“Are you leaving?”
She stood in the doorway, her back to him. Heard him roll over and crawl deeper into their bed, pulling sheets around him in the cool autumn morning. The window was open. He was asleep. He’d spoken in dream.
She walked the short hallway to the bathroom, business, and returned. Levered comforters from him and wrapped herself. Draped an arm around him. He took her hand. Squeezed. He was asleep and she wasn’t.
He’s writing me in.
She felt his heartbeat, traced the scar on his chest.
Something wormed within her, something without meaning, intangible and cold. She’d be leaving soon, but not yet. The layers of meaning in his sleep-mumbled question drew focus on lines in her heart. He expected her to leave—and she would, eventually. That something spoke through his dream, that something was aware of the future while his eyes were closed and his heart was slow, that was the break.
So she held him tighter. She would leave tiny notes in hidden places. She would wake him up by crawling on top of him. She would smile into the window light, and he would fall in love in that moment. He would push her hair back from her eyes. She wouldn’t leave yet. The question echoed.
Are you leaving?
He lay there with his eyes closed, rolled to the left, his arm coming to rest on a pillow, a space, reached farther, and remembered that he was alone.
Opened his eyes to find the cat staring at him from the banister bounding the landing. The cat resented him. He had been a cat person before he got one.
Swung his right leg, muscled straight so as not to aggravate the shattered knee and its cap of scar tissue, to the cold tile. Wiped sleep from his eyes and craved a cigarette. Looped chicken legs into gray boxers and sat on the edge of the bed. There had been a picture on his nightstand. There had been books. Itineraries folded between pages. A booth photo. There had been many things.
Stood and pulled cotton over his sex. Jeans.
The stairs were narrow and tall, and he wondered the shapes of the people who had built them. The stairs were built to trip him. He’d bought replacement treads and two tubes of adhesive, but he’d forgotten to improve, and now there was no time.
Down right angles into the kitchen, and he was still alone. There were birds outside. The cat made angry barking sounds and tried to trip him for food.
Through empty rooms filled with many things into a cracked leather chair on wheels. The floor was tilted, and he could roll the length of the office with no effort. It was difficult to remain in place before the monitor.
Hooked glasses around his ears and there was an empty inbox. Grabbed yesterday’s used coffee cup, three grounds, not much of a reading, at its bottom. There was a spoon. It circled as he walked, its bottom edge gummed to the cup with the residue of hardened hazelnut creamer. She had been allergic. He could drink that now.
His body woke him most days at 8:57, and he couldn’t remember what significance that time had or why it had been imprinted on his body.
The paper was late again. He could tell because he looked out the patio door and couldn’t see it sopping mud water in the puddled divot that was the end of his driveway. Sometimes it was in the ditch. He felt like an adult, reading newspapers that were delivered to him three hundred sixty days each year. He kept them stacked in a milk crate in his kitchen, out of the reach of the cat, which had once mistaken that archive for its litter box. The highlight of most days was the bra advertisements in the sale papers.
To the bathroom, still looking for tiny notes pressed into the edge of the mirror.
Four Kinney Brand acetaminophen tablets. Water. Two more to be safe.
He looked at pill bottles and ignored them.
Watered the cat. Stared for too long at a small ceramic vase, two dried yellow shoots of bamboo. He’d soaked them in his dishpan. Spent hours pondering their revival. Had decided to let them die.
Measured fifteen scoops of generic coffee into the twelve-cup maker, added water, waited, withdrew three. To the kitchen table. The first sip. The first smoke. He looked out the window and watched blue jays toss seed to the new concrete of the veranda. The cat wagged its tail and chattered. The coffee was hot and bitter. Considered the distance to the refrigerator to retrieve the creamer. Scratch flicker click. He breathed deeply of the smoke. It calmed him.
There had been other mornings, other coffee, places without cats. Eggs. The Tony Danza show. No underpants and yes plaid shirts. Messy morning hair and breath. The way people intersect.
There had been other mornings in other cities, or in cities at all. He looked out the window and saw fifty beef cattle across the road. He heard geese. The grass was too long; it was his responsibility.
Stirred the coffee and wondered if he’d painted himself into a corner. Two gallons of paint had been enough for eight corners, but there was still so much to do.
The kitchen had an island. He’d bought two stools for it in the hope of someday sitting with her. He’d have coffee; she could have tea. He could boil water. Quiet mornings sitting together. That’s all he wanted. Counted the chairs in his house, the seating surfaces: twenty-four. There was one of him.
Swished the coffee in his mouth and swallowed. Chained a smoke to it.
Went to the bathroom and ate an antacid tablet, because when all you consume is nicotine and caffeine, the stomach attempts to burn itself apart. Two more painkillers to be unsafe.
Sat back down, his back to the window. He could hear the birds. The cat glared at him. There was room for three other people at his table. She could choose any of them. He’d give her his chair. She could use his lap. He could feel her weight against him. She had been so small. He had felt so much smaller.
Such thought shunts the mind down recollections that break. Remembered the feel of her legs around him, in a chair, on a couch. In bed. His name, whispered. Oh, Paul Hughes. I love you, Paul Hughes.
Reached for the cup, and his hand shook enough to spill the bottom two thirds. Brown plastic clattered to brown china. Coffee rivuleted out to the place the newspaper should have been.
His hand shook more than usual. He held it in front of his face, looked, knew. Wondered if his hand could still bend to the curves of her by sense memory alone. Wondered if he could remember her textures and tastes and scents. The architecture of her laugh. A face framed by sculptures of plastic and metal. The way, as she looked down at him, her tears had skated across her glasses, and how once, in the dark, one of those tears had fallen to his face and broken his heart as he held her tiny, shaking form closer.
He slumped out of the chair and fell to the kitchen floor. His head bounced from linoleum he’d glued down. The cat looked on, mildly amused.
A line of silver snaked lazily from the holes in his face.
“Midsagittal plane breached.”
“It’s spread into—”
“Ready lesioning probe on my—”
“Physiologic confirmation of the target location.”
“Initial pass in three…two…”
Alina ran after him, just barely getting through the door into the construct before it slammed shut.
He spun, made to say something, didn’t know what to say.
“It wasn’t her, Paul.” Alina walked closer, remembered holding a hand and what had seemed something deeper. “Just Maire. Hope’s—”
“Merged. Maire took her.” He slumped into a chair that flashed to existence just before his behind made contact. “And now—If Maire’s merged with Hope, she knows everything that Hope knew.”
Alina stood a distance.
“If Maire has Hope’s code…”
“It’s bad.”
“More than bad. Hope had calculated the A/O line to almost perfect half. Now Maire has the modular calculus. The bleed—It’s going to get a shitload more than bad.”
Alina didn’t know what to say. She thought about the rough plain of his hand.
“And you—Jud, you there?”
“She’s here.”
Paul nodded. Something flickered behind his eyes. “I take it she needed mobility.”
“Something like that.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“If it helps.”
He scoffed, tugged at his whiter hair. “I need to get back to the pool. I can find an answer in there, I know it. If Maire has Hope’s code…” He studied his hands on the table’s top. “I need to get back into the silver.”
He stood to walk past her, and she shoved him to the wall. His look was disbelief and confusion. His eyes were a foot above hers, and looking down was like falling. She bridged the gap and kissed him, standing on toes to do so. He bent to make it easier.
Frantic, grasping, they went to the floor, knees and elbows, rolling, combat for position.
He pushed her away and from the distance tried to see behind her eyes. “We can’t. I’ve been in the silver. You’re not—”
“Shut up.” She pulled him back down and cut off the possibility of further uncertainty with her tongue and lips.
They collided.
She felt him smile against her thighs. Enveloping, bounding, penetrating her sex. She shuddered and gasped
“Don’t let go,” hitched out through sobs. Adam held her tighter, the stubs of once fingers smearing against his chest.
“It’s spreading.” Reynald fingertipped the glass, dragged a new plan into place. “Hank, reverse the phase.”
He shifted. Nodded once. “Target locked.”
Reynald’s claw hesitated. Sweat blossomed across his brow. “Probe ready. Pass in three…Two…”
To fail to hit, reach, catch, meet, or otherwise make contact with.
To fail to perceive, understand, or experience.
To fail to accomplish, achieve, or attain (a goal).
To fail to attend or perform.
To leave out.
To omit.
To let go by
To let slip.
To escape or avoid.
To discover the absence or loss of.
To feel the lack or loss of.
To be unsuccessful.
To misfire.
To fail.
A young woman.
Miss.
Something’s wrong.
“Jim?”
shut up.
“Jimbo?”
shut UP.
“Come on, pardner. You gotta talk to me sometime.”
no i don’t.
“You just did.” Hank grinned from his command chamber. ”Anyhow, what’s it look like out there?”
whiter than jo’s inner thigh.
“That white, huh? That must be pretty white. You know, one time I was at a saloon in—”
for the love of all things holy, shut UP.
Crawl, crackle.
“You feel that?”
certainly did. initiating full sensor sweep.
“Looks like we ain’t alone out here, buddy.”
indeed.
“Think it’s Hunter and Lily?”
…
“Jim?”
secure your tether to the ME.
“What in—”
do it, hank. now.
The cowboy was disconcerted by Whistler’s tone, urgent, honest. Afraid. “Show me.”
The command display sparked to life as Whistler fed the exterior view of the Timestream to Hank.
His gasp was audible. “That ain’t…Hunter. Or Lily.”
secure your tether, hank.
His knobby hands skittered over the controls on his cardiac shield. He felt the tug of his constituent particles locking back into place on the Judith line. In an instant, he could be downloaded back into the thought ocean made possible by the author and shaped by the wounded god.
Following them through the Timeline was a nightmare armada.
“What is—”
enemy.
“Jesus fuck.” Hank instinctively stroked his handlebars. “You runnin’?”
varying phase to lose them.
“S’it workin’?”
no.
“Shit.”
There were hundreds, thousands, an incomprehensible number of vessels reaching toward them, an undulating mass of black edges flashing with silver, a school of embodied hate and desire. At its center, something horrific and laughing. They could feel the reach of fury.
Whistler dug deeper into Hank, tapping the pattern for something, anything that would throw the Enemy off their trail. His nacelles glowed with the effort, leaving a veil of desiccated lifetimes in his wake. The howling fleet lurched closer, smashing the fragile fabrics of reality, clawing toward the soul cache hidden away in Hank’s marble.
“Uh, Jim?”
quiet, hank.
“We ain’t getting out of this, are we?”
The vessel dived and shattered as an Enemy gained hold. Hank fell to the floor of the command chamber, his cardiac shield sputtering an alarm.
you are, old friend.
“Jim, don’t—”
Hank flashed from the Timeline in a burst of static and dust.
come now, maire. show yourself.
The Black tendriled over his surface, piercing and stroking, merging and solidifying. Absorbing. Whistler felt a scrape across his pattern, dislodge, reformation. He found himself shifted back into human form, alone in an echoing cavern of burnt mercury, a blinding light lasering down to scan his image.
“Bravo, Whistler. Bravo.” The ruined child walked from the shadows.
He smoothed his cloak and stood defiant.
“You,” she poked his thigh with one taloned, tiny finger, “were supposed to be on my side. Our side.”
“He made a better offer.”
She snarled. “I could have given you everything, James. The universe. History.”
He scoffed. “What possible use could I have for all that, poppet?”
“I trusted you.”
“You’ve a lot to learn, child.” He adjusted the tips of his gloves.
“Why’d you do it?”
“I’m tired.” He bent to her level, put his hands on her shoulders. “I was meant to be gone a thousand years ago. To be with Jo again, wherever that might be. When you tore me from that slumber, you ruined my heaven. Paul offered me a chance to sleep again.”
“Tired of bouncing around in his head, huh?”
“Your head, too.”
She nodded a smile. “You were good to me, bringing Lilith in. I can forgive this transgression. I’ll let you rest.”
“Dear child,” his eyes glinted, “thank you.”
“Just one more thing.” She took his hand, gently, tenderly. “Who does his maths?”
“Hmm?” Whistler frowned.
“You can tell me, or I’ll just take it from you. Who’s calculating the bleed? Who’s zeroing in on me? He’s no good with numbers. Can’t be his brawn, West. Is it Benton?”
Whistler’s lips opened over clenched teeth.
Maire’s tiny fist punched through his chest and closed over his silver projector. He gurgled with blood and shattered bone as silver laced through the mash of his heart and lungs. She yanked her arm out, leaving his dusted form to fall in a flop of grit and glitter to the floor.
Her fist shuddered over the marble, absorbing everything that Whistler had been. One more crack in the author; one more influence torn away and consumed. She looked through the folds of memory and saw that everything hidden from her echoed through the heart of one Hope Benton. The modular calculus that equaled her undoing, the intricate lattice of defense around the author’s fading mind—it would be hers.
Her dimples deepened.
Said while walking through a door: “Paul, Hank’s—”
West cut himself off.
Paul sat on the edge of the silver pool, his legs dipping in. He turned around slowly, and West saw something horrible flash behind his eyes.
“They’re back?”
West just shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to bury a wash of confused emotion. The author hadn’t been the same since Hope’s murder. He’d been spending more and more time in the silver containment chamber, that cache of machines gathered during their various engagements of Maire’s forces. “Hank’s back.”
“Just Hank?”
West nodded.
“And Whistler?”
West inhaled. “Get out of there, and we’ll talk about it.” He turned and left.
“Shit.” Paul’s hand went to his temple, kneaded.
Hank scooped another nervous pinch of chew into his already-dribbling mouth. The old cowboy’s face was more wrinkled, stubblier. The downward slopes of the distinct halves of his moustache only reinforced the image of his broken heart. “I didn’t—I would have stayed. We could have fought, but—There were so many of them. I would have stayed.” He blinked over glistened eyes.
The newly acquired Jean Reynald baritoned the chamber. “No. That would have solved nothing.”
“It’s for the best that Whistler sent you back, Hank.” West leaned toward the shaking man. “If she’d gotten your pattern—”
“Hope could have changed the math.”
Nobody knew how to tell him.
“She’s dead.” Judith.
He chewed faster, brow furrowing, squeezing out two distinct lines of wet. “But—What the fuck next? Hope’s…?” He let the question fade away.
“Maire’s getting better at this.” Jud curled deeper into her chaise. “With Whistler’s pattern—”
“I’m going back in.” Paul stood and walked toward the door.
“Where?” Jud frowned.
He hesitated. “Back into the silver.”
“Paul, please.” West couldn’t look him in the eyes.
“I have to. Maire’s—I have to.”
“Paul—”
He whirled, fangs bared, his eyes swirls of black and metal. “Don’t.”
As the door cycled shut behind the author, the assembled remnants of Judith Command sat through a heavy silence.
Hank spit tobacco juice to the floor. Whistler’s chair was empty next to him. “What next?”
Nobody answered.
“Jean?” Judith rose and walked to the window. “I want you to take over operations for the time being. Paul’s…You know.”
Reynald nodded.
The air hurt.
“Listen…” Judith said, her voice bouncing from the window. “I know it hurts. Whistler. And Hope. But we’ll get by. We’ll do this.”
They all tried to believe her.
His eyes raced behind fluttering lids. The cat, curious, approached slowly, stuck out a paw, carefully padded his cheek until another seizure wracked his body. The cat reared back, came to rest sitting up. It sniffed the linoleum, reached out, withdrew. It bent down and licked at the growing slick of blood. At the taste, the cat bristled and ran to hide under the couch, leaving a trail of red prints across the gray carpet of the living room.
Somewhere behind bone, pressure built, soft gray curves flooded. The newspaper arrived. The cat hissed at its still owner silvering out in the kitchen. Somewhere, a clock ticked. Somewhere, nobody thought of him.
“Are you leaving?” she asked, half asleep. His impression marked the sheet behind her, a curved kidney bean spooned into position over half a dozen hours and thirty thousand heartbeats. He pulled the blankets back over her shoulders, concealing any evidence that he had ever been there at all.
“Need to get back into the silver.”
She woke in earnest, sat up. She wiped sleep from her eyes and tried to focus. “Don’t go.”
“Al—”
“Please.”
“I have to.”
A sad shake of the head. “Don’t go.”
He bent to kiss her cheek. She pulled back and forced a locked gaze. “Please.”
His lips hovered inches from her. He frowned and
Maire smiled, bent to help Richter to his feet. He coughed another glut of phase to the floor. Tendrils and thick loops of the sludge slicked his chin and chest. He rocked against her, still solidifying, and she altered her form to match his memories of Benton. He was blinking away the birth blindness; she couldn’t rely on a stolen voice alone. She cut into the remnants of Benton’s pattern and searched for convincing.
“Hope?” he repeated, his hands now surveying Maire’s face, which molded to the memories she pulled from him, the histories stored within herself. His hands traced down her sides, came to rest on hips that hadn’t been hers for long. “Where are we? I thought—That light—”
“Shh, baby.” Maire smiled with Hope’s face. “It’s going to be okay now. You were right. About everything. I knew you’d come for me.”
“Baby—” He looked at the metallish expanse, the uplink chamber swaying at the top of a tower city jutting from a dead future. “Where are we?”
She stood on tip-toes, wrapping her arms securely around him. Richter tabled the question and responded, burying his face in her hair, dragging lips along her cheek, coming to rest in the angle of her neck. “I thought you were gone.”
“I’m right here.”
“I needed to see what was in the light.”
“It’s heaven, James.”
“I thought—I needed to see. To find you.”
“You did.” Maire tugged with Hope’s colorless eyes, and for an instant, a deeper blackness existed.
Richter’s grasp on her weakened.
Maire lashed out with her claws, Hope’s shape and form dissolving into nothing. Richter’s neck hung in tatters; his look of surprise was endearing. Maire sneered with delight as she grabbed his head and bit the rest of his neck through. The assembly of blood and meat flopped to the floor. She took her time excising his projector.
“Too easy.” She licked her lips and sucked wads of his viscera from the marble.
One step closer to Jud. Another piece of Paul fell into
the place was empty, just a scatter of overturned tables and splintered chairs. Napkins dispensing lazily from dented stainless bricks. The door shut the city out behind him, squeezing down and crimping off the sound of wind and the staccato vibrations of war.
A sign sat on the neglected counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.
Richter walked to the counter, was drawn to the sign. His hand, finding purchase, marred clean paths into the veil of dust. There was an empty cigarette pack on the floor. There was the flapping cellophane skin of a Zinger, the bottom residue of cream and unnaturally red coconut slowly yellowing across one plane of it. The tip jar was empty except for a small blue marble, clouded.
His hand went to his throat, found it intact. Confusions blossomed.
He heard movement from the back room. Something falling, something dragged. A female grunt of a nameless emotion.
The windows shivered with the sudden onset of rain.
An overturned cylinder of red plastic stir sticks. An eared copy of Demian, the pages crisp and cracking. A single black leather glove, glittering with something beautiful and heartbreaking.
Richter walked slowly to the back of the shop, wondered at his boots, the clothing from so far ago. He remembered a desert and the Styx. A spire. New memories dislodge. Timesweep. His jaw worked over new bends in history. He felt his neck again; it was whole. He walked through coffee grounds and crumbled ceramic, the green, furry remnants of pastry. He reached the door to the back room and jumped at a crash of something heavy and fragile.
The doorknob was cold. Its turn was rusted and audible. Hinges cracked ancient resistance, and the door pushed away from him.
Benton kneeled on the floor, flopping thick manila file folders from a cardboard box.
She looked up at his gasp and the quick backward retreat of his boots. “James?” A folder fell from her grasp, spilling an inch of photographs, postcards, love letters to the linoleum.
“Stay away from me.” His hands shifted to silver.
She stood. “James? How did you—”
“Stay back!” His eyes flared white.
Benton halted her advance.
“You touch me again, I’ll fucking kill you.” The silver crawled up Richter’s arms, consumed his form, leaving him a shadow, an implication.
Realizations slammed into place deep in the works of Benton’s mind. “James—It wasn’t me.” She tested a step toward him. “I wouldn’t—”
He lunged forward and lashed out with both hands, which passed ineffectually through the image of her. She bent toward his shimmer where he touched her, but her projection swam back into a solid, sparkling with her own shift. His fingertips dragged a merge out with that contact. New truths metastasized across lines of resistance.
“It wasn’t me, baby. Please…Believe me.”
The wind screamed through the collapsing city.
Her slurp was a cute annoyance. She was a loud eater. She smacked her lips. He couldn’t remember ever having heard her chew gum, but he could forgive the cracking he suspected she would have allowed herself to ignore. Every brilliant mind controls an eccentric body, a collection of actions that set it apart.
She wiped aside a windrow of dust and put the teacup down on a laminated menu used as a coaster. “You were right.”
His eyes asked.
“The signals were getting through, not bouncing back. Someone was listening, out there. They talked back.”
He remembered an expensive restaurant lifetimes ago, a conversation broken off because of an unexpected flight to Wyoming.
“Who?”
“Maire. The Alpha Centauri system. Just one of infinite possibilities. The first to respond, because of the relative proximity.”
“I don’t—”
“We traded signals for thousands of years, neither civilization understanding that someone was listening. Someone was out there. And when the Sol system finally died, when Michael Balfour’s probe finally reached Proxima Centauri, the aliens there—people with two hearts, black blood, but people—they considered it an act of war. Things bend out there in the empty spaces between galaxies. Things splinter into spectrums of possibility. Time thins out and doesn’t mean much.”
Richter broadcast his lack of understanding with a long draw of coffee.
“Life isn’t a straight line. This time, Maire was there to catch you. Another time, Michael pulled you out, and you led the resistance against the Enemy. Another, Maire’s forces got to Earth before Michael ever had a chance to build the probe. Sometimes life curves out and back again, intersecting places it’s already been. This place—this ridiculous coffee shop dream—it’s the place where everything collapses. It’s the Delta merge, the place where the two most probable timelines collide. It’s the place where a war between two solar systems begins and ends.”
“What does that make Maire?” Richter couldn’t look at Benton’s eyes. “Or us?”
“She’s the eraser at the other end of the pencil. The backspace key. The counterpoint to everything the author’s written into existence. She’s the unraveling. Revenge. And us? We’re a part of her, now. She’s torn us from him, and she’ll use everything we know to win her war against Paul.”
He opened one of the folders on the table. There was a photograph of the author in London. A postcard shaped like a sea monster. A tiny slip of paper on which a left hand had written a three-word note.
“There’s boxes of this stuff stored here. Maire’s built quite a collection. She’s pulling things from him, storing them away in this construct, using each innocent little memory to destroy him. The whole back room, shelves and stacks. She’s breaking him down.”
“And you’re going through it all, trying to find something to help him?”
“Trying. Not much luck. It’s a mess.”
“Why help him?”
She frowned at the question.
Richter shook his head. “If he’s written these horrible futures into existence, if he’s the cause of these wars, why help him fight Maire?”
Her fingertips traced over fading photographs, crumbling paper. She pulled a line of poetry from a notebook page, drew a memory of a skin’s texture and taste from a passport photo. “He made this. All of this. Even Maire. Us. Without him, we never would have existed. Maybe I feel an obligation to help the person who gave me life.”
“You really want to help him?”
Hope nodded her resolve.
Richter reached into his pocket and placed something on the tabletop. She saw small paper edges through the cage of his fingers.
“If this is the place where it all comes together, if the coffee shop is the place Maire hides the pieces of him,” Richter lifted his hand, revealing a colorful book of matches, “then maybe it’s time we end this.”
She took the matches, popped the cover open. There was a number, a cartoon face. Pigtails. She wondered where James had gotten the matches, but it didn’t matter. The Cafe Bellona was a focal point. Nothing had a satisfactory explanation. Nothing needed one. Sometimes life collapses into distinct moments of chance. Sometimes life, or the digital approximation thereof, is a spectrum of gray.
She picked up a photograph, let her thumb trace the eroding surface. He looked happy. Whole. A depiction of a time and place he’d never live now.
She took Richter’s hand. Her face bent into a quiet attempt at a smile, but it only squeezed wetness across the colorless hemispheres of her eyes.
She’d been trapped so long here, searching for an answer to the calculus, the silver concretion savaging the author. She’d tried to prevent Maire from using her against Paul, but exiled to the construct, she’d been powerless, deconstructed. A silver marble held in a child’s hand.
Hope tore a match from the book. Her third strike resulted in flame. She slowly, gently singed the edge of the manila folder on the table. Outside, the wind grew louder. A building collapsed. The sky tasted like ash.
She fed a postcard into the fire. The ground shook below them.
Richter pushed a note into the curls of flame. One of the front windows splintered.
“The whole back room?”
“And the basement. Stacks of boxes.” She held the burning edge of a photograph. The author’s face blistered and fell away.
Richter counted twenty-seven matches.
“Are you okay?” Alina’s voice echoed out into the command chamber. She adjusted the drape of the interface web, reached out to see for herself how he was doing, but felt nothing. There was none of the consciousness lockstep that interfacing with Sam had provided. Paul was wrapped in layers of silver.
The vessel shifted, walls realigning, nacelles stretching out, clawing. They fell.
Concern itched to life behind her eyes. “Paul? Talk to me.”
Somewhere below them, rapidly approaching, was a small blue planet and the exile city and Maire.
i’m
“Paul?”
so many
She could feel him trying to contain the silver, the trillions of souls inserted not gently into his core.
too many
“Hold on, Paul Hughes. Almost
there it is.” Reynald fingered sweat from his forehead. The targeting laser arced over the author’s skull. Reynald hesitated, looked up at Hank.
“Go for it.”
He triggered. A stark lance of white light
rocked the superstructure as a shard of silver tore from his caudal fin. Alina swung in the interface web, burying panic, unable to keep her hearts from racing. “Hold on, baby. Just
come and get me.” Maire grinned, leapt into the air as the city shattered beneath her, the planet imploding, great plates of continent glowing with ancient silver light. She could feel him, the line collapsing above her, countless futures dying in his wake. Every particle of her glinted with the shift, with the ocean of machines that defined her.
She could see him, the terrifying shiver of his form, as it tore through the fabric of that time and plummeted into the merge. Her claws cut into her fists in anticipation, spilling torrents of black blood and mercury into the sky. She could feel the god buried somewhere in
Alina saw through his blurred, dying eyes, the nightmare below them, the monster that was Maire, looking up and through, a smile on her face, her Enemy army surging below, an armada of them careening around the planet toward Paul. He shook, and she didn’t know how to stop him. Didn’t know the plan. He was silent. Alina sobbed, helpless.
Richter lit every match in the book, let the flame grow. Hope wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her forehead, finally home.
Was that an orgasm? I’ll be the old man with cats. With loves.
This is where the fish lives. We did the 69. How do you catch a unique rabbit?
Kentucky City. Cover my feet. Horses don’t get flu shots.
Paul Hughes, come here?
He dropped the fire into the tinder and
“Paul!” Alina surged in the silver umbilicals. “Tell me what to do!” She struggled in the unresponsive interface gauntlets.
The planetship that he was fell, uncontrolled, into the atmosphere. Maire’s army rose to meet the threat, to cut into that silver flesh, to extract the guts of it, the pattern cache of the remnants of a species.
alina? His voice was forever away.
Head shaking, hearts breaking, two tiny hands pulling against silent systems, the witch below. “What?”
i love you.
And his presence cut a deeper distance as the umbilicals withdrew, the uplink severed, and he jettisoned his lifeboat into the sky, Alina and the pattern cache at its center, thrown savagely away from him. Where the hidden ship had rested, broken silver fingers snapped and fell away. He fell without control or direction into Maire and her horde.
Alina screamed as she felt him fall away.
I’m losing
her, he thought as he put the truck into reverse, her image burned into his arc of vision as he checked his mirrors and pulled out onto the street. He smiled and waved, his right hand hesitating in that wave a little too long before retreating to the shift forward.
Are you leaving?
He felt his smile breaking as he pulled away, blinked through something overwhelming as he looked into his rearview. She was wearing his shirt and his pajama pants. She was wearing a smile all her own, and as he accelerated into the curves and down the hills, he catalogued the memory of her, everything, holding tightly to everything, because somewhere he knew that he’d never get that shirt back. She’d had the pants since that first night, making them more hers now than his. So ridiculously big on her, lost in fabric, accelerating into her curves and he remembered the landscape of her, the scent of her hair, that morning frizz and the sleep in her upturned eyes. He let the radio sleep. Drove past the field of tiny horses. Horses don’t get flu shots. All the stupid fights they’d fought over nothing, all the disagreements over things that didn’t matter; these are the edges that define loss. These are the frantic thoughts before the fall: please stay, please forgive me, please let me hold on to you, because you’ve become integral.
Left hollow and without purpose, these are the edges that define broken tomorrows, all the futures we’ll never live, all the mornings we’ll wake alone, hoping the pillow isn’t a pillow, that the weight of her will be the incentive for waking, the dim angles of sunshine through a rusted ghetto window, the sound of the morning world outside, chill air stippling gooseflesh across arms and chest, we will remember those senses only so long, we will replace and forget, and each loss will take a little more of us with it.
He was leaving, and she slept on his shoulder. Speeding across the nighttime country on the wrong side of the road, running through concourses weighed down by a lifetime’s collection of things; I need this to remember, I need evidence that I was ever here at all. She shifted against his arm, dug deeper into the overhang of his chin, spiraled hairs popping up to tickle his nose, and he inhaled, because this is life, such contact, and without it, he is lost. A coffee break in a Starbucks; he’s never been in a Starbucks except for with her. The coffee burned his tongue, but not badly enough so he can’t remember her taste hours later on the plane over plains of snow, a nearly empty plane, enough leg room in his own aisle to take off his cowboy boots, to pull out his wallet, the photograph from it, and the inscription that breaks his heart, he is so happy.
And sitting by the water in another’s territory, the attacks of the morning forgotten or at least unspoken, cutting cheese with a key, he’d seen her upset and needing to run, and he’d driven her to the land’s edge, because they both needed it, the sun burning their skins. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and the slough of that exposure had outlasted them. Looking out across the water, he wondered which of his lives was the dream. The wind brought her scent to him, the sand between his toes and the square cleave of the rocks grounding him to that place. Spider webs between the rocks, Zinger wrappers he collected and took home. Maybe the sandwiches got too warm.
And walking down the streets of her, that tiny hand lost in his. The streets that defined her, the cobbles of places far from him, the avenues she’d walked a lifetime and he’d followed a year. Sitting on a rock, hiding a cigarette from spying armies, he hated the way she grabbed his ass and loved it. Public. Displays. Her hand held him to that place and time, and he remembered her whispers. Wondered if it was real. Hoped he’d finally paid off the wages of a lifetime, and that finally he’d found her. He’d seen her eyes a thousand times before, felt her heartbeat in other cities and beneath other cages of bone, slowly edged toward that soul we search for all our lives, the one that so reflects us that we can’t help but die a little each day after it leaves. Something fuses. Something breaks. We’re left with pieces missing.
And the lifetimes we assemble into madness, the fragments of the departed we write into the days. He thought of Alina and knew that wasn’t her name at all, that the scrawl of their love couldn’t begin to emulate reality, that not even the Jud god inside of her or the Maire witch outside could approximate the feeling generated by staring across an antiques store in Lewes, making sure she’s not watching, stealthily jogging to the cashier to purchase a teacup with feet, wrapped into the football pages, secreted away in a drab green ruck, returning to the rows before she noticed, hands tracing over the dust of centuries, settling on misshapen birds that have vented the steam from a thousand meat pies, over photographs of people dead now, crumbling, the photographs and the people, from times before we were born. That we run to train stations and weave through the schoolchildren, our hands held, collapsing finally into seats jangling with our change and the day’s treasure, tiny old women sitting opposite, their accents thick and their skin thin like paper, speaking to each other but watching the two American kids pull out a bottle of water, a Yorkie bar, splitting it to share before dinner, curling together on the plastic bench, a head of curly hair, glasses, smiling eyes closed coming gently to rest under a stubbled chin, which lowers to rest, a tickled nose, a heart beating fast, knowing that this is heaven; this is all he needs.
Are you leaving?
Alina wretched as she felt herself break apart, the tangle of interface web sparking. Her vision doubled, trebled as she fell to the floor of the chamber, her form cleaving, new limbs flailing from the split of her form. Static and agony. Jud crackled to solidity and slumped from Alina, a glistening mess of wet silver and dried blood, chest grating over bitter air, hair dripping with something black and ancient.
“Get up,” she growled over loose vocal cords, her tongues reaching for better words. She rocked with the exhaustion of being whole again.
Alina’s hands splayed over a shattered cardiac shield. There were lifetimes of her missing. Two lines of tear fought through the slick of nervous sweat to bead out onto the floor.
“Get up.” Judith grasped her hands and seesawed her to standing. The severed souls supported each other’s stance. “Where’s the cache?”
Alina was looking past Jud, who turned to meet the direction of her desperate gaze. The glass, cracked and fading, showed
Maire’s army a whirlwind around her, the nightmare cacophony of the damned, the merged silver purpose. Paul could hear them, the collection of an eternity of broken tomorrows, the aggregate fury of the lost.
Maire paused in her flight, her claws a brilliant silver, garish strands of the machine ocean pouring from her eyes in a disconcerting ruin of a mask. Paul could hear her war cry spilling from between those horrible shimmering fangs. She was older than he’d ever written her, thick strands of white contrasting the black, dancing in the winds.
He ratcheted his wingtips, his nacelles forward, struggling against the gravity and drag of his descent.
And they collided.
West flickered to life and snapped to grid, a stumbling, confused landing. He was even more confused by the fact that Reynald and Hank were standing next to him, before a lifeboat’s glass, and Alina, and—
“Jud?”
Reynald’s hand went to West’s shoulder. His head shook an uncertain negative. His eyes directed a heartbroken look to the glass, and West followed just in time to see
Maire smashed through Paul’s central hub, a brilliant spray of fragmented armor and hemorrhaging silver racing after her exit wound. The vast planetship dived, Maire and Enemy vessels caught in its wake. As the imprisoned singularity at his center went critical, Maire and her horde tore at the air, attempting to escape the pull of his horizon. One by ten by thousands, the scrabbling silver forms collapsed into Paul, his edges red, melting away, great chapters of him rending away and bursting from existence.
He fell, the expanse of wailing souls spiraling after him.
The lifeboat was far enough away to pull stubbornly from the collapse, but the vessel veered a spinning retreat, its contents shifting savagely.
“We need a lock on his pattern,” Reynald barked.
“I’m on it.” Jud stood before the glass, her voice a whisper.
Alina touched the display, shaking. “Please, Paul. Don’t—”
All of Puget Sound was erased from existence as Paul impacted, the field of vision instantly blinded, a stark assault of silver light boiling across the planet’s surface. The cataclysmic deluge of liquid metal erupted from his savaged superstructure, dusting the sky, then drifting lazily down to blanket the world with argent. The Enemy forces not caught in his wake, neatly clipped from Maire’s mind essence, stippled the new surface in craters of shattered phase. All across the barren scar, new oceans of silver coalesced.
Paul’s chassis shuddered, grappled with its new foundation. Then stillness.
Alina screamed. She sobbed, throwing herself against the display until her tiny hands wilted. West heard flesh split, fingers crack. She kept beating against the glass, kept beating, kept screaming, even as he pulled her away, the stubs of fingers smearing that image with bloody letters; hers was a language written in despair.
West held her tightly, but she still struggled, her crumpled hands pressing against him only jarring loose more of that loss; she seeped through his shirt, and he felt warm copper run down through the hair on his chest, pause to circumvent his navel. She eventually relented, slumped into him, allowed herself to bury her eyes under his jawbone, anything to force away the screen, to erase that image.
West watched it all, even as he held Alina so she couldn’t.
Inhale: no lung, no mouth, but why the sensation of drowning, of choking, the scent of burning flesh when there was no nose, no body?
All around him, silver. Waves still came back to slap at his shallow corpse, near-corpse. It burned; it froze.
He struggled to sit up and remembered that things were no longer attached to him in the way he remembered. His starboard nacelle lazily rose, slammed back into the silver ocean, stirring the metal again, angering what sensors he had left operational.
The nacelle crawled through half-crystallized mercury slurry until it met his main chassis. He was disturbed but not surprised to find that his pelvic fin had been shattered on the impact, and his caudal fin was twisted into an array of broken metallish.
s
paul hughes((?))
come here ((?))
cover my feet ((?))
rupture rend rive split cleave
Maire had pierced through his chest, heavy silver armor cracking and splintering before it. Reflex forced his head back; agony kept it there as spasms wracked his entire form. The hole in his hub was slick with his blood, mechanicals, the shimmer of venting containment chamber exhaust. He finally settled in the shallow silver, nacelles digging into the flooding ground.
Too tired to move his port nacelle. Too broken.
Starboard nacelle feels around the hole. The wingtip snaps off, falls to his belly, slides into the silver.
Focus, but
It’s flooding, that alien, that lifeblood. Choking, gasping. Somewhere, a line of code reminds him that there’s a human buried inside that ruined sculpture of metal.
i’m sorry
i’m
His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.
i’m
Paul finds her in the exile city. He finds her sitting in the street, a young woman again, covering her face with clawless hands. A few tears have spilled between her fingers. She snuffles a few more to the back of her throat.
He sits down next to her.
The Cafe Bellona is a ruin, the detritus of the fire still smoldering. He can see bones under blackened beams. Maybe the bones are broken coffee cups. Tarnished metal stems poke up, twisted stools crushed under the collapsed roof. There is no wind. The city is silent except for popping knots and the slow burning deep down.
He thinks of cigarettes and inhales the smoke from one, passes it to Maire. She takes it. Her arms rest on her knees. Her body stretches toward the Bellona waste as her hair flops down, obscuring her face from him. Her eyes are blue now, and he looks away.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Her brow works over the question, her face torn between thin probabilities of rage and despair. She shakes with it, a fading question, a veiled surrender.
“Tu crois être le doute et tu n’es que raison. Tu es le grand soleil qui me monte à la tête quand je suis sûr de moi,” he says.
“Comme on oublie,” she says.
“Je t’aime contre tout ce qui n’est qu’illusion.”
“I know.” She exhales smoke. She extends her hand. She offers him the three silver marbles rolling the folds of her palm.
He closes her fingers around them.
We are machines of a horrible beauty, and life is a collection of moments. Fundamental redefinitions of trust. The suffocating intersections of coincidence. Rejection mechanisms. We are forgotten as easily as the quiet desperations of our madness.
And it’s okay.
In the lifeboat’s command chamber, Reynald swiveled the targeting laser of the lesioning probe to a new position over Paul’s skull. They’d successfully downloaded his pattern from the dissolving devastation of his superstructure, but the final tendrils of silver had entrenched themselves in his mind, lacing, consuming.
“I—I can’t.” Reynald stepped away, kneading his temple. The code burns were gone.
“Please,” Alina sobbed. “Help him.”
“There’s too much of it. I can’t separate the silver from his brain without damaging him.”
West turned from the display. “There’s no sign of Maire. And the Enemy…They aren’t moving.”
“That’s good. Right?” Hank searched their faces.
“She’s not gone.” Jud said from the corner into which she’d hidden herself. Her eyes no longer glowed. “She’s in there.” She motioned at Paul, then tapped her head. “They’re together, somewhere in there.”
Alina held her arms tightly, shook her head.
“Better believe it, baby.” Jud stood and walked to the motionless author. “They’ve merged.”
“He wouldn’t—”
“It’s what he always fucking wanted.” Jud said through gritted teeth. “Can’t you see that?”
“But—He hated her.”
“And he loved you?” One side of Jud’s mouth upturned. “Life isn’t that simple, kid.”
Reynald cleared his throat. “If the silver spreads through his mind again—”
“That’s not gonna happen.” Jud swung the targeting laser into place above Paul’s forehead, the barrel’s glow intensifying.
A veil of surrender obscured the room.
“Do it, then,” West choked out, his growl stumbling over resignation. “If we’re going to ruin this, let’s ruin it forever.”
Reynald’s hand joined Jud’s on the barrel. “It’s been an honor.”
Hank crumpled his hat in his callused hands, spit tobacco to the floor. “Yeah, a real fuckin’ hoot.”
Alina bent to the author, kissed his cheek. Took his hand. She tried to smile, her freckles shifting to new constellations.
Jud met each gaze. Histories and universes collapsed behind her eyes.
“Okay.” She grinned through tears. “Let’s go home.”
She pulled the trigger.
Flatline.
They walked, the streets shifting beneath their feet, sometimes cobble, sometimes pavement, sometimes the wooden planks of the pier. The buildings were different and all the same. People came and went around them, between them, through them. Sometimes she held his hand.
They took a left.
“You know where we’re going?”
He laughed. “Does it matter?”
She shrugged.
They stopped in front of a coffee house.
A heavy wooden door to a nameless, dark place. He held the door for her.
He didn’t recognize anyone. There were two stools empty at the counter. Ashtrays. The server was busy placing steaming cups in front of other customers, her hands balancing coins and receipts. They sat.
“What would you recommend?” She couldn’t read the menu.
“What do you like?”
“I’ve never had coffee.”
He felt an emotion for her, and it wasn’t fear.
“I’ll order,” he said, bringing the server over with a motion. “Hi, I’ll just have coffee, black, and she’ll—” He turned to Maire.
And she was gone.
Paul slowly turned back to the counter, struggling against the sudden stillness of the place. Took a Marlboro from the hardpack in his pocket, lit it. Inhaled, and the smoke tore at his eyes.
“Will that be all, sir? Just the coffee?” The server’s pencil hesitated over an order book she really didn’t need. There was a flicker of recognition that could not be. There was a system of desire that was fundamentally flawed.
And Paul felt decades older, the empty stool next to him only deepening that sensation of age and loss. He surveyed the shop, the people sitting together, engaged in important conversations that meant nothing, sipping and slurping and spilling, laughing, falling in and out of love. The stool remained empty.
Something’s wrong.
The server faded, the customers, the tang of bitter coffee and the jostle of cell phones, the tables and chairs, the street outside. He inhaled smoke. No more neon or important books, no more pastries or expensive soups, no more undercurrent of conversation. He was at the end of the pier. He was looking at the lightning over the gulf. His pockets were empty, the marble gone, the jigsaw Michigan. His wrist was bare, the silver bracelet lost. His hair danced in the wind and sand eroded the planes of his face. He couldn’t remember. He was lost. He exhaled, closed his eyes to the midnight winds. He could still see the lightning out in the gulf, still feel her touch.
He opens his eyes and finds himself at his kitchen table, the cat stalking a fly around the linoleum. The coffeemaker sputters its completion. He stands on grating knee. Stacks of newspapers. Boxes of memory. Photographs hidden away upstairs. An empty inbox. And he can’t remember what made him. Can’t remember the faces of the lost, the tastes of the dead. Can’t remember their songs or the textures of them, the warmth of skin or the secrets between them. Forever poised in the moment before a first kiss, the phantom scents of cheap beer and cigarettes and something rich and hidden, something fading from him no matter how he claws to hold it, something rending and beautiful hiding behind blue eyes.
He reaches into his chest and feels nothing at all. He’s hidden the artifacts, or someone’s stolen them. There are pictures on his walls of people he doesn’t know.
He has coffee. Another cigarette.
January cuts a deeper distance.
He stands at the window and watches the snow fill in the morning’s tracks. He loses something in that.
Love is the farthest unsteady light.
He knows they’ll all go eventually, leaving behind an unfinished equation, an unwritten song, a fragile calculus in which nothing is integral. Forevers are redefined in departures. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to deserve nothing. He can travel around the world to end up where he began. He can search a lifetime to find the one who will ruin him. He can fall to the floor, stumbling through bent physics, hands searching for the ineffable past, sobbing for the war dead, the faces he can’t remember, the whispers, the gasps: Paul Hughes, come here? Paul Hughes, I love you.
Because suddenly he’s looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, she’s there, seconds, she’s there and they’re together, instants, she’s there, moments, there, now, she’s there, now, there forever, there, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays, and they contain multitudes, lifetimes of stillness hovering in the air between them.
And they’re running down those ancient streets, hands held, eyes open, laughing and whispering and knowing.
Staring, but not seeing.
Thinking of the thought [itself].
Breathing, but not living.
In the struggling light, the snow looks silver.
He inhales.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
He exhales.
Bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and