Bartimaeus goes completely still, frozen in place as if he were cast in bronze. Time gets away from her again, sitting there helplessly, just waiting for a reaction, any reaction… A minute stretches out before her and it feels like hours.
"B?" She sounds tentative and small, and the sight of him - not just Bartimaeus, but the body he's wearing - twists a cold knife into her already damaged heart.
He shudders at that. His hands twitch. And, finally, he speaks. One little word, whispered with equal parts wonder and fear. "How?"
"I don't know."
"You weren't anywhere near the pentacles. And you - you weren't in any shape to say any kind of incantation…" He draws his shoulders up, hunching in on himself.
"Kitty. You died. I saw you die."
Kitty forces a laugh. "Just for a couple of minutes." She can almost see the cogs in his mind turning, like he's trying to convince himself that she's crazy, that she only thought she was in the Other Place because her body was shutting down and that's how she interpreted it. His disbelief isn't surprising, but she just wishes he'd turn around so she could see his face, so he could see the truth written all over hers. "B?" she says again, pleading this time. "Would you just look at me?"
He turns. Slowly, like he's forcing himself to do it.
"I was there, B. Don't forget, I've been there before, I know what it's like. It was only a couple of minutes, but it felt like I was there for days." She catches his gaze and holds it. His eyes are wide and huge. "It was like… My body, this place, didn't want me any more. So I - everything that makes me me - went through the Gate again. And it got me thinking. If that happened to me, then…" She takes a deep breath. "It must have happened for Ptolemy, too."
She paints his thoughts on over his unreadable expression. Is he wondering how much more restful the Other Place was for him since Ptolemy's death? How it felt when he was finally dismissed after a long toil on earth, wrapping himself up in the comforting chaos of home? Did a summoning hurt him more these days? Was it not just the pain of separation from the multitude, but the pain of separation from the only being he'd ever loved?
They buried Nathaniel yesterday.
She'd never seen such a spectacle made out of the loss of one man. There had been eulogies, but none made by anyone that knew him. She heard the word 'tragedy' near on a hundred times, and 'hero' a hundred more. They called him an 'exemplary magician' for his 'noble sacrifice', and didn't that just drown her in irony, and then dropped him in the ground under a headstone with the wrong name on it.
The coffin was closed the whole time. But the contents probably weren't recognisable anyway.
They buried Nathaniel yesterday, but she still couldn't believe he and Bartimaeus were dead.
So Kitty paced, running her fingers through her silver hair, her still bright eyes darting to the pentacles she'd scrawled on the floor in a moment of weakness. Was she really, seriously, considering this?
And, more worryingly, was she even up to it?
That thought made up her mind. Only a coward would back out of attempting a summoning just because she felt a little tired. And when there was no answer from the Other Place, at least she would know.
She stepped into the pentacle, and spoke the words. Counted the seconds for her incantation to reach the Other Place.
At first, she thought the hesitant little curl of smoke was just her imagination, a mirage built out of her blind hope and stubbornness. But it thickened, curling and spinning up towards the ceiling like a tornado, and she smiled, huge and wide as she never had before.
Show over, the tornado compressed itself into the form of a boy, but not the boy she expected.
He was younger than she'd ever seen him, with an innocence in the stubborn expression that belied the blind ambition underneath.
Her smile evaporated. She had always thought of Bartimaeus as a child - that dark-skinned boy that died for him longer ago than she can comprehend - but she'd never seen him look so young.
"Hi," said the boy that looked like Nathaniel.
She knows how his mind works, the twisting flames of it devouring every possibility faster than she ever could. She looks into his face – not really his, but the dutiful portrayal of a boy long dead kept alive in the essence of a being she would never properly understand – and sees the black eyes flicker with hope.
"Kitty -"
She cuts him off. "You could see Ptolemy again." Her voice is soft, uncertain. "If you wanted to. We could… I could… Summon him."
With those two little words, all of his carefree wit, all of his hard won affection, disappears.
The temperature drops in a room already cold with medicine and machines. His expression hardens, slowly, into a dark look of contempt. A heavy shadow falls across him, and when he speaks, his voice carries with it all the scorn his kind has for hers.
"You mentally deficient, ignorant child." His lip curls. "To even suggest such a thing."
She feels fear wrapping its cold hands around her and she's seventeen again, making infantile suggestions to an ancient creature. Her ears clog with her own stupidity, vision clouded with it, and the quickening beepbeepbeep next to her barely registers.
The minotaur dropped the bookshelf from such a height that she worried its weight would send it crashing right back to where it came from. Kitty shook her head and made a beeline for the chair. The climb had left her feeling light-headed.
Bartimaeus, his cloven hooves clop-clopping across the wooden floorboards, headed for her desk and its organised scholastic chaos. The thoughtful look on his bull's face forced a smile from her. "The project's moving along, I see," he said, picking up a handful of carefully typed papers in a brawny fist.
"Slowly," she admitted. "I think I've got most of what I want to say in there somewhere. The basics, anyway. The Gate, and such."
Bartimaeus nodded, running his beady yellow eyes across the script impossibly fast.
Nervousness wheedled its way into her chest. "What..." she hesitated, caught her breath."What do you think?"
"Not bad, not bad." He finished his third page with a flourish, whipping it to the back of the sheaf. "It sure does read like a commoner wrote it, but you could have done much worse." He glanced over at her, his big mouth twisted in a grin. "I could go over the lot for you, if you want. Make it sound a little more respectable?"
Kitty tried to speak. Her chest hurt. All she managed was a little whimper.
"Kitty?"
She hit the floor.
The door bursts open and the otherworldly fire that had been smoldering around the djinni disappears as quickly as it appeared.
"Ms Jones?" The nurse runs to her side, trying to steal her attention. Unwillingly, she gives it. "Ms Jones, I need you to relax… Doctor!"
Suddenly, a man in a white coat shouting orders.
Suddenly, hands on Bartimaeus' narrow shoulders.
Before the sedatives hit her, she hears his last words, spat out in bitter haste.
"I was leaving anyway."
She lets her head fall back into the pillows.
