Chapter 42: He Refuses

"No," said Nine. It was the loudest thing she had heard from him in days, and it came out of the shape against her bookshelf like something he had been saving since dawn, and it filled the little room. "No," he said again. "Absolutely not. Never. Put that book back on the shelf and close the cases and let me go." "There's only one case left." She said it to the lamp, not to him. "Then close it." "If I close it, you fade." She had said that sentence to herself since the Saffron Market, and it sounded no different aloud. "Yes!" The lamp flame shook. "That's the point! That's the terms! That's what I'm for!" Ming looked at him in the small light, at his white blazing face, and thought that she had never once in six weeks seen him like this, not at the fox wedding or by…