An arc of electricity snapped brilliantly across the rock, and for a split-second the thing became solid and real before blinking back into nothingness. When it was gone, I struggled to understand the ghost image seared into my vision: it had been a machine. It had had panels, moving parts that looked almost like clockwork, inlaid with fine glowing patterns of circuitry, bunches of needle-thin antennae, sensors, feelers; a cluster of inset lenses that only incidentally resembled the pupil of an eye.
And it hadn’t been looking at me.
It had been staring directly at Danae.
As my vision cleared, I saw her freeze. Someone was standing there in the dusk on the far side of the rock.
I couldn’t guess at the stranger’s gender. Their face was partially obscured by a semi-reflective visor, and they were sheathed in a formless gray cloak that totally obscured the body underneath.
Kat was fighting with her pistol. It had powered down on its own and refused to prime again, no matter how hard she hit it. When she realized it was futile, all four of us stood perfectly still. Even the wind seemed to have gone suddenly, deafeningly silent around the rock.
“Who are you?” the stranger asked.
Danae was trembling. She held her arms slightly out, as if fearfully offering herself up for inspection.
“Don’t you recognize me?” she asked.
“It is you. Me. Alive?”
They stepped tentatively closer to each other. The visitor peeled back the hood of their cloak and took down their visor, revealing their piercing gray eyes.
“It’s me,” Danae said.
“All these years. I saw you coming, but I didn’t believe it. I was certain only one of my bodies made it out of Asher Valley alive.”
“What?” Danae gaped. “But I saw the rest of me die. All of me. The church was surrounded on all sides.” She tapped her sternum. “This was the only body to escape.”
The strange shook their head. “No, think back earlier. You split one body off to go investigate the fire. That body came back to me and reunified. It was . . .” Their body twitched. “How did you survive? Where have you been all this time? Why . . . why didn’t you try to contact me?”
Danae stumbled wordlessly forward. She reached for the gray figure and fell into them, clutching at the gray fabric of their cloak, weeping into their shoulder.
“It’s okay,” the stranger said. “It’s over. You’re safe. You got here just in time.”
The air around them boiled and deformed to swallow them. Before I knew I was even speaking, I called out, “Danae! Wait!”
The gray figure, half-dissolved into the bent air, turned and stared at me—and I knew in my marrow that it was the same cutting gaze I’d felt in Antarka, as tangibly hot as a waver beam. Danae looked back too, speechless and uncertain. Then the liquid fabric of space washed over them both and healed into empty air, leaving Kat and me alone on the empty rock.
Around us in all directions, the lifeless dunes and mesas stretched far away.
Kat put her hands on her hips. “Well, shit.”
DANAE
The field was clear and unrefractive, but I could tell we’d been rendered invisible to Alexei and Kat. A faint repulsive force danced across my fingertips at the boundary, and the stinging clouds of rust-colored sand bent around us in flight—but the air inside the bubble was still and clean.
“What is this?” I whispered. “How are you doing this?”
The Whole answered twitchily, “I’m not sure how to explain it. I’m not used to language. I haven’t needed it for a long time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry, you will. I’ll help you.”
I tried as hard as I could to choke back the tears, but I couldn’t. I felt such a surge of emotion in the warmth of that other body holding mine—in knowing both bodies were mine, and I was really here. I was home.
And yet I could never go home again.
My other self’s sharp eyes met my tear-streaked ones. Hands—every crease familiar, every fingerprint whorl once my own—raised toward my head, palms open: offering to unify. I drew back reflexively. I struggled to form the words to confess what I’d done, but my voice stuck in my throat until all I could do was grab those hands and pull them down. My face fell back into that familiar shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” the Whole said, smoothing my hair. “Of course. We don’t need to do this now. You need time to recover.”
I looked back through the bubble at Alexei and Kat and asked, “What about them?”
The Whole of me looked puzzled.
“They need water and fuel,” I clarified.
“You shouldn’t concern yourself. Your struggle is over. You made it back.”
“But they helped me get here. I owe them—”
“Please,” the Whole said. “It’s under control.”
The authority in that voice banished all my worries. I trusted them; I had to. I was talking to everything I had once been, everything I’d yearned for all these years to be again. Serenely confident. Limitlessly wise.
“Understand,” my other self said soothingly, “a lot has changed since we’ve been separated. Without unifying, you might find you need a long time to reorient yourself. I’ll do everything I can to make it easier. You are me, after all.”
My other body sat down in the dust, cross-legged. When I did the same, there was an odd vibration in the ground beneath us, and I looked down to see particles of sand moving with urgent intention. They locked together like microscopic puzzle pieces until the ground under us formed a smooth hexagonal plate, translucent, laced with hair-thin filaments of luminescent geometry. The Whole’s body was glowing with the same spiraling and angular patterns, woven through their skin like capillaries of light. Such a cold white light. When I glanced down again, I was shocked to see the ground beneath us suddenly distant: we were flying, and yet there was no sound, no sense of movement. Acceleration without inertia.
“How is
