rollover. It was an attempt doomed to failure as soon as the protruding kres struck the low wall by his side, ensuring that any more motion in that direction could only drive the shaft still farther into his body.
He extended both arms toward me, his fingers bloody, his eyes imploring.
He tried to say my name again, through a mouth filled with blood. Buried beneath gurgles, it was still recognizable. I heard affection, sadness, and deep, unresolved confusion.
But it was those imploring eyes that got me.
In my nightmares, I see those beautiful, nearly but not quite human, eyes with the odd rectangular pupils and the irises that almost completely obscured the whites. Eyes like those were one of the things I’d most loved about my Bocaian friends and family. They were so much more colorful, so much more expressive than the human equivalent. They were more like jewels than eyes, and my Vaafir’s eyes had always seemed bigger and warmer and more filled with magic than most.
The eyes get me now because I think he returned to himself in those last few minutes of life. I think he was telling me he was sorry.
But at that one moment, I saw nothing but beauty.
And it was not just because of the monstrous force that had taken hold of me and everybody I loved, that had colored me with a stain I would carry for the rest of my life, that had doomed me to a childhood of being cared for by people who saw me as an enigma to be solved and one other who saw me as a toy to be used, and that had left me with nothing to look forward to in adulthood but a lifetime as Dip Corps property, that I did what I did next.
Because, whatever else I’d become, I was also still a little girl, attracted to shiny things.
I returned to the cooking pit and hunted up another kres.
I needed the end with the spoon.
When I came back to myself, I found myself comforted by two pairs of arms.
Skye Porrinyard sat with her back against the wall, allowing me to use her lap as a pillow. Oscin lay curled on my other side, his hands cupping mine. He had brought my bag, and wore it slung around his shoulder. I could hear Skye’s heart, and only had to shift a fingertip against Oscin’s wrist to feel his pulse. The two beats surprised me by being out of synch.
I didn’t want to move. But the sense of wrongness, of inconsistency, still nagged at me, like a distracting distant sound heard at the edge of sleep. “No. This isn’t me. I’m not comforted by other people. It’s not something I do.”
“There’s nothing wrong with trying.”
Their shared speech had always seemed to originate from some undefined point between them, but when they were this close to me, and I lay between them, that undefined point seemed to be somewhere inside my own head.
My voice was a croak. “They want me to trust you, don’t they? The AIsource, I mean.”
Did their grip tighten, a little? “Yes.”
“Are they doing anything to me to help me trust you?”
“Yes.”
“Did they arrange for you to save me from falling?”
“No. That was just luck. Like I already said, I was coming to visit you already.”
“That’s the truth?”
Skye alone: “Don’t ask that again, Andrea. It’s hurtful.”
“But they’re still doing something. To help me feel what I’m feeling.”
Now Oscin: “Yes.”
“I should resent the hell out of that. I don’t much like being manipulated.”
The joined voice again, surrounding me all sides, confident and beautiful: “They’re not manipulating. Not with this. They’re just freeing.”
“It’s still not right,” I insisted.
They shifted, together, pulling me into a standard seated position. I didn’t resist as I was moved. Once they were done, I was still cradled by them, but able to take in both sets of eyes at once. Skye’s heart pounded a hypnotic tattoo in my ear. Oscin glanced at her, as if seeking some kind of confirmation he couldn’t discern through everything else they shared. Then Skye spoke alone, in a voice as gentle as any I’d ever heard from her, her words soft and evocative as she began a fairy tale. “A woman spends her entire life cursed by evil forces outside of her control to carry a stone so heavy that her back creaks beneath its weight. Because of all the years she’s carried this burden, without a single moment of rest, her arms have grown incapable of ever putting it down. Because she has never had freedom from that burden, she’s grown strong. Because she will never know freedom, that strength is useless. For as long as she lives she will never be able to hold anything else in her hands, let alone release the burden that torments her.”
I missed the point when Oscin took up the story. He might have taken over from her in mid-syllable, or simply faded in with his own voice easing into dominance while hers faded breath by breath. “Then, one day, she sees a caravan blocked by an obstacle. It is a stone, identical to her own. She is the only person in sight gifted with enough strength to move that second stone out of the way, so the caravan can proceed. The problem is that she will not be able to do so, and join her fellow travelers, until someone relieves her of the stone she’s already carrying. Which, thanks to the curse, they cannot do. She cannot drop the weight, and she cannot do anything else until she does.”
During the next few sentences, control of their shared voice gradually returned to Skye. “When a magical hand reaches down from the clouds, and plucks that first weight from her back, freeing her to stand up straight, do what must be done, and live whatever life she chooses to lead, she should be happy. But her first reaction is anger.”
Their next words emerged in a spooky duplication of my own New London accent. “‘
“Believing it by then to be some kind of treasure—” Skye spoke alone.
“And not what it actually is,” Oscin concluded, “a crippling burden.”
I wanted to wrest myself free of their shared attentions, and curse them for thinking they could understand me so easily.
Somehow, I didn’t move.
Skye used her fingertips to draw circles in my hair. “It is like I told you yesterday. The individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They each carried their own weights, their own secrets, that might have been as terrible as any of yours: secrets that even included blood on their hands. Neither Oscin or Skye thought they could possess enough strength to carry anything else. They even wanted to hoard their burdens, afraid that sharing such things would mean giving up everything.” Oscin’s voice joined hers, forming a new gestalt that filled the chamber to its ceiling. “But they were burdens, and not treasures. They could be shared. And if that boy, and that girl, needed a little help, then that help was not wrong. It was a gift.”
The AIsource had spoken of three gifts: one they’d already given me, one they were still in the process of giving me, and one they hoped to offer me at the end of this business. I wondered just what I was experiencing now.
Either way, it was growing increasingly difficult to maintain even the pretense of not trusting this. The warmth, rising from the base of my spine, felt like it belonged to me even if it originated from someplace else.
Desperate to deny the feeling, and drive it away by any means possible, I seized Skye by her wrist, digging my fingertips into her tendons to inflict the greatest possible degree of pain. “When I was eight years old I killed my Bocaian father. My Vaafir. I stabbed him through the back and felt joy doing it. I scooped out his eyes while he was still able to feel the hurt. When the Dip Corps found me, I was sitting on his floor, playing with them, my hands covered with his blood.”
Skye placed her free hand on the back of mine, and with a mere touch loosened my grip on her wrist. “I know that, Andrea. It’s like I said: I’ve looked up your background. And you were just one small child among an entire peaceful community that went mad all at once.”
“A community contaminated,” Oscin said, “by nothing you could have controlled.”
