“There’s no one left to send it. All the leaders are already dead.”
The Whole shrugged their hundred small shoulders. “Then they died wishing to take everyone else with them. Who am I to deny them that?”
“You’re me,” I cried. “You’re me!”
The red-stained holographic Earth bore down on me like a fever dream. I dropped to the glassy floor, stricken and numb, straining to breathe. The Whole looked worried—but only about me. Not about anyone or anything else.
“I don’t understand your objections,” they told me through a hundred small mouths. “I want us to understand each other again. We could resolve this if you would simply reunify with me. Why are you making this so difficult?”
“I don’t want to understand this,” I wheezed. “You may have forgiven me, but I could never forgive you.”
The child bodies staggered back as if I’d hit them.
“What happened to you?” I shouted. I looked up at the Whole’s nearest body. “I know you. I am you. You can’t do this. This isn’t who you are. This can’t be who you are.”
“This is very . . . difficult for me,” the Whole said unevenly. “I didn’t anticipate ever having a conversation like this. It . . . hurts me that we can’t agree.” The child-body nearest to me turned away and clasped their hands behind their back.
“Our friends are dying out there,” I insisted. “Our families. People we know. Their children. Our children and grandchildren.”
The Whole shook their heads slowly. “I told you. From my perspective, it’s been centuries since I cut ties with anyone outside this sanctuary. I’ve made my peace. I can’t let my past connections cloud my judgment now.”
“But you’re judging the entire species for the actions of a few. Not just a few. The worst out of all of them.”
“No,” the Whole corrected. “I’m judging them for tendencies inherent in all of them.”
“Naoto didn’t deserve to die.”
“The Medusan propaganda artist, you mean?” the Whole responded curiously. “Even if I took your appraisal of him at face value, how many Dukes are there for every Naoto? How many Standards? How many Keepers? How many empty-headed wastelanders living out their brutal lives without an iota of meaning?”
“Who are you to say whose life has meaning?”
“My reply is to ask you that same question.”
They knew me as well as I knew myself. Their mind was a fortress of solipsistic self-agreement, thousands of times as broad and deep as my own small head. There was no argument I could make that they couldn’t effortlessly rebut—and I’d already passed my breaking point. The familiar numbness of depersonalization was seeping around the edges of my mind. I was running out of words. Out of air.
“You don’t need to be here,” the rest of me consoled. “You should go rest.”
I couldn’t speak. It was all I could do to prop myself up against the force of my own anguish and suck one more breath into my lungs—but in the time it took me to move that air, hundreds more died.
“By the time you wake up, it will all be over,” the Whole said, laying their small, soft hands on me, “as if it was only a bad dream.”
I had been so strong, once. In body, in mind, in heart. I’d been someone who could have argued with this monstrous and amoral and all-surrounding intellect without sliding into catatonia. The person I’d been before Asher Valley could have gotten through to this other me, but now I was reduced to this one lost fragment, and this would be the way the world ended: with the Whole’s silent indifference and my whimpering failure, vanishingly insignificant in the shadow of forces beyond my control.
“We’ll have all the time in the world to make our peace,” the Whole told me. “Come.”
But just as my muscles went limp and the tunnel of my vision began to close—I thought of Naoto.
I remembered his belief in me, so frustratingly immune to all my refutations. I felt the persistence of his love, and I knew:
If I were a fraction of the person he’d always thought I was—if I had half that wisdom and courage—I wouldn’t try to play logical chess with the Whole. They could always outthink me. Whatever about them that had so terribly broken wasn’t in their thought processes, but their soul.
Their hands started to pull me up and out of the chamber, but I broke free and held still.
“Something happened to you,” I said. “Around the time we were separated. Something horrific happened to you in Asher Valley, didn’t it?”
The Whole stopped. Suddenly they were avoiding eye contact.
“You didn’t evade the Keeper mob when it was coming to kill me,” I realized. “You ran right into it. You were caught.”
The Whole nodded wordlessly.
It was all starting to make a terrible sense. I swallowed hard and said, “You were tortured?”
“For nearly eight months. Yes. With a level of sadism the likes of which you and I had never experienced before. Never in all our lives.” They gave me a hard look: all those eyes daring me to doubt it. I didn’t.
“They collected all the dead from the church,” the Whole said. “I was made to share a cell with them—my own bodies. Stabbed, shot, burned, mutilated. Twenty of the people I was and still am. Twenty times over, for eight months, I was made to watch and hear and smell my own gradual decay. A whole mass grave of me.”
I shuddered. “I’m sorry.”
“They were devoted to the idea of hunting me down. They wanted to exterminate me. Not just those bodies. I mean all of me.”
“I know,” I said. “But in the end, you escaped.”
“I was left for dead.”
I shut out the horror surrounding us just long enough to fit the understanding into my head. “So you returned and reunified. You gained all the memories of that torture—”
The Whole interrupted. “I take issue with your
