He had catalogued the deaths of two hundred and fourteen things, and he was beginning to understand that all of them had simply been practice for this.
They sat where the weeks had taught them to sit — backs against the curved steel ribs of the dish, the rainwater black and still below them, holding the last of the dark. Sable read aloud. Her voice fogged in the cold. Tomás watched her breath appear and vanish, the way everything he loved eventually did.
She said *Persephone* the way she had always said it, stress on the second syllable instead of the third. She had learned the word from a page and never from a mouth. He had stopped correcting her in the first month. By the third, he had begun to need it.
She reached the end of the passage. He did not turn the page.
She waited for the small rasp of paper. It didn't come. The geothermal pulse thudded somewhere under the hill. She looked up and found him already looking, his hands open and idle on the book, and she understood that the stillness was the sentence now — that he had stopped reading the story and started reading her.
"What," she said. Not a question. Her breath caught before the word, and he heard it catch.
He took out the small device he carried for work. He played her three seconds of herself, weeks old, saying *Persephone* wrong.
"I have all of them," he said. "Not for the archive. Because I can't stand a world that forgets how you say it."
She didn't speak. She had mapped grief in two hundred strangers and never once been this seen.
She turned the page for him.
