Burst forth: Did you ever need to live on as I needed you to live on? Did you ever have a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren’t sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren’t sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still, you were here.

Until in the thinning and the thrashing there came a silence, and Behemoth realized it was the silence. It was the silence. It was the stillness. Nothing moved but the wind. Nothing moved but the scavengers of the holding pond, come to observe, to take what could be taken. Peered scared. But all that was left was the stillness.

Came to myself. Crawled, then walked, from the body of us both. Back into the City, to live my life, the life I never had before.

The great carcass lay beside the Company building. It stank for days. The flesh crumbled in on itself. Flaked and rancid. Many fed for months. Even on the dried, weathered flesh. Even on the network of scars. Until even the scars were gone and then the bones and then all trace.

Neither was the same again. Neither could ever be the same again. Both were different and in different ways. And, yet, in the moment, on the long journey ahead: Recognized. Not alone. Never alone.

That blue and verdant lake of youth. The blazing, blinding blue reflects. Can’t remember. Can’t forget. Hops to the water’s surface, wary of herons. Peers out through the reeds once more and forever.

Dives in.

Gone.

Not gone.

8. The Dark Bird

Murder control not quite gone, through all the haze of sand and fog, the breath of wind and the breeze curling unruly over dead river, half-dead City. Murder control clicking like a switch flipped like a click like a cut like a blood-covered switch that clicked on, beckoned, beaconed off. Bodies, the memories of bodies all along that blasted plain, rendered down to coordinates, stashed away like caches, but only in memory or abandoned museums. Except memory was murder control.

Faces limned by the beatific cowl of sea salt and crumbling fossils. The dried black and red of the dead, the flies, the maggots. The amnesia of the drunken father who lashes out and then subsides. Does not remember, so the dark bird is not allowed to remember. She must not remember.

Murder control in the night upon a lonely promontory. Murder control in the stabbing and piercing and the sawing after. Murder control in the impulse, the pulse, of the black grasshoppers chirping and creeping across the sands. Feasting on whatever tiny limped or crawled or scuttled. Needling the dark bird’s mind with intel through their shells.