"I can't do this," she said.
"You must. Give up the body. I have to have the body or the Iad wins. You want that?"
"No!"
"Then stop resisting. Your spirit'll be safe in Trinity."
"Where?"
Momentarily he let something show in his eyes, a spark of fury—self-directed, she thought.
"Trinity:'" she said, throwing the question out to delay his touching and claiming her. "What's Trinity?"
As she asked this question several things happened simultaneously, their speed defying her power to divide one from the other, but central to them all the fact that his hold on the situation slipped as she asked him about Trinity. First she felt the smoke dissolving above her, its weight no longer bearing her down. Taking her chance while it was still available she reached for the handle of the door. Her eyes were still on him however, and in the same instant as her release she saw him transfigured. It was a glimpse, no more, but so powerful as to be unforgettable. He appeared with his upper body covered in blood, splashes of it reaching as far as his face. He knew she saw, because his hands went up to cover the stains, but his hands and arms were also running with blood. Was it his? Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant losing another. The blood vanished, and he appeared before her unscathed again, only to unleash some other secret his will had kept in check.
It was far more cataclysmic than the blood splashes: its shock wave striking the door behind her. Too powerful for the Lix, even if they were massed, it was a force Kissoon was clearly in terror of. His eyes went from her to the door itself, his hands dropping to his sides and all expression gone from his face. She sensed that every particle of his energies was being put to a single purpose: the stilling of whatever raged on the threshold. This too had its consequence, as the hold he'd had upon her—bringing her here, and keeping her—finally and comprehensively slipped. She felt the reality she'd left catch hold of her spine, and pull. She didn't even attempt to resist. It was as inevitable a claim as gravity.
The last glimpse she had of Kissoon he was once more bloodstained, and standing, his face still drained of expression in front of the door. Then it threw itself open.
There was a moment when she was certain whatever had beaten against the door would be waiting on the step to devour her, and Kissoon too. She thought she even glimpsed its brightness—so bright, so blindingly bright—flood Kis-soon's features. But his will got the better of it at the last moment, and its glare diminished at the very moment the world she'd left claimed her and hauled her through the door.
She was flung back the way she'd come, at ten times the speed of her arrival, so fast she wasn't even able to interpret the sights she was passing—the steel tower, the town—until she was miles beyond them.
She wasn't alone this time, however. There was somebody near to her, calling her name.
"Tesla? Tesla! Tesla!"
She knew the voice. It was Raul.
"I hear you," she muttered, aware that through the blur of speed another, darker reality was vaguely visible. There were points of light in it—candle flames perhaps—and faces.
"Tesla!"
"Almost there," she gasped. "Almost there. Almost there."
Now the desert was being subsumed; the darkness took precedence. She opened her eyes wide to see Raul more clearly. There was a wide smile on his face as he went down on his haunches to greet her.
"You came back," he said.
The desert had gone. It was all night now. Stones beneath her, stars above; and, as she guessed, candles, being carried by a ring of astonished women.
Beneath her, between body and ground, were the clothes she'd slipped from when she'd called her body to her, recreating it in Kissoon's Loop. She reached up to touch Raul's face, as much as to be certain she was indeed back in the solid world as for the contact. His cheeks were wet.
"You've been working hard," she said, thinking it was sweat. Then she realized her error. Not sweat at all; tears.
"Oh, poor Raul," she said, and sat up to embrace him. "Did I disappear completely?"
He pressed himself to her. "First like fog," he said. "Then...just gone."
"Why are we here?" she said. "I was in the Mission when he shot me."
Thinking of the shot, she looked down at where the bullet had struck. There was no wound; not even blood.
"The Nuncio," she said. "It healed me."
The fact was not lost on the women. Seeing the unmarked skin they muttered prayers, and backed away.
"No..." she murmured, still looking down at her body. "It wasn't the Nuncio. This is the body I imagined."
"Imagined?" said Raul.
"Conjured," she replied, scarcely even aware of Raul's confusion because she had a puzzle of her own. Her left nipple, twice the size of its neighbor, was now on the right. She kept staring at them, shaking her head. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd make a mistake about. Somehow, on the journey to the Loop, or back, she'd been flipped. She brought her legs up for study. Several scratches—Dutch's work—that had adorned one shin now marked the other.
"I can't figure it," she said to Raul.
Not even understanding the question he was hard-pressed to reply, so simply shrugged.
"Never mind," she said, and started to get dressed.
Only then did she ask what had happened to the Nuncio.
"Did I get it all?" she said.
"No. The Death-Boy got it."
"Tommy-Ray? Oh Jesus. So now the Jaff has a son and a half."
"But you were touched too," Raul said. "So was I. It got into my hand. Climbed up to the elbow."
"So it's us against them."
Raul shook his head. "I can't be of use to you," he said.
"You can and you must," she said. "There's so many questions we have to have answered. I can't do it on my own. You must come with me."
His reluctance was perfectly apparent without his voicing it.
"I know you're afraid. But please, Raul. You brought me back from the dead—"
"Not me."
"You helped. You wouldn't want that wasted, would you?"
She could hear something of Kissoon's persuasions in her own, and didn't much like the sound. But then she'd never experienced a steeper learning curve in her life than in the time she'd spent with Kissoon. He'd made his mark without so much as laying a finger on her. But if she'd been asked whether he was a liar or a prophet, a savior or a lunatic, she couldn't have said. Perhaps that ambiguity was the steepest part of the curve, though what lesson she'd gained from it she couldn't say.
Her thoughts went back to Raul, and his reluctance. There was no time for involved argument. "You simply have to come," she told him. "There's no getting out of it."
"But the Mission—"
"—is empty, Raul. The only treasure it had was the Nuncio, and that's gone."
"It had memories," he said softly, the tense of his reply signalling his acceptance.
"There'll be other memories. Better times to remember," she said. "Now...if you've got people to say goodbye to, say it, because we're rolling—"
He nodded, and began to address the women in Spanish. Tesla had a smattering of the language; enough to confirm that he was indeed making his farewells. Leaving him to it, she headed up the hill towards the car.
As she walked the solution to the puzzle of the flipped body appeared in her head, without the problem being consciously turned. In Kissoon's hut she'd imagined herself the way she most often saw herself: in a mirror. How many times in her thirty odd years had she looked at her own reflection, building up a portrait in which right was left, and vice versa?
She'd come back from the Loop a different woman, literally; a woman who'd only ever existed as an image in glass. Now that image was flesh and blood, and walking the world. Behind its face the mind remained the same, she hoped, albeit touched by the Nuncio, and by knowing Kissoon. Not, in sum, negligible influences.