Since their internment, Caitlin had been coming to Zeke, hoping to get from him some hope for her daughter. Instead, she had found peace, the humbling of life to memory and perception when all hope is lost.
'Gentleness and love will survive,' Zeke spoke, his voice swollen with silence. He didn't care about the world's plight. The remorseless agony of his zotl possession had purged him of all caring. Pain and pleasure had become for him two ends of the same board, the flimsy plank of his body; floating on a sea of electrons, riding the long currents of time to wherever. .He felt more clarity than any man alive.
'What are you thinking?' Caitlin asked. The storm had frenzied again; and needles of rain prickled her skin.
'Why do people think heaven is up?' he replied. 'I mean, look at it. The sky is tearing itself apart. I wouldn't want to go up right now'
Caitlin grinned at that -thought and turned her attention to the wheeling sky. She hadn't had a drink since, she was brought here, yet at that moment power was flushing through her like a shot of whiskey. The drugs that controlled her tremors usually left her dense with torpor. Now, watching the storm clouds stampeding like white bison, she was exhilarated: Something was going to happen.
'I'm leaving soon myself,' Zeke said at last, and when his thin black eyes touched hers, she saw the happiness in his harrowed face. His short hair was bristly, and the blue regulation fatigues they both wore
looked wrinkled and ill-fitting. She reached out to touch his mottled hand, and a spark cracked between them. A gasp hissed through her lips.
'You want it?' he asked.
'Yes,' the old woman answered.
Zeke peeled o$' a splinter from the arm of his rocker and lanced his left thumb. He offered her his hand and its gem of blood.
Caitlin's forefinger smeared the blood when a spark jumped to it from his thumb. She brought her finger to her mouth, and the taste of iron chilled her.
That evening, one of the residents complained that Zeke was glowing. Guards in bright-orange jumpsuits, hooded goggles, and gasmasks found Zeke in the gazebo grinning with muscular ecstasy.
They took him to a protective chamber monitored only by cameras.
He wrote a note to Caitlin, and fifteen minutes later, he caught light and vanished.
Caitlin received the note the next morning at breakfast. Even among the sinuous fragrances of coffee and toast, she could still smell the blue scent of a windshaken mountaintop on the paper. It read- .
Caity-What goes up is
futileunless it goes
out.
-Z
