through tragic circumstance. As I hold this weapon, as I prepare to end this war, I remember and it gives me strength.
This is the moment of ultimate truth; I inhale and know all. I know what I have to do to end this. Even as the child stands before me, even as I hold this weapon to target on her heart, I know what I have to do.
It is a flood of thought and emotion; this is the moment before an end, those instants when the world pauses, those instants when everything is revealed and I am held motionless in a hesitant peace.
Inhale.
She begs me to end it. I will, but not before telling you the story of how it all came to be. Seconds stretch to hours, years, decades, forevers. I will take my time.
They’re all dead now on this dusty plain, this barren world where it began and where I will enact an ending. Only now do I realize the depth of my loss; I’ve killed the woman I love by killing the doppelganger sent to replace me. The shot went right through him and hit her as well. What have I done?
Exhale.
She’s in my arms right now, lifeless body. I hope her soul is elsewhere.
So much to say. So little time. The child yearns for this weapon, yearns for cessation and stillness.
She can wait.
How far back does the mind go? How far back does this story stretch? I barely remember the Earth. What still remains in my memory are broken images: a talking teddy bear, a gravel parking lot, the weapon jutting from the ocean, firing the white balls of phase that would begin the war. I remember a fence, a little girl, the static of the dead television. Daddy leaving. Mommy’s gloves. My baby sister, and the tears late at night.
I remember the smell of the smoke rising from my mother’s broken chest as she lay on the ground, dying.
They lied to us. They said we’d be reunited with our families once Archimedes was out of harm’s way. I knew that they were all dead, and I knew that Uncle and the angels were lying. Maybe that’s why I did what I did.
I think my heart has stopped beating.
Is there love between stars and times? Can the lost soldiers ever know that most poignant of emotions? Can something develop between two people brought together by loss and war that transcends explanation, safety, reality?
I can feel her blood through my shirt.
The child laughs at me. The temptation…I can taste it. I want to kill her, will kill her. Not yet, though.
I can’t kill her yet. I don’t want to leave. Images flood this confusion: a hand, her eyes, subtle smile and the shudder of her release. Forbidden love, forbidden coupling. I killed Tallis for what he did to her. I would have killed Uncle if I had known in time. His heart gave out. In this moment, I feel my own, each beat distinct. I feel the blood coursing through my veins, flushing my face, reaching every last extent of my body. I feel the gun warming to my touch.
This is the final moment. I know everything, I see everything.
I can smell her hair, tainted as it is by sand and blood, sweat and dust. I can smell her hair.
How did it come to this?
Gary’s wreckage to the south, Hannon’s final gambit spilling fire and black smoke into the afternoon sky…What is this place? Can it be home? Did God die for these bleak plains, this impossibility of continuation? Did Lilith die so that I could kill her Mother and be left alone here?
This is the final moment. The ultimate truth. Senses are heightened, flashes of memory dance before my eyes, replacing the child with past, this desert with the cold of space, this corpse with warmth and touch and life.
I know it all now.
We tore the ship apart after I killed Tallis.
The angels tried to keep us from the bridge. They’d seen what happened in the hangar. They’d known all along that Tallis was a special little present that Maire sent along with Arch to keep watch over us, to take over once Uncle had died. They’d known it was coming, could see it in Uncle’s eyes for months before the final heart attack. His great crop of kinked black hair turned from salt-and-pepper to pure white, his rich chocolate skin turned sickly gray, eyes once brilliant white yellowed with age and exhaustion. I don’t blame him. I now know that he was an unwilling participant in this slaughter, just as my father and Uncle Jean were long before I was born.
Did my father see this world before he died?
I can feel that final collapse. I felt it then…But in this moment, he is with me.
Is it the silver? Is that the link between our past and present and whatever lies beyond? It crawls just beneath my skin, jabbing behind left eye, right. It is alive, so much more alive than the little girl, so much more alive than I am in this pause.
Brendan’s blood was still on my hands when we went to the bridge. The angels tried to stop us, but we fell upon them with blades and fists, slashing throats, knocking them down, gouging biomech eyes from silent, confused sockets. I felt nothing. They felt nothing. We emptied the ship of Mother’s spawn. We smashed things. I paralyzed Arch with stripped circuits, broken boards. Lobotomy.
At last, we were alone. Just men in the middle of nowhere.
And woman.
I remember being alone with her for the first time.
We thought it was a drill, but it wasn’t. Must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, just starting our outside flight training. Brendan’s Attack One was running formations in what we thought was an empty system. Turned out to be inhabited. We were told they were the aliens; I know now that they were probably just an advance team from Hannon’s systemship. Arch went into evasive, left the slithers outside. I was on Catalyst guard shift with Arik. He abandoned his post; I don’t know where he went. But when Arch started shaking, I almost panicked. We’d never been bombarded from close-range before. EM slugs. We lost phase containment on the lower decks, and the system glitched. The Catalyst chamber opened.
She was in there, alone. Crouched on the floor, so scared. I went to her.
I don’t know if she’d ever been held by another human.
It wasn’t until after the attack was over that we realized that my shielding had never activated. I’d been in the chamber without phase, but nothing had happened.
We kept it a secret. Our little secret.
I owe it to decades of planning. When my father was in the service of Mother, she changed him. This child…She knows that I’m the son of Joseph Windham. She knows, she knew, but she still let me get on that ship. Maybe she had plans for me. In the end, she decided to kill me, replace me with an angel named Nine. She never suspected that Hannon would find my Machine in the outer. She never suspected that I would kill her.
This silver is starting to
Maybe she wanted this. Maybe she knew.
She is weak. I can feel her. Digging, clawing, struggling against this, even as she knows that it must be done.
She fades, lashes out. Final struggle against this
Maire is ancient. She is older than this world, older than home
speaks to me without lips, without voice or tongue or breath.
She is.
And now I begin to understand. Laughter like pleas for mercy resonate. Purpose. Will be completed. I heard it in the wind and saw it in the sky; I thought it was the end.
Please, give me strength.
I’ve seen God. Judith. Touched her. Held her hand as she died. I wept for her. I don’t know if there are others. I can only pray that there is something beyond this dust, this plain, this dead weight of my love bleeding out into the hardpan. I can only pray that in these moments, it will guide me, give me the strength to do what I must do, to end this war, to kill this child, to find that stillness between
There was music in her voice.
