“What?” she said. The air left her lungs. “Yes. That’s one way to say it.”
She held her hands in front of her. They were quivering slightly as she said, “There was so much blood when I killed Curtis. I couldn’t wash it off. I wake up and my hands still feel the heat of him. It was like my life ended back there, and I just kept running. And yet . . . without that experience, without all my remorse, nothing I could have said or done would have been enough to make the Whole act. It was only my guilt that. . . .”
“That made them understand they weren’t inherently better than the rest of humankind,” he finished for her.
She looked at him.
“Alexei,” she said, her voice suddenly shaking. “I remember now. There was something I—we realized, while we were connected, after the rocket attack. In the link between us, for just a second, I understood something that neither of us could have figured out on our own—”
“—That our guilt is valuable,” he said. “That it’s something we need to keep alive. That the same thing that’s been killing us both—”
“—is the very thing that makes us people worth being,” she finished.
He closed his eyes in thought.
“We don’t have to do this,” she said suddenly. “We have another option. We could unify.”
“Us?” He took a breath. “You would unify with me?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m a monster.”
“So am I.”
“I’m responsible for so many deaths.”
“So am I.”
“From everything you’ve told me, I should be the last person on Earth you would ever consider unifying with.”
She nodded. “You would have been. But I’ve changed. I have to.”
“No, listen. Nothing can ever make up for the harm I’ve done. I’m beyond redemption. Beyond forgiveness. Do you understand that?”
“I do. And so am I.”
He swallowed hard. “I’m not that kid you remember. And you’re not Eryn. I have to stop thinking of you as her.”
She grabbed his hand. “I am Eryn. The body that used that name, that first added all of Eryn’s experiences and thoughts and personality to the sum of me, is dead—but I am her. And you, you’re the killer this world has made you into, but you’re also still that boy.”
He focused on his breath and struggled to hold himself together. She lay her hands on the wrist he would have cut, and he held them back tightly.
“And me,” she said, “I know now what happens when I let myself believe I’m better or purer or more innocent than everyone else. When I let myself think I could ever transcend the human condition. I’ve seen now where that leads, and I refuse to ever think that way again. As long as I exist, I swear that none of me, no one who ever unifies, will ever think that again. That’s my one rule now.”
They pulled closer to one another, until he could feel her breath as she told him:
“Nothing is ever going to redeem us. Either of us. You’re right about that. But we can still make our life mean something. Not in spite of who we are, but because of it. We can be what the Whole was supposed to be. We can protect humankind—not like a parent looking down on it, but as part of it, fatal flaws and unforgivable sins and all. We can help it heal.”
Alexei kept his eyes closed. He said, “It will be like dying, in a way, won’t it? We’ll cease to exist as the people we are now.”
“Yes. But we’ll also be reborn. We’ll become something new.” She waited. “Do you understand everything I’m saying?”
“No.”
She took a deep breath and asked, “Do you want to?”
He opened his eyes and met hers, suddenly calm.
“Yes,” he said.
She raised her hands and held them open toward him, and he mirrored the motion. Carefully, and with a kind of reverence, they held each other’s heads and leaned in to one another.
They willed.
You know who I am. I’m Danae, with all the 223 lives whose combined memory and experiences amounted to her consciousness—and I am Alexei, with all the lives he took. I’m more than the sum of those parts: I am all the things neither of them were capable of doing, or being, or realizing, as long as they were separate; connections they couldn’t make, thoughts too complex to fit inside a single head, emotions too vast to pump through the chambers of one heart.
I’m still figuring out what it means to be their gestalt. I know I always will be, but never more than in these first days. I ask myself while my two bodies tend to each other’s wounds. Sometimes they talk aloud; other times I share what I’m thinking directly, without need for language. I meditate on it while I walk through the streets of Phoenix on two pairs of feet. Once or twice I let myself laugh at the name of this town: it’s as good a place as any to begin again.
It’ll take time to put my new memory into an order I can make sense of. I need to understand how different I am from my constituent selves. I think of the things they each yearned for so desperately, that I no longer want or need: I accept that I’ll never be whole, nor forgiven. I’m guilty of all their crimes, and no amount of good will ever erase the evil I’ve done—but erasing it is not my goal.
As I walk, there’s a chill on the air, and a greasy shadow that falls over the sun, and the people of this hollowed-out wasteland town look up with so much fear. They’ve lived all their lives under the threat of storms harsh enough to wipe places like this off the face of the war-torn Earth, and they know in their bones when a new one is brewing. Maybe the worst yet.
But I know things, too. When I turn the Whole’s parting gift between my palms and
