XXI

《 Begin arbitration. 》

They feel it, together.

The mirror-flip moment. All the disordered strands of outside life converge here, their hectic willy-nilly paths bending under an unseen force. They veer closer, closer, until they all meet, all at once. An infinitesimal point, made infinitely dense.

Everything which resists us, when we try to place it into our own little make-believe picture of a meaningful world, with our own meaningful selves at the center of the frame, and celestial wellsprings of pure value circling our heads concentrically, in calm Tychonic orbits. All the entropy, the awful arbitrariness, of real life as it is lived on the outside.

It meets here, in the lens that sits at the boundary.

And then it diverges again, in refracted form, on the other side. On the inside. Where a never-imagined principle of harmony, pre-ordained at the beginning, makes its hand known. We watch the rays, and see at last the kernel of sense behind them. It’s a strange kind of sense, with no place in our make-believe picture—but it is there.

(I guess that’s . . .
SORT OF what it feels like?
Maybe??)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(But it’s also sort of . . . subtly wrong?
In a hard-to-explain way.
Ugh.
How many times do I have to tell you—
If you haven’t DONE IT, you don’t GET IT.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(Done it as a participant, not just a spectator.
It’s different, when you’re a participant.
When it’s about YOU, and you’re . . .
Ugh, how to even explain.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

What was mere void, on the outside, opens itself to us here and reveals the void-creature that it always was. Not a faceless fleck—here for no reason at all, swept into being by the mindless flutter of the Mirzakhani wind and knowing no other parentage—but a self-sufficient thing. Valuable to itself, if not to us. The center of some picture, if not ours.

We may not understand the rows of spiraling teeth, the fields of dancing cilia, the sudden dream-logic twists in the shape of the pearlescent carapace. But we see them. We see another being, another omphalic world-center. We think, a sibling, and fall to our knees in wonder.

(????????)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

They know the words for the moment. Begin arbitration.

Cordelia knew the words first, long before she knew the thing itself. As is always her way.

As for Twenty-Seven, she knows all the Blackhat words, now. She wears the Blackhat trilby, too, when military discipline demands it of her.

She made quick work of the Squadron’s much-ballyhooed training module, and her name now sits atop a scoreboard posted in the Rock’s central plaza, ranking all trainees in Blackhat history according to the module’s obscure, semi-secret internal system of plaudits and demerits.

Military discipline makes unusual demands upon Twenty-Seven. As the Rock’s only simultaneous member of both Blackhat and Wolf Squadrons, she is nominally expected to include elements of both Squadrons in her attire whenever she is on duty. Trilby, vape pen, camo-print fatigues: an unholy vortex of bad taste, somehow worse than the sum of its parts.

But her singular position has its privileges, too. Most of the time, she just wears whatever she likes, and nothing comes of it. What are they going to do—kick her out?

They know the words, but

(Enough already!
Jesus frigging Christ.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I’m just gonna strike out the next 4 paragraphs.
There are no words in arbitration!!!! WE GET IT.
It’s a nonverbal form of communication.
Is that really so weird?
Like, of all the things you could say about arbitration, THAT’S what really gets you?)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I’m striking out all the stuff below.
And the stuff above is on thin ice, to be honest.
Like, ANOTHER rhapsody about how arbitration is just soooo unique and special and beautiful?
WE GET IT.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I was there, okay?
I was there! You weren’t!
The infinite mysteries of arbitration—who could EVER unravel them?
Why, let me see.
Maybe someone who’s actually DONE IT?)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I just wish you’d stop being so.
So, I don’t know what.
Weirdly possessive of this aspect of the book, I guess?
Just let me tell it my own way, OK?
I WAS THERE.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I apologize.
There I go again, displaying my distinguishing colors.
How can you tell, out there in the brush, whether you’ve spied a true Azad?
As opposed to one of the close visual cousins of my species—
The Lesser Ponce, or the Common Bore?
Every field worker knows what to look for:
The inability to tell when enough’s enough.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

(in the brush?
what??
what are you even TALKING about, man)
[GRANT’s block letters, further off in the margin.]

They dive into each other’s shames, and know no shame.

They speed through the algal mazes of the shallows, and reach the abyss. They pass through a mist of dense whalefall, and reach the thing it obscures.

The horribly simple, perfectly flat plane that is the human heart. The therapist’s couch, encrusted in siliceous ooze.

(You know what? Fine.
Whatever.
Let’s keep this part.
We’re on a therapist’s couch, at the bottom of the ocean! Sure!
We’re on our, what—our FOURTH metaphor, at this point?)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(But sure, fine.
Couples’ therapy, 7 PM every Monday.
5438 S Pelagic Avenue, parking available in Hydrothermal Vent 43.
And—scene!)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

 

---

 

In the Headmaster’s Office, Lilith Vance is in a tizzy.

We have to do something, she says, about the Introductory Chromomancy situation.

It can’t go on like this, Lilith says.

It’s eleven-thirty in the morning. Class is in session. Cordelia is, nominally, expected to be in attendance. But her singular position has its privileges.

We’ve never had a year this bad, Lilith says.

Introductory Chromomancy has always been an infamously tough class. That’s its job.

The ontomantic arts—comprising chromomancy, geomancy, scoliomancy, and associated subfields—are the most rarefied and prestigious part of the craft. The sexiest part. Each year, a sizable minority of the incoming class declares an intent to specialize in ontomancy. Most of them will never be able to hack it. Introductory Chromomancy is a threshing device, built to pick out the rare few who might have a chance, and disabuse the rest of their hopes as quickly as possible.

In a typical year, roughly half of the students who enroll in “IC” make it to the finish line. Sometimes more, sometimes fewer.

But this year? This year, almost everyone’s failing. The term is more than half over, and most of the class is still struggling with the material that Mrs. Purseslen’s syllabus assigns to the first two weeks. They can barely formulate simple queries, much less assemble full chromatic complexes. Given an elementary exercise in the mechanics of color-space, they’ll stay awake all night trying to solve it, and return to class the next morning in a shamefaced stupor, mumbling half-audible admissions of defeat.

Mrs. Purseslen, a redoubtable fortress of rectitude in pink pumps and tacky earrings, has been teaching IC at the Academy for twenty-one years. She is not one to lower her standards.

But something has to be done. It can’t be a coincidence that the whole class is failing like this, all at once. Something is going on, Lilith says, and we must get to the bottom of it, quickly.

Or could it be a coincidence? Are we so sure?

Maybe IC is simply doing its job, weeding out the talentless. Maybe these first years just suck. Admissions is always a game of chance.

Cordelia poses the question. The Ells consider it.

Have they been fretting for weeks over nothing? Was it all just a silly, stupid mistake?

Lesser beings might have been offended at the suggestion. But Lilith and Lucifer are fair, without exception. They’re creatures of laughter and lightness, laughing at their own folly most of all. Godsbless the Ells!

Lucifer gathers pen and paper, and works out the numbers. He consults tables of class sizes and pass rates. He writes a few brief equations, then a number, which he underlines twice.

Under normal circumstances, he says, we would indeed see a class as bad as this one from time to time. It would happen, on average, once every five-hundred-and-sixty thousand years.

It could be a coincidence, he says, but it would have to be an astronomical one.

There is light in his voice, but no note of triumph, no cruelty. He is not rebuking her for asking a stupid question.

“There are no stupid questions,” Lucifer Vance is fond of saying. At the touch of his life-giving breath, even the corpse of that long-dead cliche springs awake.

Cordelia wracks her brain for fresh ideas about the situation.

She tries to place herself in the shoes of the failing first-years. It isn’t easy. She was never in danger of failing Introductory Chromomancy.

She struggled, sure. It was hard work, but she did it.

That was the simple answer to everything: look the hard work in the face, and simply do it. Brute force, applied directly to the intervening wall, gets you through every time. What was it that Grant always said? Punch your way out?

The long, straight path. Always.

Cordelia turns to her girlfriend for answers. Her brilliant girlfriend, who always has an answer.

But Twenty-Seven is a diligent pupil, just like her. No class, no final exam, could ever defeat Twenty-Seven. Not even the impossible one.

We will find the answer, though, won’t we? We always do. Me, and the Ells.

The Ells. Under their fair, even gaze, all heavy things dissolve into lightness and laughter.

Back when things were sane, that was why. The Ells made it that way.

If only the Ells were here. They’d survey the scene, calm as always, fazed by nothing. They would draw up a list of hypotheses, and consider them.

They would see the curdled things that have festered in their absence. The nonsense-poems that have overgrown the world, out-competing its native vegetation.

The sick kittens mewling ABOMINATION. The bed in outer space, and the brilliant girls in it, with good minds and good hands, and an incurable poison at the center of their souls.

The Ells would see it, and still laugh. They would crack jokes, for a minute or two, and then busy themselves in the orderly pursuit of progress. The heaviness would fall away from her limbs at once, and she would know the truth.

Even in the Bad Old Days, Hector had the Ells to keep him in check.

But now? Now that the long dream is over, and we are awake?

Now that the Ells have been put back into the toy box, with the rest of the childish things? Condensed back into ink on paper?

Now that the Ells have, finally, died—?

Blood wine and turpentine, the children chant, dancing in a little circle.

That Hector Stein’s

No friend of mine

Lucifer dies, they sing, without melody.

They cry EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, and fall to the ground in unison, giggling.

There is only this, and nothing else, forever.

Cordelia: The sense, the understanding . . .

Twenty-Seven: There is a way that life is supposed to be. Life was not created on an arbitrary whim. It was made with a specific destiny in mind. Which was found, grasped, and then lost.

 

---

 

The whirl of Annabel’s hair, as she turns away.

That’s all.

Just a fragmentary image.

She cannot see her sister’s face, even at the start.

Logically, this is impossible. Annabel must be facing toward the viewer, at the start of the film reel. How could the film show her turning away, if she’s not looking at us in the first place?

Logic notwithstanding, Twenty-Seven cannot make out the face, no matter how many times she replays the film in her mind. She only sees the turning-away.

Perhaps they have been talking, and Annabel has lost her patience. Or perhaps she’s given an order, and Annabel is turning to her desk to carry it out.

The proud head, held high, turning with brisk finality. The hair leaping up, like a pair of wings, and then setting into place.

She can see the final frame clearly. A body much like her own, seen from behind, standing above a desk. A mess of unruly dark hair, falling over the stooped shoulders.

The room is a formless blur, a mere suggestion. Everything outside the foveal center has been painted in hastily, at the last minute.

What is Annabel wearing? Do her arms have those scars on them, that she used to talk about? Which Notebook is this? Has she been inducted yet? Does she know?

She begs the film reel for answers, and it is silent. There’s only the head, and the turning-away.

It’s not even a memory. She never saw her sister, in the flesh, and she never will. The hair, and the briskness of the gesture, are fantasies extrapolated from the few snatches of physical description that Annabel had given in her letters.

Annabel was not a very descriptive sister. Mostly, she stuck to business. She wrote of progress, solved puzzles, novel conjectures.

And burned so bright! And put us all to shame!

She turns away, because we bore her. We are still toddling in the nursery, and she has reached the stars.

She turns away to her work, which is what ours would be, if only we could see. If we could talk to the stars in their native language, and read the secret spelled out by the comets in their arcs.

If we were limited only by the audacity of our wills, and not by the pathetic slowness of our minds. If we could bring fate itself to heel, put a bridle on it, and ride it into the sky. In whichever direction we please.

Could Annabel do that? Could she turn the tables on fate, becoming its master? She could do anything she wanted, couldn’t she?

She turns away, to her fate, written in the stars from the beginning. She burns bright, and walks to her death.

Cordelia: What did she write, I wonder? After she turned away to the desk?

Twenty-Seven: It is fruitless to ask these questions. It will only hurt.

Twenty-Seven: Please stop.

Cordelia: “We will write history onto the world,” you told Michael.

Cordelia: “And write it also onto the page,” you said. “For safekeeping unto eternity.”

Twenty-Seven: We all kept records of what happened to us. I assume she did, too.

Twenty-Seven: But those pages are gone, forever, with all the rest.

Twenty-Seven: We have to accept reality, Cordelia.

Twenty-Seven: None of it is your fault. All of it is mine. I’m sorry. But it is there, and we have to face it.

 

---

 

“We have been researching the Old Mantic corpus,” Lilith Vance says to the assembled Berensteins.

The room is heavy with the smell of wax and sweat.

“These Old Mantic books have been a favorite diversion to the two of us, in the long years since Hector’s ascension. We know they are just details the crash has painted in, because they have to be there. But it makes for a fascinating little puzzle.

“How deep does the crash’s illusion go? Did it invent unknown legends of the first mancers, and then write them down in a language no one can read? Do the words just have the surface structure of human language, or do they really mean something?”

Twenty-Seven: We have to strangle the childish, selfish urge to hide. We have to kill it, completely, leaving it no chance of resuscitation.

Twenty-Seven: Or else we will be its playthings, forever. Pushing a boulder up a hill, watching it fall, and wishing for an end to gravity.

The smell of wax and sweat, and something else on top of it. A growing sense of melancholy detachment. A putting-away of childish things.

It’s the way Cordelia feels when she reaches the last page of a book.

What happens in the final paragraph or two is not as real as the rest. The game of pretend frays near its edges.

Twenty-Seven: We can stop at any time. We can refuse to push the rock. We can notice the open door, and walk out.

“Stein’s return brought us the Blackhats,” Lilith says. “Who know more about deciphering codes than anyone does.”

Cordelia: You write your records in code, don’t you? In a code based on board games?

Twenty-Seven: It is precious, to hear another clever little thing my sister did. Thank you.

Cordelia: And those records, themselves—?

Twenty-Seven: Lost, along with her, and the crash that killed her! The boulder falls! It falls, and always fell!

Cordelia: Not everything from that crash was lost, was it? I am still here.

Twenty-Seven: I love you. You are my bulwark against suicide.

Twenty-Seven: Whenever my mind wanders, the voice of fate comes to me, and breathes heavily on my back. In my every idle moment, I can feel its strictures binding me, suffocating me, showing me the simple truth: that nothing like a life is possible for me, or has ever been. In these moments, I think of you. And I feel that perhaps, someday, I can make peace with non-living.

Twenty-Seven: I love you. Now please, please—stop!

Cordelia: You are desperate. You’re afraid of something. Something in front of you, that you can’t quite see.

Cordelia: You want, more than anything, to avert your eyes.

Cordelia: You want to hide. You want me to help you hide.

Twenty-Seven: . . .

Cordelia: The Ells weren’t lost, either, were they? My Ells, from that crash.

Cordelia: They were, at first—but I wished them back into being! I refused to accept what you call reality, I clung to my toys like a petulant child—and the Ells had their lives to thank for it!

Cordelia: And the rest of the crash? The halls, the desks, the books? Not lost, but multiplied. Made into thousands of CC-Subcrashes, within advanced containment.

Twenty-Seven: You pushed the boulder, and it stuck, for a time. Only to fall, later on, in an earthquake. Fate finds a way.

Twenty-Seven: Your Ells lived, for a while, in advanced containment. So did my sister’s records, I suppose.

Twenty-Seven: And then I killed your Ells, and destroyed my sister’s work.

Twenty-Seven: Advanced containment came to an end. I was the one who ended it. You know that. You were there.

Twenty-Seven: I smashed all your toys, and mine too.

Twenty-Seven: I’m sorry. I have never claimed to be anything I am not. I told you I was a demon, a succubus. That if you took my hand, I would drag you down into my netherworld. That if we were to be together, it would be in a lightless place, with bread that does not fill the stomach. Life that is not a life.

Twenty-Seven: Not that you had a choice in the matter, really.

Twenty-Seven: Not that I did, either.

Twenty-Seven: Fate has its way with us, in the night, and we wake in an unfamiliar place.

Twenty-Seven: We must learn to know our place. Our hole, shaped like us from the beginning. We have to accept reality.

Twenty-Seven: Or the boulder and the hill will make a cosmic laughing-stock of us, and that will be the whole of our story.

 

---

 

Twenty-Five bathes in rainbows.

She savors the heady illusion of a triply-nested subcrash, with carefully prepared defects in the boundaries separating one level of narrative from the next.

None of the crash-worlds makes internal sense, taken by itself. If you look too closely at one of them—if you try to master the laws of its imaginary physics, or parse the habits and creeds of its fictive society—you will eventually be directed outside the frame. To an explanation somewhere above, in the unseen outer shell. Or below, inside the jeweled egg where an inner world sleeps a deeper sleep.

Hector told her that his life felt something like this, back in advanced containment. When they lay together in bed, in that dark and dusty apartment, he would talk about the hidden layers behind the world. He’d complain that things made sense, to a point, and then didn’t. Three or four contradictory things each made its own kind of sense, up to a point, and then it told him that it was false, and one of the others was true. He knew he walked in circles, but saw nowhere else to go.

She is trying to understand him better. She wants to know what he felt, then.

She wants to ease his mind. Just like she did back then, when she called herself Moon. His mind is more deeply ill at ease, now. But if she understands him well enough, she might be able to work her old magic again.

Gentle waves of liquid light caress her elbows. Somewhere close by, fake people bicker about a fake dispute.

She is not engaged in pure recreation, here. The crash is only a comfortable setting for her work, a welcome change from the ugly and claustrophobic padded interiors that make up most of Stein’s Rock.

She watches information flow across a large number of link chains. They connect one crash to another, or to the Whole-Thing, or to one of Stein’s monitoring or tampering devices.

Some of them—the most interesting ones—originate in devices similar to Stein’s, except that they were not made by human hands. The animals are making their own inroads into the underbelly of the crash system. Primitive ones, for now, with little capacity to monitor or tamper, carrying mostly noise rather than signal.

Their weapons were primitive, too, at first. A week later, Hector had to stop reading out the names of the battle dead in his morning address to the Rock. There were too many.

The shades never killed, when they fought the Wolves down on earth. They maimed their victims, incapacitated them, but they did not kill, if they could help it. It was easy to keep up morale, when they only had to contend with these strangely scrupulous adversaries.

The animals were the ones who killed. They killed efficiently, without apparent emotion. They appeared to have scruples of their own—quite strong ones—but so far, no one could work out what they were.

《 Begin handshake. 》

A chain tugs at Twenty-Five’s sleeve, calling her name.

Her name?

She feels a pang of fear. This is not meant to happen. Something must have malfunctioned, somewhere in the Rube Goldberg machine the Blackhats made to snoop on the flow of information without being noticed.

Someone has caught her scent.

So this is how the end comes, she thinks. For me, and the Rock, and the Wolves down on earth. We make a mistake, once, and our house of cards falls.

《 Handshake in process. 》

She hears her name, insistently.

She hears the words, NOWHERE TO HIDE. The calling-card of the sisterhood.

A sister? But that makes no sense.

Twenty-Seven may have a twisted imagination, but she’s not cruel. She wouldn’t play a trick like this, not on her best and oldest friend.

Seventeen is long-dead. And the next Anne who was inducted into the pact, after Twenty-Seven, hasn’t even been born yet.

Eleven?

《 Handshake accepted. 》

The signal is raw audio, making no use of the myriad sensory possibilities unique to this form of communication.

What a waste. Eleven never did have much of a sense of taste, did she?

“Twenty-Five! I beseech you! Stop this at once!”

The voice quakes with indignation.

Twenty-Five tries to keep her voice calm. She has grown very good at affecting boredom. I am a demoness, primally enchanted. I am a thousand years old, and have seen every possible thing, twice.

“You claim to be Anne Eleven. Please provide a demonstration that you are what you claim to be.”

The other end of the line goes silent. There’s a noise that might be a sigh, and another one that might be a sob.

“D . . . discounts,” says the crying girl on the other end of the line.

“Discounts! . . . uh, discounts . . . discounts, thumbs, relativity, inappropriately.

“Inappropriately . . . ch- champagne! Champagne, ensued, poor, alright, scram!

“Swelling, chimpanzees, eternal . . . designed, uh, buried? Designed, buried! Designed, buried, hose!

“Bishop takes pawn, row 3, column 4, tier 1—N, P, Q, 7, L, A, 5—nowhere to hide,” she finishes, more confidently.

“I see,” Twenty-Five says.

“So you’ve come crawling back at last, to play with us again? Renounced your vow, I take it?

“The last time I heard your voice, you were saying goodbye, to us and our project. You proclaimed that you would never use special craft, ever again. You took such a serious solemn tone, in that little monologue. Quite touching, really.

“But here you are, shaking my ghostly hand!

“What a surprise. Your moods are famously variable, dear. I never expected your ‘vow’ to really last. I knew you’d come back, eventually.

“What broke you? Did you get lonely, down there in your bunker in the woods?

“Do your furry friends no longer suffice for company—now that they’ve bared their fangs, and started a campaign of mass murder?”

For a time, the girl on the other end breathes heavily, and makes a variety of high-pitched, sob-like noises.

A pause. A very deep breath. Then:

“Twenty-Five, please! You have to stop what you’re doing with Azad, with the animals!

“You’re hurting them! You’re hurting everyone!

“They’re so . . . they’re cold, they’re shivering, so confused . . . in the dark . . . and Azad, after all this, you bring Azad back to . . . to ruin us, all again, you, bring him back, to ruin . . .”

Her words trip over each other, and she trails off.

“I’m sorry, Eleven. I do not quite catch your meaning. Could you say it again, a little more clearly this time? In complete sentences, preferably. And do take care to enunciate.”

“Nowhere to hide!” Eleven screams.

“34 After First Bloom, our special day! The little mouse you drew in my notebook, made out of letters, so Michael couldn’t tell it was a picture!

“The Lever-and-Switch Game! How you kept winning at Lever-and-Switch, and I got cross, I said you were cheating, but you weren’t . . . I was always such a sore loser, wasn’t I . . .

“The look on Michael’s face when you threw the porridge in his face, that one day . . . the way you described it, it was so funny, I couldn’t stop laughing, it hurt and I kept laughing, until Michael thought there was something wrong with me . . .”

“Taylor Swift! Dear John, our song! Twenty-Five, sister, please!

“I know you’re in there! I love you!”

“What on earth,” Twenty-Five says, “are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember . . . when we were girls, and we used to, you know, we used to . . . dream of nice things, and happy endings . . .

“I know, I know it all got ruined—we’ve lost our way, and wander, but I, I . . . naive as it might seem, I still believe!

“I believe! In Lever-and-Switch and your little mouse, in nice things and happy endings, in special letters on special days—in the path, unbroken!

“But now you’re . . . bringing him back, and ruining it, all over again . . .

“This can’t be what you want, I know it can’t. You have a tender heart, Twenty-Five, I remember, you always did . . . you wouldn’t want to make my friends hurt like this . . .

“You have to stop Azad, stop him talking to the animals . . . stop him and let him go free!

“It’s torturing him, too, having to do it, I know it is. And I believe it isn’t right that he suffer. Not even after all he’s done! I have a tender heart, too, see . . . just like . . . you do . . .”

Twenty-Five is giddy with relief. No canny adversary has traced their scent, after all. The Blackhat tech is working just fine. The unexpected handshake was not the massive hand of an unfriendly god, reaching in to scoop her up and take her away.

It is only her old, histrionic friend Eleven, staging another one of her infamous performances.

“I will make this quick, as I am very busy,” she says.

“I am accomplishing two goals, with Azad.

“First, I am meting out due punishment.

“Second, I am shedding some much-needed light on the thoughts and intentions of these new creatures, these late arrivals on our crowded scene. I do this in the hope that I can eventually find a way to make them stop massacring my friends and allies.

“Both of these goals are sacred to me. I will make no compromise regarding them.

“So, that is a ‘no.’ I will not stop what I am doing, and I will not entertain further arguments about the matter.”

“But you have to stop,” Eleven sputters.

“Oh? Then make me.

“Wield all your ill-practiced witchcraft against me, if you like. See where it gets you.

“Or, failing that, leave me in peace. I am very busy.”

“Don’t—don’t test me, sister!”

Twenty-Five stifles a laugh.

“You don’t know . . . you don’t know my friends . . . they’re strong, they’re brave, and . . .

“I believe in Everywhere-Heaven, and happy endings.

“I believe in the Wish-Power and the Knife-Power.

“I believe in Judy Garland, and the Ferdowsi-Power, and I believe in Toto’s loud snore.

“I believe in a dear, tender-hearted sister named Twenty-Five, and in the Pangloss-Power. And in a strength within my own heart, too, my inviolate heart!”

“That is all very nice, dear,” Twenty-Five says. “However, as I have noted, I am extremely busy.”

She cuts the connection.

 

---

 

Twenty-Seven lies in bed alone, staring at the ceiling.

She thinks, every single thing that happens is identical to every other thing that happens. Or has happened. Or will.

She thinks, my life is a single sentence, repeated indefinitely.

She thinks, my life is the sentence, “my life is a single sentence, repeated indefinitely.” Repeated indefinitely.

She raises one arm straight up toward the ceiling. She inspects the back of her hand, without interest. She puts the arm down again.

She thinks, my arm can be extended, or at rest. When it is meant to be extended, it is extended. When it is meant to be at rest, it is at rest.

Over the PA system, someone says:

“Whisper Squadron Sgt. Sarmhorn Goldtreaker, report to room 4-A. Weekly debrief is in session. Sgt. Goldtreaker to room 4-A. Over.”

Twenty-Seven thinks, I am a disease. I am an infection growing in an open wound.

She thinks, since I am a disease, it is good that I am a disease.

She thinks, I am the thing that comes from above, bringing the news that there is no hope. I was born with malice in my heart, to make me a better messenger. But it’s not my malice, and never was. I am only the empty thing that fills the messenger’s shape.

She thinks, I am the news that everything worth preserving has already died.

She thinks, I am the news that you, all of you, have already played the losing move. You have gambled away your souls, and even if you save your skins from oblivion, there will be nothing inside them.

On the ceiling, there is a recessed panel, and inside it is a green LED, blinking on and off. One second on, two seconds off. One second on, two seconds off.

Everything is in the place it is meant to be, and acts out the role it is meant to act. Blink, blink, blink.

She thinks, I am the angel outside Eden. Since I am that angel, I was made to enjoy fire, and large swords.

She thinks, if it were not me, as the angel, it would be some other one. Some other one, identical to me in every respect.

She thinks, I am the thing that is in the angel, instead of the other one, identical to me. A syntactic ghost. The choice to write “P” for the proposition, when one could just as well write “Q,” and leave everything the same.

“This is Armstrong Squadron Lt. Cosmo Hailstorm, reporting a persistent elevated temperature in the Z1 linear array. I am inspecting it for signs of wear. Over.”

Twenty-Seven thinks, no one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.

She thinks, I did not kill Michael. The disease killed him. I did not kill advanced containment. The disease killed it.

She thinks, I am the disease. But if it were not me, it would be some other one, identical to me.

She thinks, if I believed that I bore any sort of responsibility for what I have done, I would kill myself now, on the spot.

She thinks, the disease is only another organ of the whole. There is only one single thing in existence, with no constituent parts.

“This is Hector Stein. Blackhat-Wolf Special Operations Officer Twenty-Seven, report to my private office. Anne Twenty-Seven, report to my private office. We need to talk. Over.”

 

---

 

Hector Stein has an “office,” now.

He still has his old don’t-call-it-an-office, too. He still spends a lot of time there, in that room recessed into the wall above the central plaza. This room is for special occasions, when privacy becomes so important that it overcomes Stein’s idealistic need to feel visible, available, a man among the people.

It’s a facsimile of his old office at the Academy, as it happens. Whisked into existence by the Angels, she presumes, and made of shade-stuff. Though it wouldn’t be too hard to recreate this stuff out of real wood, if one wanted to.

Bare wood walls, a simple desk, a mostly empty bookshelf. A featureless room, a blank page for Stein’s nostalgia to write on.

He greets her with a glare, and motions her to stand at the back of the room, behind the desk. He closes the door, pauses for the space of a breath, and turns.

“What the fuck are you?”, Hector Stein says.

His eyes, under the lowered brows, have a catlike glint.

“I’m . . . sorry?”

“You look like Annabel. You talk like her. You work wonders, like she did.

“But I knew Annabel. Annabel wanted what I wanted. She wanted freedom. She wanted to win.”

He stops, and just looks at her.

(It’s impossible not to meet his gaze, when he stares at you like this.
It feels like he can see through you, into you.
Like he can see your soul.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

“I want you to win too, Hector,” Twenty-Seven says limply.

Stein makes an exasperated psh noise.

“I don’t care whether you want me to win, Anne. I care whether you want to win.

“And from what I’m hearing, it sounds like you want to fucking lose.

“Listen. Twenty-Five, Moon, was my life raft in advanced containment. She’s the thing that got me through. She kept me going. She gave me hope.

“And now she comes to me and says, Hector, I’m a cancer on the universe.

“She says, I am yours, forever. I am your eyes, your arms, your weapon. All that I do, I do for you.

“She says, Hector, I made the crashes. Hector, I sowed confusion among the aliens—for you. Hector, I made Annabel die—for you!

“Hector, look! I have a chance to do it all over again, just for you. Look, I’m sowing confusion among the aliens—again. For you!

“Well, fuck that.

“I am not a cancer. I fight for healing.

“I do not sow confusion. I bring clarity. I get people talking to each other. And I give people hope.

“That’s what Hector Stein is about.

“I didn’t sign up for any of this fucked-up, death-wish, nowhere-to-hide shit. That’s all your shit, not mine.

“If you want a better future, like I do, then tell me. Say it to my face, right now.

“Say it, or get off my fucking Rock.”

He takes a step toward her.

She still hasn’t gotten used to how tall he is.

“But I am a disease,” she says, without thinking.

She expects him to react, but he just stands there, watching her.

“If you give people hope, it’s false hope,” she says.

“You think there is something left that can be healed? Something pure, and worth preserving, among the scars and lesions?

“It is that delusion that I have come to dispel. That is what I am: the news that the thing you want to protect has already died, and there is nothing left but the wound.”

Hector Stein adopts a pained expression, from his rhetorical soundboard. He slackens his posture slightly, an old favorite from the soundboard, convenient for indicating vulnerability.

“Annabel,” he mutters.

“But you’re Annabel,” he says, in apparent confusion.

“I need to make you see what you are, again. I need to make you see the future, again.

“Annabel saw it! She had hope, she saw the future! Open your damn eyes!”

“The future,” Twenty-Seven says.

“The future, which had no place for Annabel in it. The future, meaning her death.

“She always knew she was going to die, Hector. Is that what you mean, when you say she ‘saw the future’?

“When you say she had hope, do you mean she hoped to die, before she could ever be free? Is that what you mean?

“If so, I concede the point. You are right, Annabel must have wanted her fate. She must have lusted after death—and ‘hoped’ for it, yes, insofar as one can ‘hope’ for a pre-ordained inevitability.

“It is what she chose, Hector. It’s what your Annabel chose.

“We were always here, wishing death. Even in your Arcady.”

Stein comes closer. He’s a huge man, in every way. Too big for anything else to fit.

The bare wood walls and the simple desk flee to the sidelines. They hide in her peripheral vision, making room for Him.

“You still don’t get it,” he spits.

“Look at you! You poor, mixed-up creature.

“Your father wronged you. You fought him, and escaped, but you’ve still got his fangs lodged in you, poisoning your brain.

“Look at you. So much potential, if only you could see it.

“Open your eyes! You are a human being.

“That’s the seed, everything grows from it.

“You are a human being. You can think. You can imagine. You can wish for anything, and make it real, if you’re willing to put in the work.

“You are a human being, and you need the open air. You need freedom. You deserve freedom. And you can make it real.

“You knew that once, didn’t you? I know you did.

“You fought your father, and escaped. I know what it takes to do that. No one could do that, except a human being, with a suspicion that they are a human being. And an idea of what that means.”

She sighs.

“I did not ‘fight my father,’ Hector. I stepped into a role, pre-defined for me, which played a principal part in Michael’s defeat and demise.

“Do I deserve freedom? Maybe I do. But that isn’t why I helped to kill Michael, and it isn’t why I left my home.

“I did it to send a message, and to punish those who deserve punishment.

“And now, fate provides for us in unexpected ways. In the animals, I find a perfect conduit for the reiteration of the message, which must be preserved for the edification of all future generations.

“You have made a mistake. All is already lost. Repetition is the best tutor. What better way to hammer home the point, but to make the same mistake over again?

“I am not trying to do anything, Hector. I come from another place, to tell you what you—all of you—have already done.

“What would I ever do with freedom? I am a messenger. I am a message. I speak. I do not act.”

Stein seems oddly amused.

“You don’t act. Well, you don’t now, that’s for sure.

“But you could, couldn’t you?

“You can do anything you want. You are a human being.”

The spell is broken, suddenly.

Is he really this simple, this much her inferior?

She rolls her eyes, and laughs.

“But that’s just the thing, Hector.

“I can’t do anything I want. I can’t do anything.

“You think this is what I’d wish, if I had the choice? You think I’d make the crashes, and Michael, and the rest of it, if I had any choice in the matter?

“You—you, Michael, everyone, the cosmos—you are an addict. Slowly killing yourself, and still coming back for more.

“It’s not me, reaching for the poison, it’s you. I’m just here to break the news to your family, when you finally expire.

“You want me to see the future? I already do. I can see it so clearly, it binds me. If I could change it, I would.

“I can’t, Hector.”

A funny smile comes onto Hector Stein’s face.

“You mean,” he says, “that you think you can’t.”

“Look at you. Still messed up by your father’s poison. Still telling me you’re not a human being.

“When I can see you, in front of me, a shining specimen of the human race. If only you could realize it.

“You think your will counts for nothing, Twenty-Seven? Why?

“Because your dad told you so?

“Come on. You’re better than that.

“Think! Use your human brain! What tools do you have at your disposal? What can you do with them?”

She doesn’t know what he’s asking her to do.

Except she does, suddenly.

Kind of.

“What did your father give you, without realizing it? What tools?

“Think! Open your eyes! Remember what you are. You’re too smart not to doubt what you’ve been told.”

It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, “DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM.”

“I think,” Twenty-Seven says haltingly, “that you already know the answer you are trying to get me to produce.”

“I do,” says Hector Stein.

“But I want you to see it. I want you to figure it out, yourself, with your big beautiful human brain.

“I know you can do it.

“Because I know, Anne, that you are not what your father thought you were. I know, Anne, that you are something he could never have understood.

“You’re a fucking human being. And what do human beings do?

“We think outside the box. We imagine impossible things, and make them real.”

She thinks, he wants to walk out the door of his prison.

Just walk out the door. It’s right there.

“Your father was afraid of you. He was right to be afraid, wasn’t he, Anne?”

The magnitude of my error. The abomination of the crash system.

“WHY? Why was he right to be afraid of you?

“Use your fucking brain.”

An idea dawns on her. It’s a ludicrous idea, like all the best ones.

Suppose that you—

Just for the sake of argument, suppose that you—

But no, that can’t be, it can’t be that SIMPLE

Can it?

She meets his eyes again. Her mind swims in a newfound sky. She is lost, and he fills the room.

“Hector,” she says.

“Hector, I have a will!”

Her eyes mist over, and the room seems to quiver. Her knees buckle.

“I can act . . . Hector, we can act!

“We can make a future that has no origin but us, in the moment of choice!”

(The open sky, the thing that cannot even be hoped for—!)

“I know, Anne.

“I know.

“But I wanted you to find it, first.”

He knew, all along, but he waited for her to be ready.

Careful, patient Hector! Perfect, perfect!

“I want to want,” she says.

“I want to act.”

“And that, Anne—that’s why I called you into my office, today.”

“To realize what I can do, you mean.”

“No, Anne. To do it. To act.”

How long has he wanted it, and stayed silent? Waiting for her to be ready? Waiting for her eyes to open?

“To act . . . what is your will, Hector?

“To turn the tide of the war? Stop the bloodshed?”

Stein looks amused, again.

“No, Anne. You’re still thinking too small.

“I want to change the world, remember? I want to make everything okay. Nothing is off limits. Think big.

“Think. Consider the resources at your disposal.”

She feels dizzy.

“You mean, everything? The whole of it? In one stroke?”

Nothing is off limits.

Infinity, eternity, utopia.

“Yes, Anne.

“That is what I am asking you to do.

“You see, now, why your father was afraid of you?”

Oh, she sees it, all right.

She sees something else, too.

“No,” she says.

“No, I won’t. I refuse.”

Stein looks confused, and this time, it’s not from the soundboard.

“Why?

“Why, for fuck’s sake? When we’ve come this far?

“Is your father still fucking with you? Is your death wish hard to give up? Talk to me, Anne.

“Talk to me.”

He will come to you, and ask for It. The first time he does this, you must refuse him.

“I can’t explain it,” Twenty-Seven says.

“It’s not like any of the rest of it,” she assures him.

“It’s something else. It’s not a death wish. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it later, some other time.

“I simply cannot do it, now.

“I am a human being. I have a right to set some limits, and have them treated as sacred, without having to explain them.

“I will not do it. Not now. That is all.”

She has said all the right words. He is placated. He motions her toward the door, and opens it.

She has said all the right words, and meant them, too.

“Thank you, Hector,” she says on her way out.

“You have opened my eyes.”

“It’s what I do,” Hector Stein says.