I sat up, and in doing so I realized that I was wearing my Earth body, and that until I made it move again it had been lying in a crumpled heap. Also, close by me, somebody was crying.
I turned, the white scintillations around me smearing into streaks, and saw Oxana, just as I had last seen her, her face buried in Halyna’s red hair. Halyna was just as pale and lifeless as she had been when I carried her in my arms.
“Oxana?”
She jumped, or at least she tried to, but the cellular glow around us was nothing so simple as a floor: when she moved she seemed to be swimming in something viscous, and a scatter of tiny lights drifted up around her like startled fish.
“Oh, what is . . . ?” In the midst of so much sparkling brightness, Oxana’s eyes were muddy holes. “Ja ne rozumiju. Don’t understand. You are alive, Bobby?” A tiny glint of hope crept into her stare, but when she looked down at Halyna’s body, the glint died. “No. Not her, just you.” Tears filtered her eyes. “What is this? What place?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think either of us are supposed to be here—especially not you. But it’s okay. I’m going to take you back.”
Her eyes got big. “Back where? Not there! Not where Halya . . .”
“No. God, no, not to the museum. We’re going back to the apartment.” At least I hoped that was what Sam had managed to arrange, but I wasn’t going to share my concerns with her unless I had to. She’d already suffered too much for my mistakes.
I stood, struggling with the strange surfaces, the oddly thick air. My feet sank into the cellular material of the tunnel, but the resistance was uneven. I couldn’t even make any sense of what I was standing in, whether it was one big thing or a billion tiny things, but the white glow made everything feel relatively safe, if not exactly cheerful.
“No, Bobby. I don’t want it.” Oxana, clearly driven past what any sane person should have to endure, slumped back down beside her friend’s body. “I want to stay. With my Halya.”
“We can’t. This place isn’t meant for people—not living people, anyway.” Remembering what Sam had said, that only angels and souls could pass through, I wondered if we were inside some kind of lining for the universe we knew, a placental barrier to keep things out that should stay out and keep in that which was appropriate. Certainly the living, vibrating vastness of it felt more like some kind of organism than any artificial construction.
It took a while to convince Oxana. I was beginning to worry that Anaita herself might pass through this place on her way to Kainos, and when I told her that, Oxana finally got up onto her hands and knees and then onto her feet, shaky as a newborn foal. “Where we take her?” she asked.
It took me a moment to understand she was talking about her friend and lover, Halyna. “Nowhere,” I said. “I think we should leave her here.”
“No! Never!”
“Halyna’s gone, Oxana, believe me. This isn’t her, this isn’t the woman you love—it’s just a body. The reason I came back but she didn’t is because she died. Now her soul has gone somewhere else. If anyone knows that, I do.”
A sudden, new worry struck me like cold water—what would happen when Halyna’s soul was taken to Judgement? Like everyone else, she must have had a guardian angel. Now that she’d died, the authorities would know everything, including every crime of mine that Halyna had witnessed. And wouldn’t they find out about Anaita, too? She was the cause of Halyna’s death, after all. How could even Anaita interfere with such a basic function of the heavenly system?
As had been the case far too often lately, I could only shake my head. Too many questions that even an angel couldn’t answer. “Come with me, Oxana,” I said. “After all we’ve been through, all my fuck-ups, I’m afraid you still have to trust me. This part of Halyna will stay here, maybe forever. I think somehow this is the body of the universe itself, or at least, as much as we can understand it. The most important part of her has moved on, Oxana, but her body will be safe here. It won’t be any different than burying her in the earth, just . . . cleaner.”
“No!” Oxana would not look at me. “No. We don’t go.” I was close to carrying her out by force when she added, “Give me small time. To say goodbye.”
She bent over Halyna’s body and arranged the limbs, placing the young woman’s pale, freckled hands on her chest, drawing her legs straight. She brushed a coil of glorious red hair back from the bruised face, stroking Halyna’s skin, and murmuring to her in Ukrainian. At last she sat up.
“I wish she had weapon. We bury Scythian with weapon.”
“God will know she was a warrior,” I said. “I have no doubt about that.”
“She was. She shot the Persian bitch! She hurt her.”
“She did, and it saved my life, I think. All of our lives.” I kneeled down and touched the corpse’s bruised, pale cheek. “Thank you, Halyna. God loves you. May your journey be a good one and may you find the reward you deserve.”
• • •
Oxana and I walked along the glimmering, soap-bubble corridor until the light closed behind us like a shining curtain, and we could no longer see Halyna’s body. Oxana seemed nearly catatonic, but even for me it was like pacing through a dream. I wish I could explain that place better, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. I don’t know if I will ever see it again, feel the musical air and the all-blanketing light (which tells you nothing about the weird physicality of the place) but I know I’ll remember it until I finally stop thinking.
We had been walking awhile when I noticed everything around us was getting darker, as if twilight had begun to creep through the not-world. We seemed to be moving through a duller sort of light now, drab and colorless compared to what had surrounded us before. We continued on in silence through this dimming world, but it slowly became clear that the dimness was not uniform: patches of lesser light were followed by even darker stretches, then back to the dull twilight. Gradually these dim passages became alternating bands of dark and darker.
Some time later, we moved from a corridor striped with black and near-black into a few moments of total lightlessness. I felt Oxana’s hand reach out and grasp mine, but I couldn’t reassure her because I didn’t know myself what was going on. Then a few seconds later, with little sense of transition, we were no longer inside something but outside, walking down a suburban street lined with trees and streetlights.
I had my phone in my pocket again. That and the street signs told me that we were back in San Judas in the early morning hours of the day after we’d broken into the museum, still a couple of hours before dawn at least. After everything else that had happened, clever, heroic, exhausted Sam had somehow managed to land us in the eastern part of the city, only a half a mile from home.
When we finally staggered into the apartment, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do for her, I made Oxana a cup of tea. A few minutes later she fell asleep sitting up on the couch, drink untouched. I took the teacup and dish off her lap, tilted her sideways and covered her with a blanket. Then I went back out.
It was a long walk to Stanford, but I needed to get the taxi back. Part way there I caught a bus full of the living dead you always see on buses before the sun comes up. I must have looked right at home. I’d washed myself and doctored my cuts and abrasions as well as I could, but I hadn’t taken time to change clothes. My pants looked like I’d just been fired from Pit Bull Obedience School for incompetence, and I had a couple of weird, large, purple-black splotches on my shirt that would have stumped just about any forensic chemist you could find. Also, I felt dead inside. Empty like you can’t even imagine.
I got off the bus on the Camino Real and climbed over the campus wall. I moved slowly and extremely furtively through the extensive wooded areas until I was close enough to the Elizabeth Atell Stanford Museum to get a good look.
No lights, no cop cars, in fact no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Which was good. Not that I was planning to go back in there, no fucking way. But if the crime had been discovered the cops would have locked down all the main gates by now and be checking anyone trying to leave.