“And call that true love? Two soulless avatars, each operated by a puppeteer? Can that really be love? Or would it be only a squalid passion?”

“I can have another you,” she insisted. “If you won’t be what I need, I can make what I need.”

“Then make him, use him. And tell me what you did that night ten years ago, when Pat Corley insisted you couldn’t let Emily die?”

Anna shuddered as if speaking the truth tore something loose in her. “Okay, all right, damn you, yes. That night, while she still lived, we took your Emily below.”

“Into the basement?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“We healed her.”

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.

“And then?” he asked.

“Your precious bitch is in a stasis chamber, suspended animation, unaware of her condition.”

“She . . . she’s been there for ten years?”

“We promised Patrick, when our work is done, when changing Emily’s destiny poses less risk to our mission, we’ll release her.”

“And if you never succeed in your mission?”

“She remains in suspended animation.”

“No. Not any longer. Bring her to me.”

Anna looked again at the framed photograph she held. Her face flushed and twisted with a pure hatred of which Emily would never have been capable, a hatred seeded in a childhood of beatings and cruel rejection and perpetual fear. She might want to know what love was, might yearn for it, but she remained a victim of her fallen future and of her twisted physiology. She threw the picture at him, and he ducked, and it knocked against a wall. She swept the other photographs from the dresser to the floor, pivoted toward David, and declared, “All right, deny me! Treat me like shit! Spit on me! I can pull the plug on your precious princess. Then you’ll have exactly what you started with—nothing.”

He turned away from her, toward the armchair where he had left the tote bag that contained the bomb.

The Corley avatar had quietly entered the room and stood now between David and the chair.

| 94 |

She is here. Emily was here, in the realm below, waiting to be awakened from a long, unnatural sleep. She hadn’t been lost forever, though he might yet lose her—fail her—again.

As David backed off from the avatar of the dead contractor, which was inhabited now by one of Anna’s two nameless comrades, Corley spoke to her. “We should do with him what we did with her. Suspended animation in a stasis chamber. Let them sleep away the century together, while we change it.”

“He deserves a harder judgment,” Anna said, her Emily face ugly as it never had been before, distorted by bitterness.

“The protocols—”