauna have begun to thrive or fail with the loss of humanity, “I kept an eye on the news, all those centuries. I always expected to see you running for president under an assumed name one day, or at least as an advisor, ruling from behind the scenes.”
“I thought about it frequently,” he admits, “once people began to forget my face and it would have been possible to take a public role. I certainly would have done better than some of the fools that Ravka gave power to. And it was tempting, to see if making a bid for power would draw you out, force you to speak to me.”
It’s an interesting thought, whether she would have confronted him, suspicious of his motives. Or would the idea of seeing him in person been too difficult?
“In the end, though,” he sighs, “I stayed away. I watched them make mistake after mistake after mistake.”
“To err is human,” she reminds him, “and they found their way, for the most part.”
“And what was the point, in the end?” his expression is bleak now, his eyes showing his age and sorrow, “they’re all gone. Only you and I remain. Saints, perhaps Baghra was right all those years ago, when she said trying to help was pointless.”
“No,” Alina shakes her head vehemently, “no, she was wrong about that. You did terrible things, Aleksander, but wonderful ones too. You’re the reason the Grisha had the Little Palace, the reason they weren’t driven to extinction by ignorance and fear.”
“But you still left,” he says, voice tinged with bitterness, “you never spoke to me again.”
“I … I was angry and hurt.”
“Did you mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“You said you would never love me, even if we were the last two people on earth.”
“I never actually thought we would be.”
“But you didn’t reach out through the tether, not for three hundred years. And not after everyone died.”
“I guess I was scared. I knew what would happen if I spoke to you.”
“What?” he asks, voice soft, “what would have happened?”
Alina reaches out tentatively to touch his cheek, fingers stroking the angry scars on his face.
He closes his eyes, exhales, his expression almost pained and yet full of hope.
“I would have remembered everything I felt when we were together,” she whispers, “I would have felt that connection between us and that sense of rightness when we touch.”
“Alina, please.”
Alina has kissed too many people to keep track of over the centuries.
But no kiss ever compared to those she had shared in the Little Palace with Aleksander
When she slants her lips over his, it feels like coming home, like finding her other half after a long, lonely wait.
All their history melts away in that moment. It’s still there, of course, and she won’t forget what passed between them so long ago – what he did, and what she did – but right now it just doesn’t matter.
“I will never love you, Aleksander, not even if we were the last two people on this earth.”
As it turns out, Alina eventually goes back on her word.
They wander through what was once Os Alta, hand in hand, making their way towards the Little Palace – overgrown and derelict in places but still standing.
It seems like the perfect place for them to start their new life together.