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Palamedes opened his eyes, staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom. The gauzy curtains around his bed hung limp and miserable, an insipid shade of mint.
He should ask Prot to take those down, he thought, and then he sat up with a start.
Dulcinea laughed from the bedside chair, her form partially obscured by the curtains. "How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Confused," he said, turning to drink in her features, however indistinct. "Am I dead?"
"'Souls are permeable. When they rub up against each other, they contaminate each other.' Sound familiar?"
"Vaguely, yes," Palamedes agreed. He reached out to move the curtains aside; when he did, the chair was empty.
He frowned, paced around the room. Camilla paced alongside him, her footsteps precise. "This isn't real, Warden," she said.
"To the contrary," Palamedes objected. "I believe it's happening inside our mind, to be clear. But that doesn't make it unreal. I believe it is very real, in fact."
Camilla put a hand on the doorknob. "There's only one issue with that hypothesis," she said. "Which is that neither of us still exist."
"That is an interesting wrinkle," Palamedes agreed. "Both of us should have been entirely dissolved into the new creation. Neither of us ought to be capable of independent thought."
Camilla opened the door. Beyond were the austere halls of Sixth House. "If we are, in fact, independent. You have talked to yourself before."
"Mental constructs, then? Which we are using to sort ourself out?" Palamedes considered. "And Dulcinea is?"
"You have imagined many a conversation with the Duchess, I believe," Camilla pointed out. "Don't scowl."
"I am not scowling," Palamedes scowled.
"If you are both mental constructs," Dulcinea said from behind them. Camilla whirled to look at her, and she disappeared.
Camilla turned back to face forward.
"and you are both real, then I can be a real mental construct too, right?" Dulcinea finished.
"She has a point," Palamedes said. "Dulcinea, there's no need to be shy. What Camilla knows, I know."
"Not my rules, I'm afraid," Dulcie said. "I'm just a guest here."
"I would like you to move in," Palamedes offered. "If that's an option on the table."
Dulcinea's laugh was like wings. "And I would have liked to move in with you." There was something impossibly sad in her voice, so sad that Palamedes turned to comfort her—but she was gone.
Camilla put a hand on his arm, and he turned back to face forwards. "We ought to explore this place," she said. "Look for clues. Don't you think, Warden?"
"I suppose so," Palamedes agreed. "If Dulcinea doesn't mind following?"
"I would follow you anywhere," Dulcie said.
There were many doors in the long Sixth House hallway, but Camilla walked past each of them with unerring purpose. Palamedes followed in her footsteps without a thought. The hall ended, as the ringed Sixth halls so rarely did, in a single door. Not a Sixth door, but an old and battered thing whose paint was more chip than color. The bottom right of it was dented from Nona's head; Palamedes's eyes sought the spot on the wall where there ought to be a similar dent from Pyrrha's equally frustrated fist.
"You should have kissed her," Dulcinea put in wickedly.
Camilla stood restlessly, one hand on the doorknob.
"I wanted to do it right," Palamedes said. "Simply, without all of the complications."
"It was never going to be simple. Very little ever is," Dulcinea said. "But I can't say I blame you."
"Camilla?" Palamedes prompted.
She worried the knob with a thumb. "We would have only broken her heart, in the end."
"I think we did anyway," Palamedes admitted.
"There was no other way out," Camilla said, and opened the door.
Beyond were the great arching tunnels beneath New Rho. The ceilings were baffled with recesses that ate sound; the ground was often inexplicably damp. Camilla felt eyes on them, though she did not turn around.
"And to think. Even a perfect soul, a perfect Lyctor, still has regrets," Palamedes concluded.
"You had said that we were but mental constructs, a few minutes ago," Dulcinea said. "What did you mean by that?"
"Psychology is not my specialty," Palamedes admitted, and Camilla stifled a laugh like leaves beside him, "but a person might construct roles, personas, for them to inhabit. To help them work through something."
"Are they not imaginary?"
"As imaginary as money, as the Empire, as science. You are quite put out by the idea that you may not be real, Dulcinea."
"Can you blame a girl?" She laughed, kindly, like sand. "But it is not just that. It is—what did I say earlier? 'Souls contaminate each other?'"
"I struggle to think of you as contamination, my dear."
"Then explain me!" Dulcinea insisted.
"I would have liked to share this sort of intimacy with you," Palamedes said, taking Camilla's hand in poor demonstration of his meaning. "We used to be quite intimate, while we were alive, but never as close as we might have liked."
There was a sound like the rustling of leaves, a sound that neither Palamedes nor Camilla had heard before leaving the Sixth. "It is easy to wish for intimacy. Easier, still, when you think only of the first time that you will wipe vomit from someone else's lips and awake to sit with them tormented in the dead of night." Dulcinea made a sad sort of noise, and went on. "I think you two might have done it, despite everything. But—oh, how does it go. 'Do not stand at my grave and weep?'"
It was Camilla who turned, eyes closed, grip tight on Palamedes's hand. "I would have liked to sit with you, Duchess."
"Oh, please," Dulcinea said, deeply flattered. "Call me Dulcie."
Camilla's lips found Dulcinea's in the dark. It was a long kiss, long and sweet and yearning.
Palamedes could feel the ghost of it on his lips when Dulcinea put her small hands on each of their shoulders.
"I don't think I am Dulcinea," the ghost said, her words like ashes. "I think I am something else. When you think of another, you cannot imagine them in their totality, in their true complexity; to know another like that would be—well, you both know what it would be! And we never got there. But there is a ghost of a person in what you do think of, in your memory of a person. Your imaginings of them.
"That imprint, that ghost, is as much a part of you as it is of them. It is a thing wrought of the space between you. A conversation, if you'll allow me yet another reference. An imperfect ghost, of course, a misattributed quotation, warped through the lens of memory. But nevertheless, an imprint of a soul."
With that, she kissed them each once on the cheek. "But neither of you are strangers to tragedy. And you both know how this ends."
"So we do," Palamedes said. And as one, he and Camilla opened their eyes and saw the cool grey ubiquitous to space-faring vessels. They held themself, and smiled as the tears rolled down their cheeks.
They could not quite remember what they'd dreamed, but they knew it was beautiful.