Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

34

THINGS KNOWN AND BURIED

They were at least twenty minutes doing paperwork, signing a series of nondisclosure agreements that escalated Eliza’s anxiety page by page. Another quarter of an hour fumbling into hazmat suits—ratcheting the anxiety up even further—and at last they joined the insectlike parade of white-clad figures on the path.

Dr. Amhali paused at the top of the slope. His voice came out thin, filtered through the breathing apparatus of his suit. “Before I take you any farther,” he said, “I must remind you that what you are about to see is classified and highly volatile. Secrecy is paramount. The world is not ready to see this, and we are certainly not ready for it to be seen. Do you understand?”

Eliza nodded. She had no peripheral vision, and had to turn to catch Dr. Chaudhary’s nod. Several white figures trouped behind him, and she realized that there were no distinguishing features to any of them. If she blinked, she could lose track of which one was Dr. Chaudhary. She felt like she’d stepped into some kind of purgatory. It was deeply surreal, and became even more so once the restricted site came into view. Downhill from the kasbah, a rope perimeter enclosed a cluster of acid-yellow hazmat tents. Big, squat generators hummed, snaking power lines into the tents like umbilical cords. Personnel milled about, grublike at this distance in their head-to-toe white plastic.

Farther out, soldiers patrolled. In the sky were more helicopters.

The sun was merciless, and Eliza felt as though her air supply were being syphoned into her mask through a straw. Clumsy and stiff in her suit, she picked her way downhill. Her fear, like her shadow, lengthened before her.

What was in the pit? What was in the tents?

Dr. Amhali guided them to the nearest one and paused again. “ ‘The Beasts are coming for you,’ ” he quoted. “That’s what the angel said.” And it seemed to Eliza that in the space of seconds she became just a heartbeat encased in plastic. Beasts. Oh god, here?“It would seem that they are already among us.”

Among us, among us.

And with a showman’s flourish, he whipped back the flap door to reveal…

… beasts.

The word beast, Eliza realized slowly, encompassed an extremely broad spectrum of creatures. Animals, monsters, devils, even unspeakable dream-things so terrible they can stop a little girl’s heart. These were not the latter. Not by a long shot.

These were not her monsters, and as her heart resumed something like normal beating, she chastised herself. Of course they weren’t. What had she been thinking? Or notthinking. Her monsters existed on a vast dream plane, at a whole different order of magnitude.

You call these beasts, Youssef?she might have said, laughing in breathless relief. You don’t know from beasts.

She didn’t laugh. She whispered, “Sphinxes.”

“Pardon me?” asked Dr. Amhali.

“They look like sphinxes,” she clarified, raising her voice but not lifting her eyes from them. Her fear was gone. It had been snatched away and replaced by fascination. “From mythology.”

Woman-cats. Two of them, identical. Panthers with human heads. Eliza stepped through the door, immediately feeling a reprieve from the heat. The tent was cooled by a loud AC unit, and the sphinxes were on metal tables set atop drums of dry ice. Their furred, felid bodies were soft black, and their wings– wings—were dark and feathered.

Their throats had been cut, and their chests were dark with dried gore.

Dr. Chaudhary stepped past Eliza and removed the helmet of his hazmat suit.

“Doctor,” said Dr. Amhali at once, “I must object.” But Dr. Chaudhary didn’t appear to hear him. He approached the nearest sphinx. His head looked small and disembodied above his suit, and his expression was poised at the edge of skepticism.

Eliza took off her helmet, too, and the stench hit her at once—a much purer form of the smell that had wafted up the hill, but she could see the creatures with much greater clarity. She joined Dr. Chaudhary beside the body. Their escort was agitated, scolding them about risk and regulations, but it was easy to tune him out, considering what lay before them.

“Tell me what you know,” said Dr. Chaudhary, all business. Dr. Amhali did, and it wasn’t much. The bodies had been found, more than two dozen of them in an open pit. That was what it boiled down to.

“I hoped to dismiss it easily as a hoax,” said the Moroccan scientist, “but found that I could not. My hope now, I will admit, is that youcan.”

By way of reply, Dr. Chaudhary only lifted his eyebrows.

“Do they all look like this?” Eliza inquired.

“Not remotely,” replied Dr. Amhali, twitching a stiff nod toward a sheet of white canvas humped high over a much greater bulk than the sphinxes.

What’s under there?Eliza wondered. But Dr. Chaudhary only nodded and returned his attention to the sphinxes. She joined him, ran a gloved finger over a feline foreleg, then leaned over one dark wing. She lifted a feather with a fingertip and examined it. “Owl,” she said, surprised. “See the fimbriae?” She indicated the feather’s leading edge. “These flutings are unique to owl plumage. It is what makes them silent in flight. These look like owl feathers.”

“I hardly think these are owls,” said Dr. Amhali.

Are you sure?Eliza quipped inside her head, because I heard the owls in Africa have lady heads.She felt… high. Dread had walked down the hill with her. At the mention of the word beasts, it had coiled itself around her and squeezed—the dream, the nightmare, the chasing, the devouring—and now it was gone, leaving relief in its wake, and exhaustion, and awe. The awe was on top: the top scoop in the ice-cream cone. Nightmare ice cream, she thought, giddy.

Lick.

“You’re right. They are not owls,” agreed Dr. Chaudhary, and probably only someone as familiar with his tones as Eliza was could have detected the dryness of sarcasm. “At least, not entirely.”

And what followed was a cursory head-to-toe inspection with the aim of ruling out a hoax. “Look for surgical seams,” Dr. Chaudhary instructed Eliza, and she did as he asked, examining the places the creature’s disparate elements conjoined: the neck and the wing joints, primarily. She couldn’t share Dr. Amhali’s hope; she didn’t want to find surgical seams. If she did, for one thing… then where—or who—had the heads come from? That would be a horror movie rather than a momentous scientific discovery. And anyway, it was a pointless exercise. She knew that the creatures were real. As she knew that the angels were real.

These were things that she knew.

No, you don’t, she told herself. That’s not how it works. You wonder, and you gather data and study it, and eventually you posit a hypothesis and test it. Then maybe you begin to know.

But she did know, and trying to pretend otherwise was like screaming at a hurricane.

I know other things, too.

And with that, one of the other things… presented itself. It was as though a fortune-teller flipped over a tarot card in her mind and showed her this knowledge, this truth that had been lying facedown in there… all her life. Longer. Much longer than that.It was there, and it was a very large thing to suddenly know. Very large. Eliza took a deep breath, which is not an excellent idea while standing corpse-side, and she had to stagger back, taking a succession of quick, purposeful breaths to clear the miasma of death from her lungs.

“Are you all right?” inquired Dr. Chaudhary.

“Fine,” she said, struggling to cover her agitation. She really didn’t want him thinking she was squeamish and couldn’t handle this, and she really reallydidn’t want him wishing he’d brought Morgan Toth instead, so she got right back to work, assiduously ignoring the… tarot card… now lying faceup in her mind.

There is another universe.

That was the thing that she knew. In school Eliza had shirked physics egregiously in favor of biology, and so she had only the most simplistic understanding of string theory, but she knew that there was a case to be made for parallel universes, scientifically speaking. She didn’t know what that case was, and it didn’t matter anyway. There was another universe. She didn’t have to prove it.

Hell. The proof was right here, dead at her feet. And the proof was in Rome, alive. And—

It hit her with hilarity. “They should treat it like an alien invasion,” Morgan had said, and he’d been exactly right, the little pissant. It wasan alien invasion. It just happened that the aliens looked like angels and beasts, and came not from “outer space” but from a parallel universe. With ever-deepening hilarity, she imagined floating this theory to the two doctors beside her—“ Hey, you know what I think?”—and it was about then that she realized her hilarity was not hilarity at all, but panic.

It wasn’t the beasts or the smell or the heat or even her exhaustion, and it wasn’t even the idea of another universe. It was the knowing. It was feeling it inside herself—the truth and depth of it buried within her, like monsters in a pit. Only the monsters were dead and couldn’t hurt anyone. The knowing could rip her apart.

Her sanity, anyway.

It happened, in her family. “You have the gift,” her mother had told her when she was very young and lying on a hospital bed, full of tubes and surrounded by beeping machines. It was the first time her heart had gone haywire and turned into a mass of fibrillating muscle, very nearly killing her. Her mother hadn’t held her, not even then. She’d just knelt beside her with her hands folded in prayer, a fervor in her eyes—and envy. Always, after that, envy. “You will see for us. You will guide us all.”

But Eliza wasn’t guiding anyone anywhere. The “gift” was a curse. She’d known it even then. Her family history was potholed with madness, and she had no intention of being the latest in a string of “prophets” locked away in asylums, ranting about the apocalypse and licking spots on the walls. She’d worked very hard to stifle her “gift” and be who she wanted to be, and she’d succeeded. From teenage runaway to National Science Foundation fellow and soon-to-be doctor? She’d succeeded pretty freaking wildly—in all ways but one. The dream. It came when it wanted, too big to bury, more powerful than she was. More powerful than anything.

But now other things were stirring in her, too, other truths that weren’t her own, and it terrified her. Several times she swayed. Her light-headedness had become extreme, and she was beginning to suspect that by going sleepless to deny the dream, she had weakened something else within herself. She breathed in and she breathed out, and she told herself she could control her mind as she controlled her muscles.

“Eliza, are you certain you’re all right? If you need some fresh air, please—”

“No. No, I’m fine.” She forced a smile and bent back over the sphinx in front of her.

They found they could not satisfy Dr. Amhali’s hope. There were no seams to be found, they concluded, and no “made by Frankenstein” patch sewn conveniently onto the back of the necks, either. There was something, though.

Eliza held one of the sphinxes’ dead hands in her own gloved one for a long beat, staring at the mark, before speaking. “Did you see this?”

From Dr. Amhali’s silent stance, she guessed that he had, and maybe had been waiting for them to discover it. Dr. Chaudhary blinked at it several times, making the same connection that Eliza had made.

“The Girl on the Bridge,” he said.

The Girl on the Bridge: the blue-haired beauty who’d fought angels in Prague, hands held out before her and inked with indigo eyes. They’d made the cover of Timemagazine, and had since become synonymous with demon. Kids liked to draw them on with ballpoint pen to act wicked. It was the new 666.

“Are you beginning to understand what this means?” Dr. Amhali asked, very intense. “Do you see how the world will interpret it? The angels flew to Rome; it’s all very nice for Christians, yes? Angels in Rome, warning of beasts and wars, while here, in a Muslim country, we unearth… demons. What do you think the response will be?”

Eliza saw his point, and felt his fear. The world needed far less provocation than actual flesh-and-blood “demons” to go crazy. Still, these creatures ignited a wonder in her, and she couldn’t bring herself to wish them fake.

In any case, those were concerns for governments and diplomats, police and military, not scientists. Their work was the bodies in front of them—the physical matter, and that alone. There was much to do: tissue samples to collect and store, along with exhaustive measurements and photographs to take and log as reference for each body. But first, they opted for an overview of the work ahead of them.

“Do all the bodies have the marks?” Dr. Chaudhary asked Dr. Amhali.

“All but one,” Dr. Amhali replied, and Eliza wondered about that, but the next creature they saw—the large bulk under the white tarp—did have them, and so did the bodies in the next tent, and the next, so Eliza forgot about it. It was enough to try to process what she was seeing—and smelling—one body at a time. She was nauseated and overwhelmed, her panic never far off—the sense of things known and buried—and she was prey, too, to a peculiar sadness. Going tent to tent like this, seeing this array of unearthly creatures, it felt like a carnival menagerie where all the exhibits were dead.

All were wild amalgams of recognizable animal parts, and they were in successively advanced states of decay. The deeper they had been in the pit, the longer they’d been dead, suggesting that they’d been killed one by one over a period of time, and not all at once. Whatever had gone on here, it hadn’t been a massacre.

And then they came to the final hazmat tent, off by itself on the far side of the pit. “This one was buried alone,” said Dr. Amhali, lifting the flap for them. “In a shallow grave.”

Eliza entered, and at the sight of this final “exhibit” in the dead menagerie, sadness sang in her brighter than ever. This was the one without marks on his palms. He’d been buried with some suggestion of care—not flung into the stinking pit, but laid out and covered with dirt and gravel. A grayish residue of dust clung to his flesh, making him seem like a sculpture.

Maybe that was why she was able to think, right away, that he was beautiful. Because he didn’t look real. He looked like art. She could almost have wept for him, which made no sense. If the others were variously “monstrous,” he was the most “demonic” or “devilish”: mostly humanoid, with the addition of long black horns and cloven hooves, and bat wings stretched out on the ground on either side of him, at least a dozen feet in span, their edges curling up against the sides of the tent.

But he didn’t strike her as demonic. As the angels hadn’t struck her as “angelic.”

What happened here?she wondered in silence. It wasn’t her job to figure that out, but she couldn’t help herself. Questions rose in a stir, like startled birds. Who killed these creatures, and why? And what were they doing in the Moroccan wilderness? And… what were their names?

A part of her mind told her this was the wrong response to seeing dead monsters—to wonder at their names—but this last body especially, with its fine features, made her want to know. The tip of one horn was snapped off, a simple detail, and she wondered how it had happened, and from there it was an easy trajectory to wondering everything else. What had his life been like, and why was he dead?

The men were talking, and she heard Dr. Amhali telling Dr. Chaudhary that the creatures seemed to have been living in the kasbah for some time, and had vacated it only the day before yesterday.

“Some nomads witnessed their departure,” said Dr. Amhali.

“Wait,” Eliza said. “There were some seen alive? How many?”

“We don’t know. The witnesses were hysterical. Dozens, they said.”

Dozens. Eliza wanted to see them. She wanted to see them living and breathing. “Well, where did they go? Have you found them?”

Dr. Amhali’s voice was wry. “They went that way,” he said, pointing… up. “And no, we have not.”

According to the witnesses, the “demons” had flown toward the Atlas Mountains, though no evidence had been found to back this up. If it weren’t for the proof of the story in the form of liquefying monster corpses, it would have been dismissed as ludicrous. As it was, helicopters continued to scour the mountains, and agents had gone by jeep and camel to track down any Berber tribes and herdsmen who might have seen anything.

Eliza stepped out of the tent with the doctors. They won’t find them, she thought, looking at the mountains, the vision of snow-capped peaks so incongruous in the heat. There is another universe, and that’s where they’ve gone.

35

THRICE-FALLEN

“Get. Off.”

As soon as the door closed behind him, Jael, emperor of the seraphim, gave a savage lurch and twist of his shoulders to dislodge the invisible creature riding on his back.

If Razgut had wanted to stay put, such a maneuver would never have knocked him loose. His grip was strong, and so was his will, and—after a long life of unimaginable torment—so was his pain tolerance. “Make me,” he might have snapped, and laughed his mad laugh while the emperor did his worst.

Usually he found it worth the pain to cause others misery, but, as it happened, Jael’s foulness superseded even the pleasure of torturing him, and Razgut was happy to oblige. He let go of him and flailed to the marble floor with a thud and gasp, becoming visible at the moment of impact. He pushed himself upright, his atrophied legs splayed to one side. “You’re welcome,” he said, a parody of dignity.

“You think I should thank you?” Jael removed his helmet and thrust it at a guard. Only in privacy could the ruin of his face be revealed: the hideous scar that slashed from hairline to chin, obliterating his nose and leaving a lisping, slurping wreckage of a mouth. “For what?” he demanded, spittle flying.

A grimace teased Razgut’s own hideous face—a bloated sack of purple, his skin stretched blister-tight. He replied peevishly and in Latin, which the emperor could of course not understand: “For not snapping your neck while I had the chance. It would have been so very easy.”

“Enough of your human tongues,” said Jael, imperious and impatient. “What are you saying?”

They were in an opulent suite of rooms in the Papal Palace adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, and had just come from a meeting of world leaders at which Jael had presented his demands. Had presented them, that is, by way of repeating every syllable Razgut whispered in his ear.

“For words,” said Razgut, in Seraphic this time, and sweetly. “Without my words, my lord, what are you but a pretty face?” He snickered, and Jael kicked him.

It wasn’t a dramatic kick. There was no showmanship in it, only brutal efficiency. A quick, hard jerk, and the steel-enforced toe of his slipper spiked into Razgut’s side, deep into the misshapen bloat of flesh. Razgut cried out. The pain was sharp and bright, precise. He curled around it.

Laughing.

There was a crack in the shell of Razgut’s mind. It had been, once, a very fine mind, and the crack was as a flaw in a diamond, a seam in a crystal globe. It spidered. It snaked. It subverted every ordinary feeling into some mutant cousin of itself: recognizable, but gone oh so very wrong. When he looked back up at Jael, hatred mingled with mirth in his eyes.

It was his eyes that marked him as what he was. To stand back and look at him in the company of his kin, it seemed impossible that they were of the same race. Seraphim were all symmetry and grace, power and magnificence—even Jael, as long as the center margin of his face stayed covered—where Razgut was a blighted, crawling thing, a corruption of flesh more goblin than angel. He had been beautiful once, oh yes, but now only his eyes told that tale. The almond shape of them stood out as fine in his swollen, bruise-colored face.

The other tell of his ancestry was more dreadful: the spikes of splintered bone that jutted from his shoulder blades. His wings had been torn off. Not even cut, but ripped away. The pain was a thousand years old, but he would never forget it.

“When there are weapons in my soldiers’ hands,” said Jael, looming over him, “when humanity is on its knees before me, then perhaps I’ll value your words.”

Razgut knew better. He knew that he was destined to become a bloodstain the instant Jael got his weapons, which put him in an interesting position, being the one charged with getting them for him.

If he was to become a bloodstain whether he failed or succeeded, the question was: Would he prefer to be a quivering and obedient bloodstain, or a willful and infuriating bloodstain who brought an emperor’s ambitions crashing down around him?

It seemed an easy decision on the face of it. How simple it would be to humiliate and destroy Jael. It had amused Razgut, in the meeting of great gravity and importance they’d just come from, to think up absurd lines he might feed him. The fool was so certain of Razgut’s groveling servility that he would repeat anything. It was a rich temptation, and several times Razgut had chuckled, imagining it.

There is no god, you fools, he might have made him say . There are only monsters, and I am the worst of them.

It was fun, holding the cards. For his part, Razgut understood perfectly well that if Jael had come here without him, and addressed Earth in his native tongue, their hosts would have put all their considerable human ingenuity to work coding a translation program and would probably have been able to understand them perfectly well within a week, and even speak back by way of a computer-generated voice.

As one may imagine, he had not explained this to Jael. Better to intercept every syllable, control every phrase. To the Russian ambassador: Does anyone have gum? My breath is unbelievable.

Or possibly, to the American Secretary of State: Let us seal our communion with a kiss. Come to me, my dear, and take off my helmet.

Now wouldn’t thatbe fun?

But he had held himself back, because the decision—to ruin Jael or help him—had profound and far-reaching ramifications quite beyond anything the emperor himself imagined.

Oh. Quite beyond.

“You will have your weapons,” Razgut told him. “But we must go carefully, my lord. This is a free world and not your army to command. We must make them wantto give us what we need.”

“Give mewhat Ineed,” corrected Jael.

“Oh yes, you,” Razgut amended. “All for you, my lord. Your weapons, your war, and the untouchable Stelians, groveling before you.”

The Stelians. They were to be Jael’s first target, and this was rich. Razgut didn’t know what had sparked the emperor’s especial hatred of them, but the reason didn’t matter, only the result. “How sweet will be the day.” He simpered, he fawned. He hid his laughter, and it felt good inside him, because oh, he knew things, yes, and yes, it was good to be the one who knows things. The only one who knows.

Razgut had told his secrets once and only once, to the one whose wish for knowledge had made him a broken angel’s mule. Izîl. It surprised Razgut how much he missed the old beggar. He had been bright and good, and Razgut had destroyed him. Well, and what had the human expected: Something for nothing? From scholar to madman, doctor to graverobber, that had been his fate, but he’d gotten what he wanted, hadn’t he? Knowledge beyond even what Brimstone could have told him, because not even the old devil had known this. Razgut remembered what no one else did.

The Cataclysm.

Terrible and terrible and terrible forever.

It was not forgotten by chance. Minds had been altered. Emptied. Hands had reached in, and scraped out the past. But not Razgut’s.

Izîl, old fool, had tried to tell the fire-eyed angel who came to them in Morocco. Akiva was his name, and he had Stelian blood, but not Stelian knowledge, that was clear, and he wouldn’t listen. “I can tell you things!” Izîl had cried. “Secret things! About your own kind. Razgut has stories—”

But Akiva had cut him off, refusing to hear the word of a Fallen. As if he even knew what that meant! Fallen.He’d said it like a curse, but he had no idea. “Like mold on books, grow myths on history,” Izîl had said. “Maybe you should ask someone who was there, all those centuries ago. Maybe you should ask Razgut.”

But he hadn’t. No one ever asked Razgut. What happened to you? Why was this done to you?

Who are you, really?

Oh, oh, and oh. They should have asked.

Razgut told Jael now, “We will bring the humans around, never fear. They’re always like this, arguing, arguing. It’s meat and drink to them. Besides, it’s not these self-important heads of state we care about. This is just for show. While they wag their withered faces at each other, the people are working on your behalf. Mark my words. Already groups will be building up their arsenals, making ready to hand them over to you. It will only be a matter of choosing, my lord, who you wish to take them from.”

“Where are all these offers, then?” Spittle flew. “Where?”

“Patience, patience—”

“You said I would be worshiped as a god!”

“Yes, well, you’re an ugly god,” spat Razgut, no model himself of the patience he preached. “You make them nervous. You spit when you speak, you hide behind your mask, and you stare at them like you would murder them all in their beds. Have you considered trying charm? It would make my job easier.”

Again, Jael kicked him. It was a brighter stab of pain this time, and Razgut coughed blood onto the exquisite marble floor. Dipping a fingertip into it, he scribbled an obscenity.

Jael shook his head in disgust and stalked over to a table where refreshments were laid out. He poured himself a glass of wine and began to pace. “It’s taking too long,” he said, his voice a snap of spite. “I didn’t come here for rituals and chanting. I came for arms.”

Razgut affected a sigh and began to drag himself slowly, laboriously, toward the door. “Fine. I’ll go and speak to them myself. It will be faster, anyway. Your Latin pronunciation is appalling.”

Jael signaled to the pair of Dominion guarding the door, and Razgut was laughing as they seized him by his armpits and hauled him back, dropping him hard at Jael’s feet. He cackled at his joke. “Imagine their faces!” he cried, wiping a tear from one fine, dark eye. “Oh, imagine if the Pope walked in here right now and saw the pair of us in all our magnificence! ‘These are angels?’ he would cry and clutch his heart. ‘Oh, and then what in the name of God are beasts?’ ” He doubled over, quaking with laughter.

Jael did not share his amusement. “We are not a pair,” he said, his voice cold and very soft. “And know this, thing. If you ever cross me—”

Razgut cut him off. “What? What will you do to me, dear Emperor?” He peered up at Jael and held his gaze. Very steady, very still. “Look and see. Look into me and know. I am Razgut Thrice-Fallen, Wretchedest of Angels. There is nothing you can take from me that has not already been taken, nothing you can do that has not already been done.”

“You have not yet been killed,” said Jael, unyielding.

At that, Razgut smiled. His teeth were perfect in his awful face, and the crack in his mind showed mad in his eyes. With taunting insincerity, he clasped his hands and begged, “Not that, my lord. Oh hurt me, torment me, but whatever you do, please oh please, don’t give me peace!”

And spasms of fury moved over Jael’s cut-in-half face, his jaw clenched so tight that his scar pulled white while the rest of him flushed crimson. He should have understood, then. This was what Razgut thought, still laughing, as Jael laid into him with the steel-enforced tips of his slippers, giving birth to pain after pain, a whole family of them, a dynasty of hurt. That was the moment that Jael should have grasped, finally, that he was not in control. He couldn’t kill Razgut; he needed him. To interpret human languages, yes, but more than that: to interpret humans, to understand their history and politics and psychology and devise a strategy and rhetoric to appeal to them.

He could kick him, oh yes, and Razgut would croon to the pain all night long and comfort it like an armful of babies, and in the morning he would count his bruises, and number his spites and miseries, and go on smiling, and go on knowing all the things that no one remembered, the things that should never have been forgotten, and the reason—oh godstars, the most excellent and terrible reason—that Jael should leave the Stelians alone.

“I am Razgut Thrice-Fallen, Wretchedest of Angels,” he sang in a patchwork of human languages, from Latin to Arabic to Hebrew and around again, breaking it up with grunts as the kicks came to him. “And I know what fear is! Oh yes, and I know what beasts are, too. You think you do but you don’t, but you will, oh you will, oh you will. I’ll get you your weapons and I’ll get them fast, and I’ll laugh when you kill me like I laugh when you kick me, and you’ll hear the echo of it at the end of everything and know that I could have stopped you. I could have toldyou.”

Don’t do this, oh no, not this, he could have said. Or everyone will die.

“And I might have,” he added in Seraphic, “if you had been kinder to this poor, broken thing.”