On the periphery of every cheering crowd, other people swarmed the nearest pane, their faces frozen into unreadable expressions. The scale of the devastation was beyond all comprehension. Most of the Pacific Ocean had been scoured completely clean: not just of all life, but of all solid matter. One quarter of the human population of the world was gone, along with half the global food and energy economies. In the following days, the billowing black dust of self-terminated nanobots would rise into the stratosphere, turning the sunsets strange colors and darkening the sun enough to cool the planet nearly to pre-Industrial temperatures. Everyone had lost someone. Many had lost everything.
Despite it all, business continued nearly as usual at an inn at the edge of town. One Medusan wave pistol was sufficient barter for a bare room. The three of them peeled off their stinking and dirt-caked clothes and washed away all the days of grime and blood, ocean salt and sand and smoke, and fell one by one into deep and dreamless sleep on their thin bedrolls, insensitive to all the shouts and explosions of fireworks unfolding on the streets outside their windows.
In the morning, Alexei opened his eyes to see Kat sitting on the floor by his head, waiting for him. Her bags were packed, and her hair was tied back into a tight bun.
“I have to leave,” she whispered.
Alexei propped himself up on an elbow and listened.
“I don’t belong here.” She looked around and sniffed the air. “In this meatspace of yours. It’s not for me. I’m a fish out of water. I don’t know if nodespace still exists, but if it does, I’m going to find it or die trying. I have to get connected again. Get back to where I can make sense of anything.”
Alexei nodded. He managed to reach out and take her hand, and their fingers laced together.
“I owed you everything for busting me out of Fujiko’s lair,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able repay you, and in a weird way, that debt . . . .” She sniffled. A smile crossed her face before she could wipe it off. “It was kind of beautiful, wasn’t it? Almost romantic, at times. Don’t you think?”
Alexei sighed.
“Too bad we’re even now,” she said. Then she stood up and left without another look back.
Alexei and Danae stood motionless at the windows of the room, staring out into the searing light. They might have been standing there for minutes or hours. People and machines staggered through the streets below in a thin, unending flow.
“After everything that’s happened,” she said, “it all looks the same. I feel the same. Nothing was solved.”
He said, “You’re speaking again.”
She nodded.
“What’s that thing you brought back?”
She took the sphere from her pocket and turned it between her palms. “A sort of archive,” she answered emotionlessly. “All the Whole’s scientific knowledge, for me to access by unifier. If I wanted to.”
He nodded, though he couldn’t fully imagine what she described.
“What will you do now?” she asked him.
He was silent for a long time. Finally he asked, “What will you do?”
She said, “I’m going to kill myself.”
In unison they turned and met each other’s eyes. Their faces were oddly serene.
“So am I.”
“How?”
He produced a short knife from a hidden pocket in his coat. The razor-sharp carbon fiber blade had a black sheen in the dirty sunlight.
“May I use it as well?” she asked.
He pulled a second knife from his belt.
They sat down cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, symmetrically holding the knives in their right hands while their left forearms rested outstretched on their knees.
“Together?” she asked.
“Together,” he said—but when the blade touched his skin, he hesitated. “Wait.”
She looked up from her own arm.
“We made a promise, once,” he said.
She closed her eyes and sighed. “It feels like lifetimes since I was that little girl. It probably was.”
Alexei nodded. “It’s hard for me to believe I was ever that boy. But we promised each other we’d always survive, didn’t we? No matter what.”
“We loved each other.” The faintest trace of a smile crossed her face. “As much as any two children can.”
He swallowed. He hadn’t been prepared to hear that.
“I thought you were dead,” he said. “I thought Eryn was dead. I thought the Confederacy had killed you. It’s why I joined the Major’s youth battalion in the first place.”
This, in turn, caught her off guard. “I . . . I thought you were dead too. As Eryn, I thought that. The matron dragged me away. She said the other kids had all been conscripted, and I was the only one she could save. For years, I didn’t know. I went back to look for you, but you were gone. I never forgot about you. I never stopped looking.”
“You loved me?”
“. . . Yes. I loved you.”
A silence passed between them.
“Then we have to release each other from our promise,” he said. “If we’re going to do this.”
“Okay. It’s forgiven.”
“Forgiven,” he responded, with effort.
He took a deep breath and pressed the blade into his wrist again.
“Wait,” she said.
He withdrew the knife and waited.
“Just wait,” she repeated. She set her knife down on the floor, and he did the same. “You don’t know what happened to all the Gray, do you? You don’t even know how the war ended. I must be the only one left who does.”
He shook his head, and she told him everything that had happened inside the sanctuary. When she was done, he sat speechless.
“When I left Bloom,” she said, “I wanted to die because I couldn’t live with who I’d become when I was cut off from the rest of my being. But now, after everything we’ve been through, what I can’t live with is knowing who I would have been instead, if that had never happened. I can’t live with knowing what the rest of me became.”
“Because they never lost
