No one. Only me.
But I had made it, I thought.
Some vital part of me is still back there—will always be trapped inside that day. For five years I’ve never closed my eyes without finding myself in that dark room again: alone, gritting my teeth blunt against the pain of my broken arm, but with nothing left between me and escape except a trap door and a half-kilometer of sewer. I’m down to my last body, but I’m alive.
Then I hear the chuckle from the darkness. Dry, rasping, and drunk.
“The stupid bitch confessed,” he growls, and I recognize his voice and the stink of his favored alcohol before his silhouette gives him away: Lorelei’s husband, Brother Curtis. His black shirt, a shade darker than the darkness around him; yellow teeth leering out of a sunburned face; the dull glimmer of his wave pistol, pointed unsteadily at my head.
“We got it out of her,” he continues. “We know what you are, witch. What you two did. She told us everything about you. Your soulless ant-hive mind. We got it all out of her. We got it all.”
There is no sorrow in his voice.
“We know what you are, and we’re going to hunt you down and exterminate you. Every last wicked one of you. Your name is Legion, and we will send you to the pigs and drown you in the sea.”
No trace of remorse for the cold-blooded murder of his own wife.
“We’re going to hunt you to the four corners of the Earth.”
Nothing but hatred for me. Bottomless. Ignorant. Triumphant.
On instinct I dart to the side, and his waver cuts a smoking hole in my cloak and scalds the skin of my neck—but before the gun can prime again, I’m on him, heaving all my weight into one sharp kick straight into his fingers on the grip. He grunts in pain. The weapon clatters away across the concrete floor.
He reacts quickly, unsheathing a long knife from his belt, but he misjudges my motion, and I bend around him like a breath of wind. He lunges into a metal shelf and turns around, dazed. His fingers are weak on the knife’s handle, some of them broken or dislocated from my kick, and it’s a simple thing to kick again—to watch the gleam of the blade swinging up into the air—to catch it with my good hand.
Curtis is beaten. He braces his knees as if to lunge at me again, but he’s dazed and drunk and already winded, whimpering at his hurt hand, out of shape and untrained. With one good hit I know I can knock him out cold, break his ankle to stop him following me, bruise his vocal chords to silence his shouts to the other Keepers while I open the trap door and run.
But I don’t run.
I turn the knife in my hand, filling my vision with its dull gleam and finding it already soaked in blood—and it dawns on me that this is my blood, from one of my other bodies.
My mind begins to overflow: with the radiant pain in my arm; with the thought of all the lives that have just been taken from me; of Lorelei burning at the stake; of Blood Rain’s billion-plus victims; of how it felt to die six successive times in that ecstasy of sick fear; of collecting tissue samples from mass graves; of the plasma thrusters bolted to Cruithne; of the men even at this moment designing ever more vicious strains of Gray to stoke the cold war in the Pacific; of the impossibly cruel ingenuity of it all. I think of the people responsible, the whole breadth and banality of the evil in humankind—and in the moment Curtis finally braces to rush me again, I see all of them wearing a single skin—
And I want that skin to bleed.
In all my 223 lives, I have no memory of ever wanting anything so much.
When he lunges again, I duck and slide the blade into his calf. I brace my grip and feel—hear—his stumbling motion pry all the tendons apart. He crashes into a helpless fetal position, clutching at his ruined leg, and even through the intensity of my bloodlust and the adrenaline-crazed speed of my motions, there is a perfectly cold and medical logic to everything I do. I want the most pain, the slowest bleeding. I avoid major nerves and blood vessels. Instead I slash at his hands and face, his limbs, his bowels. I twist the blade and punch the wounds. His screams ring in my ears, and I close my eyes to savor it—how it joins the increasingly frantic shouts through the door and becomes music, the sweetest I’ve ever heard. It resonates in all my bones, broken and whole. I suck in breath and taste the smells on the air, delighting in a promise to myself: I’m going to make him pay in kind for every one of my deaths.
At some point Curtis begins to quiet down, and I abandon all restraint and slash harder—as hard as I can with only one good arm—as if he’s gone silent to spite me, and a deep enough cut might make him sing again.
He’s collapsed his own lungs, screaming.
The music ends suddenly. The clang of the blade slipping to the concrete floor is only dead noise; the bang of the battering ram has ceased to be a drumbeat. The drip of his blood from my fingers is impossibly loud and dissonant as I finally stumble back from the body of the man I’ve killed.
I’ve killed.
No. I’ve done so much more than just kill him. I’ve made him unrecognizable. I relished every second of it, and in my heart of hearts I wanted so much more—still want so much more.
It might be half an hour that I stand there, moving from that spot only to empty my stomach on the floor. I think
