I still had my sword in my hand as it pulled me down. I slashed wildly and caught the ghost in its core. I hit the ground on my tailbone and bounced back up, still swinging.

My sword met only air. I swung it several more times, desperately, blindly, before I slowed down enough to see there was nothing left to hit.

I looked over to see Sanya stalking after two ghosts yards back, the only two still standing. I caught up with him in time to take down the second one and turn to him with the full force of my bewilderment. “What the fuck?”

He looked grim and wouldn’t meet my eyes. He always looked grim and never particularly liked to make eye contact, but…

“Sanya, what happened? Where did all the other ghosts go?”

He shook his head.

“Was that it? Was that my zhiva?”

He put his hand on his chest. His coat and the layers under it were ripped, and I could just see the jagged edge of black on his skin.

“Shit. I hope you have myortva left, because I’m fresh out.”

He grimaced.

“If you don’t, I can go hunting. For regular animals, I mean. Last time, I got a squirrel to get me through the last day. Wow. I can’t believe you did that. If you don’t have myortva left, I’ll get you some. Shit, that was amazing. I wish I’d seen it. I didn’t see anything, just… Boom, all of a sudden I’m down. How much did you use? Was that just my zhiva, or was it your myortva, too? Could you separate them?”

He brushed his shoulder off and put his sword away. “Let’s go back to camp.”

“Okay, but you gotta tell me something.” We started walking, and he kept quiet, no matter how many questions I peppered him with. He was frustrating like that. Unless he was within a very narrow emotional range, he just didn’t talk, and unless I was within a very narrow emotional range, all I did was talk. We were fundamentally incompatible in that way.

When we got back to camp, he still wasn’t talking, but he stripped off his layers and started working on his chest, so I guess he still had energy left after all. “Do you still want me to go find a rabbit or something? One got my ankle, but my boot got most of it, so it’s not a problem.”

“No,” he said, and that was it.

So I checked the talismans and built the fire, even though it was barely noon. I didn’t have any energy to circulate and warm myself up. When I was done, Sanya was buttoning his torn coat back up. He motioned for me to come over.

“Let me see your ankle,” he said as I sat down.

“Aren’t you worried you’re going to pull zhiva out of me again? Of course, that might not be such a bad thing. You killed so many ghosts with it, and with energy to spare! Who knew my zhiva was so powerful? You’re a lot better with it than I am, though. I should just give it all to you.”

I peeled my boot and sock off and draped my foot across Sanya’s lap.

He gave me a look but just put his hands on my ankle and started to pull. There was not much there, just a faint, dotted black stripe where the tentacle had gone through my boot, but he pulled tentatively, less sure than he’d been before.

“I was just joking about pulling more zhiva from me. I don’t think you’ll do it again. But even if you did, I wouldn’t blame you. It didn’t hurt for long, and it really saved us back there! If that’s what happened. Is that what happened, Sanushka?”

“No.”

“No, that’s not what happened, or no to ‘Sanushka’?”

Slow exhale through the nose. “No to ‘Sanushka.’ It was your zhiva. It came out first. I couldn’t stop it.”

I leaned forward. “How did it feel?”

His brow knotted. “I don’t know. I didn’t like how it felt inside me, but coming out, it felt… powerful. Overwhelming. I knew it would be. I was scared of it. I didn’t know if I could handle it.”

“Sanya! Of course you could! You’re so strong. One day, I’m going to find something that I can do better than you. Other than talking. Who knows, maybe if you tried once in a while, you’d be better at that, too.”

“Why would I want to be better at something so useless?” His pull on my ankle had gotten stronger without me noticing until he took his hands away.

“You’re done already?” I said, leaning over to peer at my ankle.

“It took longer than usual,” he said. “Move your foot now.”

“But I’m so comfortable.” I gave him my most charming smile.

He picked up my leg and dropped it on the ground.

“No zhiva came out this time, huh?”

“No.”

“That’s good. But hey, Sanya, what you did back there was amazing. And it didn’t hurt you, and it didn’t hurt me. Much. What if… Okay, so I wanted to see if we could do something with the gnila from the ghosts, right, and maybe that won’t work out, but what if we could use this? Do you think you could do it on purpose, even if there’s no gnila in me at the same time? I wonder if you can pull zhiva from yourself. Do you think you need myortva to pull it out? You need myortva to pull out gnila from wounds but not to pull out more myortva from dead things.”

“Myortva wants to come out. It just needs somewhere to go.”

“Yeah, I know, and zhiva doesn’t. It wants to stay where it is. Someone must have tried this before. When we get back to the palace, we should go to the library and look. Or we could try it now.” I looked at him hopefully.

He stared down at his hands in his lap. “It’s dangerous, Iyu. Your zhiva is what keeps you alive.”

“As the name suggests.”

“You understand why that’s dangerous?”

“Yes, but if you only take a little, it’s fine, apparently. And it goes so much further than myortva! Based on what you did.”

Sanya looked up and out into the middle distance and rolled his shoulders back. He’d been hunching. Very uncharacteristic. I could tell he was steeling himself for something. Probably speaking more than two words together at a time. “There’s a finite amount of myortva you can take from a dead animal. There is a finite amount of zhiva contained in a living being, too. You may never get the zhiva I pulled from you back.”

“It didn’t hurt me.”

“You fainted.”

“I feel normal now.”

“Your myortva worked the same?”

“Yes. Why? Did it seem different?”

His lips pressed flat, and his hands pressed the tops of his thighs. He was having a hard time with this conversation. He’d tell me later, much later, that I was impossible to talk to when I had an idea. I wouldn’t let it go, like a dog with a bone. “I only took a little zhiva from you. You don’t think anything about making sparks to light a fire, but if you do that enough times, you run out of myortva all the same.”

“So you think I’d run out of zhiva and die.”

“Yes.”

“But what if that’s not how it works? What if it’s more like blood? Sure, if you lose it all at once, you’ll die, but you can lose a little plenty of times and be fine. Why wouldn’t it be like that? Of course, myortva is finite in a creature; the creature is dead, so it can’t heal. Whatever blood or energy is in its body, that’s all that’s left. But when we’re alive, we heal, and we regenerate. I could shave my head today, and my hair would grow back, but if you shaved my dead body, it wouldn’t.”

By the time I was done, he was looking at me, face calm. “It’s possible.”

I held my hand out. “Why don’t you try it? I felt bad at first, but then I felt better. Just like any injury, you know? I got better.”

He pushed my hand away. “It’s possible, but there is no reason to risk it now, when we don’t know for sure. There are reasons this is forbidden, and it’s not just because of what it can do to the person losing the zhiva.” He made eye contact with me. “We have to tell Yelena Artyomovich.”

I didn’t know what I was going to do until I was down on my knees in front of him, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t, Sanya. We don’t have to tell her. Don’t tell her.”

He nearly jumped out of his skin when I grabbed him, but he stilled himself and pried his hands out of mine. “You’re being ridiculous,” he said. I thought he would get up and leave then, like he usually did when I went too far, but he stayed there, looking down at me. “Why don’t you want to tell her? Don’t say because she’ll cut our hands off; she won’t. She will understand it was an accident.”

“Because she’ll tell me I can’t do it again,” I said miserably.

“And why is it so important to you to do it again?”

I sat back on my heels and looked around, as though there might be some explanation around the campsite, something that might make him change his mind. I couldn’t articulate it myself then. I had not yet seen the faces of the specters that haunted me, that drove me to push boundaries and break rules. So all I could do to answer Sanya was to shrug. “I’m just curious.”

His expression didn’t change. He looked at me with the same face he always did. Then he dusted off his knees and stood up. “Go rest, Iyu Aksanevich.”

***

He went to rest. I didn’t. Those unseen specters wouldn’t let me.

I sat by the fire, poking at it uselessly. After a while, I went to his tent and poked my head in. I always pictured Sanya sleeping flat on his back, hands crossed on his chest, possibly with his sword cradled on his sternum. But there he lay, curled on his side with his knees up at his chest, his fingers wound in his blanket, and his hair knotted up under his shoulders. Unkempt. He was certainly asleep. There was no way he would let himself be in that position if he weren’t. I felt ashamed for having seen it, like I’d walked in on some secret, sacred ritual.

I ducked out and went to go hunt rabbits.

It was more difficult, of course, hunting without any energy. I was hoping to find a corpse, maybe, some little thing caught out in the cold, but what were the chances of finding a fresh body with any myortva left in it? I startled a hare but had no hope of catching it without myortva. Eventually, I found a bird with a broken wing struggling in the snow. This was the best way. This way, it felt like a mercy.

The bird was too small to get any real meat, but I brought it back to camp anyway. Plucked it and prepared it. Then I thought better of it and buried it outside of camp, dumping its feathers on top of it.

Sanya was still sleeping, which surprised me. He’d never napped before when we were hunting together. Maybe he’d felt worse than he’d let on. I’d been expecting to have to wait until he went to bed that night to try this. I hadn’t gotten a lot of myortva from the bird. I hoped it was enough.

Sanya may have still been sleeping, but I went to my tent, anyway. It was dim inside, and I liked the natural light, but it was safer here.

I’d tried many times before to force myortva out when I didn’t have any to give, so I knew I couldn’t just force my zhiva out the same way I did myortva. I thought I’d have to suck it out first using the myortva, then push it back in and hope it pooled where the myortva did.

I didn’t know where to start, so I kicked my boot off and went back to the spot Sanya had worked on earlier. Maybe there were still traces of gnila he hadn’t gotten. I had the feeling that the gnila made it easier. Gave the zhiva something to stick to. But if there was any gnila left in there, I couldn’t feel it, and I didn’t know how to separate and pull my own zhiva out. It was just a part of me, like looking for specific water in a pond.

It was possible I just didn’t know what I was doing, but as I sat there with my cold hands clamped around my cold ankle, feeling nothing but gooseflesh rising on my skin, I thought this would never work, no matter how good I was at it. It was just intuition, but I trusted my intuition, and my intuition said that I couldn’t pull my own zhiva from me, at least without gnila for it to stick to. I needed to go find another ghost to attack me.

I sighed. If I were going to do it, I should do it now. Night was no time to go into the Sundered Lands alone with as little myortva as I had in me. But if Sanya woke up and found out what I was doing, he would… Well, I didn’t know what he’d do, but whatever he did, he’d tell Yelena about it.

I had better be quick, then.