Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 73 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“Right. The apas die. The woolyvibs die. The oshe? I haven’t seen even a track in the mud in more than ten years.” Shev leaned forward into the camera’s eye, spreading his arms and flaring his spines fully forward to make himself as impressively sincere as possible. “But there are corrokis all over Yroq. Chew on that for a while. Right this moment, there are probably five, six corrokis eating the shrubs off the Prime Chancellor’s lawn.”

“They’ll die out,” said Lashraq with finality, proving that whatever else he might be, he was no prophet. “Nothing that size could possibly survive now, but other animals might. And as long as we have something to feed on and something else to clean up after us, we have some hope of restoring and maintaining a natural balance.”

“Natural,” snorted the Brunt.

“I believe the world will survive. In our arrogance, we may have thought we could destroy it, but the world is more resilient than any weapon our mortal minds could dream up. All we can do is kill each other,” Lashraq said.

“But we are damned good at that,” agreed the Brunt, striking his chest with feigned pride. Shev and Ichazul laughed.

Zhan stared at his boots until they quieted. At last, he raised his hand and indicated the group as a whole. “Hard to believe this started out as a supply raid.”

Meoraq started again. “Raid?”

“I’m from Daophith, originally. After the cloud hit, somehow a fire got started and the whole city burned to the ground, along with Jezaana and Zethoze and half the northern states. Best thing, really. The cities were no good after the Fall, nothing but killing grounds for God’s Wrath. I ended up outside Ynanje with Shev and Ichi here, living in an old waystation. By the time the cold season came along, we were all six together and Shev made two fairly sky-shaking observations. The first was that God Himself couldn’t have arranged a better group to survive the annihilation of all life as we know it: soldier, mechanic, surgeon, historian, technician and botanist. The second was that we had no women.”

“And you all were starting to look pretty damn good to me,” Xaima remarked.

“So with the lofty goal in mind of acquiring, in no particular order, food, water, supplies and sex,” said Zhan archly, “we set out from our cozy waystation to see what was left of the world. Somehow, that turned into a two-year trek across the fucking country, stopping in at every house with a lit window along the way.”

“Got dipped once in a while, didn’t we?” Shev grunted.

Zhan acknowledged this with a shrug of his spines. “So. The Brunt back there pointed out that we were probably the first people to really get a good look at the world beyond the one little piece we inhabited after the Fall and we had what he called a divinely-ordained obligation to record our findings.”

“Fuck you, O noble leader,” said the Brunt, amused.

“Records are important,” Mkole whispered, and the Brunt patted his shoulder.

“Records are important,” Zhan agreed, his spines lowering. “Because when we sat down to really talk about it, we realized we’d actually learned something pretty damn amazing. I think it was…I think it was you who noticed.”

“In Reqann, yes.” Xaima stepped up as Zhan moved back, eyeing the camera with an expression of rueful humor and contempt. “By that time, we’d been to a few of these military outposts and finally found out just what the fuck had happened. Most of them had some kind of survivor’s journal left for us to find, like the one this poor pisser made, but with the exception of that crazy woman with all the dolls, they were dead. We couldn’t ask any questions and if we didn’t have Ichi along, we could never have run the damn videos in the first place.”

“Almost every one of them were technicians,” Ichazul remarked, “and not one thought to put their video on automatic playback. Sure, the recording will last until the end of Time or until their roof caves in, but in fifty years, everyone who knows which buttons to push is going to be dead.”

“So here we are,” said Zhan and snorted. “And I don’t know how happy you’re going to be when you hear what we have to say, but if you’re standing there to hear it at all, then our plan probably worked. Just remember that.” He glanced at the other men, grunted to himself, and looked back at the camera. “If we did our job right, you may have heard that we came here to meet with Great Sheul and that we heard His words and wrote His laws,” he said. “But honestly…we’re going to make it all up.”

* * *

Amber and Meoraq listened. There were plenty of words she didn’t know, but she was able to work most of them out by context; there must have been just as many words he didn’t know, and set down in ways just as foreign to him, but Meoraq asked no questions. Her awareness of him faded as the men on the screen talked about the virus Nuu had called God’s Wrath with the kind of clinical callousness that came so easily to survivors. They didn’t pace, rarely gestured, and had a habit of looking right at the camera even when they weren’t talking so that it began to feel uneasily like they were alive—that they were here in this room, in this very moment—so much so that Amber found herself nodding now and then to show them she was listening.

Beside her, Meoraq remained motionless. He listened and did not react at all.

“The virus had absolute communicability in its first stage, the cloud stage,” Xaima said, gesturing vaguely towards the consoles surrounding them. “And if Ichi really knows how to read these machines and isn’t just lying us along for the dips and the good times—”

“Oh fuck me, my secret is out,” said Ichazul dryly.

“—then it’s still at ninety-six, seventeen fucking years after the Fall. The shit is in everything now. The air, the ground, the water…everything. So I guess it’s safe to assume that everyone has it. Why isn’t everyone dead?” He paused. “I have it. I woke up alone in the streets of South Thuure covered in blood. Caked in it. And I don’t know what I’d been fucking, but I’d scraped half the scales off my dick doing it and what was left was also caked in blood. I found a—” He stopped himself there, rubbing restlessly at his throat, which was still safely black. At last, he tipped his head slightly and went on.

“So. God’s Wrath is finite. Eventually, no matter how deep in you are, you run out of things to kill and things to fuck. You calm down. Of course, you’re ready to rage again the instant Mkole starts talking or, hell, even if you get a little too deep into a nice, tight woman, but if you feel it coming on, you can sometimes get clear of it. It’s not like being crazy, at least not all the time. You’re aware when you start to burn. You can stop it if you try. The problem is what the problem’s been with us dumaqs all along: Trying is hard and we don’t want to do it.”

“Burning is easy,” added Shev. “Especially when we can all tell each other that it’s the virus and how impossible it is to stop once you’ve let go. We’re not in control. It’s all the virus.”

“But there is a scale,” Ichazul put in. “Some of us let go slow and come out of it fairly quick. And some of us go completely fucking out of their scaly skin and stay there for days. So far, we haven’t found anyone who’s actually immune, but there’s obviously some kind of resistance. And since we’re starting to see the first generation after the Fall coming into their maturity, it seems like it might be genetic.”

“Right,” said Xaima, flaring his spines with irritation, although the interruption itself hadn’t appeared to have bothered him. “Now I’m going to talk about a place called Nishi, which used to be some holy site two or three thousand years ago—I guess it still was—but for the most part, it was a city like pretty much every other city except for the eastern edge of town, which was occupied by the Sheulists.”

Amber glanced at Meoraq. He seemed calm enough, but only if one didn’t look at his eyes.

“When the cloud hit Nishi, it went down exactly like every other city we’ve visited…except along the eastern edge. There were over a thousand people living there after the Fall, and just in case you don’t understand how significant that is, I don’t think we’ve come across a thousand more people anywhere else in the world, even if we lumped them all together. When we first found them, we didn’t know what to think except that maybe they were somehow immune or maybe they’d all been underground or maybe they’d been transmitting their location to survivors and most of them were refugees, but no. The only difference between eastern Nishi and the rest of the world was the Sheulists, and the biggest thing about the Sheulists is not just that they believe in their god, but they believe that their god is in control. These people work, and I mean work, for hours every day, systematically reinforcing the idea that nothing a man does has any lasting effect and any perception to the contrary is only part of God’s plan.”

“We’re not in control,” said Shev, in exactly the same tone he’d used before and with only the slightest arch twist to his expression. “It’s all God’s will.”

“That shit is maddening,” Xaima commented, glancing that way. “I had to be tied down for eight days because of the rage those fools put in me with that.”

“I didn’t handle it too well at first either,” Shev admitted. “But it was hard to ignore a thousand people in one place where everywhere else, you couldn’t count fifty. I’m sure Mkole can fill up a few hours talking about the altered mind states of meditation or how it suppresses this chemical or excites that gland or what the fuck ever it does. It worked, that’s the important thing.”

“Right up until their high priest decided they should all go to Sheul’s Halls together,” Ichazul said with a snort. “Crazy fucking zealots drank deathweed. Brewed it up with honey, lined up and drank it. Like they were drinking tea.”

“Yes, but they were calm when they did it,” said the Brunt. “And when we moved on from there to Maiaq, Zhan told the leader of those refugees that if he gave himself to Sheul, the Wrath couldn’t take him. Maybe it helped that none of them had ever been a Sheulist themselves or knew much more than whatever you pick up listening to some idiot pray up a transport dock. Zhan told them—correct me if I exaggerate, noble leader—the most outrageous packet of lies ever emitted by the mouth of a man.”

Zhan didn’t correct him. He just stood there, arms folded, brooding on his boots.

“And they bought it,” Xaima said, flinging out his arms. “They bought every fucking word. In a single day, this man reinvented both a caste system and a working model of a fucking theocracy and hammered them together, and by the very next morning, forty-two people were out in the fucking rain, praying. These were people who would have laughed at the very idea of god-worship just seventeen short years ago.”

“Gets harder to laugh at the idea of a vengeful god after the world comes to a burning end,” Zhan remarked.

“I guess.” Xaima gave his head a shake. “We spent the whole cold season there, the six of us wedged in with forty-two other people in a warehouse no bigger than this room, and no one died. He had them praying every morning, meditating every night, and preaching Sheul’s grace and Sheul’s justice and Sheul’s hammer and Sheul’s fires farting out Sheul’s ass until we almost had to tie Ichi up again.”

Ichazul snorted. “No crying. I was that close.”

“But no one let go. Not one of them raged. So suddenly, he’s Prophet Lashraq and we’re his holy oracles. And we’re not chasing after slit and free food any more, we’re preaching about Sheul’s burning hand and the caste of the Hammer or the Sword and the sacred number of creation.”

“And being handed slit and free food,” said Shev.

“Never got so much dipping in my life as I did after I turned holy,” added the Brunt in a reflective manner.

Still nothing from Meoraq.

“And it seems to work everywhere we go,” Xaima went on, “but what good does that do, really? The cloud will be around a hundred years at least. The virus will be in everyone’s fucking blood. We’ll all be dead, but the rage goes on, and already we’re finding people pretending to be priests of Sheul and adding their lies to our lies for their own unscrupulous purposes.”

“Like chasing slit and getting free food,” said the Brunt.

“So Zhan says we need a holy writ, something people can read, something that will last,” Xaima concluded. “We found a printing shop in what’s left of Pholcha and Ichi says he can get it running and bind us up some books. All we have to do is come up with some sufficiently holy-sounding way to keep people from letting go to rage. Zhan studied this piss for who knows how many years, so we’ll let him do all the wording, but for posterity’s sake, here’s what we’ve come up with so far. First, limit the fucking.”

“No,” said Zhan quietly. “First, Sheul’s word alone is law. There are no other gods and no men with authority to alter or interpret his word. His law is absolute as written. There is no other truth.”

“Whatever,” said Xaima, rolling his eyes. “Second is to limit the fucking. God’s Wrath doesn’t just make a man mad. It hits him in the part of his brain where all us civilized dumaqs keep our most basic impulses.”

Mkole raised his head, blinking as if he’d heard his name. “It attacks the hypothalamus, primarily, and through it, the adrenal system. Females have been, ah, depressed and males, stimulated. Rage is essentially an overdose of male sexual hormones, ah, which dominate our aggressive response and…and…hyper-sensitivity to female pheromones.”

“That’s what I said,” Xaima snapped, looking annoyed. “If he gets a whiff of a woman, he’ll fuck her. If he gets caught up fucking, he’ll eventually go into rage. The longer he’s in rage, the more he’ll want to fuck, and while his brain is burning up, he’s killing and fucking everything that moves. So lock up the women and limit the fucking.”

“Be very careful when you write that one up,” Shev added. “You’ll have them castrating themselves or killing their daughters.”

“Right. Sex is fine—”

“Sex is great,” said the Brunt, with feeling.

“But limit it. We’ve been saying no more than twice a dip—”

“Because three is the sacred number of creation,” agreed Shev and threw Zhan a grimace of admiration. “I honestly don’t know where he comes up with this stuff.”

“—because two seems to get a man past that first desperate stage, even if he hasn’t had a righteous poke in a year, but two doesn’t wear him down so much that the burn just takes over. But the challenge is going to be limiting the killing. If we did this right, you probably don’t have any idea what kind of killing is going on out here,” Xaima said in a low, suddenly somber tone. “You’d think, in a world where so many people have died so senselessly, that we would do anything to preserve another dumaq life, but let me tell you, it is not so. We are killing each other over water, food, medicine, women, blankets, shelters, books, boots, who won the fucking Cenuqa tournament in 3013, whether or not corrokis can look up—”

“They can not,” Shev interrupted, sending a black glare at the Brunt, who calmly replied, “Of course they can, they just choose not to.”

“Anything and everything,” Xaima concluded with a sigh, rubbing at his throat again. “Not because we’re sick, not because of the virus, but just…because. And we’re doing it more than ever before, because now there’s no one around to tell us not to.”

“Yet,” said Zhan.

“I don’t know how the hell he thinks he’s going to scare us so bad we stop fighting overnight, but if I have the broad strokes right, it comes down to three things: Take away the knives. If they don’t see or smell blood, apparently, they won’t think about it. Like there aren’t a hundred other ways to kill a man, Zhan.”

“Have to start somewhere.”

“Here’s an idea, start with the fucking guns!”

“I will. That kind of technology will be part of Gann’s corruption. We’ll make it a sin to work machines.”

“The piss you say!”

“You can’t mean it, Zhan. What are we supposed to do, live in caves and wear animal skins?”

“Who’s Gann?”

“We’ll destroy whatever we can, of course, but all we really have to do is convince them that the cities carry Gann’s taint and can corrupt anyone who enters.”

“But why?”

“Because they can,” Zhan said quietly. “They did.”

“That is shit and you know it,” spat Xaima. “Zhan, there have to be a thousand people, good people, trying to make lives in those cities, trying to build them up again and make them safe. They’re not going to leave just because you offer them a god! You give this ridiculous fucking cult of yours ten years and your Sheulists will kill those people for no reason! For God!”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care!”

“I can’t, Xaima. I have to care about what else they were making when they dropped God’s Wrath and who might be looking for it. There may be a thousand good people in those cities, but there have to be ten thousand weapons and they’re all just lying around. There’s no way we can pick everything up ourselves. We have to make them all want to just…not look.”

“What are we supposed to do without cities?” Shev demanded.

“Build new ones.” Zhan looked up as a faint rumble heralded a particularly vicious peal of thunder in whatever storm beat on their walls in the past. “Stronger ones. The old cities aren’t safe anyway. Not anymore. Even this place will fall down if we don’t protect it.”

“Right, so let me see if I have your plan. We herd everyone out of their shelters, tell them technology is bad and give them a pointed stick and a fucking spoon to build a new home with, and then we take the most violent people we can find, the ones with the absolute least resistance to the virus, and, instead of just killing them—”

“We can’t just kill them, Xaima,” Zhan said patiently. “If we turn it into a fight, they’ll win it. They’ll rage first, they’ll rage longer, and they’ll rip us apart.”

“Whatever. We tell them the reason they’re so violent is because God has blessed them, have I got that right?”

“Yes.”

“We make them members of the highest caste instead. We give them the knives no one else gets to play with and we tell them they’re holy warriors instead of the psychotic murder machines they really are.”

Amber looked at Meoraq again. His spines were flat and shivering slightly against his skull, but other than that, he looked only very mildly interested.

“When they believe it, they’ll pray,” said Zhan. “When they pray, they’ll calm down.”

“We give them all the women they want—”

“Provided they respect the sacred number of creation—”

“He said it with a straight face,” murmured the Brunt.

“—and raise any children they make as members of their caste.”

“What the hell good does that do?” Xaima burst out. The patches along his throat began to pale ominously. “Why the fuck would you go out of your way to find the worst fucking strain of the virus and breed more carriers?”

“Calm down, Xaima.”

“It makes no sense!”

“Xaima. Breathe.”

Xaima clapped both hands to his snout and bent himself in half, choking in air and hissing it out while the others watched warily. Gradually, very gradually, his scales faded back to black.

“The idea,” said Zhan, “is not to breed carriers, but to isolate them. We start them praying as soon as they can talk and keep them at it all their lives. We let them fight each other away from the public eye and we make them kill each other when they do. We give them women so they don’t have an excuse to riot through people’s homes and take them. We take the children away and start them praying and on it goes. If we do this long enough, with any luck, we’ll breed whatever quality it is that makes some of us so predisposed to the virus into the smallest percent of the population, which will then kill itself off.”

“Never work,” said Shev.

“Probably not, or at least not for a long time. But it will keep them under control. Look,” said Zhan, his own scales lightening although his tone never changed, “if you throw a man in a cage, he will spend the rest of his life fighting to escape. But if you tell him no one else in the world gets the cage but him, dress it up and throw in a few pillows, then he’ll walk in on his own.”

One breath. That was all Meoraq did. Just took one breath a little harder than the rest. Amber took his hand impulsively. He looked at it, then at her, and then up at the screen again, all without expression.

“What a shining flood of ghet-shit!” Xaima was exclaiming.

“They’ll believe me,” said Zhan, not looking up from his boots. His scales were already returning to their normal color. “They want desperately to believe in something, anything, and there is nothing else left. Yes, it’s a lie. But the lie will be glorious. If it’s the one lamp left burning in the whole world…everyone will come to see it.”

The doors clicked. The androgynous lizardly voice informed them that the timeout had ended, the locks were released.

Meoraq turned around.

Amber started after him, but he stopped her with the cut of one upraised hand.

“Stay,” he said in a hoarse voice that strove for calm. “Stay and hear them. I need to…I need to think.”

He walked away. Amber watched the doors groan open and shut as Zhan kept talking, outlining the principles of a gospel Meoraq could probably recite in its polished form from the first invocation to the final amen. His glorious lie.

10

It couldn’t have been much more than an hour before the recording finally finished, but if someone had told her that it had been three hours or even six, Amber would have believed it. She felt older, right down to her bones.

She didn’t want to move, but she didn’t linger. The lights were already fading, the room powering down, and she did not want to be trapped in here when the doors died. Human voices weren’t the same as a dumaq’s. She wasn’t at all sure ‘Nuu Sukaga was going to work for her.

But the lockplate took her tap and the doors hissed open and there was Meoraq, sitting just outside, his knees drawn up and his chin resting on his arms, staring at the mark of the Prophet on the wall. He’d lit some of the candles. He’d stomped on a few too, but at the moment, he was just sitting there.

“Hey,” she said.

He did not reply, not even to look at her.

“Do you want to hear any of it?” she asked, because she felt she’d ought to offer, even though she knew damned well he didn’t.

No response.

She went over and stood next to him, fidgeting unhappily with the front of her tunic. She felt awful, too awful to cry, too awful to even throw up. She touched his shoulder—it was stone wrapped in leather—and then petted at the top of his head. His flat spines flicked hard, throwing off her hand. She took it back and kept it to herself, clutching at her girdle. “Please talk to me,” she said.

Silence.

“Can I talk to you?”

His faceless stare wavered and finally shifted up at her. He still didn’t answer, not even to grunt, but he watched as she moved around and sat down in front of him.

“There’s this saying I used to hear a lot,” said Amber. “It goes, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ I used to think it was total horseshit, to tell you the truth. I mean, intentions matter, so if someone tries to do something good, I mean really tries, that ought to count for something.”

Meoraq remained immobile, silent.

“I can only imagine what you’re feeling,” she said. “And I don’t think I can imagine it very well. But…he had good intentions, Meoraq. People were killing each other. The last people on the whole planet, the very last ones, were still killing each other. He stopped it the only way he knew how.”

“He lied.”

The words were wounds in Meoraq’s throat. She could hear them bleeding.

“Why?” he asked suddenly. “Why did he have to leave a message? Why couldn’t he just do it and let us have the lie if we needed it so much?”

“Maybe because…he wanted to believe you wouldn’t always need it. He was a teacher once. He knew the value of preserving the past for the future. And he—Listen to me, Meoraq!” She caught his arm and refused to be shaken off. “He thought he was doing the right thing. And maybe he was. If people could change on their own, don’t you think they would have in the seventeen years before this guy Lashraq came to Xi’Matezh?”

“Don’t call it that,” Meoraq said harshly. “This is no shrine.”

“Yes, it is. It may not be the one you thought it was, but it is a shrine. When it would have been so easy to make sure no one ever heard any of that, Lashraq wanted it heard. He wanted people to know what he did and why he did it. Meoraq—” Amber moved her hand from his shoulder to touch the heaving plates over his heart. “He wanted people to know the truth.”

“Truth? What is the truth, eh? Yesterday, I was the Sword in His hand! Today, I am sick! Today, God’s hand on my heart is a poison in my fucking brain! Today, I have murdered hundreds of people!” He slapped a hand hard over his snout and shut his eyes, taking several deep breaths before he spoke again. “Stop trying to comfort me. I have been well-trained by their lies. A Sheulek is always calm.”

“You told me once that truth isn’t always just what someone says,” said Amber after a moment. “But what something is. What it means.”

“This place means nothing. Sheul’s Word means nothing.”

“So God didn’t open up the door and shake their hands and say things out loud while Lashraq wrote it all down, but so what? When God talks to you, do you hear it with your ears? It’s…hard to believe in God, but if there is one, I can believe He brought them here. I saw that whole tape and I can believe it because I believe it was the only thing that could have helped your people save themselves and maybe God knew it too.”

“There is no God!” hissed Meoraq. The stripes along his throat brightened visibly in surges, throbbing with his pulse. “There’s nothing here! He lied! They all lied and I can live with that, but right now, damn it, just shut up! There is no God and you knew it all along, so just let me be!”

She did, but she kept looking at him, watching the yellow bloom and die on his scales, and eventually, he looked back at her. “Can I tell you something?” she asked quietly. “Something I really have known all along. Something that is one hundred percent true. Something…Something I could have built my own shrine on.”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t say no.

“You’re an alien,” she told him. “Or I am. One of us is, at any rate.”

He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges.

“Our worlds are billions of miles apart. We come from two entirely different evolutionary trees. You have scales, I have hair. We have different skeletons, different organs, different everything, right down to the number of fingers and toes. We are one hundred percent incompatible. The only thing we have in common is a carbon base.”

“So?” he said wearily.

“So I’m pregnant,” said Amber, and was amazed at how matter-of-fact she sounded, saying it for the first time. “What the hell do you call that if it isn’t God?”

He raised his head from his hand and stared at her.

“You told me once that I was good at seeing evidence and, boy, did it piss me off because this is something that I really did not want to see. But men can only push themselves so far, Meoraq, and men with faith can only push so much further. All the evidence is telling me…there’s something else out there, pulling from the other side. I don’t like it,” said Amber bluntly. “I’m not at peace with it. I sure as hell don’t take comfort in it…but I’m glad you do.”

He frowned, tried to look away, but Amber caught his snout and turned him back.

“Because all the things God isn’t for me,” she said, “you are. Because of you, I see Him every day. So start talking, lizardman, but I warn you, you’ve got a hard talk ahead of you if you’re going to convince me there’s no God after He gave you to me.”

She waited, but he didn’t say anything. He took a few deep breaths, then reached up and brushed the back of his hand along her cheek. His eyes closed. He bent and let her guide his head to rest on her shoulder. He put his arms around her. He did not rage.

He wept.

* * *

He cried off and on for a long time. Even after he was done, he held on to her, so heavy and so quiet that she thought he’d fallen asleep. Amber stroked his back and stared into space and after an eternity of this, was startled when he thickly said, “What are you thinking?”

“Huh?”

He lifted his head off her shoulder and shifted around until he was sitting at her side, facing the same blank stretch of wall. “You were very quiet.”

“So were you.”

“But I know my thoughts. What were yours?”

“I was thinking of the day my mother died,” Amber admitted. “Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably. “I should have been thinking about you or something. You know. So you could ask me what I was thinking while you were at the lowest point of your life and I could say, ‘How much I love you,’ and you’d feel better.”

He smiled faintly. “I feel better.”

“Because I was thinking of my mother?” she asked, surprised.

“Because you told me the truth, even when you thought it was something I did not want to hear. That is how I know how much you love me. I do not need to be told.” He brushed the back of his knuckles across her brow, then dropped his hand to his lap again and stared at the wall. “What happened the day your mother died?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“You always sound so certain about the things I want.”

“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Nothing happened, really. I mean, we were there, but they didn’t let us in to see her. We were just sitting in the room outside, me and Nicci, and I was holding her kind of like this. Waiting for the world to end.”

He grunted.

“But it didn’t. End, I mean. Life went on.” She heard herself utter a surprisingly sincere little laugh without knowing she was going to. “Look how far it went on.”

He said nothing.

“What were you thinking?” she asked.

“That I’m glad you’re here with me.” He said it without emotion, without looking at her. “Master Tsazr had to hear that message and walk all the way back to Xeqor alone. I couldn’t do that.”