threw the door open to Jud’s chamber.
“Stay out of my fucking head.”
The twins were there, Alina, the bear: a symmetrical arrangement: Alina flanked by the girls, the bear on her lap. Jud Indian-legged on her chaise; her words ended upon his entry.
“Guess you saw the boys.”
Paul scoffed, paced beside the window that looked out upon the birthing fields below. “Lab coats? Yeah, I saw them. Stuck out like an ingrown toenail. Try harder next time.”
“Sorry.”
“Fuck you. Bring her back.”
“You know I—”
“Bring her back!” Alina and the children flinched at his voice. The bear’s smile faltered. “You expect me to work with these?” He indicated the silent onlookers.
“Hope’s dead. Her code’s lost.” Jud shrugged. “Sorry.”
A breath and he was over the god. Lifted. Strangled. She grimaced, her face turning black from her suffocation. Paul walked her to the window, slammed her against the frame. A slizzle and his blades leapt forward, opening her chin to pubis, through flesh and bone.
He tore the silver ball from her heart and threw the corpse through the window. Glassish shards fell miles below to babies, babies.
Screams: Alina and the children.
He squeezed the marble in his right hand. It started to blacken.
“Find a way to bring her back.”
He tossed the marble to the chaise and stormed from the room.
Al did her best to comfort the sobbing girls. Honeybear frowned to himself.
The thick gurgle and flicker of silver, flesh, blood. The Judith ME sculpted a new body over the marble. Flash, snap to grid: Jud stretched and sat up.
“He’s broken.”
that savage transition back to the merge, the tickle and strain, dull beating behind my eyes, the pins and needles stippling up the spine and neck, around my head to settle at my temples, and West was there, all shoves and fists, beating me to the pavement, a knee on my chest: I felt ribs crack.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again.” He got off me, extended a hand. I accepted and he pulled me up.
I wheezed through blood. “But—”
A swift crack across my face. Index finger extended. “Don’t do that again. I don’t care. I miss her, too. But it’s not Jud’s fault, not Alina’s. Not my daughters’.” He reached and wiped blood into the front of my shirt. “I loved her, too.”
We stood in a silence. The merge had flattened for the moment: one existence, no fragments or echoes. I knew it had been raining; the sidewalks reflected the emerging moonlight.
Jingle. Jangle.
I pulled West into the alley beside Cafe Bellona. I knew the door had opened and was now lazily swinging shut. She laughed, and four feet tapped paths past our hiding spot.
West’s eyes narrowed. He looked from the couple to me: lock. He’d known them.
“Welcome to the merge.” I felt my whisper had been too loud, but they didn’t seem to notice us.
“Simon and Maggie?”
“Yeah.” I looked out from the alley. They were much too focused on each other to notice me. “Let’s get out—”
“Quiet.” He pulled me back. “Listen.”
Another set of footsteps. A different sort of sound.
I felt it: that lance, that extraction, the energization of the metal now coursing through my blood, the place where my heart had once been, and I knew that Maire was there, somewhere.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Shut ‘em. You’re glowing.”
I shut my eyes and heard her draw closer to us. The footsteps stopped at the alley entrance, just a pause, but pause enough that I sensed West’s heart beat faster, knew he wanted to inhale, but like me, he’d retreated to silence.
She started walking again. When she’d passed, I opened my eyes.
“Let’s go.”
the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified, the theory that the self is the only reality: solipsism.
He was solipsistic. He knew rejection, and that knowledge forced him within. That knowledge forced him apart.
She knew this because he knew this.
And children, and werewolves, and piano, and cheese. She’d never heard music. She’d never learn to sing, to dance. She’d never smell lilacs or taste Pabst Blue Ribbon. These things were good.
She’d managed to distract the girls from Paul’s break with a runtime environment resembling a beauty school dropout’s bedroom. There were giggles. The twins played with rouge. The blush brush tickled Alina’s cheek; she attacked them with bright-red lipstick, drew a smiley face on Phire’s forehead, a moustache above Jade’s mouth.
Confident that they were engaged enough in the trappings of teenybopperhood to relent the gosling imprinting with which they’d taken to her, she slipped deep into the Judith ME.
The source of that plague, that collective of shadow and doubt: she thought through the entry guardians and walked without footsteps into Paul’s refuge. She wasn’t good with maths, but she knew intuitions and rejections. The silver pool chamber was colder than she’d expected; her breath danced, and each painful inhalation, each wheezed exhalation echoed, bounced, and in return to her ears, heightened the loneliness of that place.
Reaching into, out and through: she knew their senses.
The silver should have killed her, lapping at the edge of the pool, exposed as she was, but she’d always known from that first breath after virgin birth that she wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t a fragile construct of flesh wrapped around bone; she was, and just was.
He’d made her to precision specifications, a fine silver blade hidden within a despised and uncertain framework.
Alina leaned over the pool’s edge, saw her shadowed face in near-perfect reflection, her awkward long neck drawing the eyes down to prominent collarbones and pendulum breasts, nipples erect from the chill and something deeper, darker, pointing parallel to the silver’s surface, and she cupped small hands (long, lithe fingers) and plunged in, retrieving, and she drank deeply of that metal, that mercurial fire, the burning like ice, carving through teeth, tongue and gums, into and down her throat, gasping, coughing, a flare and seizure of cold
and she rolled into that mirror, let the metal pour into her, a frigid embrace, an inclusion and wrapping, and in that metal horror, she felt him, knew him, surrendered to that silver and that man, because that’s all he was: silver, and as the surface hardened above her, fine crystalline suffocation, she screamed without sound, her fingers plunged into her, frantic and yearning, her liquid, his liquid, all silver, all silver and
It wasn’t love, but it was something as painful.
When she was done, satiated, the surface released with crackle and splintering. She stood from the pool, let the rivulets of silver, of him, of loss and ruin retreat from her entries. She wrung the metal from her hair, for once a semblance of control, spiraled curls then escaping and drying, frizzing, accusing outward.
“You’d think,” Jud half-whispered from the edge, “he’d have told me about you.”
Alina jumped at the voice.
Snap and a towel. Jud flickered, threw the towel to Alina. “Dry off.”
