Chapters (90)
Rhita shuffled back through her past, hiding. Why remember? There was nothing she could do; no way to escape when the legs with which she would run weren’t real. She visited with her mother for a time, sitting in the stone and plaster house near Lindos, talking about inconsequentials. Relaxing in the sun, which was not as warm as it should have been, nor as bright. On the road to the temple to spend a day alone, her shadow preceded her, walking long in the morning sun on the dirt and gravel. She watched it with mild interest, then stopped. It raised its arms; her arms were down. It gestured wildly. It lengthened, crossing the road, up over dry hedges and stone walls, across a dead orchard. The tree branches swayed wherever it touched.
A young man with black hair approached along the road. He stood beside her for a time, watching the shadow lengthen to the island horizon, and then spread across sky and rushing clouds. She glanced at him, not at all curious. He told her, “We are losing you, Rhita Vaskayza. You must not hide. If we cannot hold you, your self will dissolve in its own memories, and we would not wish that. We will have to inactivate you. Wouldn’t you rather continue thinking?”
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
She ran from the youth, but in thought or memory or wherever she was now, she made a very wrong turn.
Rhita stumbled into the warehouse of all her nightmares.
Before she could be inactivated, she saw the ghosts of all she had killed, flying over the sea’s bloody waters, questions on their lips, knives in their hands: Why did you open the gate?
She had killed Gaia.
But she could not herself die.
Her psyche, her butterfly, lay pinned in a box, examined and prodded by monstrous collectors. She saw hall upon hall, brightly lit, stretching for millions of miles, lined with steel cases, in every case row upon row of humans—infants, old men, crones, girls, young men, mothers-to-be, soldiers, all passing under her inspection with infinite detail, more real than anything in her true life had ever been, squirming on the pins that ran through their hearts. I am with you, she said. I can’t run from you.
But she was running. With no physical body to run with, she chased her self through her own memories, over all the roads of her mind, frantic with grief and fear and guilt. She ran faster and faster, until she seemed to melt and flow like water, the water frantically surging into a cold spray, diffuse and selfless…No center, almost no awareness.
A brief warmth before null.