“It does,” I said. “It should.”
“Lie down,” he said.
“Talis—” I said, and then could not think of a thing to say.
“Put your head,” he said, putting one finger on the tabletop, where the intersecting radiation beams (though still quiescent) made a bright spot that only the two of us would have been able to see. “Just here.”
I put my head just there.
The bright spot was brighter than I’d anticipated. I squinted, but it wasn’t that kind of bright. I could see the sparkles of ionization where high-energy particles were entering the soft gel of my eyes. “This will blind me,” I said.
“Hmmmm?” Talis was standing at my ear, a flicker and loom on the periphery, bigger than he should have been, nightmarish. I could see his busy hands, the invisible light dancing over his weaver’s fingers, the blackwork tattoo at his wrist. “Oh, yes. Cataracts. That body won’t last long enough to develop them. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry.
Something as hard as a scythe swung into my vision then, and I flinched—and then strained my eyes upward to look. The cage for the head. It was a half circle of metal that swung into slots beside my ears. It was pierced with threaded bolts.
Bolt. Literally bolt, Talis had said.
I was ready to.
I heard metal brush metal, very close.
Elián, I thought. Pittsburgh. Louisville.
And then, reminding myself: I choose. I hope. Something new.
Talis leaned over me; I saw his face upside down, bisected by the metal arch of the halo. He put a hand over each of my ears and moved me minutely, this way, then that, then simply holding me steady, centered in the beams.
“Talis,” I said, and was ashamed that I was starting to cry with fear, ashamed that I could think of nothing to say.
“Greta.” He swiped tears off my cheekbones with the pads of his thumbs. “Let me tell you something that I learned in my youth, from a sage called the Road Runner. You can walk off a cliff and the air will hold you. Only, don’t look down.”
I tried to take that in. I would have nodded, except that I was afraid of ruining the alignment. Lu-Lien, who’d wiggled. Melted like an ice-cream cone. I held very, very still.
Talis’s eyes were intense and sure. “It’s too late for doubt. Understand?”
I choose. Not death. Something new. “Yes,” I said. My chest was so tight.
Talis began to set the bolts.
I could hear them, ticking and creaking, as minutely as crickets. Tick, tock, drop. He set one against the prominence of bone behind my left ear. Another against the right side. I could still have sat up; I could still— He set one against the center of my forehead. I could see the flat bottom of the bolt starting to come down. I laid her faceup in that press and let her watch.
The blunt ends of the bolts were firm and cold, like coins on the eyes. There were four more to set.
Talis set them.
And then tightened them.
Bruising. And then burrowing. No pain, but a wrongness that no amount of anesthetic could ever deaden. They were in me.
Don’t panic, Greta. Don’t panic.
The radiation like ants crawling over my face. Into my eyes and ears. I reached up and touched the halo. Talis laid his fingers over mine. I could feel our sensors meeting, meshing, like to like. “Don’t look down,” he said.
I swallowed. Lowered my hands slowly to my sides. One wrist brushed leather.
“You don’t have to . . .” I meant the straps.
Talis’s smile flickered. “You’ll need them,” he said, and buckled them tight.
He leaned in, hesitated as if shy, and then put a cool kiss on the end of my nose. “Greta Stuart: see you on the other side.”
And he left the room.
I was alone. My aloneness echoed around me. I took a deep breath, and counted it: one.
Two.
My implanted datastore sensed what I was doing and started scrolling milliseconds.
Three. Four. A tightness in my chest: pure fear.
Blessed and glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed—oh help me— I choose this. Power in the choosing. I claim it. I claim it.
Five. Six.
Seven breaths and 25,172 milliseconds later, the beams switched on.
Is there any point in describing my death from induced currents in the brain? There were magnets; they induced currents; I died.
Does it hurt? I had asked the Abbot.
The word he’d chosen: “profoundly.”
It hurt profoundly.
There is a threshold before which sensation is not painful. There is another, which few people know, past which pain becomes something besides sensation. There are no words for it, though some people call it light, the white light induced by the overload of the dying brain. Perhaps I should call it color, the thing that quarks are said to have. Quarks bind themselves into twos and threes so that their color adds up to white. Take one out of its pairing and hold it apart from the others, and the strain, the wrongness, will be so great that space itself will rip apart.
And create something new.