"Is it a riddle?" she asks aloud, asking no one or herself or whoever left the package at her doorstep. "Am I supposed to understand any of this?"
For an answer, her stomach growls loudly, and Farasha glances at the clock again, adding up all the long hours since breakfast. She leaves the papers, the glass vial, the peculiar metal disk, the empty envelope — all of it — lying on the countertop and makes herself a cheddar-cheese sandwich with brown mustard. She pours a glass of soy milk and sits down on the kitchen floor. Even unemployed ghosts have to eat, she thinks and laughs softly to herself. Even dead women drifting alone in space get hungry now and then.
When she's finished, she sets the dirty dishes in the sink and goes back to her stool at the counter, back to pondering the things from the envelope. Outside, the rain has turned to sleet, just as she suspected it would, and it crackles coldly against the windows.
The child reaches out her hand, straining to touch the painting, and her fingertips dip into salty, cool water. Her lips part, and air escapes through the space between her teeth and floats in swirling, glassy bubbles towards the surface of the sea. She kicks her feet, and the shark's sandpaper skin slices through the gloom, making a sound like metal scraping stone. If she looked down, towards the sandy place where giant clams lie in secret, coral- and anemone-encrusted gardens, she'd see sparks fly as the great fish cuts its way towards her. The sea is not her protector and isn't taking sides. She came to steal, after all, and the shark is only doing what sharks have done for the last four hundred and fifty million years. It's nothing personal, nothing she hasn't been expecting.
The child cries out and pulls her hand back; her fingers are stained with paint and smell faintly of low tide and turpentine.
The river's burning, and the night sky is the color of an apocalypse. White temples of weathered stone rise from the whispering jungles, ancient monuments to alien gods — Shiva, Parvati, Kartikeya, Brushava, Ganesha — crumbling prayers to pale blue skins and borrowed tusks.
Farasha looks at the sky, and the stars have begun to fall, drawing momentary lines of clean white fire through the billowing smoke. Heaven will intercede, and this ruined world will pass away and rise anew from its own gray ashes. A helicopter drifts above the bloody river like a great insect of steel and spinning rotors, and she closes her eyes before it sees her.
"I was never any good with riddles," she says when Mr. Binder asks her about the package again, why she touched it, why she opened it, why she read all the things inside.
"It isn't a riddle," he scolds, and his voice is thunder and waves breaking against rocky shores and wind through the trees. "It's a gift. "
"I was never any good with gifts, either," she replies, watching as the glass vial from the manila envelope slips from his fingers and begins the long descent towards her kitchen floor. It might fall for a hundred years, for a hundred Thousand years, but she'll never be quick enough to catch it.
The child reaches deep into the painting again, deeper than before, and now the water has gone as cold as ice and burns her hand. She grits her teeth against the pain, and feels the shark brush past her frozen skin.
"If it's not already within you, no one can put it there," the droid says to her as it begins to unbutton the pink, ketchup-stained blouse she doesn't remember putting on. "We have no wombs but those which open for us. "
"I told you, I'm not any good with riddles. "
Farasha is standing naked in her kitchen, bathed in the light of falling stars and burning rivers and the fluorescent tubes set into the low ceiling. There's a girl in a rumpled school uniform standing nearby, her back turned to Farasha, watching the vial from the envelope as it tumbles end over end towards the floor. The child's hands and forearms are smeared with greasy shades of cobalt and jade and hyacinth.
"You have neither love nor the hope of love," the girl says. "You have neither purpose nor a dream of purpose. You have neither pain nor freedom from pain. " then she turns her head, looking over her right shoulder at Farasha. "You don't even have a job. "
"Did you do that? You did, didn't you?"
"You opened the envelope," the child says and smiles knowingly, then turns back to the falling vial. "You're the one who read the message. "
The shark is coming for her, an engine of blood and cartilage, dentine and bone, an engine forged and perfected without love or the hope of love, without purpose or freedom from pain. The air in her lungs expands as she rises, and her exhausted, unperfect primate muscles have begun to ache and cramp. This is not your world, The shark growls, and she's not surprised that it has her mother's voice. You gave all this shit up aeons ago. You crawled out into the slime and the sun looking for God, remember?
"It was an invitation, that's all," the girl says and shrugs. The vial is only a few inches from the floor now. "You're free to turn us away. There will always be others. "
"I don't understand what you're saying," Farasha tells the girl and then takes a step back, anticipating the moment when the vial finally strikes the hard tile floor.
"Then stop trying. "
"Sonepur—"
"That wasn't our doing," the girl says and shakes her head. "A man did that. Men would make a weapon of the entire cosmos, given enough time. "
"I don't know what you're offering me. "
The girl turns to face Farasha, holding out one paint-stained hand. There are three pearls resting in her palm.
The jungle echoes with rifle and machine gun fire and the dull violence of faraway explosions. The muddy, crooked path that Farasha has taken from the river bank ends at the steps of a great temple, and the air here is choked with the sugary scent of night-blooming flowers, bright and corpulent blooms which almost manage to hide the riper stink of dead things.
"But from out your own flesh," the girl says, her eyes throwing sparks now, like the shark rushing towards her. "the fruit of your suffering, Farasha Kim, not these inconsequential baubles—"
"I'm afraid," Farasha whispers, not wanting to cry, and she begins to climb the temple steps, taking them cautiously, one at a time. The vial from the envelope shatters, scattering the sooty black powder across her kitchen floor.
"That's why I'm here," the child says and smiles again. She makes a fist, closing her hand tightly around the three pearls as a vertical slit appears in the space between Farasha's bare breasts, its edges red and puckered like a slowly healing wound. The slit opens wide to accept the child's seeds.
The pain Farasha feels is not so very different from the pain she's felt her entire life.
Farasha opens her eyes, in the not-quite-empty moments left after the dream, and she squints at the silver disk from the manila envelope. It's hovering a couple of inches above the countertop, spinning clockwise and emitting a low, mechanical whine. A pencil-thin beam of light leaks from the dimple on the side facing upwards, light the lonely color of a winter sky before heavy snow. The beam is slightly wider where it meets the ceiling than where it exits the disk, and the air smells like ozone. She rubs her eyes and sits up. Her back pops, and her neck is stiff from falling asleep at the kitchen counter. Her mouth is dry and tastes vaguely of the things she ate for her supper.