Above him on the ceiling: hummingbirds, thirty-two of them plus twenty, a sheaf of years. She asked about them, about the pictures on the walls and the notes, the printed glyphs; he told her about the endless hunger and the vengeance of Huitzilopochtli, the blood of his sweat and the sweat of his blood.

Rhiannon was mesmerized by the obsidian knife. She picked it up. She turned it over, fingers tender and gentle on the rippled blade, and held it up and watched the light fall through fluted edges the color of old blood. His eyes followed her eyes as they traced its brute shape. Her pupils unfurled and made dark bottomless flowers. She handled it like a living extension of his flesh and the ghosts of her fingers tingled under his skin. All of her attention was given to the blade. She lifted it up and arched her wrist so the bone haft balanced on the heel of her hand. A rolling dance between skin and stone, a fine tremor quivering at her fingertips, a gradual flexion of her wrist. The tendons buried there popped up and made a valley for the blade to slide into. The stone shifted. He held his breath. Her veins screamed blue beneath her alabaster skin. Light flecked off the blade’s surfaces. She stretched out her arm and lifted it to eye level. “Is it sharp?”

He let out his breath. “N-No.”

She put the knife back on the nightstand. “Pity.”

“The edges are retouched so…so it won’t be.” His guts melted and curled around his bones. “It’s a…a reproduction.”

“When it’s knapped properly, an obsidian blade is a molecule thick on its leading edge.” She touched the blade. “It’ll slice through so quick the flesh doesn’t have time to register pain. You have to wait for it. You have to bleed for it. The blood comes and you’ll feel that first and then the pain comes in splintered throbs, like it’s your heart beating in the wound. Of course, if the wound is deep enough, you’ll pass out.” She smiled and ran a finger along the haft. “This handle isn’t suited to my hand.” She glanced at him. “And it’s not sharp. Such a pity.”

“W-What…do you want me to…to do?”

She got up on her toes and whispered into his ear: “I want to see your face this time.”

His eyes closed. “Uh.”

She kissed the curve in his jaw. “On your back.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

He got on his bed. It was smaller than the one in the basement, the one he’d built the blue room around; this bed was smaller and dressed in white cotton sheets that smelled of sleeping skin and a faded brown comforter that looked like it had seen better days. The pillows were scrunched and folded and jammed up against the headboard. He smoothed the sheets and pulled up the comforter while she opened her kit. She set up the scalpels and the alcohol pads, arranged them on the nightstand in the shadow of the obsidian knife. He got on the bed and laid down on his back. She tucked a pillow beneath his head. She moved his arms like they were doll’s arms. He looked at her as she tied a length of rope around his wrist, watched her with raw eyes and an expression flayed and lifted up in gentle layers, peeled back until there was trembling and grief and the silken agony of waiting. She tied the arm to the headboard. She picked up his remaining wrist. The touch of her hand spurred his breath, and he was torn between the urge to close his eyes and the desire to look at her. She looped the rope around his thick bones and knotted it. He started to pant. She brushed his cheek with her knuckles. His eyelids lowered and he opened his mouth.

“I’m going to hurt you,” she whispered. She touched his lip. “I’m going to make you bleed.”

His breath caught. He jerked at her fingertips.

“I need you to be still for me.”

He took a deep breath and let it out. He closed his eyes. He nodded. She lashed his other wrist to the headboard.

“Please look at me.”

He pulled on the ropes and they burned. Icy panic clung to the back of his neck and melted in trickles, dripping down his spine. The inside of his belly felt sharp and quivering. He opened his mouth and took deep hacking breaths and at the warmth of her skin his wrists curled, fingers tightening into fists.

“Carl.”

His eyelashes struggled apart. She kissed the space between his eyebrows and his face lifted into the moisture of her breath and the slickness of her mouth and the sensation squeezed between his vertebrae and there was too much heat, so much sweat yearning to climb out of his skin. The insides of his lips itched for hers. He hauled against the urge to touch her. She opened an alcohol pad and the sound tore through him. The bones in his shoulders ached. He let his head fall back into the pillow. He smelled sharp chemicals and his eyes filled with the unfocused texture of her skin, its shadows and hollows intruding upon his mind. The pad touched down between his collarbones. She wiped in deep strokes, the chill strange and paralyzing. She moved astride him, the insides of her thighs warm and soft. Her belly flattened into his. The heat in his belly rose to meet the heat in her skin and the metallic brush of her nipples. She kissed the side of his nose.

“Look at me.”

He did.

“Look.”

She held a small scalpel poised between her fingers. It rested there with ease, the languid curve of the handle relaxed within her joints and aligned with the curve of her wrist. Her fingers looked elegant and full of subtle skill. The blade hovered. His eyes widened and focused on the sharp point; he felt its magnetism, the powerful draw of its keen edge and the promises it whispered. Its tiny pinprick of light subsumed him. Stillness floated down over him in disintegrating layers and melted into his skin. It trickled through his flesh. The edges of his perception softened. He curled up inside the warm cocoon of his skin and waited. She leaned her forearm into the mattress and looked at him and saw this waiting, tasted his patience. He looked at her eyes and they looked down. They focused. Her hot breath climbed his cheek and the edge of the blade touched between his collarbones like a cool feather.

“Be still,” she whispered. “There’s a pulse hiding in here.”

As if she’d willed it into existence he felt it, the sudden thrum of his blood and the hot beat of it pushing against the blade. A burst of adrenaline scratched a match on the inside of his ribs; it dilated his eyes and gilded everything: the bridge of her nose, the gleam of her skin, her soft bristles of hair. The burst wrung through his belly and poured up his spine. His ankles started to shake. His breath came aground on the shallows. His hands tightened on the ropes. She applied pressure to the blade and the skin broke beneath it with a sudden yielding. He moaned. She drew a slow sparking line, a deepening ache between the collarbones and down to the sternum. The frantic beat of his heart rose up into his voice. His head twitched. His collarbones rose and fell, twisting the ache around into a burning steady throb. The outrage of his neurons sunk into him, wove through him like a thorny ribbon and wrapped him in tight silken loops made of breath and skin. He panted. The blood welled, a steady ticklish fever, and filled the straining hollow of his throat. She dipped a pinky into this living chalice of flesh and drew a line across one cheekbone. Fire bloomed in his chest. Loose heat crawled inside his thighs. She touched her ring finger to the blood and painted the other side. The wet swaths of skin tingled. She looked at him and put both fingers in her mouth. She sucked them.

He looked at her. He looked into her.

The incisive kiss carved a second line. It got lost in a wash of pain, a harsh and sensuous gnawing.

She lowered her face. “Does it hurt?”

Fat beads of sweat glistened on his top lip. “Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

His voice broke. “Yes.”

The blade insinuated its way into his skin. She drew down and it split, obedient to the ruthless nature of steel. His consciousness caught fire. It sparked and fragmented into ash and the bottom sizzled and smoked and fell out. He plunged into dizzying depths.

“…and though Coyolxauhqui schemed against their mother, and the four hundred others schemed against her,” Rhiannon whispered, slicing a fresh line, “he was born with a maquahuitl in hand, he came out of the womb armed, and he killed them all and made stars of their bodies.”

He took shallow breaths. He swallowed and closed his eyes.

“Look at me, Carl.” Her voice. “I want you with me. I’m with you and I want you with me.” Soft as ash. “I want you. I want you with me. Stay with me?”

“Oh-okay.” The sound of his own voice melted through a starry sky. He opened his eyes and saw the ceiling. “Yes.” His eyes were unfocused. “Yes.”

She cut. Her hand hovered over the skin as it split open. Blood flowed, a dark rich red scented with dead oceans and hot metal. It ran down his neck. It dripped on the sheets. “He dismembered her,” she whispered. “And flung her limbs to the moon…and cut…a bell…into her cheek.”

His neck arched and he moaned, a long wavering sound that cracked into a higher register before losing strength.

“Almost done,” she whispered. “Almost.”

The shallow breaths kept him aloft. The pain took the place of his mind and he lived in the flesh, sunk deep into it and twisted as if ensnared in a thicket of nettles; it was like fire ants marching on his bones, like unraveling, like gaps opening up between veins and skin and longing and memory. His consciousness funneled down into his throbbing points, thickened into stinging honey that struggled through those tight channels: wrists and neck, chest and groin.

She smiled. The sight of her simple joy, the uncontrolled surge of it, and the way it loosened her cheeks and flowed up to the corners of her eyes arrested him. She put the bloodstained scalpel on the nightstand. It fell with a clink. She picked up a hand mirror. She held it up and the image danced in her trembling fingers, flickered back and forth. He looked up at his own skin and saw blood. There was so much of it. The realization kindled a weakened surge of adrenaline. The tremors settled into his flesh and a touch of dizziness added to the tremor in her hands and the unsteadiness of the glass. Dark clotting lines sliced into his white blood-streaked flesh. Short pointed wings and a long narrow beak sipping from the hollow of his throat. Her lines were straight and elegant.

A sheaf of years…plus one.

“Do you like it?”

His mouth opened. He willed the words but they wouldn’t come. He blinked and exhaled instead.

Rhiannon put the mirror down. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t know.

“Carl?” She touched his forehead and her light fingertips overrode the pain. “Say something.”

The word came out dusty. “Something.”

She grinned like a little girl and giggled like one too. “How do you feel?”

He looked at the ceiling. “Sanctified.”

The girlishness melted out of her face. “What does that mean?”

“I am in cem-anáhuac yoyótli,” he whispered. “In the heart of the one world.”

She looked at him. He gazed at the ceiling and his eyes came back into focus. The timorousness ran out of him. She put her head on his shoulder and left it there for the space of three breaths. On the fourth she closed her eyes and he touched her temple. Her chest froze. He stroked the fuzz of her hair and her muscles relaxed. His hand settled on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. She rested a hand on his chest. The blood started to turn sticky.

“I should clean you up,” she murmured. “Put some plastic on the wound. It helps the lines set properly. They’ll smudge if you scratch them too much.”

His slow breath filled the passing seconds.

“So don’t scratch.”

“Okay.”

He felt her smile, her cheek pushing into his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be all right if I leave you?”

“I…I think so.”

“I’ll be right back.”

He closed his eyes and he felt her departure. The mattress lifted beneath her absent weight and he listened to her footsteps cross the floor. He imagined her in her nakedness, tall and slim as a length of white ribbon but twice as smooth and luminescent and infinitely more fluid. He listened to her move around the kitchen. He counted her footsteps and moved his hand across the place where she had been, the cooling cotton of the bedclothes and the rumpled impression of her flesh.

She came back and he felt a washcloth on the broken skin of his chest. It hurt a little, but it was a good kind of hurt. It was commonplace and utilitarian. The damp cloth felt cool and her touch was gentle. She soaked up the loose blood and wiped away the drying trails. She hummed a little, some tuneless thing or a melody he did not know, something so quiet and soft that it wavered in and out through each breath. She touched the cloth to the cuts, patting them with a light even pressure, blotting up the tiny water-softened clots. He listened to her voice. He took in her breath-softened notes and absorbed the competence of her fingers. She cleaned. Her humming was like the muted song of a bird. She dried the cuts and pressed a piece of plastic wrap flush to the damp skin.

“You don’t have any tape,” she said. “Or at least I couldn’t find any. You’ll have to tape it later. I guess I don’t have to do it right now. It’ll still scar if you don’t leave the plastic on it but the scars will set better with it.”

“This isn’t work. You don’t have to work right now.”

She closed her mouth and blushed. It started in her chest and climbed up into her face. Her forehead glowed like a coal. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

She laid down on her stomach beside him. She tucked her arms beneath her chest and put her head on the pillow.