“That hasn’t been my name,” I murmured, “in a very long time.” My shock had given way to numbness. I stared at the thick metal shackles still locked onto my wrists and ankles.
“I’ve waited so long for this moment. You have no idea. Ever since the night we parted, I’ve been trying to find my way back to you. It’s all I’ve thought about.” His every word made me shudder: I could still recognize his cadence and intonation. I could hear the same mind speaking through that teenage boy’s throat.
“Seventy years,” I whispered.
“Seventy-two years, nine months, eight days, fourteen hours,” he rattled off. “I’d almost given up all hope when I found you. Thank God I found you. You can help me. You can save me. You’ll make everything okay again. Yes, you’ll see.”
There was red in the corner of my eye, and I unthinkingly turned to stare at the waver burn in the side of his abdomen. Blood from the imperfectly cauterized wound ran steadily down his hip and puddled on the seat cushion.
He caught me staring before I could look away. He picked idly at the raw flesh and examined the color of blood on his perversely young fingers before returning his attention to the road.
“That looks painful,” I said.
“Fatal, most likely, but irrelevant. I only need this flesh for a little while longer. It’s just a means to an end. It wouldn’t have served my purposes for much longer anyway.”
“You don’t feel that?”
He ignored the question. “I rescued you. I saved you. I had to, at any cost. My God, what a high cost.”
“You’re holding me captive.”
“No, Sybil, no.” The frantic energy dropped out of his voice and left it eerily placid. The face he was wearing was still growing its first beard, and I shuddered when he turned it toward me and said, “I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“Then let me go.”
He stopped talking. He shifted uneasily in his seat and knitted his brow. “I can’t. I . . . I need you. I can’t exist without you. You can help me. You can save me. You don’t understand yet, but you will soon.”
“It’s too late. I can’t save you.”
“Yes you can. Yes, you can.”
“Where are you taking me?”
He gestured out across the empty rocks and sand. “Don’t you recognize it? I’m taking you home, to where we met.”
“It’s not there anymore. It’s just ruins.”
He barely registered my words. “It’s so auspicious that I should find you here, so close to where we both began. It’s fate, I think. Everything’s finally come full circle. Everything is really going to be okay.”
“Listen to me. Stop this thing and let me out. I’m asking as someone who once called you a friend. As someone you claim to love. Let me go.”
He shook his head. “All this talking won’t be necessary soon. We won’t need language once we finally unify, like we were meant to.”
My heart nearly stopped. “Unify.”
He nodded. “Like we were meant to. It’s the obvious solution.”
My head was a morass of useless wishes. I wished I was anywhere but here. I wished the explosion had left me with enough strength to try to fight him, even with my wrists and ankles bound; if not for my injuries, I might have had a chance. I wished all the way back to Asher Valley, fixating on the thought that if only it had been one of my more masculine bodies that had escaped alive to find itself here, at least the roles would be different. At least he wouldn’t be looking at me that way—the same way, through someone else’s eyes, that he had seventy-two years ago, and ever since then in my nightmares.
In the distance I saw the skeletal remains of the road sign that had once marked the way to Sybil’s long-abandoned alma mater, and I felt the motors decelerate. I was running out of time.
There had to be some way out of this. Some way to get out of these shackles, or delay Luther long enough for him to pass out from blood loss.
I needed more time. I had to keep him talking.
“If you’re going to . . . to unify us—” my stomach clenched as I said this— “maybe we should take this opportunity to talk to each other while we still can.”
“I’ve missed talking to you too,” he said. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed it. But words are such a clumsy medium, don’t you agree? What could we possibly say to each other that wouldn’t be more elegant to share directly?”
I thought of asking him how he’d been, and where, but I was afraid to know the answers. I couldn’t find it in myself to pretend that nothing had changed between us since I’d so naïvely called him a brother. I couldn’t look away from the wounds on his side. He kept reflexively scratching them, making them bleed more and more effusively.
“That’s what you meant, isn’t it,” I said, staring at the blood. “That’s what you think I’ll save you from.”
He looked surprised to notice himself worrying at the burns. He pulled his hand away and wiped the mess off on the knee of his pants. He spoke rapidly, in his characteristic way, as if his mouth were struggling to keep pace with his brain. “Habitual use of our unifier seems to have yielded some long-term side effects that weren’t predicted by our original models. At first, I assumed it was a biological problem, but moving into new flesh has no effect. I now think the condition must arise from some sort of . . . iterative transcription error, but all my attempts to understand the exact nature of the degradation have come to dead ends.”
“You don’t feel any pain?”
He blinked slowly. “It’s more like I feel something, intensely and constantly, but I can’t discern specific sensations from the noise. I’ve spent decades trying to understand and treat the condition. I’ve exhausted every avenue of research that I
