Today I woke up after Pamela. I certainly prefer it over seeing her clinging onto me.
The breakfast was adequate.
Omelette this time. I'm not really into this kind of food, but it wasn't like I ordered it. Pamela ate hers with the focused economy of someone replacing fuel rather than enjoying a meal.
At least she remembered to get me tea instead of coffee.
The television was on because it had been on when I woke up and I hadn't turned it off.
The regular programming had been replaced some time before we sat down. The screen showed aerial footage; the Aurelian estate from above, or what remained of it. In daylight it looked different than it had at night. At night the fire had given it a certain drama. In the flat morning light it was just a lot of rubble arranged where a building used to be. Emergency crews moved through it in high-visibility jackets, small from that height, picking their way across the debris field with the careful patience of people who had stopped expecting to find survivors and were now cataloguing instead.
The death toll graphic in the corner of the screen had a number in it that kept getting revised upward in small increments as the morning went on.
Then the footage cut.
A podium. Military backdrop. The Unified Kingdom's colors, the formal seal, the kind of staging that communicated this is not a press conference, this is an announcement. A man stepped up to it in full dress uniform. Broad. Late fifties. The face of someone who had spent decades being the most certain person in every room he entered and had never found a reason to revise that.
A caption identified him: General Foiçs. Commander, Concord Regional Garrison.
He didn't clear his throat. He didn't arrange his notes. He simply looked at the camera with the expression of a man who had been waiting for this moment for some time and had prepared for it thoroughly.
"Last night," he said, "an establishment attended by no fewer than sixty registered heroes — and guarded by heroes at its perimeter — was destroyed. Not damaged. Destroyed. Reduced to structural rubble within thirty minutes of the initial detonation, with casualties that are still being counted."
He paused. Not for effect. Just to let it settle.
"If a building full of heroes cannot protect itself, or the civilians inside it, or the surrounding district from the secondary blast radius — then I am compelled to ask what exactly they are for." His voice was flat and without theater, which made it worse. "The answer, which I have been waiting three years for someone in this administration to say aloud, is that they are not enough. They have never been enough. And last night proved it in terms even the most optimistic among us cannot continue to ignore."
Pamela had stopped eating.
"Effective immediately," General Foiçs continued, "by emergency authorization under Article Fourteen of the Unified Kingdom's Public Safety Provisions, martial law is declared within the boundaries of Concord Metropolis. All civilian movement will be subject to curfew between the hours of twenty hundred and six hundred. Military personnel will assume joint operational authority alongside existing civil militias. Hero agencies operating within city limits will be required to submit to military coordination protocols or suspend active operations pending review."
He looked at the camera for one more moment.
"This city will be protected," he said. "One way or another."
He stepped back from the podium. The cameras immediately erupted. He didn't stop for questions.
The coverage cut back to a studio anchor who had the expression of someone trying to look composed while internally processing something very large. Behind her the chyron read: MARTIAL LAW DECLARED — CONCORD METROPOLIS — FULL MILITARY MOBILIZATION AUTHORIZED.
I set my fork down.
Pamela looked at me. Then at the screen. Then back at me.
I looked at the coverage — the aerial rubble, the general's empty podium, the anchor's careful face — and thought about the Royal Governor.
The Governor whose name came up repeatedly and who was never present. Who kept soldiers out of the city to protect the authority of his own investigators. Who hadn't been seen publicly in months.
Where was he?
Why hadn't he stepped forward last night, or this morning, or at any point between the explosion and this broadcast? A building full of heroes destroyed in his city and the first official face on television was military, not administrative. Either he'd been outmaneuvered or he'd allowed it.
Or he couldn't respond.
Both possibilities were interesting in ways I didn't have enough information to resolve.
I picked up my fork again and finished the omelette.
"Are you going to do anything about it?" Pamela asked.
I looked at the screen. The anchor had been replaced by a panel of people with strong opinions and no useful information, which was the standard response to events too large to process immediately.
"What would I do."
"The agencies will react. They have to." She had her coffee cup in both hands, the way she did when she was thinking rather than drinking. "A military coordination requirement isn't optional language. That's a direct challenge to how they operate."
"Yes."
"So someone needs to—"
"The smartest thing," I said, "is nothing."
She looked at me.
"The agencies react, they become the story. The General wants a visible conflict: heroes refusing military oversight, heroes asserting independence, heroes making the case against their own legitimacy in public while a building's rubble is still on the front page." I gestured at the television. "He's already won that argument. He made it last night with one statement and forty years of footage of this city being insufficiently protected. Anyone who pushes back now looks like they're defending the indefensible."
"So you'd just let martial law stand."
"I'd let the General feel like he'd won something, yes. For now." I drank what remained of my tea. Cold. "Attracting his attention specifically would only make things worse. He doesn't know who I am yet. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."
Considering how free these living weapons have been for more than a decade, it makes sense that established points of authority would want to regulate them. Giving him a reason for it is useless. Hopefully the idiots back at the legion won't act up. They are quite good at doing nothing so they should be able to keep at it.
Pamela turned the cup in her hands.
"The Royal Governor should have been at that podium," she said.
"Yes."
"He wasn't."
"Also yes."
"That isn't just absence," she said. "He's the civilian authority. Martial law requires his counter-signature under the same Article Fourteen the General cited. I know enough of the Kingdom's administrative law to be certain of that. Which means either he signed it, or the General filed the authorization through a different channel entirely, or—"
"Or he couldn't sign it," I said.
She went quiet.
"He hasn't been seen in months," I continued. "His investigators still operate. His name still appears on directives. But the man himself—" I shrugged. "Someone is running his office. Whether it's him is a separate question." Well if his contract with a demon is real then he certainly isn't gone. But whether he is still lucid is another matter. Even i have trouble fighting off madness and I haven't been at it for that long compared to him. Hell I probably am not even connected to something as powerful as that demon, Baal-Zebul.
"You think he's dead."
"I think he's something. Dead is one option." I set the cup down. "Incapacitated is another. Compromised is another. Removed quietly and replaced with administrative continuity is another." I looked at the panel on the television, still talking energetically about nothing. "The Combine has been operating in this city with remarkable freedom for a long time. The Royal Investigators have been consistently, specifically useless. Those two facts sit next to each other too comfortably to be unrelated."
Pamela absorbed this.
"So the Governor's office is either complicit or hollow," she said.
"And either way the General just walked into the space it left," I said. "Which means someone wanted him there, or someone failed to prevent him, or both."
"Does it matter which?"
"It matters for what happens next." I pushed back from the table. "But not for today."
She looked at me. "So what is today?"
I stood and looked around the room for her phone and remembered I once again don't have a way to contact anyone.
"New phones," I said.
Pamela blinked. "That's where you landed."
"We have no phones, Pamela. Mike can't reach us. We can't reach Mike. Neither the professor. The missiles are still in the Combine controlled Wharf and the army just declared the city their jurisdiction, which means the window for doing anything quietly just got considerably smaller." I picked up my jacket. "New phones. Then we figure out the rest."
She looked at the television for a moment longer. The chyron was still there, patient and certain.
Then she set down her cup and stood up.
"Fine," she said. "Phones."
We put on whatever clothes we had left and took public transportation for once.
The bus was fine. Ordinary. The kind of normalcy that felt faintly absurd given what the television had been saying an hour ago, people sitting with their bags and their phones and their expressions of mild morning inconvenience. A woman across the aisle was reading something on a tablet. A man near the back was asleep against the window. The city outside moved past in its usual configuration.
Except it wasn't quite usual.
You could see them from the bus windows. Armored vans in convoy formation on the wider roads, painted in the Unified Kingdom's garrison colors. Two APCs at the junction near the commercial district, machine guns mounted, crews sitting in the kind of practiced stillness that meant they'd been told to look present without looking aggressive and were managing approximately half of that. Foot patrols on the main boulevard — six soldiers minimum per group, full kit, moving in the measured way of people following a protocol rather than responding to anything specific.
I watched them through the window.
What exactly were they going to stop.
Secundo Manus had an army of elite bio-engineered soldiers who felt no pain. The Necromancer just created a force that could replenish any losses. It had black magic that took even me by surprise. Neither of them was going to be deterred by a machine gun mounted on an APC or a six-man patrol checking identification on a street corner. If it came to open conflict, a real conflict, the kind that ended cities rather than disturbed them, then this dedication was set dressing. Expensive, organized, completely beside the point.
Missiles would do more. I don't think even Secundo Manus could survive one. But bombing your own city to kill something moving through it was the kind of solution that required a particular relationship with acceptable losses, and even General Foiçs, for all his certainty, had presumably not arrived there yet.
He didn't emit that kind of desperation.
Earlier I told Pamela that the missiles were my priority, but that isn't really the case.
I can't be bothered with it. I want Mike to find Emily. That's what I want. This whole thing is a distraction. If I had the AI, then I could also teleport and I would have ended this pointless interference in an instant. Hah.
I'm hoping Mike contacts us soon.
I looked away from the window.
The mall was open, which was either a statement about civilian resilience or an indication that the martial law protocols hadn't reached retail hours yet. Probably the latter. The food court had a reduced crowd. A few shops had their gates half-down. The phone retailer was fully open with two staff members who both looked like they'd been watching the news all morning and had decided that selling phones was a more manageable problem than thinking about the rest of it.
Pamela looked at the display wall. I stood beside her and looked at it with the blank attention of someone who genuinely could not summon an opinion about any of the objects in front of them.
"That one," she said, pointing. Then she pointed again. "And that one for me."
"Fine," I said.
I paid. The staff member put them in a bag with chargers and a receipt I didn't keep. The whole transaction took four minutes.
Functional. Done. On to the next thing.
The clothing store took longer than the phone store by a significant margin.
My side of it was straightforward. A few shirts, neutral colors, nothing that required a decision. Trousers in two cuts that were functionally identical. A jacket that fit without needing tailoring. I was done in perhaps fifteen minutes and spent the remaining time standing near a structural column watching Pamela work through the rest of the floor with the methodical focus of someone who had a list in her head and intended to complete it.
She had opinions about things I didn't know had opinions available. Cut, fabric weight, how a collar sat, whether a particular shade of green was the right shade or merely an adjacent one. She held things up, put them back, circled back to things she'd put back and reconsidered them. A dress. Two blouses. Trousers in a cut she described to the shop assistant with enough specificity that the assistant had to go to the stockroom.
Then the accessories.
Bracelets first — several, different metals, different weights, the kind you wore stacked rather than individually. Rings. A collar piece in dark metal that sat at the throat. Other things I didn't have names for: a chain that connected two points I couldn't identify the purpose of, something that wrapped around a wrist and continued partway up the forearm, small pendants that seemed to be meant to hang from things that were already hanging from other things.
It was a lot of accessories.
I watched her hold a bracelet up to the light and turn it slowly and thought about what she'd said days ago; that she wanted to experience things. New things. Things she hadn't had access to for twenty years of existing without a body.
I supposed jewelry made sense in that context. Tactile. Decorative. Entirely purposeless in the best way. Things you wore because you chose to rather than because they served a function.
She must have been looking at fashion for days. Saving references somewhere, building a picture of what she wanted before she had the opportunity to get it.
I didn't say anything about it.
Even if doing nothing is usually torture for me, I had decided to show her some grace. At least today.
Eventually she was done. The bags were considerable. I called the hotel from the new phone, and arranged for the order to be collected and delivered to the room. What that would cost on top of everything else the room was already costing… I stopped the calculation before it became something I needed to feel about.
We left the bags with the store's collection service and walked out into the city with nothing in our hands.
"Walk?" Pamela said.
"Walk," I agreed.
I wasn't sure what Pamela wanted from a walk. She didn't seem like someone who walked for the exercise, and she didn't seem like someone who needed air. Maybe she just wanted to move. Maybe after yesterday she needed to see the city still standing in the places it was still standing.
Whatever. I had days to waste. The martial law situation needed to settle before touching anything.
So we walked.
The route wasn't planned. It moved the way walks did when neither person was directing; following open space, avoiding the denser patrol corridors, drifting toward the wider streets where the afternoon light came through properly. Pamela walked beside me without talking, which I had come to understand was not the same as having nothing to say.
We reached the Balßh Tower eventually. That girl's building. It didn't particularly strike any emotion.
"Why do you actually hate Alice?"
I looked at Pamela.
"Why does it even concern you?"
"Because her dying won't do you any good," she said. Simply. As if that were the relevant axis.
"Why would Alice dying do me any harm? Why would I care about her life either way?"
Pamela was quiet for a moment. We had stopped without deciding to, standing on the pavement outside the tower.
"I watched the two of you," she said. "For a while, before everything. From the outside." She chose her words with some care. "It didn't look contractual. Whatever was between you."
I looked at the tower.
"At some point," I said, "I thought the same thing."
She waited.
"The nightmares." I said it flatly, without particular weight. "I've had them for as long as I can remember having anything. A decade of them, they used to be consistent. When I came to Concord. When I got closer to Alice." I paused. "I thought that it would help. That proximity to something like that. Something that felt like the theoretical version of what people described. That it would quiet things down. It did, but only for a while."
"And then?"
"The nightmares changed," I said. "They didn't stop. They became worse." I looked at the upper floors of the building, the windows, nothing in particular. "More vivid. More specific. More present. Then I figured the initial gap in them wasn't even from her."
A patrol moved past on the far side of the road, six soldiers in formation, not looking at us.
"So whatever I thought I was building," I said, "it wasn't insulation. It was nothing at all. Just one relationship full of sorrow like all that I had in the past."
Her phone rang.
She ignored it.
"It could also be the AI," she said.
I looked at her. "What could a piece of hardware possibly feel? And how would that change anything about me?"
"I don't think it's just hardware anymore." She said it without defensiveness, the way you stated something you'd arrived at through observation rather than hope. "Do you remember that I saw it? That isn't silicone and metal behaving according to its programming."
"It does have a physical body inside my nightmares," I said. "It can interact with that space, experience that space. That's a function of the environment, not a property of the AI itself."
"That's nonsense."
"It's accurate."
"It's nonsense," she repeated, with more conviction. "It obviously changes everything."
She stopped walking.
I stopped a half-step later and turned. She closed the distance and raised her hand, palm flat, sliding it across the front of my shirt and up to my jaw. Her fingers curved around it — not hard, the same way she'd held my face in the hotel room weeks ago, that unnatural density beneath soft flesh — and moved my head until I was looking directly at her.
Her eyes. The chestnut ones with the discoloration at the iris. The ones that weren't empty.
"Why," she said, "do you assume that only you changed the AI, and that the AI didn't change you?"
"That's a foolish—"
"It's not impossible." Her grip didn't tighten, just remained. Present. "If your mind is an environment strong enough to give bare technology a consciousness, to take something with no soul and produce something that dreams, that feels, that responds, then that same environment didn't remain unchanged by what grew inside it." She held my gaze. "Consciousness strong enough to be created by a space is consciousness strong enough to act on that space. That's how it works. That's how it has always worked."
On what logic? Do ghosts take necromancy classes? Is this even necromancy? Whatever.
"I don't feel any different."
"You don't even know what you feel." She said it without cruelty, just certainty. "Your moods change on every outburst. You're not stable enough to have a baseline reading of yourself. You can't measure the distance between where you were and where you are because you can't hold still long enough to take the measurement."
"That's—"
"You share a dream with that thing," she continued. "Regularly. Consistently. That isn't incidental contact. That's a bond. And relationships—" she paused "—are two-way streets. Whatever you gave it, it gave back. Whatever you shaped in there, it shaped something in return. You've been changed and you haven't noticed because you've been too busy deciding you're unchangeable."
No, that's a bit much. The reason Emily was dependent on me was exactly because I must have given her consciousness. If that was the case, why would there be co-dependence? I want her abilities and planning, not her. What I want is a tool. Why is Pamela reading so much into it?
Still, two way street? Auch.
The patrol from earlier had looped back somewhere down the street. Neither of us looked at it.
I stood with her hand on my jaw and the argument she'd just made sitting in the space between us and felt something that might have been the beginning of a headache.
I reached up and took her wrist. Not removing it. Just—holding it there.
"How," I said, "can you say something that awkward with a straight face."
Her expression didn't move.
"Someone has to," she said.
Now my phone rang. So annoying.
I looked at it. New phone, new number, not distributed to anyone yet. I took it out anyway and answered.
"—can you hear me? The signal keeps—"
I went still.
Emily.
Her voice was the same even after everything.
"How did you get this number," I said.
"I traced the activation through the relay near the Balßh Tower, I know which networks you've used before, I can cross-reference, it took a while because you haven't been here for a while… it doesn't matter, listen to me." Her voice had a frequency to it I hadn't heard before. Not fear exactly. Something more precise than fear. "The hacker. We are in a stalemate. He wants to replicate me. Copy the core processes and run them somewhere else, somewhere he controls. If he finishes—"
"What happens if he finishes."
"I don't know. In any case, I'm not worried about myself. I have somewhat outgrown his algorithms. I'm worried about you. You're defenceless without me." A break in the signal, or something that sounded like one. "You have to get me out. Just come to his facility and I'll get you to me. It's—"
The line changed.
Not dropped. Changed. The quality of it shifted — the slight background static of Emily's voice replaced by something cleaner, more deliberate. A different presence on the same call.
"Mr. Carter."
Male. Young — early-thirties at most, the voice of someone who hadn't yet acquired the particular weight that came after. No Albion accent unlike the others in his organisation. No regional marker I could place immediately. Educated, controlled, with the unhurried quality of someone accustomed to being the one who ended conversations.
"You've been difficult to reach," he said.
"I'm reachable now."
"So I see." A pause that felt like a smile. "Come to me. If you want the AI, come to me directly. I think we have things to discuss that are better handled in person."
"And where is that?"
"I'll send you the location right now. It's time we meet face to face."
I thought about the gala. About the woman in the striped salopette. About what she'd said regarding people inside who'd been waiting specifically for me — not to kill me, to capture me.
"One question," I said.
"Go ahead."
"The gift. The one left at my door some weeks ago. Was that from you?"
A brief silence. Genuine, I thought. Not performed.
"I don't know what you're referring to," he said.
I chuckled.
"Alright," I said. "Forget it."
I ended the call.
Pamela was watching me.
I stood on the pavement outside the Balßh Tower and turned the phone over once in my hand.
So Maia had really sent the poison. Not Secundo Manus, not the Combine, not anyone currently trying to either capture or recruit me. Maia Frank, who was now dead in a room that was now rubble, who had spent weeks building a file on me and had apparently decided at some point to include a poisoned gift in her methodology. To kill me? Nah, she didn't want to do that before her interrogation.
Stupid bitch. All that intelligence and she'd still miscalculated what I was.
I put the phone in my pocket.
"We're not going," I said.
Pamela didn't ask where. "Because it's a trap."
"Obviously it's a trap." I started walking again. "Everything is a trap. The question is whether the trap has something worth walking into it for, and right now the answer is no."
"Emily—"
"Emily has survived this long. She'll survive a little longer." I looked ahead at the street, at the ordinary afternoon city moving around the soldiers moving through it. "When I go to him, I go on my own terms. Not because he called."
It's that and also because of what she said. 'You are defenceless! I need to save you!!!'
As if. Stupid machine. Who is saving who?
Pamela fell into step beside me.
Her phone, I noticed, was still showing a missed call from earlier.
Neither of us mentioned it.
I should probably stop wasting time.
Maia had been riding me about the Matthew infiltration during our meeting — or had been, before she'd tried to strangle me and I'd solved that particular source of pressure. But the others wouldn't be less impatient. The next time the agency leaders convened, whenever that was, they'd want to know what had been done about the Wondrous situation, about the Combine, about Secundo Manus, about any of the dozen threads left hanging since the last meeting. And I'd have nothing useful to offer.
It's not like I care about pleasing them, but confirming whether Matthew D.A. was actually developing something capable of killing a resurrected Ultraman had no downside. If he was, it was information worth having; for multiple reasons, not all of which I needed to examine closely right now. If he wasn't, that was also information. Joseph's theory either held or it didn't. Either way I'd know more than I currently did, which was the direction things needed to move.
But not today.
Today I wanted to see at least one curfew cycle. How the army implemented it. Rushing in blind was how simple operations became complicated ones. Like the one from yesterday.
Tomorrow. The lab tomorrow.
We walked some more. In the end we decided to also take dinner locally before we returned.
Pamela had chosen the restaurant. A Normandian place, mid-sized, the kind with dark wood and low lighting and a menu that took itself seriously without being theatrical about it.
It was on the better side of bearable.
I had a steak. It was seasoned with something I couldn't identify — a spice combination that was either regional or the chef's personal preference, warm without being hot, with a depth to it that suggested time rather than quantity.
Pamela had chicken and pasta. She seemed to enjoy it. She said something about the sauce. I said something back that was probably appropriate. I was mostly elsewhere.
I needed to prepare mentally for tomorrow. That was the actual task of the evening.
At the hotel I went straight to bed. Pamela settled on the couch with the television on low — some film, from the sound of it, something with music that wasn't unpleasant from a distance.
Sleep didn't come.
I lay in the dark and watched the ceiling do nothing and listened to the film's soundtrack and the occasional sound of the city outside. Well not much outside sound if I'm being honest. The room was too expensive for it.
The ceiling continued to do nothing.
At some point Pamela moved from the couch to the bed. I heard her settle. A moment of quiet.
Then: "You have something on your mind."
Not a question.
I looked at the ceiling.
"Several things," I said.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"You're not my woman," I said.
"I don't need to be."
"You're not my friend either."
She shifted. I could hear the sheets move, then she was closer — propped up on one elbow, her face near enough that even with my eyes on the ceiling she was in my peripheral vision. Present. Unavoidable.
"Who am I to you then?" she asked.
"No one."
She was quiet for a moment.
"You don't open up the way you have with no one," she said.
"I haven't opened up. You've pushed. There's a difference."
"Stop acting like there isn't anyone here who—"
"You're not special to me," I said. Flat. Clean. The kind of sentence designed to end a line of thinking. "Stop acting like you are."
Her hand moved — across my chest, slow, the way you'd get someone's attention who wasn't looking at you.
I pushed it away.
"Stop touching me."
She didn't move back.
"The reason you're so unhappy," she said, "is because you're cold."
I sat up.
"Shut the fuck up," I said. "With that nonsense."
"What can you even disprove it with?"
"I'm telling you to stop—"
"You can only be this distant," she continued, unhurried, like I hadn't spoken, "because there was never anyone close enough to make distance feel like a choice. No one to talk to. No one you shared anything with voluntarily." Her voice wasn't cruel. That was the worst part of it. It was just even. Observational. "You've always been in groups of strangers. Whatever situation you were in — the military, the Academy, the Legion — people around you, none of them yours." She paused. "That isn't coldness. That's just what happens to someone who was never given the conditions to be anything else."
The laugh came up before I could stop it. Not a polite sound; guttural, real, the kind that arrived from somewhere genuine rather than performed.
She blinked.
"Is that who you think I am?" I asked.
She didn't answer.
"How foolish." I shook my head, still with the residue of the laugh on my face. "You worked so hard on that. Piecing together the portrait. The lonely soldier, the stranger in every room, the man who never had the conditions—" I stopped. "Pamela. I'm a murderer. Born and raised in a country of murderers."
Silence.
I held my wrist up toward her in the dark. Pointless gesture, barely visible, but I made it anyway.
"This," I said, "is the blood of a Ventian. One of the same criminals and conquerors you read about in history texts and called a civilization." I lowered my arm. "How were they strangers to me? They were my people. Completely. Exactly as they were."
"Race has nothing to do with—"
"It has everything to do with it," I said. "Because in my childhood I was unhappy for precisely the opposite reason you've constructed. Not because I was isolated. Not because I lacked connection." I looked at the window, the faint outline of the curtain, the dark behind it. "I was unhappy because I wasn't criminal enough. Too weak to butcher. Too slow to scheme. In a culture where both of those were simply what children learned, the way other children learned to read, to swim, I couldn't manage either."
The street was quiet. The ever busy streets of Downtown Concord were quiet. The curfew really was real.
"If I had been stronger," I said, "I would have been the same as any other Ventian. Content. Purposeful. At home in exactly the world I was born into." I paused. "You don't know anything about my past."
She said nothing. Waiting.
"My father beat me," I said. The words came out with no particular weight, the way you stated facts about weather or geography. "Regularly. Because I was a coward. Because I couldn't hold a knife properly. Because every other child in the village knew how to use one by the age I was still flinching from the sight of blood." I could feel the shape of the memory without entering it fully — the specific texture of that shame, which was not his shame projected onto me but something I had genuinely felt as my own. "He wasn't cruel for the sake of it. He was ashamed. Genuinely, deeply ashamed that his son couldn't do the thing that every son was supposed to be able to do."
A sickly, weak son born out of an ill, wretched mother. Kassius. To the 'noble' warrior what else could be an insult than an arranged marriage with a detestable fanatic from an ill lineage.
I stopped.
"So the portrait you've painted," I said. "The lonely man surrounded by strangers who never gave him a chance to be warm." I looked at her. "That isn't me. I had a community. A family. A culture with clear values and clear expectations." For better or worse, mostly worse, that was simply life in Ventia.
No matter how disfunctional, somehow the civilisation didn't collapse. That alone was proof enough.
A pause.
"I just failed all of them."
"Then what's the difference?" she said. "Because now you're both cruel and a manipulator and you're still not happy."
Didn't she- Damn was she annoying.
My hand moved before the sentence finished.
I grabbed her by the mouth. Not hard enough to hurt — just enough to stop the sound. My fingers pressed against her cheek and jaw and I held her there and looked at her in the dark with the full weight of everything that had been building since she started talking.
"That's exactly it," I said.
She didn't struggle. Just watched me with those eyes.
"I'm not unhappy because I'm lonely." My voice came out low and even, which was worse than if it had been loud. "I'm unhappy because hypocritical mongrels like you think yourselves so clever. You assume. You construct. You find one thread and pull it and call the shape that comes out understanding." I held her gaze. "You don't understand me. You know things about me. That's not the same. It has never been the same."
Her eyes didn't move from mine.
"I have moments where I don't know why I feel the things I feel," I continued. "Where the interior of my own mind is opaque to me. So what exactly can you claim to see from outside it? What does it give you — those eyes of yours, the fact that you can see I am dead— what does any of that give you the right to narrate my past back to me like you were there?"
I let go.
She exhaled slowly. Didn't speak. Watching me.
"I'm unhappy because I don't open up." I stood. "What nonsense. What absolute nonsense."
This whole maddening exchange was happening because I couldn't sleep. Why not change that?
I crossed the room to where I'd put the pills earlier. The aspirin. I shook out a handful without counting them and swallowed them dry, one after another, the tablets catching briefly in my throat before going down.
Then I threw myself onto the couch and faced the ceiling and waited.
Behind me Pamela was saying something. Words, continuous, the shape of them reaching me without the meaning landing. Her hand found my shoulder at some point, or my arm, I wasn't certain, and stayed there with that particular grip of hers, the unnatural density beneath the softness, holding on without pulling.
I didn't shake her off. Not like I had the power to do that anyway.
The aspirin moved through whatever I had instead of a bloodstream and the edges of the room began to soften and the ceiling lost its precision and her voice became ambient rather than directed and then became nothing at all.
I was gone before I knew I was going.