“I was happy,” Duncan wrote in his journal. “I thought we were reaching a new closeness, one beyond words. That the extremity of our situation would make us as one. Instead, we were growing further apart with each passing minute. Now, I am confused by my happiness that night. Was I blind?” (Was there a moment when I switched from the epiphany of discovery to the weight of discovery? I don’t know, except that one day I realized that knowledge—especially secret knowledge—had become a burden.)

Mary’s assault began from that moment, from the moment when her mind refused to accept what she had seen, for she maintained her distance all the way back up to the surface the next morning.

From that moment, it was only a matter of time until the flesh necklace, until I would confront her at the base of the stairs. It smoldered in her eyes, as indelible as the mottling of fungus on Duncan’s body. All of her scholarship, all of her will, would be focused on making what she had seen as unreal, as distant, as possible. Who could blame her? I could, and did, even if Duncan lacked the nerve. It was a failure—a failure of love and of imagination.

While they waited underground, I lay on the cathedral floor, gray caps walking among the bodies, me dead and yet not dead, seeing yet sightless, staring up at a ceiling that depicted the glory of the Truffidian cosmos. It almost might have been a premonition of Sabon’s flesh necklace. It too was incongruous to its surroundings. It too was dead and yet not dead, blind yet had eyes. But mostly I had not a thought in my head as I tried to survive by playing dead next to such a weight of bodies. I had no room for grief at that moment. I had no time for tears. In that moment, I began to relax. I began to give up my self. I had no choice. I had nowhere to hide, nothing to hide with.

That is the night I stopped being a reporter and became something else entirely.

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