A child’s plea. Nobody has to know. To God! For a moment, he changed. He grew angry, and you thought it was at the rank foolishness, the irresponsibility of what you’d said. Those monstrous, unnatural eyes narrowed, and his mouth became hard as the stones and rocks that had made up the planetoid you’d later slaughter. For a moment you perceived a hint of his great immortal age—of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell beholding a heart.

“Harrowhark, nobody has the right to know,” he said fiercely. “Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”

That night in your bed, you did not weep. Your body tried, and failed, to produce tears. Afterward, God was more careful with you than ever, and he had been careful before; sometimes you caught him glancing at you as if he was trying to see something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for it was not what your parents had done. At the time you swore that you would tell him about the Tomb: you would find it within yourself to admit that also. You had never told anyone about the Tomb, but you would tell him—you would tell him if he asked—no, that was equivocation. You would tell him of your own free will, and be glad of any punishment he saw fit to give you.

Before you’d left him then, when your tea had cooled sufficiently that you were no longer required to drink it, you’d asked: “What does BOE stand for?”

“Blood of Eden,” he’d said, slowly.

“Who is Eden?”

“Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera … Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”

At the time, that had made perfect sense to you.

15

ONE OTHER CONSOLATION WAS THE BODY. She kept close by in the months that followed; she walked around in an old bloodstained copy of the scintillating First House robes, and you startled whenever you saw her. But you took enormous comfort in watching her pace your sterile, empty quarters, and in watching her kneel before the mummified assembly that lived within the corridors and apses of the Mithraeum. The greatest gift she gave you was that when you laid yourself down on your bed to sleep fully clothed, you would dream of her with an uncanny, profound regularity. You could not in fact dream of anything else.