Red sky at night, shepherd's delight.
Elide huffs, her throat constricting until the breath is more of a sob, the cold turning the moisture to ice crystals in mid air. The sky outside is a creeping orange at the horizon, but the arching expanse above her is the colour of rose petals. Or the colour of flushed cheeks, pink from the autumn chill. Or the colour of the silken scarf that's one of her last heirlooms from her mother.
Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning.
She murmurs it aloud, and Manon scoffs beside her, but the warm, steady arm never leaves her shoulders. "That's orange, Elide," her friend insists. "It's not red."
"It's red," she says with quiet conviction. Calm conviction.
Not that she is calm. Not in the way she usually is, with quiet confidence and alertness and a kindness ready to encompass the world.
No, she is calm in the way that a desert is calm.
Empty.
Hollow.
Bleak.
Barren.
Perhaps Manon hears a little of this in her voice, because her arm tightens round her shoulders, her warmth forcibly bleeding through Elide's frozen muscles, like she thinks she can defrost her completely if only she squeezes hard enough.
It is the only heat she can feel, and it is not enough. Besides the sub-zero temperatures outside the car - they'd had to yank and curse and kick the car door open from where the ice had frozen it shut - she feels like a fire has been extinguished inside her, leaving only the ashes in the gutter.
But no; it's not ashes, because there's something there, a large, squishy blob wedged in her chest that throbs and contracts and aches when she thinks of the way Lorcan looked at her before she went into the airport, those words that damned her to hell for eternity. Every flicker of motion across her mind's eye, every sound formed by the movement of his lips. . . It lifts the mallet and slams it into her chest, and her heart is a bell that sings as it breaks.
She is so, so tired.
She is so, so cold.
Asterin is driving, and she glances at Elide in the rear-view mirror. She manages a wan smile, but her friend is not convinced. She's not surprised.
The two cousins came to pick their friend up from the airport only to find a blubbering mess instead.
Elide is not one to cry. And she didn't cry, not when Lorcan turned away, not when she sat alone on the plane and struggled to sleep, not when she resolved herself to lying awake for the whole five hour night flight, her sorrow spilling out of her and leaving water stains on the blanket.
She bottled it up inside her, and she didn't feel empty.
But then someone stood on her phone.
She was walking in the crowds, when someone jostled her. And then they stood on it, and she watched with a sort of detached finality as the screen shattered, the lights guttering and dying as it broke.
It was too much.
She isn't this upset, this cold, because her phone broke. But because everything else on top of it was so much worse.
And Lorcan's words ice her core when they play on a loop in her head, and there is a brand round her shoulders where Manon holds her, and two rivers of fire and brimstone torching her pallid face as she cries. They are the only warm spots on her.
Crying is ugly. Crying is ugly, and Elide has always been a pretty girl, the girl-next-door, according to her uncle and neighbours. Crying is uncomfortable and hot and sticky and wet, with the tears running through her ears and into the crook of her neck and clinging to the edge of her chin like mountain climbers teetering on the edge of a precipice.
Crying is lubricating, and she can feel that ringing mess inside her - bell, sponge, blob, she doesn't care - loosening and dissolving. Now her chest cavity is hollow, and when the mallet strikes it rings hollow - it hurts less but it screams louder.
She is so cold.
Asterin meets her gaze in the mirror, even as Manon grips her tighter. But Manon is fire and ice and steel all at once, and she can do nothing but burn and freeze her further.
"I know it's scientifically proven that different people see different colours, sometimes, Elide," Asterin says quietly. "But the sky is orange. Not red. The bad weather's passed."
Elide nods, a short jerk of her head, and wishes it could be true.