If I could go back now and choose differently, I would.
I don’t know how long I spent running. For weeks I never slept and have no memory of eating. Whatever coherent thought passed through my suddenly isolated head was harnessed to my sole objective of traveling as far as possible, by any means available, trusting no one, moving as erratically as I could for fear that what Curtis had told me was true: that the Keepers really intended to hunt me forever. I started to believe that they knew about all the other branches of my consciousness, about Redhill and the equinox—that they were even now in the process of exterminating every part of me that still existed. I was convinced that I was already the last fragment of unified consciousness in the entire world. I began to see the same faces recur between the ragged backwaters I passed through; I couldn’t tell how many of them were real, and how many waking nightmares.
I fled the surface and crawled under the ocean, hoping to bury myself so deep in the underworld that no one could follow me. I rode the elevators into the rusty lair of Medusa Clan and offered my technical expertise to that queen of terror, Dahlia Lem, in exchange for her protection. That had become the logic of security in this age: nothing would make me safer from my enemies than to become the property of someone who guarded her possessions with lethal jealousy.
Eventually I learned to sleep again. I regained strength. My head finally started to clear, until one day my fever broke and I startled awake to find myself entombed in those claustrophobic steel chambers—finally grasping that the protection the Medusas offered was not just from real or imagined threats from outside, but from the Medusas themselves. I had made myself too valuable to let go—and I’d made myself an accomplice, however indirect, to every atrocity the Clan visited on the world.
Despair would have broken me within the first year of my exile, had I never met a tortured master muralist by the name of Kusanagi Naoto. He had despair of his own: fusion fuel moguls had hired him to cover every public wall in Epak with colorful imagery to celebrate the glory of their industry, and he’d been working himself ragged to cram as much subversive symbolism as possible into all of his own work. His every brushstroke was a muffled scream that most of that ‘clean’ energy was destined to be used as waver ammunition for one genocidal war or another—and almost no one noticed. We met eyes in Bloom City’s habitat: me on my way to work for the Clan; him at the top of a ladder, splattered in self-illuminating paint; both of us salaried with blood money. I nodded to him across the crowd to let him know I understood his message loud and clear, and he nodded back in beleaguered relief, and that was all it took us to forge the beginnings of an unbreakable connection.
We never had any one word for what we gradually became to each other. No label or category would have done it justice. He loved me with an intensity and devotion the likes of which I’ve rarely known in all my lives, and I loved him back as much as I was capable of loving anyone; trust and vulnerability weren’t resources I had in any abundance. There were months at a time when I needed to keep him at arm’s length and recoil back into myself. He respected that, whether or not he ever fully understood—and though I had no one else, I didn’t expect any kind of monogamy from him.
But when we were close, he gave me things I needed desperately, things I’d resigned myself to never having again. When I most hated myself, he held me in so much admiration. When my head was stuffed full of lives I could never lead again, he loved me for my complexities and contradictions and delved into them as far as I would let him. At a time when I was racked by the claustrophobia of a single unchanging body, he was pansexual, with an insatiable attraction to fluidity. There were times when our varied lovemaking, its endless role reversals and permutations of assumed genders, was the only way I could still remember or express who I was. He became the only person I ever spoke to, let alone who knew the truth about me. I remember times when we whispered to each other in the hot, musty darkness of my coffin apartment in the Medusan barracks module, and I wondered if he was the last person left alive who knew me—who would ever know me again.
For all the safety and solace I found in our undefined relationship, it wasn’t enough to hold me together. Every day I stayed in Bloom City wore down my will to live a little further. The closer Epak’s cold war with Norpak came to its seemingly inevitable flash point, the more I had to reckon with never living to reunite with the rest of myself—and, in turn, the more desperately I needed to. Even if Curtis’s blood was still on my hands, even if I could never unify again, I had to find my way back to the rest of myself. I had to be with them, no matter how dangerous the journey.
And I nearly made it. I came so close.
I don’t know for sure who hired Serena to kill Alexei and Naoto and abduct me. I don’t know who fired the rocket that hit our APC, possibly killing all three of us inside it. Maybe I’m dying even as
