I leaned my head back against the stone wall. “What’s the point of all this? Why do you do it? You’re a clone, aren’t you? Made in a lab?”

She shook her head. “Not a clone, a conduit. It’s not like you think. All bad, like. It’s more like a vaccine. How you use a disease to strengthen your immune system.”

“A vaccine? How did sending pictures of us having sex to my wife inoculate me?”

She shook her head again. “It’s not.… You won’t figure it out all at once. It’s not something I can explain.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

She remained silent.

“What about those stories of you growing up. All lies?”

“No.” She turned and looked me in the eyes. “That’s our initiation. Our education. Our suffering. It helps us understand.”

“Understand what?”

“The stakes,” she said.

As Cassie would say, we are all just men and women crushed in Krishna’s teeth. The world would be a better place if everyone played guitar.

“It’s changing, though,” she said. “Evolving. It’s working. The darkness gets lighter. I am not like versions before me. One of the woodsmen went rogue, rescued an initiate. Don’t give up no matter how dark it gets. Fight it until your dying day.”

I scoffed. “Fight what?”

She looked toward the door like my enemy waited in the next room.

“The force of resistance,” she said. “The scourge.”

I laughed and shivered at the same time. “Those sound like names for songs my band would play.”

“I’ve seen your band play, remember?”

What was that, a century ago? “Oh, yeah. You seemed to be enjoying yourself. Or was that all an act?”

“Honestly?”

I wondered if she even knew what that meant.

“It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” she said.

It was up there for me, too. Why had I given all that up?

That reminded me. “Hey, what happened to Caspian and those guys? What happened to Al?”

She shrugged. “They’re all alive, if that’s what you mean. Just have a blank space where the memory used to be.”

“What, you have one of those memory erasers like they used in Men in Black?”

She shrugged again. I doubt she consumed much commercial art.

I looked at the unmarked door. Someone had decided to paint it grey. Why not yellow? Why not pink? “What’s in there?” I said. “What’s up next?”

“Why tell you when I can show you. Are you ready?”

“Hell no,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “We can wait.”

We sat for about a minute in silence, staring at the blank wall. Show wouldn’t start until I stepped on stage and every minute I wasted delayed our return home. The crowd was growing anxious, or maybe that was just me.