But he didn’t hear me. I contained the scream, slunk back out of the room, ran upstairs and used my parents’ rotary phone to call the police. I never saw my father again. My mother recovered from the attack that broke ribs and knocked her unconscious, but she was never really the same.
The memory resumes, playing out differently than I remember.
I step out from behind the tree and say to my father, “You did this.”
He looks startled. Hurt. “No! I found her like this. She did it to herself.”
I look back down at my mother. She’s covered in blood. Shot.
“She killed herself, Jon.”
“She wouldn’t,” I say. I’ve never believed anything so firmly in all my life.
“She did.” My father stands to his feet, his shoes squeaking on the white tile floor.
I shake my fists. “You killed her!”
My father frowns, crouches by my mother’s body and moves her hand.
“Leave her alone,” I demand.
My father looks me in the eyes, a rare calm expression on his face. “Your mother killed herself, Maigo,” my father says, “but she killed you first.”
The gun, now in my mother’s limp hand, is pointed at me.
The explosion makes me flinch. But I feel no pain. No impact. I turn to find Maigo, clutching her stomach, tears streaking down her smooth cheeks. She falls to her knees, dark almond eyes locked on me. I’ve see those eyes before... Then she pitches forward, landing hard on the cold tile floor, a pool of blood spreading from her core, mingling with her mother’s.
I feel the pain of this moment acutely. The heartbreak. The rage. It was very nearly my own fate. And therein lies the heart of my connection to the monster that is Nemesis. I don’t just sympathize with a murdered young girl, I understand her. That thirst for vengeance. I’ve hid from it all my life, but it’s there, in my dreams. I’m not sure where my father is, or if he’s alive, but I’ve thought of finding him more than once. My position at the DHS would make it easy. But then what? Kick the shit out of an old man?
“What if he’d killed her?” Maigo asks from the floor, her dead eyes looking at me? “What if he’d killed you?”
“I...don’t know,” I tell her. But I do know. I already answered this question a year ago when I offered up Alexander Tilly for execution, and I did it without an ounce of guilt. But it’s still not the same. One guilty man doesn’t justify the killing of untold innocents. I attempt to say as much, but suddenly I feel strange.
My living room that is also Maigo’s high rise condo, disappears. I’m surrounded by darkness and otherworldly screams. I’ve never heard anything so horrible. Then pain. Electric. Burning. I’ve never felt such searing pain. I feel my mind slipping away. And then, just as quickly, I’m pulled back to lucidity, and more pain. Never ending. I’m being driven mad, all the while a flow of information is flooding my mind, drowning whatever I had been.
A moral code.
Unshakable.
Indisputable.
And for those that break the code, death is the only recourse. No mercy.
A doubt lingers.
The pain returns, worse than before. I scream, joining the chorus of shrieking voices.
The flow of information repeats. I see images. Murders. Rapes. Unspeakable violence. I feel the difference between what is right and wrong. My anguish is slowly replaced by rage for the perpetrators. I want to stop them.
No, I want to destroy them.
I must destroy them!
Mercy means suffering. Relief only comes from the slaying of corruption. I am addicted to their destruction. And I will annihilate anything and anyone that stands in my way.
The cycle of pain and information continues until there is nothing else. I experience years of pain-based programming in a matter of seconds. Pain and screaming, good, evil and vengeance. This was the birth of Nemesis. The creation of the monster. Whoever...whatever, she was before, has been erased. But I know for certain that she was not the winged goddess of retribution. Someone made her this way.
Against her will.
The darkness is empty again.
I hear footsteps, small and gentle.
Maigo emerges.
“You cannot control me,” she says, and I know she’s right. The blind rage of Nemesis is beyond anyone’s control...except Maigo’s.
But... “You’re not Maigo.”
She stands still, staring at me.
“And you’re not Nemesis,” I say.
“I am new,” she says. “And I am not. We are one, but...separate and different.”
“Confusing,” I admit.
“Very,” she says, though she doesn’t really say it. I feel it. This conversation isn’t really happening. It’s in my mind, translated into something I can understand. Whether that’s me, Maigo, Nemesis or Endo’s device, I have no idea.
“I—I am sorry,” she says with a frown.
“I understand.”