I lifted my right foot and rested its full weight on the first of the shelves.
Had I been an adult, the shelf might have buckled.
But I was just a child. An eight-year-old. My body, much like the current state of my conscience, weighed practically nothing.
The shelf held.
On the other side of the wall, my Vaafir coughed. There was a peculiar, unpleasant, liquid quality to the sound, warning me that I didn’t have much time left.
I kept climbing.
One more shelf, then, moving with infinite care, scrambling up onto the top of the wall.
Crawling over the edge and looking down.
I saw my Vaafir’s back. He was prone, now, too wounded to move much. His tunic, pale when clean, was black and glistening in the moonlight filtering through the open windows. His back was a landscape of wounds, amazing me with clear evidence of just how tenaciously something worth killing could cling to life instead. Still, that was a knife in his right hand, clutched between two of the three central fingers and two grasping thumbs. He coughed out blood and managed a word. “Aaaannndreaaa…”
I happen to know, from later studies of these events, that the madness overtaking the humans and Bocaians on the island was at this moment beginning to fade. People had started to act with something approaching rationality again. Some traumatized survivors were already offering medical attention to the sentients they’d been trying to murder just minutes earlier.
I don’t know why my Vaafir called my name back then. He might have been trying to lure me out so he could kill me. Or he might have been trying to let me know that it was all right, and that he posed no further threat to me.
I’ll never know.
Just as I’ve never known how much of what I did next was the madness acting through me and how much was my mania for problem-solving, pursuing a puzzle to its natural solution.
But I rose and stood at the edge of the wall and held the kres pointy-side down with the sharp tip aimed at the small of his back and jumped with my legs wrapped tight around the thing to add more weight and momentum than I ever could have managed with a mere child’s strength.
The impact sounded like a pop.
Hot blood geysered from below, splattering my legs, my chest, and my face with the first evidence of my own monstrousness.
I rolled away, jumping to my feet in case he proved not close enough to death.
As it happened, I’d driven the kres well into his back, puncturing one of his three lungs but not quite managing to run him through. I’d missed his spinal column, leaving him enough strength to thrash and attempt a rollover. It was an attempt doomed to failure as soon as the protruding kres struck the low wall by his side, ensuring that any more motion in that direction could only drive the shaft still farther into his body.
He extended both arms toward me, his fingers bloody, his eyes imploring.
He tried to say my name again, through a mouth filled with blood. Buried beneath gurgles, it was still recognizable. I heard affection, sadness, and deep, unresolved confusion.
But it was those imploring eyes that got me.
In my nightmares, I see those beautiful, nearly but not quite human, eyes with the odd rectangular pupils and the irises that almost completely obscured the whites. Eyes like those were one of the things I’d most loved about my Bocaian friends and family. They were so much more colorful, so much more expressive than the human equivalent. They were more like jewels than eyes, and my Vaafir’s eyes had always seemed bigger and warmer and more filled with magic than most.
The eyes get me now because I think he returned to himself in those last few minutes of life. I think he was telling me he was sorry.
But at that one moment, I saw nothing but beauty.
And it was not just because of the monstrous force that had taken hold of me and everybody I loved, that had colored me with a stain I would carry for the rest of my life, that had doomed me to a childhood of being cared for by people who saw me as an enigma to be solved and one other who saw me as a toy to be used, and that had left me with nothing to look forward to in adulthood but a lifetime as Dip Corps property, that I did what I did next.
Because, whatever else I’d become, I was also still a little girl, attracted to shiny things.
I returned to the cooking pit and hunted up another kres.
I needed the end with the spoon.
When I came back to myself, I found myself comforted by two pairs of arms.
Skye Porrinyard sat with her back against the wall, allowing me to use her lap as a pillow. Oscin lay curled on my other side, his hands cupping mine. He had brought my bag, and wore it slung around his shoulder. I could hear Skye’s heart, and only had to shift a fingertip against Oscin’s wrist to feel his pulse. The two beats surprised me by being out of synch.
I didn’t want to move. But the sense of wrongness, of inconsistency, still nagged at me, like a distracting distant sound heard at the edge of sleep. “No. This isn’t me. I’m not comforted by other people. It’s not something I do.”
“There’s nothing wrong with trying.”
Their shared speech had always seemed to originate from some undefined point between them, but when they were this close to me, and I lay between them, that undefined point seemed to be somewhere inside my own head.
My voice was a croak. “They want me to trust you, don’t they? The AIsource, I mean.”
Did their grip tighten, a little? “Yes.”
“Are they doing anything to me to help me trust you?”
“Yes.”
“Did they arrange for you to save me from falling?”
“No. That was just luck. Like I already said, I was coming to visit you already.”
“That’s the truth?”
Skye alone: “Don’t ask that again, Andrea. It’s hurtful.”
“But they’re still doing something. To help me feel what I’m feeling.”
Now Oscin: “Yes.”
“I should resent the hell out of that. I don’t much like being manipulated.”
The joined voice again, surrounding me all sides, confident and beautifuclass="underline" “They’re not manipulating. Not with this. They’re just freeing.”
“It’s still not right,” I insisted.
They shifted, together, pulling me into a standard seated position. I didn’t resist as I was moved. Once they were done, I was still cradled by them, but able to take in both sets of eyes at once. Skye’s heart pounded a hypnotic tattoo in my ear. Oscin glanced at her, as if seeking some kind of confirmation he couldn’t discern through everything else they shared. Then Skye spoke alone, in a voice as gentle as any I’d ever heard from her, her words soft and evocative as she began a fairy tale. “A woman spends her entire life cursed by evil forces outside of her control to carry a stone so heavy that her back creaks beneath its weight. Because of all the years she’s carried this burden, without a single moment of rest, her arms have grown incapable of ever putting it down. Because she has never had freedom from that burden, she’s grown strong. Because she will never know freedom, that strength is useless. For as long as she lives she will never be able to hold anything else in her hands, let alone release the burden that torments her.”
I missed the point when Oscin took up the story. He might have taken over from her in mid-syllable, or simply faded in with his own voice easing into dominance while hers faded breath by breath. “Then, one day, she sees a caravan blocked by an obstacle. It is a stone, identical to her own. She is the only person in sight gifted with enough strength to move that second stone out of the way, so the caravan can proceed. The problem is that she will not be able to do so, and join her fellow travelers, until someone relieves her of the stone she’s already carrying. Which, thanks to the curse, they cannot do. She cannot drop the weight, and she cannot do anything else until she does.”