But these coffins were too frail to stand up to deliberate homicide. I could picture Steck in Rashid's armor, slamming her mailed fist against the glass, reaching in to cut a throat — Cappie's throat.
I moved to another coffin. The room contained dozens of the glass caskets, laid out in rows: first row, the oldest of our generation, Cappie and the nineteen- year-olds; next row, the eighteen-year-olds, all their male bodies; next row, the seventeen-year-olds…
Oh god…
I began to run, past the teenagers, past the children, to the coffins at the far end of the chamber. The youngest, the infants.
Waggett. His first time at Birds Home.
His last time at Birds Home.
Steck had killed him like all the rest — her own grandson. She had smashed through to his defenseless little body and cut him, spattered his blood.
I seized the Beretta and crashed its butt down on the coffin, bashing again and again until I had battered a big enough hole to pull out my son's body. He was so limp. I cradled him in my arms and he just lay there, his little hands floppy, his face slack.
The last time I had seen him alive, he had been happily making sheep sounds. 'Baaaaaa!'
I lowered my head to his bare stomach and wept.
After a while, I laid him back in his coffin. There was no better place to put him.
I took the time to check every other coffin in the room. Perhaps Steck had slipped up with someone; perhaps she hadn't cut deep enough and one of the children was still alive.
But they were all dead — the male selves of every child in Tober Cove, slaughtered. Olimbarg. Cappie's other brothers. Even the male half of Ivis, throat cut just as her father's throat had been cut by Dorr.
All dead.
I took a ragged breath. Of my whole generation, I was the only male that Steck had allowed to live. Such love for her baby boy… but it didn't extend to Waggett.
Nothing happened. Here, in the home of the gods, they allowed such a thing to happen, and did nothing.
Opposite the door I'd come from was a second door… or rather an open entryway leading into another unlit corridor. Part of me was afraid of going there — I already suspected what I would find next. But the alternative was staying where I was in that silent bloody room, with Cappie at one end and Waggett at the other.
No. Forward.
The new corridor wasn't as long as the first. As soon as I entered it, I could see what was at the other end: another large chamber, similar to the first, filled with more glass coffins. I willed myself forward, though I knew what I would find: our female halves.
Our dead female halves.
Again, Urgho was closest to the entrance — a husky female Urgho, all freckles on creamy skin… except that the freckles were now mingled with blood flecks spattered from her throat.
One of Urgho's limp hands lay across her bare belly: a belly just starting to swell with the first signs of Master Crow's child. The child would never be born now. Urgho had wasted his time, 'getting a little practice' by taking care of Waggett.
Poor Urgho. Poor Waggett.
This time, I went straight to the far side of the room, to the coffin in the same position as the one that had held my son. This one contained a little girl: a perfect little girl, with perfect baby skin and soft brown curls that had never been cut. There was nothing to indicate this was Waggett's female self, but I knew it was — a parent knows. I reached through the broken glass to smooth the hair off her forehead.
Just one touch. I wanted that. But I let her lie peacefully.
She was dead. Quite dead.
I moved methodically back through the room, checking for signs of life. The one-year-olds, the two-year-olds… all dead. I had seen them all so recently on the dock in Tober Cove. Ivis, Olimbarg, all the rest.
Cappie…
Cappie too. Her thin familiar body… the body I had made love with so often… the spring when I was fifteen, she had taken my female virginity, and later that summer, I had taken hers…
But her hands were seared to charcoal, and I had betrayed her many times. I don't know why those seemed part of the same thing.
I wanted to bend in and kiss her, but it would mean breaking more glass. Anyway, I wasn't sure I had the right to kiss her anymore.
Placed alongside Cappie was one extra coffin, one where there had been no coffin in the other room.
This coffin's lid was intact. Inside I saw myself.
I was still breathing.
My female half was alive. Steck couldn't bring herself to kill me.
Wielding the pistol butt again, I knocked in the glass — carefully, carefully, so I wouldn't cut her. First came a hole just above her feet, tapped out delicately, crack by crack. Then I worked upward, rapping the glass hard enough to star it without breaking through, then levering my hand underneath and lifting up so that the glass pushed out instead of in. I had to force myself not to speed up or cut corners; but at last I had cleared away the whole top, enough so I could reach in without fear of cutting myself.
'Wake up now.' I gave her a light touch on the cheek. Her skin was warm and soft — I remembered how often I had been intoxicated by the feel of my own skin. For a strange moment, I looked down at her, my own naked body, my own breasts, and hips, and legs…
'This is sick,' I muttered. With a mental slap to myself, I placed both hands on her shoulders (warm, bare shoulders) and gave her a gentle shake. 'Wake up. Come on, wake up.'
Her eyes fluttered, then opened. She smiled thinly, then reached up and touched a finger to my lips. 'Cappie's right,' she said. 'You
Wires and tubes pulled away from her body as she sat up in the coffin. They left no mark.
'Good,' she said.
I didn't understand. 'Good what?'
'Good that they didn't leave any marks. I can hear what you're thinking.'
'I can't hear you.'
'So it's a puzzle,' she shrugged. 'Maybe Rashid can explain it.'
'Rashid's out cold.'
'I know. I know everything that's happened.' She looked grimly toward Cappie's body. 'I suppose it's like always — while I'm sleeping in Birds Home, the gods send me your thoughts. It's like I'm seeing it all in a dream.'
'You aren't sleeping now.'
'No, but I'm still… receiving. It's strange — as if I'm looking out my own eyes, but I can still see ghosts of what you're seeing too. And feel ghosts of what you're feeling.' She slipped her leg over the side of the coffin and heaved herself out. 'Give me your shirt.'
'Why?'
'Because looking at my body is distracting you, and that distracts me. It's hard enough to concentrate as it is.'
I wanted to protest; but before the words were even out of my mouth, she gave me a look that said I was wasting breath. They say you can't lie to yourself. With a sigh of resignation, I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it to her. She shinnied into it, then smoothed out the wrinkles. It was long enough to reach halfway down her thighs, covering her most 'distracting' parts.
She caught my eye and winked. 'I'd better be careful — I know how much you like women in men's clothing.'
'This is unfair,' I protested. 'If you keep ragging on me because you know what's in my mind… we're supposed to be on the same side, aren't we?'
'We are,' she replied. 'On most things anyway. Like Steck.'
'Right.' The thought sobered me. 'Steck.'
'I don't suppose you'd let a mere woman carry the pistol?'
I shook my head.
She said, 'You know bullets won't go through the armor's force field.'
'I know. But I want to try anyway.'
She nodded, then gestured toward the door at the far end of the room. 'Let's go.'
Another corridor led further into Birds Home. We walked it together, my sister self and I. Part way along, she slipped her hand into mine. I didn't even know I'd been longing for that, for a little human contact in the face of so much death… but she knew.
I suppose she felt the same need. We were the same person, weren't we?
Ahead lay a third chamber, with more glass coffins. As before, we stopped to listen before entering… but this room was as silent as the first two. Wherever Steck was, she must have gone deeper into the stone reaches of Birds Home. My sister and I exchanged a look, then moved forward to the first coffin.
Urgho again — a Neut version. Hairless face and womanly breasts. Penis and testicles. And just behind the scrotal sac, delicate labial lips.
The coffin's glass was intact. The Neut Urgho was alive.
'I'll check Waggett,' my female self cried. She ran, and I was right on her heels. We crossed the room and skidded to a stop beside a coffin containing a pink-
