Water. Water was a conductor. She spotted a gallon of water, one Nikola had brought to her after he’d taken her from the Senate, and dashed toward it. She tackled the gallon jug like a linebacker, and ran back to Ampersand, tearing the plastic cap off as she did and dumping it on top of his body. Still pouring out the water, she shoved the neck matter back into place as best as she could, and pressed the pill bug into him.

“Go!” she cried, her voice echoing into the big, empty hangar. “Fucking go! Do something!”

She poured out more water with one hand, trying to hold his neck in with the other, spilling water all over the floor, until she had used the entire gallon and was crouching in a pool that was spreading out all over the floor, all the way into the electrical equipment below Enola’s monitors. “Go!” she screamed, pressing the pill bug desperately onto Ampersand’s wet carapace one last time. “Please!”

She didn’t feel it as the pill bug’s current ignited into Ampersand’s body, didn’t feel it when the current contacted all the water on the floor, the pool she was crouching in. She didn’t feel it when it stopped her heart.

57

57

Massive treetops framed the overcast sky, and it was silent, not even the rustle of wind in these massive trees. The treetops were green like the grass on the ground, evergreens in bright contrast to the red of their trunks. She’d never seen such a vibrant red on a tree trunk. She got up off her back, bracing for the act of sitting up to be agony, but her body was as light as air.

She stood up, tried to take a breath but found she didn’t need to. She was in a grove of redwoods. She stood in a small patch of grass between the redwoods, the sun peeking through and illuminating the patch. This grove was dead silent, no birds, no bugs, no wind.

Then the grass in front of her carbonized, turned black as if it had burned and turned to coal, but there was no fire. She backed away from it to see that the small patch of grass in the middle of the grove had turned into a black patch like cooled magma, spreading over the forest floor. Some of the carbonized matter turned to white ash, and then the ash formed itself into the shape of a galaxy spiral. She looked at it in awe as it spun slowly, like a hurricane being viewed from space. She recalled some sense of urgency, some sense that she needed to get out of this forest, but she couldn’t recall what it was or why it mattered. A gust of wind blew over the ash, scattering the image of the spiral until it dissipated.

“Hey!”