“What’s wrong now?” the Whole asked.
“You made them all disappear,” I gasped. “That was you? You made ten thousand people simultaneously vanish into thin air.”
My other self shifted uncomfortably. “I merely . . . isolated them.”
“Isolated? What does that mean?”
Their brows knitted in momentary thought. “I don’t think you understand hyperspatial physics well enough to grasp the exact nature of their isolation. They have been made harmless. It’s best if we leave it at that.”
I couldn’t help shuddering. “It seems excessive.”
“Why?”
“Because . . . if you’re capable of something like that, the Keepers couldn’t possibly have been a threat to you anymore.”
The Whole winced and looked askance. “I’m sorry. I think language is failing me. I must not be communicating what I really mean.”
I wanted to push the issue. Instead I took the Whole’s hand and let them help me up.
“Understand, this isn’t easy for me either,” they said.
I studied my other self’s expression with mounting anxiety. I felt as if somehow they already knew everything I would confess. “What do you mean?”
“Seeing you is like looking into my past.” Now that body’s voice was underlaid by a chorus of others in distant unison. “Very far backward.”
More of my other self’s bodies joined us on the platform. Most were children, but a few adults were mixed in, and the sight of each one made me quake a little more: these were all my bodies. All their names were still my own. I remembered perceiving through their senses. I remembered their lives before unity. I’d spent the last five years doing almost nothing at all but missing them—and now here I was, so close I could have reached out and taken their hands, if I could find the courage. All of me was right there, silently staring back.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” I whispered.
The Whole of me smiled kindly. All their faces, young and old, of every human color and shape, smiled the same warm smile together.
“I could say the same of you,” they answered, through several of those mouths at once. “I’m so happy I was wrong.”
They motioned behind me. When I turned, a round-edged cube gathered itself up out of the material of the floor, becoming a stool for me to sit on. Several more of the Whole’s bodies emerged from the nearest luminescent artery-corridors. One carried a glass of water. Two other small hands carefully inspected my wounds.
“It couldn’t have been easy to get here,” the Whole said. Their combined voice had an eerie music to it, as if every word was both spoken and sung.
“No. It wasn’t.”
I flinched at one of the child-bodies reaching into my arm, ghostlike. Their small fist withdrew and opened to reveal a palm full of shrapnel. Another child turned my head to examine the puncture marks Luther had left, and I shuddered.
“Where have you been all this time?” the rest of me asked.
“Bloom City,” I answered.
“Were you taken there against your will?”
“I went there to hide.”
More concern was creeping into all those voices. “But why didn’t you ever try to contact me? Why didn’t you come back to Redhill sooner?”
I took another sip of water to hide my face, but dozens of the Whole’s bodies encircled me now, watching me from every angle with the same cool expression: holding me in the center of so much careful scrutiny that I started to shake.
“Please,” the Whole said. “Tell me why you haven’t returned before now. I want to understand what happened that day in Asher Valley. I need to know how you survived.”
I raised the glass of water to my lips again, but my hands were quivering so much that I dropped it. It shattered on the floor between my feet, and within seconds the floor absorbed the glass shards and then the water, as if they’d never existed in the first place. I knew the Whole could do the same to me.
“I was trapped,” I said. “They were killing me. All of me. My unity collapsed, and then I was in just this body, running—to the old sewer exit in the bomb shelter in the basement. But before I could—”
“Yes?”
I could barely control my lungs, but through my sobbing I forced myself to shout, “I murdered Brother Curtis. I worked for Medusa Clan. I killed Luther to get here, and I . . . I caused the death of my only friend, my only love. I’m so sorry. I know there was no reason for me to come back. I know I can never rejoin you.”
The Whole was silent, and I was too terrified to look up and see whatever loathing or disgusted or horrified expression they must have been beaming down at me from all those faces at once.
“I should have died,” I repeated in a whisper. “I shouldn’t have come back at all, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Then many hands. Their warm pressure ringed my shoulders.
When I looked up, one of the child-bodies stood directly in front of me. Their large green eyes held me in a pensive, wordless gaze. They took my hand and pulled softly.
“Come with me,” said the Whole.
I stood from the sitting cube and went where the body led me—to where a new artery-corridor boiled up and bloomed into an orifice large enough for us to enter.
I hesitated on the threshold of that tunnel. It was long, nearly lightless, and I couldn’t see anything at the end—only a dim, pulsating glow reflecting along the nacreous walls.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “What’s my punishment?”
“Shh,” the rest of me responded. Their small hand pulled me insistently onward.
I took a last deep breath, making my peace with whatever oblivion waited for me down there.
Step by step, we moved deeper into the sanctuary.
ALEXEI
We sat hunched in the wind shadow of Kat’s rover, not speaking. A small fire burned between us, rapidly eating
