Its large eyes grew sadder, and I knew it hated what it was asking of me. I felt a pang of sympathy for it. I think this part of Alexi was very well practiced in hating itself.

“It isn’t an act of killing. It is an act of consuming. Absorbing. I will still be in you, after a fashion, but this identity, this will, all of that will be ended. You can go on living your life and making your own choices, no longer bound to my mistakes or Angelica.”

I tried to find a kind way to ask the next part, but any nuance had fled from me somewhere between Kiev and Pripyat. “Will I become a monster like you?”

Another rough laugh. “No. At least I don’t think so. But if you learn any lesson from this, let it be this one. I am a monster because of what I have done and let happen, not because of how I appear. Some of the best and brightest souls I have ever met were in Incarnata, and yet many would call that place a land of terror and monsters. As for what you will become? Like all of us, that is ultimately up to you.”

****

The Bowl was smaller than I remembered, though perhaps that was merely because I was sharing it now. Alena had said her tearful good-byes to my other self before it climbed into the Bowl beside me, and she called to me that she would be waiting outside near the car when I was finished. I wanted to ask her to stay, but I knew it was a selfish impulse, and so I just told her to be careful as she went.

I looked into those eyes one last time and asked if it…if he, was sure this is what he wanted. He said it was, and reaching down he plucked off a piece of his flesh as though it were a wad of cotton candy. He offered it to me, and I ate it down with little trouble. I remember as a kid going to a science museum in Kentucky. They had a machine that pumped out a thick fog, and before the teacher came and stopped me, I stood near it and bit at the mist that came pouring out. That was what this was like. Eating something that was next-door to nothing.

At the end, all that was left was a small and hardened coal that I think had once been his heart. This part had more weight and texture, and as I swallowed down the last of it, I gagged a little at the greasy residue it left behind. I waited a second, tensing for some change, but felt none. All things considered, I actually felt pretty good.