trapped within metal and phase, lances of light enacting endings on their brothers.
I’d never imagined that I would feel sorry for God when I met her. Never imagined that I would pity her.
She looked so young. So scared.
We’d made it through the rebels, through the bubble to the center star, tiny planet in orbit. We descended within, where they’d hidden God, this time not for sleep but for safety and hopefully recovery, but everyone knew. Everyone knew.
We got out of the shiver. This was Heaven.
Men lined the walkway in silence. Men, not angels, guarding the gateway to the kingdom.
They said nothing. They looked at me blankly. They knew.
And I met God.
Prayer, incantation, beseeching, pleading, those whispers behind my eyes each and every night since I could remember. Those words kept me from
She was younger than me.
Huddled, fetal position, shivering. Not what I expected. So young, so fragile. Eyes of pure silver, the lattice crawling freely beneath her skin.
So this was Heaven, a shell carved from a blackened world drifting lazily around a hidden star. This was Heaven: no angels, no clouds, no shining halos or golden gates or harps. Silent men afflicted with a silver plague, watching a young girl die.
Hannon went to her side, stroked her face. She smiled. Blind, but she knew. Of course she knew.
She struggled to sit up. So weak. Hannon helped her, held her. Both afflicted, neither caring about the possibility of cross-contamination. This was a race that acknowledged its impending extinction. He helped her sit up, and she motioned for me to join them.
And she touched my face, my neck and face. Silver eyes seeing but not seeing, looking into and through my own.
And I told her. Everything, although she knew. She was God. Judith.
No words, but I felt her pull those memories from my mind: my mother’s affliction, my father leaving for war, the attack on Earth, leaving on Arch into the Outer. Growing and learning and fighting. Killing. Soldats perdus. She knew all that I knew: of Lilith, of the stillness, the silver, our escape from Maire’s jihad, our separation complete. She knew that I’d had the silver within me always, but only through contact with Lilith was it activated. She knew that I was dying just as certainly as she.
And I saw his death, collapsed bubble, ejected into space in the binary system. The wounded system within which I had killed Tallis and the angels, from which we ran, from which we had hoped to escape Maire forever.
I saw the species reacting to Joseph Windham’s advance force. They knew that Maire’s vengeance would soon arrive, so they took what they could and ran. Megascale engineering: the construction of Hannon’s systemship, the gentle nudging of a star out of orbit, planets, enveloping all in glass and metal, hiding. They could re-align the night sky, but they couldn’t stop a little girl with an alien disease.
Her touch like fire and
Tears of pain and frustration. Her hand fell from my face as she slumped back, exhausted.
Such weakness in her blank eyes. Ancient eyes housed in a dying body. Never believed in God. Never believed in anything more than that which I could see and hear, taste and smell: lips and sweat and blood and eyes. Lilith. I never believed, but she was there, right there, resonating with
My heart dropped. I knew that Maire sought her final vengeance. She would destroy this place, this hidden Heaven. She would kill Hannon, Judith, God. I knew that Lilith and the painter, the cowboy and my ghost would be with her, unwilling participants in this end.
And God’s hand grasped mine, touch like fire and silver, burning, burning, and I saw, and I knew. You know. You do. That touch…For the first time, I believed.
and I felt the struggle within her touch, not just the dance of silver beneath flesh, but the war inside of God, striving to defeat that crawling metal, that substance without explanation or purpose. Ancient, tired eyes. Tired of fighting, but knowing that she must. Knowing that she couldn’t let the silver consume her until
and I saw the warship Guerra, weapons charging, felt at its center the child grinning, ready, smug. Vengeance.
For the first time in
I felt Lilith.
Hannon closed his eyes with interior communication from his ship.
Gary sliced through the systemship hull, venting an ocean of phased silica into the void. A vessel studded with weapons, erupting in fire, cutting through Hannon’s civil war. It didn’t matter. Gary killed without politics.
Judith shuddered, gasped. Such despair in those eyes. Lines of tears that weren’t tears: silver, running down her cheeks. She pulled me close.
She motioned to one of her guards, who pulled his weapon out of its holster and handed it to her. She opened the charge corridor, ejected the round. Shaking hands stumbled over smooth cylinder.
She used the nails of her right hand to slice into her left palm, let the now-silver blood wash over the round. Faint mist, smoky dance into the still chamber, dissipate. She chambered the round, handed the weapon to me.
Hannon exhaled. I looked at him and he nodded.
I studied the heft of the weapon, the same weapon I still hold. Cool, featureless black, the round in the corridor now imbued with the blood of the ancient, tainted and perverted into something more than a phase slug. So much power in my hand. No longer helpless for the first time in
I began to stand but Judith placed her hand on my shoulder, pulled me into an embrace. Shaking with pain. She whispered. I felt her sobs as it all came apart.
and she fell silent, motionless, slumping into my embrace.
God was dead.
