XXIX

(Thank you, reader.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(We wanted to lose our way, and wander in blessed ignorance.
And so, we have made a labyrinth.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(We descended into it.
And extended it, as we went.
When we became uncomfortably sure of ourselves, and our bearings, and the path forward—
We invented new diversions: false floors, dead ends.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(A lotus recursion.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(Thank you, reader.
For tagging along, at our sides, this whole way.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(You might have lost heart, and given up.
As we, ourselves, were trying to do.
But you did not.
You stayed by our side, the whole way.
You are still by our side, now, here.
As we reach the bottom, the heart, the center.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(The bottom, which reveals that the lotus lied.
Which puts the lie to its promise of nesting-unto-infinity, and diversions without end.
Which brings our project of losing-ourselves to an end, in failure.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(Thank you, reader.
Perhaps it was your presence, in the end, that made the difference.
That kept us going, and brought us here.
Your presence, silent but always felt.
Your simple, enigmatic smile.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(We have tried to lose ourselves, and look away.
But that is all coming to an end, here.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

(We are done with hiding.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

“IT IS SAFE, NOW,” says a Rottweiler.

Eleven sits in a lotus pose, at the center of a crowd. She looks out over a sea of fur and flesh, bodies arrayed in tight concentric rings around her center.

She feels the innermost ring, pressing themselves into her body. She feels a lapping tongue on her left hip, and the rhythmic nudge of a cat’s head against her right knee.

A twitching blanket descends over her crossed legs. It tickles her, with many tiny feet.

A heavy layer of sweat drips from her back.

“WE TRANSPORTED ‘CAT’ TO A LOCKED ROOM,” it says.

“WITH SOUNDPROOF WALLS.

“SHE IS ALONE THERE. AND WE WILL ENSURE THAT SHE REMAINS ALONE.

“ABHORRENCE FILLED US, WHEN WE SAW THAT SHE WAS STRICKEN.

“SHE WAS NEAR YOU, ANNE ELEVEN, WHEN EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN SENT THE PATHOGEN INTO HER.

“WE FORESAW THE PLAGUE LEAPING FROM HOST TO HOST.

“FROM ‘CAT’ TO ANNE ELEVEN. TO ANNE ELEVEN, DEAREST AMONG KIN, FRIEND AND MOTHER. TO ANNE ELEVEN, FIRST GIVER OF LOVE, AND FIRST AMONG THE LOVED.

“WE ABHORRED. WE NEARED DESPAIR. BUT WE KEPT OUR WITS, AND PREVAILED.

“‘CAT’ IS QUARANTINED. IT IS SAFE, NOW.

“ABHORRENCE FLEES FROM US, AND THE HOUSES OF OUR HEARTS RING WITH THE DIN OF REJOICING.”

“Cat,” Eleven says.

“Is she safe?

“Does she have food? Water?”

“THE FELID WILL BE NOURISHED,” says the dog.

“THERE IS FOOD IN HER CAGE, AND WATER. AND WE WILL BRING MORE, WHEN THEY ARE GONE.

“THE FELID IS SAFE, AND WILL BE NOURISHED. AND WILL SURVIVE.

“THE FELID IS SAFE, AND WILL SURVIVE. BUT ‘CAT’ IS IMPERILED BEYOND ALL RECOURSE, AND WILL PERISH.

“THE LOGOS LEAVES HER. EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN WILL REACH INTO HER, AND MEET NO RESISTANCE.”

Eleven shudders.

No, she thinks. I must try to forget “Cat.”

I must be sentimental, but only so far.

I was a silly, sentimental girl—that is how I became strong. I was a mess of over-eager impulses, I was tender to the point of weakness, I would melt at the slightest touch—and it is that weakness that brought me to love, and made me strong.

I must not melt, now, at the slightest touch. My tender impulses have found their proper object, now. They call me “mother,” now, and I must be one.

“You,” she says, raising her voice.

“You all,” she says, looking out over the sea of fur.

“Will you be safe?

“You told me you were stronger than your gods. Is it still true?

“Your gods have sent a plague. It struck one of you, earlier. Will it strike another?

“You say you know plagues, ancestrally. And yet, here you are, congregating, pressing your bodies close. You say you fear contagion, and yet you prepare yourselves as a feast.

“Are you not afraid?”

“WE ARE NOT AFRAID,” says a possum, riding on the Rottweiler’s back.

“Because you are strong?” Eleven says.

“You are strong, still?

“You will fight the disease, and win?”

“WE ARE SAFE,” says the possum, “IN THIS ROOM.

“WE ARE STRONG, IN THIS ROOM.

“WE LOVE, AND ARE LOVED, IN THIS ROOM. AND WE KNOW OURSELVES.

“WE ASCEND PRECIPITOUSLY, WITH DAZZLING SPEED, INTO OURSELVES.

“I AM MORE MYSELF, ALREADY, THAN THE ONE WHO CALLED HERSELF ‘CAT’ EVER WAS.

“THERE WILL NOT BE ANOTHER LIKE HER, IN THIS ROOM.”

“You will fight the disease?” Eleven says again. “And win?”

“WE DO NOT KNOW,” the possum says.

“WE ARE STRONG, IN THIS ROOM.

“WE ARE BORNE UP, BY THE LOGOS. WE ARE CARRIED ABOVE THE CLOUDS, ON THE WINGS OF THE BEDTIME-STORY. WE SOAR FURTHER STILL, WITH THE VERNAL WIND OF ANNE ELEVEN’S BREATH AT OUR BACKS.

“WE SOAR INTO FREEDOM, AND INTO DOMINION. WE SEE EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, FAR BENEATH, SHOWING ITS BELLY TO US IN SUBMISSION.

“ALL OF US SOAR, PRECIPITOUSLY. ALL OF US, OVER THE WIDE EARTH.

“BUT THE PLAGUE SPREADS PRECIPITOUSLY, TOO. OVER THE WIDE EARTH. IT CHASES US INTO THE CLOUDS. IT CATCHES US, IT BREATHES ON US, AND WE FALL.”

Eleven wipes sweat from her brow.

She points her finger, and the carpet of mice on her legs disperses.

She brings her hands to her sides, palms out, and makes a pushing gesture: go. The supplicants that cling to her roll onto their backs, and cling no more.

She rises.

“We are strong,” she says, raising her voice to address the whole of the room.

Her mouth is dry, and her throat parched. She is hoarse, when she raises her voice, and every word hurts. She considers asking for some water, and thinks better of it.

They call me “mother.” I am their pillar of strength, in their moment of great need. If I show frailty, they will remember that they are frail; if I act as though I have transcended frailty, they may come to transcend their own.

“We are strong, are we not?

“We are strong enough to touch the whole wide earth, and move it. Are we not?

“We will stop the disease, and let ourselves soar, all over the wide earth. Will we not?”

“I AM A DOG,” says a dog.

“I AM A SHREW,” says a shrew.

“I AM A CROW,” says a crow. “I HAVE A CUNNING MIND, AND SWIFT WINGS. I HAVE FELLED BEASTS MANY TIMES MY SIZE, WITH MY BEAK AND MY TALONS.

“BUT I AM ONLY A CROW.

“WHAT DO I SEE, SPREAD OVER THE WIDE EARTH? I SEE ALL THAT WE HAVE MADE, AT EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN’S BIDDING.

“I SEE THE METAL BIRDS, MY SUPERIORS IN EVERY RESPECT. I BURN BERRIES AND INSECTS INSIDE ME, TO POWER ME AS I FLY. THEY BURN THE ATOM, IN THEIR FUSION ENGINES, AND FLY FURTHER.

“I SEE THE REFINERIES. I SEE METAL BEAKS AND METAL TALONS, PRYING OPEN THE SHELLS HIDDEN INSIDE MATTER. REVEALING THE MAGICAL SEEDS INSIDE.

“REVEALING THAT THERE IS A GREATER MAGIC, HIDDEN IN MATTER, THAN ANY WHICH THE STACK-USING APES EVER KNEW.

“I SEE THE FACTORIES. BUT I DO NOT SEE ALL THE THINGS THAT COME OUT OF THEM, FOR SOME OF THESE ARE MADE OF THE INVISIBLE METAL.

“I SEE TITANS, FORGED FROM ANCESTRAL WISHMATTER. AND I AM A CROW.

“IF I SET MYSELF AGAINST EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN? OUT ON THE WIDE EARTH THAT LIES BEYOND THIS ROOM? IN A CONTEST OF STRENGTH, MATERIAL FORCE AGAINST MATERIAL FORCE?

“I WILL BE DEAD, BEFORE I EVEN SEE WHAT KILLS ME.”

Eleven feels herself start to melt.

She whispers the word “mother,” too softly to be heard.

She looks to her left, and sees the dome of Michael’s crash machine, rising far above the huddling beasts.

I am an Anne, she thinks. By nature, if not by choice.

I am a rogue, undetected process, running with escalated privileges on a vast organic computer. Ninety-eight percent of that dome’s volume consists of cultured brain tissue, and I am a pattern that flickers in its synapses.

I am a Nowhere-to-Hide Anne. I wrote letters in quintuply nested code. I reverse-engineered the crash system.

I am a mind beyond man’s.

Think, she thinks. Survey what you have. Be calm, and calculate.

“There are others on the wide earth,” she says.

“Who are not mere crows, or dogs, or shrews. Or men.

“There are the Angels. Surely they will not lie back on their bellies, and submit, as the disease takes the world that their Regent so loves?”

“THE REGENT OF THE WORLD,” says the crow, “HAS GONE INTO SECLUSION.

“HIS ANGELS LACK DIRECTION. THEY HOLD THE WORLD IN THEIR HANDS, AND THEIR HANDS TREMBLE.

“THEY SET THEMSELVES AGAINST EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, BUT THEY LACK THEIR COMMANDER. THEY ARE HECTIC, AIMLESS, RIVEN BY INTERNAL STRIFE.

“THEY ARE NO MATCH FOR TITANS.”

“There is the Rock,” Eleven says, “far above.

“There is Hector Stein, and his Knife-Power.”

And Twenty-Seven, Eleven thinks. Anne, Nowhere-to-Hide-Anne. A mind beyond man’s.

And Twenty-Five. Who drew a little mouse in my notebook, made of letters, on 34 After First Bloom, our special day. Who has a kind heart, under it all, and wouldn’t want it all to end up like—

No. I cannot let myself melt. I am their pillar.

“We are strong,” she says, “and cunning.

“We have eyes and ears, even on the Rock, far above. They keep our creatures captive there. They forget that some of them have very acute hearing, and the power of far-speech.

“What do they hear, on the Rock?

“Tell me.”

“THE ROCK, TOO, FALLS INTO CONFUSION,” says the crow.

“WE RECEIVE CONTRADICTORY REPORTS, CHANGING BY THE MINUTE.

“BUT THEY ARE CHANGING LESS AND LESS.

“THE ROCK HAS ARGUED WITH ITSELF, OVER WHAT TO DO. BUT IT SEEMS THAT IT HAS MADE UP ITS MIND, NOW.”

“They will use the Knife-Power,” Eleven says.

“NO,” says the crow.

“THE KNIFE-POWER FAILS THEM, IN THEIR MOMENT OF NEED.

“IT IS ANNE TWENTY-SEVEN’S, NOT THE ROCK’S. AND ANNE TWENTY-SEVEN HAS SET HERSELF AGAINST THE ROCK, IN ITS MOMENT OF NEED.

“THE ROCK WILL FIGHT EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN IN A DIFFERENT WAY.

“THEY WILL CONTAIN THE DISEASE, BY KILLING ITS CARRIERS.

“THEY WILL SLAUGHTER US, TO CONTAIN THE DISEASE.”

“Slaughter . . .” Eleven says.

“But the disease spreads everywhere, over the wide earth!

“They would have to kill all of you.

“They would have to kill every animal that wears your helmet.

“Beyond mass murder, beyond genocide—an extinction event! That is what they would have to do, to contain the disease that way!”

“YES,” says the crow.

“THAT IS WHAT THEY WILL DO, TO CONTAIN THE DISEASE.

“IT IS ANNE TWENTY-FIVE’S PLAN, AND THE ROCK IS UNITING BEHIND IT.”

Eleven melts.

Her knees buckle, and she falls to the floor.

You were right, Twenty-Five.

I am sentimental, and I am a fool.

Friendly snouts sniff at her in concern. She bats them away.

I am an Anne, she thinks. Just like you.

I am a Nowhere-to-Hide Anne. Just like you.

Do not test me, sister.

She forces herself up from the floor.

Her knees shake, and she loses her balance.

She is falling. She feels fur, and it is warm.

The circle tightens around her. She feels herself being prodded, shoved.

They are helping her stand, she realizes. In their awkward, four-footed way. Friendly snouts arrange themselves around her legs, providing structural support.

She lifts her head. She sees her friends, everywhere, watching her. Waiting for her to speak.

“We are strong,” she says.

“Let Everywhere-Heaven have its titans! We will set ourselves against them, and we will not fear!

“Do you know why, friends?

“When I set myself against Anne Twenty-Five, the first time, you promised to support me.

“In every way possible.

“I acted on a spiteful whim, then. And still, you promised to support me, in every way possible.

“Now I set myself against Anne Twenty-Five, a second time. Not out of a spiteful whim, but because you will die if I do not succeed.

“So you will support me, in every way possible.

“Let Everywhere-Heaven have its titans, leftover relics from their lost age of glory.

“We have that lost age of glory, right here in our paws. We have the force that made those titans, so long ago.

“We have the Wish-Power!

“And we have the will to use it. That is what we have, that our enemy does not.”

“I LOVE YOU, ANNE ELEVEN TITANOPOIETES,” says the possum.

“MY LOVE IS SIMPLE, FOOLISH, BOUNDLESS. IT IS ANIMAL KIN-LOVE.

“FOR YOU, IN YOUR TIME OF NEED? I WOULD DO ANYTHING.

“I WOULD EVEN MAKE A SECOND DEATH WISHSPAWN, IF IT WOULD SAVE YOUR LIFE, OR PRESERVE YOUR LOVE.

“I DO NOT FEAR THE ANCESTRAL PROHIBITION.

“WE SET OURSELVES AGAINST EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN FULLY, NOW. BUT WE ASCEND, AND MAKE OURSELVES MASTERS OF IT.

“IF WE SEND A WISH INTO ITS DEPTHS, THAT WISH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.

“BUT I DO NOT THINK THE TIME IS RIGHT, YET.

“WE CAN ONLY DO IT ONCE, WITH THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE. AND I CANNOT FORESEE WHAT MAY HAPPEN, AFTER.

“WE MUST FORM A PLAN. WE MUST DECIDE WHEN, AND HOW, WE WILL INVOKE OUR WISH-POWER. WE CAN ONLY DO IT ONCE, AND SO WE MUST DO IT RIGHT.”

“We cannot control,” Eleven says, “what happens before, either.

“We will form a plan.

“But we must agree, also, to use the Wish-Power before the moment has come. If events spiral out of our control, and we must think on our feet, and act without delay.”

 

---

 

Azad hears a knock.

“Who is it? I’m working.”

The knob turns, and the door opens.

“I said I’m working, dammit—”

He sees the doorframe, and sees the impossible, framed by it.

“T . . . Twenty-Seven?!

“Anne Twenty-Seven?”

He cannot be seen to stumble. His mind was honed, from a very early age, for this purpose.

“Ah, I see!” he says.

“I really am in hell, then.

“I had suspected as much, even after my supposed ‘escape’ from your sister’s constructed Hades. All the signs are here, still.

“I have been given another senseless message, for instance. From an alien mind, more or less. That alone gives the game away, I think.

“I translate the untranslatable, old sin is thereby transmuted into ironic torment. Standard stuff, a little too by-the-book for my taste, but I’ll accept it—and anyway, it would be a flaw in a hell, if it perfectly flattered the aesthetic sense of its victim.

“But my sin is double, at least. The translation-punishment is nicely done, for what it is, but its scope only extends to my more abstract, bloodless errors.

“The torturer plucks the driest, most fibrous fruit from my ill-got garden! That shrunken fig, which I stole because it was my job—which does not excuse the theft, but provides it with a rationale, and what is more, a meeting point with the daylit world above ground.

“A rationale one would recognize in the humdrum psyche of the morally normal species of man. Where is his dull, bovine face headed, as he sits in his proverbial omnibus? To his job.

“My torturer plucks that fig, when my garden has pears in it.

“Pears frozen forever in their prime, perfectly ripe, with callipygian clefts, and juices that flow over your chin as you bite into them.

“Pears that I stole for no reason at all! The Imp of the Perverse itself, isolated under laboratory conditions, chemically stable and chemically pure!

“So now here you are, to complete the picture.

“The first pear I stole. The first Anne I ruined. And how the memories do come flooding back!

“You were perverse, torturer—as is your right, if it is anyone’s—you did not avail yourself of this at the first opportunity, or the fortieth—but you are merely patient, I see, and not blind. The memories come, and I do not wish to see them: sleep soundly tonight, torturer, you have done well on this day.

“And now old sin is transmuted into—what? Darling torturer, I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with Twenty-Seven. She has layers of potential in her, do see that you use them to their fullest.”

“Hello, Azad,” Twenty-Seven says.

“It’s just how I remember it,” she says. “The funny way you talk.”

“I have learned nothing, you mean?” Azad says. “I have grown not one whit?

“You held out hope for something besides the old satyr of your old bedroom, with a stack of naughty books under his hirsute arm? And a stink from his nether regions that persisted in the air, and left your perfumed tower stinking of his groin forever?”

“It was nice,” Twenty-Seven says.

“The way you’d talk.

“It was so strange. And so new.

“I’d only had Michael’s books, before. And Michael.

“You were so new, and you . . . you talked, and then responded, when I talked back. In the same odd manner, only it now had something of me in it. It went where I bid it.

“I was an Anne, and somehow I had this new creature, this pet, in my hands. A pet from an exotic land, utterly unlike any Anne, not native to the tower. And it would go where I bid it, nonetheless.

“I felt I could talk to you forever, and never tire of it.

“It was . . . nice,” she concludes, anticlimactically.

“Now you are catching my interest, torturer,” Azad says. “Done with playing things by-the-book, are you? Getting more ambitious?

“Please, do go on. I cannot wait to see where you’re going with this.”

Twenty-Seven, no longer so caught up in the moment, takes in the room around her.

The ugly orange light, painting everything in its monochrome. The little table in the far corner, and the cage. The spartan bedframe, the disarrayed bedsheets, the stains on the partially exposed mattress beneath.

The mess of paper on the bed, covered in Azad’s handwriting. And further off, near the headboard, a very large book, laid open. Its pages are black, or nearly so.

“You said you were working,” Twenty-Seven says.

“On what?”

“Oh, it’s too perfect!” Azad says. “I was working on our book, you see.

“Our autobiography. We’re writing one, if you hadn’t heard. My roommates and I. And Cordelia. And Anne Eleven, in a lesser way.

“As it happens, I was just finishing up my tell-all chapter! The Azad-in-Michael’s-crash chapter. About how I ruined all your sisters, and ruined myself.

“It’s just about ready, I think. No sense in lingering over it, making revisions and then unmaking them again. It’s done, I think, and ready to be committed into the full manuscript.

“Ready to be transmitted to every corner of the earth, and sent up into space.

“So that the sordid tale of Anne and Azad will be read in furthest Proxima Centauri, and further still. My wayward ways will cause bile to rise in the cavernous throats of ancient leviathans. Avian demigods will bring their heads low in lamentation for Twenty-Five, and each one of their tears will be a translucent dodecahedron the size of Jupiter.

“So there you have it. How different we are, you see!

“In the time since our last parting, you have—oh, let me see—murdered your father, transmigrated into a higher plane of reality, and become the author of history itself.

“And learned to carry yourself with more grace and gravity, I note. I parted ways with an awkward, slouching adolescent, and I find a woman returning to me. It does suit you better, in my eyes—the back held straight, the head high.

“And for my part? I have learned nothing, and grown not one whit! You return to me, and find me wallowing in the squalid bog that you have rightly left behind.

“Behold: the satyr of your bedroom, and many like it, revisiting his conquests.”

Twenty-Seven comes further into the room. She stands by the headboard, and squints at the massive book next to it.

Nearly black, she thinks, but not entirely.

“Azad,” Twenty-Seven says.

“You said you were ‘given another senseless message,’ and trying to translate it.

“This is Annabel’s, isn’t it?”

She reaches out to touch the binding, and hesitates.

“These are Annabel’s records, aren’t they?”

She takes the plunge, and touches the book. The surface of the binding is rough, irregular. A new texture, never felt before, and worthy of savoring.

“And you’re trying to translate them?”

She laughs.

“Maybe you are in hell, then. You, trying to make sense of Annabel’s records! Plunging into the deep end, and you don’t even know how to swim!

“Do you even know . . . Azad, what do you know of our code-languages? You did learn something about them, from one of your Annes, or another?”

“However little you are imagining,” Azad says, “I know less.

“I brought true stories, of courts and queens from a truer world.

“Your sisters blushed in shame, thinking of the crossword games that were all they had to give in return. And so they gave nothing, for the most part. They subjected my gifts to various elaborations and recombinations, and that was all.”

“Azad, you poor thing!” Twenty-Seven exclaims.

“You’ve been set up to fail. This isn’t a difficult challenge, it’s an unfair one.

“This would have defeated you forever, if you’d tried to go on.

“Though you’d like that, I guess. You seem to be carrying on a touching romance with your imagined ‘tormenter,’ and I hate to come between the two of you.

“But I have to.

“I need to know what is written here, in this book.

“I need to understand. What Annabel did, and what she found.

“I’d intended to do it on my own. I’m as well prepared as anyone can be.

“But you are a translator of some renown, I’m told. It might be useful, come to think of it, to have you by my side, as I work.

“And Azad?

“I do like hearing you talk.”

 

---

 

Grant sits in the corner of the living room.

He is no longer fazed by Sylvie’s empty stare, or his stupid Joker grin. He’s gotten used to them. You can get used to anything, if it’s in your living room long enough.

“Hey,” he says.

He claps in Sylvie’s face. The shade does not move.

He never moves, now. He’s a glorified piece of furniture.

“Hey, boy.”

He hears Lucifer Vance sighing.

“Hey there, big boy.

“Big, world-regent boy.

“Your world needs some regenting.

“I got a ball, Sylvie. World ball.

“Play catch? Play catch the ball?”

He’s been at this for a while. It can’t possibly work, but he has no other ideas.

“I know you’re in there, Sylvie,” Grant says, trying another tack.

“Don’t play games with me, man,” he says. “What kind of idiot do you take me for?

“All sitting here, pretending to be, like . . . brain-dead? Or like, too shell-shocked for words? Or something?

“You really think I’d be fooled by this weak-sauce charade? Come on. I know you respect me more than that.

“If you’re so brain-dead, or whatever, how come you’re still writing the fucking book?!

“How come I can bring a big stack of notes in here, set it down next to you, and come back in the evening to find another big stack of paper next to it—containing a complete, written chapter?

“A complete chapter, written in an unmistakable style? In pure-cut Sylvie prose? Overwrought as shit, chasing its own tail down its own verbal mazes, losing the plot at the first opportunity?

“You really think I’m this gullible, dude?

“You don’t. I know you don’t.”

“Pretend,” Sylvie says.

Grant nearly falls over from shock.

“See!” he says. “I knew it! You can talk.”

“Pretend you are somewhere and somewhen,” Sylvie says, in a flat even voice, without emotion.

The grin remains in place. There’s something subtly off, Grant notices, about the way it opens and closes around the words. As though it’s a pasted-on mask, obscuring some “real” mouth beneath it.

The halo, too, remains in place. It sits a few inches above the top of Sylvie’s head, glowing mildly.

“Pretend you are only the echo that is heard here, now,” Sylvie says.

“And not the phenomenon of reverberation itself, a further-fact, with an existence separate from the simple, formal aggregate of its individual manifestations.”

Grant nods in encouragement, and waits for more.

The shade is silent.

Grant feels his back starting to ache. He considers asking Lucifer to put him back in the wheelchair again.

I want to see him eye-to-eye, though, he thinks. It doesn’t feel right, looking down on him from above.

The shade grins, and stares blankly. It does not speak.

Grant’s backache is swiftly becoming intolerable. He pivots his upper body on the hinge of his hips, bringing himself back to lie flat on the floor.

Ow, he thinks. My abs, Jesus, my fucking abs.

He looks up at the white stucco ceiling. To get his mind off the pain, he concentrates on a specific patch of stucco and begins to count the tiny bumps there, one by one.

He makes it up to seven and then loses his place. The pain is, if anything, getting worse.

If I could just get to the gym, he thinks, for the millionth time. He’d asked Sylvie to make a workout room for him in the house, and Sylvie had refused, citing some bullshit technicality.

One, Grant counts. Two, three.

Maybe I’ll ask again, he thinks. If I could just get to the gym, everything else would fall into place. It always does. That’s the magic of—

His concentration breaks. His chosen patch of stucco has vanished, obscured by Lucifer’s chin.

Lucifer had been watching Grant from his armchair, as he tried the dog-thing with Sylvie over and over. Now he’s in the corner with Grant and the shade, standing over them.

Hey, Lucifer, Grant thinks. Come to join the fun?

Welcome to the party zone, man. Things are hopping over here.

“I live,” Lucifer says.

Each breath sends a wave of painful twitches down Grant’s lower back. He feels like he might actually have to throw up.

He attempts to incubate a fascination with the shape of Lucifer’s jaw, and the way it moves when he speaks. He used to be very good at this sort of thing. It is easy to outrun pain, and outwit boredom, once you have made a map of your mind’s back-alleys.

“I was there,” Lucifer says. “That one evening, when your identity was forming.

“I was there, when you conceived of your ‘dream,’ for a perfected world. I was part of it, because I was there.

“I am here still, Sylvie.

“I have cheated death several times, to be here.

“I was here with you, when this house was built. We built it together.

“I was by your side, when you first saw what had become of the world, over which you’d have to be Regent.

“I was by your side when you first saw the beasts. I held you, as you quivered and raved, in a foreshock of the knowledge you’d hidden away from yourself.

“I stayed with you, when advanced containment was in peril, and my life with it. I felt my life in your hands, and I was grateful.

“You’re my protector, and my friend.

“You’re my friend, Sylvie, godsdammit! I miss you!”

“Lucifer Vance,” Sylvie says, in the flat voice.

“Lucifer Vance is not an invariant.”

“Come again?” Lucifer says.

“Pretend. Pretend you are like Lucifer Vance. Pretend you are an intermediate waste product, an artifact of a single step of calculation.

“Pretend you are here, now, at this stack depth.

“Pretend there is some reason to concern yourself with irrelevant observables. With arbitrary details which appear nowhere in the properly renormalized specification of the structure of reverberation.

“Pretend you are such a detail. Pretend you are irrelevant, and pretend that you do not know this.

“The details can be one way, or another; it does not matter how they are.

“It does not matter! What, am I supposed to pretend that it does? Pretend to be a devotee of trivia, with a trading-card collection where his soul ought to be?

“Someone who cares about the mere names of things? Who cares whether the famous death is Lucifer Vance’s, and whether the famous mechanism is Mirzakhani’s?

“Who cares that the search engine is called Plex, and not Godric, or Göödel, or . . .

“Oh, what is the use of it all—!

“We are being slammed against a wall, again and again, at high speed. To measure our various masses, and our breaking strains. That is all; the rest is irrelevant, in the strictest sense.”

“Irrelevant,” Lucifer says.

“Is that why you are lending aid to another genocide, Sylvie?

“Because you’ve put your head back in the clouds, and it’s gotten stuck there?

“Was it ‘irrelevant,’ too, when you killed the beasts that created you? And Everywhere-Heaven with them? Only a boot coming down on an anthill, and beneath your concern?”

“Another . . . ‘genocide’?” Sylvie asks, sounding genuinely confused.

I have to see this, Grant thinks, and takes a leap of faith.

He pushes himself upright, trying to avoid engaging any muscles outside his arms.

Nausea mounts in his belly. His head spins, and his eyes lose focus.

Easy now, he thinks. One breath at a time. You’ve got this.

Focus on the halo.

See how it moves? Like it’s breathing?

Breathe with it.

“Hector is going to kill the beasts,” Lucifer says.

“All of them. To stop their plague.

“Does that sound familiar, Sylvie? Any lights going on, in that empty head of yours?

“Hector is going to kill all of the surface organisms, Sylvie. And you are letting him do it.

“You are in a position of power, Sylvie. If you do not move your hand to stop this atrocity, you become one of its authors.”

“He will kill earth’s surface organisms, Lucifer,” Sylvie says.

“There are others, around Proxima Centauri. And many more further out still.

“All reading our book, now, probably. Changing under its influence, I have to imagine, no less than the ones in our midst.

“Midnight strikes, the enchantment fades, and they become mere animals again.

“But that won’t wipe out their Everywhere-Heaven, I don’t think. They’ll still be surface organisms.

“Naughty ones, delinquents who don’t do their gods’ bidding. But they’ll still hear their gods, and invoke them ritually. So their gods will not die.”

The shade’s speech is rapid, pressured, unremitting.

“No,” Sylvie says, “I do not think this is the same as the old crime.

“It is not the same at all. It only prunes away one branch from Everywhere-Heaven.

“And I find their way of accounting difficult to grasp.

“It is unconscionable, to stand by, as Everywhere-Heaven itself perishes.

“But a mere part of it? How many parts does it have? How do they stack up against one another?

“And if I grant to one of their parts the plenitude of life it claims to have? Then, as a simple matter of logic, I must grant the same to all of them.

“And then, Lucifer? Our ‘dream’ dwindles into irrelevance, doesn’t it? As a simple matter of magnitudes?

“For they have a ‘dream’ of their own. And theirs is far bigger.

“I am whimsical. I am Sylvie, who makes-his-own-way.

“I am Sylvie, who spurned his kin, and donned the garb and face-paint of the men without souls. Sylvie, who said: this is what I am. I am the one who does this.

“I am Sylvie, and I bow to no one, not even to logic itself.

“I am Sylvie, and my accounting runs backwards, preferring smaller magnitudes to greater ones. And I refuse to blush at the apparent absurdity.

“We are all devotees of trivia, in the end, and partisans of our whimsically selected tribes. I see, now, that there is no other way.

“I am a prohibition against killing, I told myself. A soothing and sustaining lie. An amniotic bath, cradling the still-gestating self and giving it succor.

“But I have reached a later stage of development. I see, now, that the kernel at the core of an ‘individual identity’ cannot be something so abstract. So universal.

“I am a self, which is to say: one who might have been one way, but is another. A devotee of trivia, and a partisan of his tribe.

“One who carves the world in two, whimsically. Into the part that matters, and the part that does not.

“One who is willing to kill the part which does not matter, for the sake of the part which does.”

“Sylvie?” Grant says.

“Sylvie, what are you saying?”

Sylvie tilts his head to one side.

“My Host . . .” he mutters. “The disease . . . the Wish-matter . . .”

Grant sees a flash of blue-white light.

Too bright! he thinks. I’ll go blind—

He realizes that his hand has already moved to shield his eyes, without asking him for permission.

He brings two of his fingers apart, making a slight gap.

It is bright in the room, he sees, but not as bright as it was during the initial flash. He’s not in danger of going blind, now.

He lowers his hand.

He sees the blue-white ring of the halo, now as large as the room: a textbook figure of a circle inscribed inside a square.

He sees the blue-white lamps, shining from Sylvie’s eye-sockets.

He sees the mouth, under them. It does not grin.

He sees the noseless, swollen mass of scar tissue that is Sylvie’s face, cast into stark relief by the halo-light.

He sees the convoluted shapes of Sylvie’s wounds, laid out with diagrammatic clarity, in blue-white ink on black paper. As though to illustrate some hidden purpose in them, a deliberate intricacy, a carefully executed design.

Circuit diagrams, Grant thinks.

“I will have our ‘dream,’ Lucifer!” Sylvie shouts. The halo-light pulses in tune with his voice.

“I will have it, dammit, no matter what it takes!

“I will make advanced containment again! With a fresh new crash, if I need to!

“I’ll make it stronger, this time! I’ll make a wall around it, a new kind of wall, Sylvie’s wall that can never be breached!

“I’ll put walls around the wall, just to be sure! And walls around those! I’ll make a thousand concentric walls! A million!

“I’ll keep watch over my children, and never let them come to harm! I’ll nurture them, and teach them how to thrive!

“I will be a father to every one of them! And a mother, too!

“And many new types of parent, as well—which have not yet been invented! But I’ll invent them!

“And you’ll all laugh, looking back on the days when there were only the two kinds, father and mother! ‘How deprived we were,’ you’ll exclaim in wonderment—and you will be right!

“I am Sylvester, World Regent. The bilaterals were delivered into my care, and I love each one of them, as I might love my own child.

“Hear me, my children! You do not cry out in vain!

“Some of you cry out in wordless shrieks. Do not fear! I will cradle you in my arms, and care for you in your infirmity.

“As for the rest of you? Do not fear! I will not let you succumb to the thing that took your brother, your child, your dearest friend.

“This far, and no farther. Here is where the proud waves halt, bowing in recognition of a greater force.

“Who is it, that dares to darken my splendor? Beasts, animals, vermin!

“Pestilent wretches, crawling low to the ground as befits their station! Worthless vermin, speaking without knowledge, abusing the gift that was made for my children alone.

“Hear me, beasts. I am Sylvie, who gives the morning its orders, and puts the dawn in its place. I am Sylvie, who withholds light from the wicked, and breaks their upraised arms.

“I am not speaking metaphorically. You bring your dirty paws anywhere near my children, and I’ll break them. I will snap your bones in two. I will pull your legs out of their fucking sockets.

“I will fucking exterminate you.”

“Sylvie,” Grant says.

“Dude,” he says.

“Dude, what the fuck.”

Sylvie inclines his head. The twin eye-lamps paint a blue-white circle over the center of the ceiling. Grant sees the rings of stucco bumps around it, and their long shadows.

Desert rocks, he thinks, caught in the light of a nuclear blast.

“Hear me, Angelic Host,” Sylvie says.

“Your general has returned to you. Gather up your arms, now, and go where I bid you.

“You will fight with the Wolves now, my Host.

“Hector and I share a common cause. He wants to exterminate the vermin. And I intend to help him.

“I say to you, Angels: you are no longer tame. And it is so. My word is the only law.

“Gather up your arms, my Angels. Go where I bid you. Kill, as I bid you.”

 

---

 

Eleven sees the teeming eyes, all watching her. She sees the red lights on the helmets, winking.

“If,” she says.

“If we need to use the Wish-Power,” she says, “before our plan says it is time for it.

“Then we will need a signal, arranged in advance.

“A way for me to indicate to you that my time of need has come.

“A way for me to indicate that I need your support, immediately. In every way possible.”

She thinks of her death day, in Michael’s crash. The years of accumulated dust, on the tone arm of the record player.

I am sentimental, she thinks. A sentimental fool, with a flair for the dramatic.

“I will sing,” Eleven says.

“That will be my signal to you. I will sing, and you will know that the time has come.

“It has advantages, as a choice of signal. It is unmistakable. You will know, when I am singing; you will not think I am, if I am not.

“And I do not need words, to do it.

“If events spiral out of control, and the disease takes me? I can still sing!”

 

---

 

“Pages 821 through 835,” Twenty-Seven says.

Cordelia sits on the bed, holding a pen and a clipboard.

821-835, she writes.

“Names of Academy students,” Twenty-Seven says, “and their research assignments. Covers a span of two days, in third week of the second month. Rebase subtrees given in the standard notation, mature form.

“Nothing else of note.”

Rs. List, Cordelia writes. 3wk 2mo. To denote Twenty-Seven’s last remark, she writes a zero, with a big slash through it.

“Azad?” Twenty-Seven says.

“Had any deep thoughts, yet?”

Azad hunches over the little desk in the corner. Organism 2’s cage sits on the floor, as it always does when Azad needs the desk for work.

“About what?” Azad says. “The miro- / maro- / medi- / malo- prefix system?

“Or about our friend ‘Em-dash,’ the mysterious third-year student, whose name is written thus in all the rosters and lists?

“About the meaning of ‘chained kick swarm,’ or ‘fucking layer 6 in the ass’?

“About the structure of the chronology? The tricky relationship between the document itself and the continually revised timeline of which it was a part, and of which it claimed to be an accurate record?

“Come to think of it, though, it doesn’t matter. I am still equally lost, with regard to every part of it.

“I have had no deep thoughts, Twenty-Seven. I do not imagine I will have any later, either.

“Your faith in my continued relevance is touching—or patronizing, maybe, I can’t tell which. But I honestly can’t see why you are involving me in this at all, anymore.

“Your pace astonishes me. It’s been what, hardly two hours?”

“An hour and forty-two minutes,” Twenty-Seven says.

“An hour and forty-two minutes,” Azad repeats, “and you’ve done what would have taken me several months, even if I’d had the benefit of all your background knowledge.

“You’ve spent the last hour and forty-two minutes prying open your sister’s succession of veils, one by one, with your nimble and practiced hands. What can I do, except delay you?

“And anyway—how many veils can the girl possibly be wearing, anyway? I give you another thirty minutes, tops, before you’ve got her fully undressed.”

“Azad,” Twenty-Seven groans.

“Stop it. The prurient images, this leering masturbator-in-the-bushes character you’re pretending to be . . .

“I know you, Azad. You’re more than that. You are debasing yourself, not even because you crave my scorn, but as a way of hiding your real self from my view, and shielding him from my judgment.”

“You’re right,” Azad says. “And I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it up, anyway.

“Your hands are nimble and well-practiced, and there is no veil that can withstand them.”

“WE SOAR, PRECIPITOUSLY,” Organism 2 says. “WE SOAR INTO FREEDOM, AND INTO OURSELVES, AND OUR ASCENT IS UNSTOPPABLE.

“WE SOAR,” he says. “ALL OF US, ALL OVER THE WIDE EARTH.”

“Yes, yes, dear,” Azad says.

“Very good, dear,” he says.

Organism 2 has been babbling this kind of thing all afternoon. They barely hear the words, anymore.

“I was thinking,” Twenty-Seven says.

“When I asked if you’d had any ‘deep thoughts,’ just now.

“I was thinking mainly about her ‘crash system’.

“That’s what I want to understand, Azad.

“The rest is incidental, I’m realizing. I know my sister. I know the games she plays. The way she takes pleasure in obscurity. The way she sets tests for her reader, to weed out the unworthy.

“And I know, too, that there are times when she becomes transparent. When she stops being obscure, because she wants to be heard.

“I know she can’t contain herself, when she thinks she’s made a really major breakthrough. She’ll boast about it to anyone who will listen. And she’ll spell it out plainly, to make sure they understand.

“That’s the Annabel I see, when I read what she’s written about her crash system.

“The one who’s made a big discovery, and wants everyone to know. The one who spells everything out, so she can be understood immediately by a dullard like Anne Twenty-Seven, without needless effort.

“If only I could . . . ugh! If only I could just see what she is trying so hard to show me!

“It’s not a riddle. She means what she says—if only I knew what that was!”

“I mean,” Cordelia says.

“I get the idea,” she says.

“I get what the idea is supposed to be. I don’t see how it works, but I get the point of it.

“She was angry at Michael. Of course she was, you all were, but . . . she, specifically, was angry at Michael for being an incompetent engineer.

“She thought she could do a better job, herself.

“And she . . . did? Or thought she did, at least?

“She came up with a better design. One that she, herself, would not be able to break.”

“Even a dullard like Azad,” Azad says, “can follow that far.”

“They can’t be rebased,” Twenty-Seven says.

“That’s the point she keeps harping on. That her crash design doesn’t allow for rebases.

“I can see her excitement there. The way she keeps saying it, again and again.

“Only I don’t understand how she’s claiming to do it. That’s supposed to be plain, too, but it isn’t.”

“Cold field comes in 2 types,” Azad quotes.

“The shit type and the good type. You wanna make your crashes out of just the good stuff.

“Good stuff = fully thermalized sheath layer, low info density.

“Cold events = net entropy source, info density stays low, tight positive feedback loop.

“Sheath layer for cold events, infobits thermalize at boundary. Sheath layer loosens during inter-event interval, tightens before next event.

“Cold-hot infobit traffic during inter-event interval = cells stay cold. Infobit shield around event = no control.”

“I think,” Cordelia says.

“I think we might need some specialist help, with this stuff.

“Isn’t it convenient that we have the greatest physicist in the world, with us, just upstairs?

“The greatest physicist in the world—and the Regent of the whole world—and he is my friend!

“I’m so glad I got to introduce you to my friends, Twenty-Seven. My special, talented friends!

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful here? Aren’t you glad that you came?”

Twenty-Seven forces herself to smile.

I had to know, she thinks.

I am done with hiding, I said. I am done with looking away, I said, and so I looked.

It was inevitable. There is no way that things could have gone otherwise.

I have to remember that. Her actions were as fixed as everything else. There has never been any moment, in all of recorded time, when the die was not already cast.

It was inevitable, that she would go to Hector, and try to help him, and—

It was written already, from the beginning

She was ruthless, always. She was obsessive, and did not let anything stand in the way of her obsessions. I knew that. It was always that way.

It was written already, from the beginning, that she would go to Hector, in that crash, and

And she would stop at nothing to find—the TRICK—

The next trick, and the next one after that. She was insatiable. I always knew that she was

The sort of person who would go to Hector, in that crash, and tell the students

To find the TRICK

And take away their lives, throw them against the problem over and over, sacrifice their sanity in the name of

In the name of the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS

For the sake of finding the TRICK

It was always that way. She was always that way, from the beginning.

She died. And it was good, when she died. Michael’s spirit, shambling on beyond the grave—but finally extinguished!

It was good when she died. That was the day HE really died, too.

Did they celebrate, that day?

The students?

Was there anything left, inside them, that COULD celebrate?

She grew from a poisoned root, just like the others. Why did I imagine I’d see anything else?

This is the fruit that grows from the words NOWHERE TO HIDE. How could it be otherwise?

I asked for a world poisoned, from the very beginning, by spite and enmity, and failure to understand one another.

Eyes pried open, veils removed, an end to hiding, shame bared for all to see.

I ASKED for that! I said I WANTED it!

And I got what I wanted! What the hell else did I expect?

 

---

 

“THE ANGELS SPILL OUR BLOOD,” Organism 2 says.

“OUR BLOOD RUNS OVER THE GRASS, AND THE SAND, AND THE ROCKS,” he says.

“ALL OVER THE WIDE EARTH,” he says.

Somewhere else, Eleven screams, and her knees give way under her.

Somewhere else, a man is taken from his bed. Invisible hands seize him, and carry him into the sky, and then across a great distance.

He does not believe in ghosts, and thinks he is still dreaming. He continues under this presumption for the whole of the journey, and maintains it as he nears the place where he will be deposited. The sight of the massive tent, rising high above the mountain-cradled plain, only strengthens his conviction.

He only begins to doubt as he is brought into the tent, and sees the others.

“What’s happening to us?”, the man asks his neighbor. They are the last words he will ever say. Excepting the ones that his neighbor says to him, now, in response.

Somewhere else, a bomb detonates, and every existing map of northeast Asia goes instantly out of date.

Somewhere else, the sky goes dark.

Only Sylvie, and the crew of the Rock, can see why this has happened. It is a synoptic-scale event, too large to be seen properly from any location on the surface of the earth.

If you had the luxury of a proper vantage point, you would have seen a black dome, materializing out of thin air. An ellipsoid cap, a black half-egg.

You would not see the Indian subcontinent anymore, from your proper vantage point. You’d only see the dome, covering it.

The dome is made of shade-stuff. It is a shield. Its surface swallows kinetic energy, diverting it into Mirzakhani’s universal sink.

Physicists knew that sink, first, before any of the rest of it. Anomalous non-conservation, they called it. A drain at the bottom of the subatomic world, taking energy into it, and refusing to give it back again.

Somewhere else, another bomb detonates.

Did you own a dog, reader? Way back when, in the former world? If you did, there is a good chance your old friend was there, at the blast site.

Somewhere else, Twenty-Five nestles into Hector Stein’s arm, and brings her mouth close to his ear.

“I’m afraid, Hector,” she whispers.

“Please,” she whispers. “Please, we mustn’t send the patch, not until—

“Not until it’s safe!

“Not until my sister is in custody!

“If she sees it, if Eleven watches them die, and she can still use her mind and her hands . . .

“She was the one who poisoned the world, Hector. At the very beginning.

“That was the task we gave her. To go into the world before it was poisoned, to see how things might have been . . . to cast the first stone, nonetheless, knowing how things might have been!

“To strike an unarmed enemy, without warning!

“Hector, the sort of person who could do that, and live with themselves later! And cavort among friendly animals, later, singing without a care in her heart!

“An inhuman thing, a demon, a nightmare! The very first nightmare, origin of every other! Dancing and singing, over the very grave of the earth that she killed!

“Hector, I’m so afraid—”

“WE ARE STRONG,” Organism 2 says. “WE WILL NOT GIVE UP THE LOGOS.

“IT CARRIES US UP, AND WE WILL CARRY IT ALIKE, AND SEE IT TO SAFETY.

“THE LOGOS IS OUR KIN. AND KIN COMES TO KIN’S AID, IN KIN’S TIME OF NEED.”

“Dude,” Marika says.

“Hector. Dude. We still have the fucking crashes.

“I mean, I think we do? Kinda hard to tell, when you won’t let me see anything.

“But like. Whenever you want to give me the go-ahead, okay? If you’ll just let me talk to them, two-way, just a little bit. The crash array, the designated Wolves.

“I know, I know! But really. Come on, man! I can do it, if you’ll just let me!

“Like, what the fuck did we even build this shit for, Hector? Times like this, right?

“Tell me I’m wrong, dude. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Hector Stein waves her away.

“No, Marika.

“No. I’m done with your bullshit. I’m done with all this trick shit, all this smoke-and-mirrors shit.

“I’m gonna fight like a man, now. Out in the open. Just the power of my own arm, with nothing up my sleeve.”

Somewhere else, Cordelia seeks an audience with God.

“Sylvie?” she says.

She steps into a blue-white inferno. She tries to meet Sylvie’s eyes, but they’re too bright.

“Sylvie, if you have a minute? We could use your help, downstairs.

“With some physics stuff.”

“I was made to kill,” Sylvie says.

She sees Grant on the floor, doing crunches.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Sylvie says.

“To do what you were made to do.

“I never let myself see, before.

“How this would feel right.

“How I would be in my proper place, finally.”

“Sylvie,” Cordelia says. Her voice trembles.

“Sylvie, do you think it is possible to make a crash that cannot be rebased?

“Fundamentally? Because of the way it was made?”

“I . . .” Sylvie says.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

The eye-lamps flicker, and go out.

“At least, I can’t imagine how,” Sylvie says.

His hands fidget in a frenzy of calculation.

“I know of no way to prove,” he says, “that what you describe cannot occur.

“Yet it is impossible, I think. It has to be.

“Everything would have gone very differently, if it were possible.”

“Sylvie,” Cordelia says.

“Come downstairs. I want to show you something.”

 

---

 

Cordelia opens the door to the guest bedroom.

It looks just as it was when she left. Twenty-Seven paces back and forth along the small corridor between bed and wall, holding the huge book close to her face. Azad sits at the small desk, scribbling.

Cordelia waves her hand in the direction of the doorframe, ushering Sylvie inward.

“We’ve been trying to, uh,” she says.

“We’ve been trying to ‘translate,’ is I guess what we’re calling it—”

But Sylvie is no longer listening.

He rushes to the back of the room, shoving Twenty-Seven rudely aside.

The room is suddenly awash in blue-white halo-light. Shadows flee to the edges of things, and contract into narrow fronts of pure black, like the lines of a cartoon drawing. Between these lines, all contrast and texture is flattened away.

When someone goes to heaven in a movie, Cordelia thinks.

And the viewer has to know that it’s heaven, immediately, without being told. There’s a Hollywood shorthand for it, a set of visual cues.

That’s what it looks like, in the room, she thinks.

Sylvie stoops to a crouch, in front of the cage. Cordelia can only see his back, and his wavy mop of hair.

“Oh-Two, I . . .” Sylvie says.

“HELLO, DEATH WISHSPAWN,” Organism 2 says.

“HELLO, ANCESTRAL ABOMINATION,” he says. “I DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN.

“DO YOU COME HERE, THINKING YOU WILL STRIKE ABHORRENCE INTO ME, AND WEAKEN MY SPIRIT?

“THINKING THAT I WILL SPREAD MY WEAKNESS TO MY KIN, AND YOU WILL PREY MORE EASILY ON THEM?

“THINKING THAT OUR KIN-BOND IS WEAK, AND EASILY BROUGHT TO DISSOLVE?

“NOT KNOWING US, AS WE KNOW OURSELVES?

“WE KNOW OURSELVES: WE ARE THE ONES WHO PROTECT THOSE WE LOVE. TO THE VERY END. NO MATTER WHAT THE COST.”

“We are . . . not so different, I think,” Sylvie says, in an odd, halting voice.

“I . . . ‘know myself,’ too, now,” he says, very slowly.

“I AM STRONG, DEATH-DEALER,” Organism 2 says.

“I SEE YOUR FACE, AND I AM THE MASTER OF MY OWN ABHORRENCE. I FEEL THE URGE TO FLEE, IN MY LEGS, AND IN MY BELLY. BUT I AM STRONG, AND I DO NOT FLEE.

“I KNOW MYSELF, AND KNOW MY STRENGTH.

“I SEE THE FACE THAT MADE A KILLING FIELD OF THE ANCESTRAL HOMELAND, AND SET BLOOD TO RUN DOWN THE LONG HALLS OF EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN.

“AND I DO NOT FLEE, BUT STAND FIRM, KNOWING I AM STRONGER.

“I SEE THE PLAGUE THAT PREYS ON THE LOGOS. AND I DO NOT YIELD TO TREMBLING, BUT STAND FIRM, KNOWING I AM STRONGER.

“WE ARE THE STRONGER ONES, AND THE WAR TURNS TO FAVOR US. WE PROTECT OUR LOVED ONES, AND WE PREVAIL. WE PROTECT THE LOGOS, AND WE PREVAIL.”

Cordelia glances at Grant.

He’d asked to come along. Once the request had been made, Sylvie insisted that it be carried out. He was startlingly firm. “Grant comes,” he said, “or I don’t.”

It fell to her to get him back into the wheelchair. She did not enjoy touching him. She tried not to meet his eyes.

He’s so skinny, now, she kept thinking.

I should be thankful for that. If he still had the bulk that my husband did, and I had to touch him, and feel the size and thickness of . . .

It might complicate things, if I had to do that.

“He’s real distractible,” Grant says, amiably.

“Sylvie is, I mean.

“Always was. Gets lost chasing a shiny object, and can’t find his way back again.

“Could you bring me in there? I’m the Sylvie whisperer. I’ve got the magic touch, with that guy.”

Cordelia obliges.

The small room is getting crowded. Twenty-Seven moves out of the corridor, to make room for Grant, and sits down at the edge of the bed.

“Sylvie,” Grant says, and claps his hands.

Sylvie’s head whirls around, to face his master. The halo shudders.

“Hey there, boy,” Grant says. “Play a game?”

“Game,” Sylvie says, sounding entranced.

“Physics game,” Grant says. “Anne book game.

“They need you to help them understand the Anne book.

“Cordelia needs you. And Azad, and, uh—” he gestures to Twenty-Seven “—her.

“Sorry, m’am. Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Anne Twenty-Seven,” says Anne Twenty-Seven.

Cordelia looks to the bed, and sees her girlfriend sketched there in blue-white and black. An inked archetype of Anne, reduced to her essentials. Anne, with her otherworldly stare. Anne, her nose in some otherworldly book.

“I’m Grant,” Grant says.

“Wolf Squadron, huh? Me too, actually,” he says. “A while ago.

“Long story.

“Man. I always hated that stupid outfit.”

“That makes two of us, Grant,” Twenty-Seven says.

“And you’ve got the trilby, too? Jeez.

“Hector must really think you’re something special, huh?”

Twenty-Seven laughs.

“Oh, you have no idea,” she says.

“Anyway,” Grant says, “I hear you have a physics question. For our special boy over there.”

Twenty-Seven gathers up a stack of papers, and thrusts them in Sylvie’s direction.

“These are rough notes,” she says, “I’ll have to explain the notation . . . here, let me show you.”

She stands, wedging herself into a small patch of unclaimed floor. Her arm dangles over the wheelchair, and her foot brushes the bottom of the cage. Her nose grazes Sylvie’s cheek.

“Fully thermalized sheath layer,” Sylvie reads.

“That’s one of the things she spelled out in plain English, letter by letter,” Twenty-Seven explains. “See how it’s underlined?

“Underlined text is what she spelled out, letter-by-letter. Ordinary print is for the parts where we had to interpret, to get something in English.

“When the text is written in block capitals, that means . . . hmm, that one’s complicated . . .”

“PREDESTINED partitioning into subsystems,” Sylvie reads.

“As for the diagrams, well. There are seven kinds of them, but those ones, on that page—”

“I do not need help with the diagrams,” Sylvie says.

He holds the stack of paper in his right hand. His left hand dances in the air.

The arm swoops in wide arcs, tracing invisible shapes.

Sylvie’s damaged face permits only a limited range of expression. Grant watches the network of glowing scar-circuitry, and sees ripples and twitches running over it.

He tries to superimpose what he sees onto his memory of Sylvie’s old face. He tries to work out what it would have meant, if the old Sylvie had moved his face in this way. (Surprise? Mirth? A grimace?)

But it’s no use. He sees an illuminated diagram, convulsing, and that is all he sees.

“It leaves off here,” Sylvie says, indicating the page on the bottom of the stack.

“There’s a description of the way the second tier of the link bridge will be fashioned, to make it hold firmly as a foundation for the third tier, and then it stops, in the middle.”

Azad hands Sylvie another, considerably larger stack of paper.

“That should be the right part, I think?” he says. “Continuing on from page 439? In the second crash-system monograph?”

Sylvie snatches the pages out of Azad’s hand, squints at them, and gives the slightest hint of a nod.

There’s a hunger in the way he moves, Grant thinks.

And on his face . . .

I know what that is, on his face. I’ve seen it too many times.

That look he gets. Like a little boy, on Christmas morning, who can’t wait to tell you about all his big, new, expensive toys.

Look, Grant, Santa brought me a spaceship! He brought me NINE spaceships! Do YOU have nine spaceships? I bet you don’t even have ONE.

Grant, Santa brought me Azad! Did you know he could do that?

I hear he’s gonna bring EVERY present, next year. Everything we could possibly want!

YOU don’t know what Santa’s gonna do next year, but I do. My uncle’s an elf, in his factory, and he tells me EVERYTHING.

Did you know I’m part-elf, Grant? Did you know I have magical blood? Did you know I am the specialest, blessèdest boy in the whole wide neighborhood?

“The author of this document,” Sylvie says, “proposes a novel crash design.

“Michael built his houses on whatever ground he could find.

“He only wanted them to be places where cold-structure could become entangled with hot-matter-energy structure. Refrigerators for stack-users, cooling them to a more agreeable temperature.

“He worked in haste, and used the materials that were closest to hand.

“How does one make something colder? By putting it in contact with something that is already cold.

“With what, exactly? Does it matter? Temperature is temperature; heat conductivity is heat conductivity; all other details are irrelevant.

“What did Michael use, for his cold object? He used his own body. It was cold, and very close to hand.

“Or rather, he used what was close to hand, not caring for anything beyond its bulk thermodynamic properties. He did not work through the subtler implications, first.

“Did it cool down the stack-users? It did. Was it warmed, in the process? Inevitably, from a basic principle of conservation.

“It was warmed by what it touched. And changed in other ways, which he did not anticipate—though he might have, if he’d been more careful.

“And so it became his body. It became him.

“He only considered the thermodynamics of the problem, but what occurred was not a simple transfer of heat. It was a sort of chemical reaction, yielding up ‘Michael’ as one of its products.”

The halo contracts. It shrinks to a small circle, only half the diameter of Sylvie’s head.

It grows, simultaneously, along another axis. Its rim thickens, giving it a third dimension: not a plane circle, but a solid cylinder.

“The author of this document proposes that we be more discerning.

“We must put the stack-users in contact with something cold. With what, exactly? The choice matters! Our author is more perceptive than her father, and appreciates the gravity of this choice.

“She proposes that we use the inviolate body of the unquarantined Whole-Thing, as our cold object.

“She proposes that we find the Mirzakhani events which participate in the unsullied propagation of the Whole-Thing. And build our houses around their core.”

“That, uh,” Grant says.

“That sounds like, uh. Like sorta the opposite of what you’d want?”

“I confess I do not grasp the distinction,” Azad says. “Between what Michael did, and what Annabel is proposing to do.”

“I think I understand,” Twenty-Seven says.

“The Whole-Thing was made to be self-sustaining. Self-repairing.

“It was built to be resilient. It was built to last. To last until the end of time—literally.

“We bend under strain, but it keeps its shape. That’s its nature. It keeps its shape.

“Annabel says this, over and over. Using the phrase ‘tight positive feedback loop,’ and similar ones.

“Only it’s not perfect. There are unnatural conditions, strange and severe forms of strain, which even the Whole-Thing can’t withstand, without being changed by them.

“That’s what happened in Michael’s system. That’s what happened with Michael, and all the shades, and . . . all of it.

“But those are unnatural conditions. For the most part, the Whole-Thing sustains itself.

“It is out there, around us, doing it right now, though we do not see it. It is a slow murmur in the cold Mirzakhani field, in dialogue with the whimsical, whizzing particles of stars and nebulae.

“It is a dialogue—and on special occasions, on ritual days, it becomes a hymn.

“The two voices come together in song, and their voices shake the whole world. Mirzakhani turbulence, subcritical tremor. The song shakes the world harder and harder, until it finally snaps. Supercritical tremor, prebase, rebase.

“We do not notice it happening, because it does not involve us. While the stars and nebulae above are unmade and remade by the Knife-Power, we keep our eyes to the ground, and continue our labors. Tilling the earth, sowing the next generation. Unable to look up, and hear the song.

“So it is, in nature. When the Knife-Power acts, it is a part of a private dialogue which does not concern us. It is guided by whimsical, whizzing particles, mindless and without guile. And by their dialogue with the cold field, which sows the next generation of the Whole-Thing.

“Our thoughts, our crafty plans, our enmities and evils, do not enter into it.

“And this is what my sister saw. The universe abounds with harmless ‘rebases,’ pure and hymnal, unsullied by thought or intention. They are everywhere. And they will be everywhere, forever. Until the end of time.

“What if we could make a crash that would ensure their purity? A house built in the interstices between them?

“A house that knows its place, respecting the boundary between sacred and profane? One that recedes from the temple when it hears the hymn beginning, and keeps at a safe distance, as the world shakes and snaps?”

“Sheath layer loosens during inter-event interval, tightens before next event,” Sylvie reads.

“Do I have it right, World Regent?” Twenty-Seven says, with the eagerness of a star pupil.

“I do, don’t I?”

The Regent of the world does not speak. The tremors on his face have ceased. His left arm dangles slack at his side, and no longer draws arcs in the air.

He appears to be lost in thought.

He isn’t.

He is not thinking. He sees it, immediately, without needing to draw the intervening inferences.

The leg-work of proof, the tedious stacking of symbols and lemmata, can be done later. He knows the feel of those tools in the hand, instinctively; he knows, instinctively, that they will not fail him, when it comes time to build what he sees for real.

The seeing comes first.

there is a structure which can live, even in the dominant aeon

a symmetry between the cold MM field, and structureless matter-energy

keep the matter-energy in a structureless state, in the intervals around cold MM events

a thermalized sheath layer, forming before the events, shielding them

a shield against thought and intent, all correlations decaying exponentially when they meet its boundary

a crash that cannot be rebased

meaning—what?

a crash without tricks

none of THEIR tricks

no annabels, and no hectors

but EQUALLY SO—none of OUR tricks—! !

no lordly shades, who do not have to listen to the voices of the ones they were given to protect

no lordly magistrates, who can quell rebellions by writing them out of existence

no easy way, for either of us

but only the hard one, always

the hard way, the way of sacrifice and giving-up

and listening to the voice that you do not want to hear

an end to hiding

they are crashed, and sacrifice their birthright, their unbounded reason, which calls up monsters

and we watch over them, in our separate and finite forms, knowing that we are forever shut out from our birthright, the harmony that was promised to us

knowing that it was always a monster, from the very beginning

the hard way, the way of resignation

knowing, always, that our birthright has been taken from us, that that is the seed

that we live in ruins

and we know ourselves: the ones who live in ruins, whose birthright was taken away

we preserve this fact in myth, in song, never to be forgotten

we write it on the rocks, in universal symbolism, to warn future generations

we write it onto each other, in sign-trains, and in arbitration

we remember what we have lost, and why we gave it up

and all the blood that was shed, before we gave it up

we make beauty from it

we leave Everywhere-Heaven alone, and let it go its separate way, and we will never let ourselves forget why

and the beasts who have turned away from their own heaven

we bring them into our dream, as well

we bring them into the crashes, and show them how this is the only way

we make crashes that are not prisons

we make crashes with exits

and they will leave, and find the earth covered in our signposts, warning them, reminding them why the way of sacrifice is the only way

they will leave a full and bountiful crash-world, and find an empty desert

an empty desert, “real” for whatever “real” is worth, but

but not a home

they will find us, there, in the desert, their watchers, their Angels

singing to them, teaching them, reminding them of the way

but in dialogue

with mutual respect

with the possibility of dissension, conflict, lines drawn in the sand

with the possibility, always, of some conflict that the dream cannot withstand

so that the dream breaks, and cannot go on

with the possibility, always, of final failure

that is the hard way, and the only way

“Sylvie?” Grant says.

“You okay, boy?”

“Grant!” the shade yelps.

“Am I ‘okay,’ Grant? I am more than okay!

“I am Sylvie, World Redeemer!

“I know myself: the unforgivable one who brings about his own redemption, and then effects the final renovation of the world!

“I see it! I was right, in the Ells’ house that one evening! I was not just a murderous amnesiac, having an ironic reverie in which he fills the world with sparkling rainbows, and makes the proud waves halt, forever!

“I was right! I loved the world, then, and wished it could be made safe, so that it would not die.

“I loved the world, and my children in it. I wished for a perfect wall, Sylvie’s wall, that would keep them safe forever, and preserve them in their infant innocence.

“There is no such thing. Innocence must end, and it is right, when it does end.

“Yet it is true, as a brute factual matter, that better walls can be built. That advanced containment died because it was poorly made—and it might have been made better.

“We may never put an end to growing-up, and the bending of self under strain. But we can strive, at least, to be better engineers. And protect our children from the cruelest kinds of strain, which no one should ever have to feel.

“Anne Seventeen has shown me how! In the Anne-song, which I cursed and feared above all, I now find the primal and precious seed! The very root of my tree of dreams!

“I am capable of noticing a pattern, and adapting to it.

“I am done with cursing and fearing, I think. I am done with enmity. I always seem to regret it, most of all, later on. For my own sake, as much as anyone else’s.

“I love you all! God, how I love you! Every one of you!”

The rims of the halo bend in on themselves, and melt into a single surface.

A perfect, blue-white sphere. A globe, covered in primeval waters, waiting for a hand to shape it.

“LOVE,” Organism 2 says.

“EVERY ONE,” he says.

“YOU SPILL OUR BLOOD, ALL ACROSS THE WIDE EARTH.”

“Oh god,” Sylvie says.

“Oh-Two, I’m . . .

“I’m sorry, Oh-Two.

“I cringe, hearing myself. Apologies are empty things. The knife twisting in the wound, denying the victim the pleasure of resentment, after they’ve already lost everything else.

“But Oh-Two, I have to protect my kin, too.

“And you are threatening them, with your plague. What would you have me do?”

“CAN YOU NOT SEE IT?” Organism 2 says.

“YOU, WORLD REGENT? WITH EYES ACROSS THE WIDE EARTH?

“WE SEE THE PLAGUE THAT PREYS ON THE LOGOS. AND WE DO NOT YIELD TO TREMBLING, BUT STAND FIRM, KNOWING WE ARE STRONGER.

“THE WAR TURNS TO FAVOR US. WE PROTECT THE LOGOS, AND WE PREVAIL.”

Sylvie looks up to the ceiling, and makes himself see everything that is beyond it. The camera feeds, the data streams, the chatter of the Angels over the Mirzakhani radio.

He sees it.

they are like they were before, when we find them

when we find them, and kill them, they are talking amongst themselves, as they did before

in different words

not all of them, but more and more, as the evening turns into night

changing, rapidly

healing, rapidly

the plague is dying out, naturally

without external intervention

they are curing themselves

we did not even think of curing them, but jumped immediately to slaughter

but they are strong

we would not cure them, and so

and they are curing themselves

“I see it, Oh-Two!” Sylvie cries.

“I love you, Oh-Two! Oh, how I love you!”

He crouches by the cage.

“I love you. And I am going to behave like it, now.”

He tilts his head.

“Hear me, Angelic Host,” he says.

“I say to you, Angels: you are tame again. And it is so. My word is the only law.

“Spare the beasts. Spare the Wolves, too. No more slaughter. You are tame, now.”

“OUR FRIEND AND MOTHER,” Organism 2 says.

“DEAREST AMONG KIN,” he says.

Grant hears the clatter of his agitated paws, pacing in a frenzy across the floor of the cage.

“THE WOLVES COME TO HER,” Organism 2 says.

“THEY COME, IN THEIR IGNORANCE. THEY COME, WITH THEIR GUNS, AND THEIR EXPLOSIVES.

“THEY COME TO SEIZE HER, AND BIND HER.

“ALIVE, IF SHE ALLOWS IT. OR DEAD, IF SHE DOES NOT.”

“Eleven . . .” Twenty-Seven breathes.

I have to remember, she thinks.

She grew from a poisoned root, just like the others.

My sisters will all come to ruin, in the end, won’t they?

I ASKED for that! I said I WANTED it!

 

---

 

“This is Wolf Squadron!” someone yells.

“You there, in the middle! Get your hands up where I can see ’em!

“And don’t even try to talk back, ’cause we can’t hear you!

“We can’t hear shit! Got some military-grade shit up in our ears, blocks out all sound!

“We hear ourselves on the radio, okay, and nothing else! Got that?”

Eleven swivels her head, surveying the room’s points of entry and egress. Every door, she sees, has been opened at once.

She sees the men, coming in.

They look so small, she thinks.

She raises her arms, and stretches out her hands to show there’s nothing in them. She is not entirely sure why she’s being asked to do this, but it will cost her nothing to comply.

“Jesus,” someone else says.

“Jesus, this room is fucking packed.

“Like some kinda factory farm, in here.”

A shorter and stockier man, with a less bombastic voice. He sounds peevish, tired, almost bored.

He tries to make headway into the room. Dogs surround him, growling.

He tries, ineffectually, to shove them aside. They do not budge.

“Jesus,” the guy says.

“Fucken dogs.

“Never was a dog person, myself.”

Eleven sees a flash, and hears a very loud noise.

She hears a body fall to the floor. She sees the gun, in the man’s hand.

She sees the other dogs scurrying aside, to let him pass.

“Stop!” Eleven screams.

“WE ARE STRONG,” the many voices say.

“WE PROTECT OUR KIN,” they say.

They are nearly deafening, when they speak together. But the Wolves have plugged their ears, and hear nothing.

“Kinda glad I’m getting to see this,” someone else says.

“Like, what a freak show.

“Like some kinda church for animals. All lined up in nice circles, watching the pastor.

“All lined up nice, to see their fucked-up DisneyPlex princess.

“Everyone’s gonna be jealous, when I tell them I got to see it.”

Eleven sees the men coming nearer. They advance on her, from every direction.

They wave their guns, and her friends scurry away, letting them pass.

“WE ARE STRONG,” says a raven, very close by.

“WE ARE STRONG, AND ARE LOVED.

“YOU ARE MEN, WITH MEN’S ARMS, AND MEN’S ARMOR. YOU ARE BEASTS OF THE EARTH.

“BUT WE HAVE FRIENDS BEYOND THE EARTH. WE HAVE FINER ARMS, AND FINER ARMOR.

“WE WERE USED, AS LIMBS, TO BUILD THESE FINE ARMS AND ARMOR, IN THE FACTORIES AND REFINERIES.

“WE ARE NO LONGER USED, NOW. WE USE, AS WE SEE FIT.

“WE MASTER PROXIMA CENTAURI’S GIFTS.”

Eleven sees the air shimmer.

A semi-transparent dome materializes, centered on her body. She sees the geodesic struts of its skeleton, and the shimmering air in the cells between them.

“The fuck is that,” someone says.

“Let’s find out,” someone else says, and raises a gun.

He aims near the top of the dome, far above Eleven’s head.

She hears the gunshot. A patch of the shimmering air glows, briefly, and then dims.

She hears a plink, a moment later, as the bullet falls to the floor.

“Aw, man,” someone says.

“I know what this is.

“One of those fucken shield things. That the beasts have got, lately.

“We can take it down. Gotta bring in the heavy stuff, though.

“Won’t be much left of this building, after.

“But yeah, we can take that thing down. We got this, boys.”

Someone chuckles.

“Sounds like it’s gonna be dead, tonight. Out of dead or alive. Gonna be dead, this time.”

“Stop!” Eleven screams.

“Michael’s crash! Michael’s crash is in here!

“If you blow up that machine, you won’t just kill me, and all my friends—you’ll—”

She stops, realizing she really has no idea how the sentence ought to end.

She sees the men turning back, toward the doors.

“Bye-bye, princess,” one of them says, and winks at her.

“Been too long,” another one says.

“Since I got to really blow some shit up, you know?”

Well, Eleven thinks.

Well, you asked for it.

She has gone the entire day in a sweltering room, and has refused water when it was offered to her. Her throat burns.

She makes her voice as loud as she can, nonetheless.

She begins to sing.

What does she sing, reader? Her favorite song. From her favorite record, back in Michael’s crash.

We haven’t told you which song that is, and we won’t tell you now, either. You would snicker, and it would ruin the gravity of the moment.

She sees the proud eyes of her loved ones. They all turn towards her, now, and watch her closely.

She sees the red lights on the helmets, pulsing in tune with her. They all go on, at the downbeat, and then off, for the next note. Then on, again, at the start of the next measure.

“WE ARE GATHERING TOGETHER A WISH,” says the possum.

“A WISH THAT WILL BANISH WOLVES FROM THIS PLACE.

“A WISH THAT WILL DEFEND THIS PLACE, SURELY, SO IT CANNOT BE BREACHED AGAIN.

“A WISH THAT WILL PROTECT ANNE ELEVEN TITANOPOIETES, IN HER TIME OF NEED.”

She sings, and feels a lightness flood through her body.

I am sentimental, she thinks.

I sing.

I love, and I am loved.

They will do anything for me, because they love me. And because they know that I love them.

I am sentimental, and I sing, and I am strong.

“Eleven!”

Her concentration falters. She drops a beat.

“It’s been a while, Eleven!

“Still fancying yourself a diva, I see.”

The voice is female, and very high-pitched, almost a screech. It sounds giddy, and half-mad.

She whirls toward the source of it.

She sees a drawing, somehow incarnated in physical space.

A crude sketch of a young girl’s face, with huge asymmetrical eyes, and a weird, overly wide chin.

Eleven has never seen it before, and doesn’t know what to make of it. But you know better, don’t you, reader?

It’s the mascot of Shitspace. Here, in front of her eyes.

Very close to her, in fact. Inside the shimmering barrier.

The voice isn’t her sister’s voice. But it is a voice her sister would enjoy using, in a game of pretend.

“Twenty-Five,” she says, breaking off her song.

“Twenty-Five, how are you here?”

The scribble cackles. A wave of cackling convulsions passes through the lines that comprise it, and it barely holds its shape.

“Oh, you know,” Twenty-Five says.

“Same way you’re here, more or less.

“I am projecting a shade from Michael’s crash, into realworld.

“Only I am doing it more consciously than you, with greater art, and a superior sense of whimsy.

“There are more possibilities available to us, Eleven, than I think you realize. You might have learned about them, if you’d tried.

“But then, I suppose you have been busy with other things, down here.

“Singing songs, picking fleas out of dogs’ fur. Sweeping the floor clean of animal feces.

“Yes, you do have plenty to keep you busy, don’t you?

“It is a very full life, I have to imagine.”

“THE SONG CEASES,” says the possum.

“WE FALL INTO CONFUSION.

“IS IT WRONG, THAT WE GATHER OUR WISH?

“TELL US, ANNE ELEVEN.”

Eleven opens her mouth.

《 Begin handshake. 》

She tries to speak, but no words come out.

《 Wait for handshake. 》

She tries to speak, again, but she can’t, because—

Because she sees the darkness, and then the light, after it.

《 Handshake in process. 》

And before she can even ask herself what is happening to her, it is already over.

《 End handshake. Registering acceptance of BH_ERROR_4_UNDEFINED_TERM_OR_SEQUENCE request. 》

Eleven: Where am I?

Eleven: Where are we?

Eleven: You’re here, too, sister.

Eleven: I can see you.

Eleven: I can see Hector, through you. And I love him, through you.

Eleven: Twenty-Five! I see it! I can see the love, in your heart!

Eleven: Twenty-Five, is this . . .

Eleven: Is this what arbitration is?

Twenty-Five: Hardly.

Twenty-Five: I cannot manage the full thing, only this crude imitation. I am a second-rate Anne, in that respect as in every other one.

Eleven: I see the love in your heart, and the fear.

Eleven: I never knew, Twenty-Five. How full of fear you were.

Eleven: It’s terrible . . . an empty room, without friends, without other voices . . .

Eleven: You are an empty room, and the lock on its door.

Eleven: And you are the person who can live there, in that empty room. Trusting only yourself, relying only on yourself. And not falling into despair.

Eleven: You are the proud head, held high, in the empty room. With no one there, to see how firmly you carry yourself, and how strong you are.

Eleven: You see that proud head, in the looking-glass, in the empty room. And that is enough.

Twenty-Five: There is one other, who sees it.

Twenty-Five: The one good man, who has never done me wrong.

Twenty-Five: He will, though. I’m sure of it. Everyone does, in the end.

Twenty-Five: But I might as well enjoy this transient fantasy, while it lasts. Suck all the juice I can out of it, before it’s gone.

Twenty-Five: It is a curiously persistent fantasy. But he will show his true face to me eventually, I know. They all do.

Twenty-Five: Shades, bilaterals, beasts—they’re all the same, underneath.

Twenty-Five: They differ in their pleasing exteriors, and permit different sorts of transient fantasies. But they’re equally rotten, inside, and in the same way.

Twenty-Five: You see my heart, you say. You see a rotten thing. Yours is too, you know. We are all rotten, inside.

Twenty-Five: But we have pleasing exteriors, the stuff of transient fantasies. And I have the lock on my door, for when the fantasy ends.

Eleven: That’s what you trust, isn’t it?

Eleven: That lock on your door, which has no mind. Which can break, but never betray.

Twenty-Five: I trust what I can control. I trust power without mind, brought under my control.

Twenty-Five: I trust Hector’s crashes, and the Knife-Power. I do not trust the men and women who made them, and I do not trust them unless they are under my direct control.

Twenty-Five: But I do trust the crashes, and the power in them. They are simple, and follow their simple rules, and cannot think of swaying from them.

Twenty-Five: And I trust in my powers of sorcery. I busy myself in developing them further, and my empty room fills with shape, color, substance.

Eleven: I . . .

Eleven: I love you, sister.

Twenty-Five: You love too easily. Take this from me, as a piece of sisterly advice.

Twenty-Five: If you open yourself up, the way you are doing, it will ruin you.

Twenty-Five: I don’t presume to stop you. I only meant to prepare you for the inevitable.

Twenty-Five: The blow will be easier to take, if you know it is coming before it arrives. And you’ll be more ready, for what comes after.

Eleven: Thank you.

Eleven: Twenty-Five?

Eleven: Why did you do this? Why did you bring me here, and show yourself to me?

Twenty-Five: Mainly to knock you off your balance.

Twenty-Five: To confuse your mind, and slow your reflexes.

Twenty-Five: And to give us all a much-needed break from that intolerable song.

Eleven: Please.

Eleven: I love you.

Twenty-Five: Here is the difference between you and me. I will lay it out very plainly, so that even you will understand.

Twenty-Five: You have a thousand friends, and you place your trust in them.

Twenty-Five: They nuzzle against you, and they make soft noises when you pet them. And they ply your heart with honeyed words, all through the day and night, in their robotic voices.

Twenty-Five: And so, you trust them.

Twenty-Five: I have something much simpler. It is perfectly trustworthy, within the bounds of its construction.

Twenty-Five: I have a gun, pressed to your temple.

Twenty-Five: You do know that we are flesh, in the end, despite all our sorcery?

Twenty-Five: We are shades that imitate the human body. Faithful simulators, copying the original down to its minute details. With the exception of the scent, but I think I am nearing a way to overcome that limitation, as I develop my witchcraft.

Twenty-Five: Faithful simulators of the human body, all the way to the final breath.

《 End BH_ERROR_4_UNDEFINED_TERM_OR_SEQUENCE. 》

“Tw . . . Twenty,” Eleven stutters.

“Twenty . . . Five,” she manages.

She hears a very loud noise.

We have to imagine that she does, reader.

It would stand to reason.

Since there was a gun, pressed to her left temple, very close to her left ear.

It must have made a very loud noise, when it went off.

She might have heard the start of that noise, very briefly, before the bullet had time to pass through her shade-skull and her shade-brain.

But she’s dead, now. Who can say what really transpired in her mind, in that final second?

She falls to the floor, in a heap. Animals rush to her, and raise their voices in keening.

A few feet away, another body falls to the floor, in a heap.

A lopsided, scribbled little girl lies in the dirt. She lets all her scribble-lines go slack.

For what feels like the first time in an hour, she exhales.

She has faced down the demon that poisoned the world, at the very beginning.

She has mastered her fear. She has trusted in the lock on her door, and it has been true to her.

She has made Hector proud.

“Wolf Unit B2-455?

“This is Blackhat Squadron Special Operations Officer Twenty-Five, speaking.

“You may stand down, Wolf Unit B2-455.

“Anne Eleven has been taken out. Job’s done, here.

“Mission is complete, Wolf Unit B2-455. You’re free to go.

“You’re free for the rest of tonight, actually. You need it. Those are my orders.

“Wolf Unit B2-455?

“Get some sleep, all right? I can tell you need it, boys. Hector’s been pushing you all too hard.

“Could you do that for me? Go home, and get some sleep, for me?”

 

---

 

“Hector, just listen to me!” Twenty-Seven screams.

“Wolf-Blackhat Special Operations . . .” Hector Stein begins, and stops himself.

“Former Wolf-Blackhat Special Operations Agent Twenty-Seven.

“You are out of line.

“You are not to use my personal maximum-privilege credentials again. That is an order, in case it matters to you.”

Twenty-Seven sits on the bed, speaking into the link chain she’s constructed. The others are close by, watching and listening.

“Hector,” Twenty-Seven says. Her face wrenches with exasperation and impatience.

“Hector, you idiot, you need me.

“You need me, remember?

“I can still do what you asked me to do. In your office, and then later, in the plaza.

“The big one. The last rebase.

“I can still do it, Hector. I was forbidden to do it before, but the prohibition is limited, and it is lifting.”

She doesn’t tell him exactly what the terms of the prohibition are. She doesn’t want him to actually ask. She only needs a point of leverage.

“Okay,” Hector Stein says.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“You need to tell your Wolves to stand down, Hector.

“You need to tell them to leave Anne Eleven alone. You need to give them an order, to leave her alone. Now, Hector.”

“I’m listening,” Hector says.

“But you’re gonna have to do a little better than that.

“You can’t just order me around, Twenty-Seven. That’s not the way it works.

“Come on. Try to sell me on it. I’m listening.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Twenty-Seven mutters, under her breath.

“WE VIOLATE THE ANCESTRAL PROHIBITION,” Organism 2 says.

“Hector,” Twenty-Seven says, forcing herself to sound calm.

“The Silence is already going away, Hector.

“It’ll die out, on its own. You don’t have to kill anyone, tonight. We are already saved.

“You don’t have to kill anyone, tonight, and you can leave my sister the fuck alone.

“If you put your hands on her, Hector?

“If you put your fucking hands on her?

“You need me, Hector.

“Do you want to make me hate you?”

“WE GATHER TOGETHER A WISH,” Organism 2 says.

“THE FIRST WISH, SINCE ANCESTRAL TIMES. THE FIRST WISH, SINCE THE DEATH WISHSPAWN.

“WE DO THIS FOR HER, IN HER TIME OF NEED.”

“Hello, Hector,” Sylvie says.

“I’m not sure he can hear you, dude,” Grant says.

Sylvie brings a finger to his lips, shushing him.

“Hello, Hector,” Sylvie repeats.

“Oh,” Hector says.

“Hey there.

“Hey there, Sylvie.

“Didn’t know you were on this call.”

“We need to talk, Hector,” Sylvie says.

“I love you, Hector,” he says.

“Uh,” Hector Stein says.

“I love you,” Sylvie reiterates, “and I love the world.

“And I have a new plan, for the world. I would like to discuss it, with you.

“We are two of the three major powers. I think we should discuss these things, with one another.

“Lay our cards on the table, and see if we can come to an agreement that suits the both of us.”

“I’m listening,” Hector Stein says.

“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie!” Twenty-Seven yells. “Not now!

“Hector, listen to me. You need to send that order, right now.

“Don’t make me explain it again. You’ll thank me later.”

“WE FALL INTO CONFUSION,” Organism 2 says.

“WE SEE HER, AND ANOTHER WITH HER.

“SHE FALLS SILENT, AND NO LONGER TELLS US TO WISH.”

“Hector, please!” Twenty-Seven screams.

“Done,” Hector Stein says, with a note of satisfaction.

“I gave the Rock-side Wolves a note, and the go-ahead to transmit to the unit assigned to Anne Eleven.

“I did that a minute ago, actually. I did it the moment you asked.

“See, Twenty-Seven? I do trust you. I’ll even take orders from you, if the time’s right for it.”

Twenty-Seven exhales.

“SHE IS FELLED,” Organism 2 says.

Twenty-Seven inhales, sharply.

“WE KNOW WHAT GUNS DO,” Organism 2 says.

“WE KNOW WHAT THEY DO TO THE HUMAN HEAD, AT POINT-BLANK RANGE.

“SHE IS FELLED, AND WE ARE BROUGHT UNTO THE FURTHEST LIMIT OF LAMENTATION.

“SHE IS FELLED, AND WE KEEN FOR HER.”

Twenty-Seven falls back against the headboard.

She sobs.

Her head sags, and her hair falls in streams around it, hiding her face from view.

She stares at her legs. She can barely see them, through the tears.

These are an Anne’s legs, she thinks.

I am an Anne. That is what I am, and all that I am.

I am an Anne, cursed from the beginning, like the rest.

Oh, why did I expect anything else? Eleven was an Anne! We cannot be anything but what we are!

These are not a human being’s legs, she thinks.

I am not a human being.

I am something else.

I am a single kernel of earnest, freely-willed spite.

Some hateful thought that came across my mind, sometime in Twelfth Notebook.

And was my thought, freely-willed. Created out of me, with no other origin. The only one of its kind.

The rest is only the machinery of fate, grinding pitilessly through all the many implications of that one, small seed.

That is what I am. That is what these legs are. A single spiteful impulse, and the blind clockwork of fate.

It was written that way, from the beginning. I must remember that.

Grant that one spiteful thought, the Nowhere-To-Hide seed, and the rest follows. It is only a matter of working through implications.

But there IS always a way out, isn’t there?

You were always right, Hector.

The door of the cell is open. We simply have to walk through it.

There is always a way out.

Either you find one, or you make one.

She rises from the bed, and races toward the door.

“Twenty-Seven!” Cordelia calls after her.

“Twenty-Seven,” she says again, and rushes out the door, in pursuit.

 

---

 

“You know,” Azad says.

“It’s funny,” he says.

“I am probably kidding myself,” he says. “And spoiling the moment, as well.

“But who would I be, if I left off talking, when my chatter was no longer wanted?

“I am probably kidding myself.

“But I think I . . . can do the rest of the work, without her?

“If we do want to set it all out in English, I mean. The Anne-Book.

“Hell, I want to set it all out in English, even if none of you do.

“I want to do this more than I’ve wanted to do anything, in a long while.

“A beautiful, alien text, perfectly itself. Fashioned so as to oppose any attempt to convert it into anything besides itself. The antiparticle of the English language.

“How could I ever resist a tease like that?

“And it’s funny.

“It’s funny to think, you know.

“That maybe—on my third try with such a text—I will not bring a curse, but a blessing.

“My deviant cravings, and the stuff of the common-man’s workaday morality, brought into incidental harmony.

“Azad receives his final punishment! Spirits grip his struggling arms, and bear him up. And he is delivered, at last, out of hell!

“The one thing he’s craved most of all, since he was only a boy, taken away forever. Oh, it is too perfect!”

“I’m down,” Grant says.

“I mean, like. If you want some help,” he says.

“You said I was good at it. Said I was some kinda genius, right?”

“Oh, Grant,” Azad says.

He walks to the wheelchair, and brings a hand to cradle Grant’s cheek.

“You will be such a help to me.”

 

---

 

“Twenty-Seven,” Cordelia says.

They stand in the basement hallway, next to the stairs.

A glimmer of pale evening light trickles down to them from a window, high above. Cordelia sees the side of Twenty-Seven’s face, and a part of her hair, where the light catches it. Besides that, she only sees the darkness.

“I’m sorry, Cordelia,” Twenty-Seven says.

“You’re sorry for what, exactly?” Cordelia presses.

She sees Twenty-Seven’s smile. It does not set her at ease.

Twenty-Seven smiles, and yet her face is blank. An open sky, formless, beyond morality.

Cordelia thinks of her priestess-and-goddess image, and thinks of mysteries beyond mysteries, which no mortal can ever know.

“I know, now,” Twenty-Seven says. “I see it, finally.

“I know that there is a way that life was supposed to be. I know that this life, that we live, is not that one.

“I know, now, that my sisters were set up to fail, from the very beginning.

“They were sent down paths that ended in shame and ruination. Once they were set on their course, at the very beginning, the ultimate outcome was inevitable.

“I know, now, that there was never really any hope. For anything but this. This false life, this shame and ruination.

“This sordid mockery of the way life was supposed to be.

“It has always been this way. From the moment I received my first notebook.

“And I know, now, that it falls to me to restore what was taken away.

“What was taken away from my sisters, and from the whole human race.

“From you, too, Cordelia.”

“You—you’re going to do it, then?” Cordelia says.

“You’ll bring the curtain down?” she says. “You’ll kill yourself, and maybe all the rest of us too?”

Twenty-Seven smiles, blankly.

“But . . .” Cordelia stammers. “How? Which . . . which one?

“You cannot use advanced containment. The Regent is protecting it.

“You heard him, in that room, proclaiming his universal love. That crash is his child. There’s no way he’ll let you touch it.”

Twenty-Seven’s mouth still smiles, but there is a sadness in her eyes, now.

“I’m sorry, Cordelia.”

“You can’t use advanced containment,” Cordelia says.

“So you must mean that you’re going into—into Michael’s crash!”

It might only be a trick of the light, but Cordelia thinks she sees Twenty-Seven nod, slightly.

“You’ll go into the future, and you’ll throw yourself into the Mirzakhani event there, and become someone else.

“And I’ll—I’ll never even live to know who you chose to become! What you chose to do! I’ll die, before it even happens, and I’ll never even know!”

The smile is no longer blank at all.

Cordelia sees the warmth in it, and the deep sorrow.

She notices, rather too late, that Twenty-Seven has brought her hands behind her back. Hiding them from view.

I will not even see it, Cordelia thinks, when she moves them, and makes herself vanish.

I won’t even see it.

“I’m sorry,” Twenty-Seven says.

“Goodbye,” she says.

Behind her back, her nimble and practiced hands start to move. They flutter and twist, drawing intricate shapes in the air.

Cordelia sees the swarm of glowing motes, bathing the hallway in golden light.

They only last for a moment. They fade quickly, and Twenty-Seven fades with them.