Dear God.
The magnetic fields reached inside me and pulled each color and held it alone in the universe: The golden skin of Da-Xia’s back, arching with joy.
The orange sparks of the funeral pyre rising against the ink-dark sky.
The fireweed, silver and white.
Grego’s blood drying burgundy.
Ivory: the weathered ceramic of the Abbot’s fingers.
Gray: the crushing stone of the apple press.
Black: the camera’s eye.
Faster and faster they came: orange pumpkins, blue orbital weapons, Charlie’s tawny coat, rose-red taffeta, the joyful multicolor of Christmas tree lights.
No, I said, looking into the camera, of course I’m not afraid.
Red: my mother’s hair, ablaze with diamonds.
Blue: Talis’s eyes.
Da-Xia blushing. Elián, his black hair tumbling over his face. His hands were bound.
My hands were bound. If they had not been bound, I would have ripped out my eyes.
A lightning strike. A feeling of charge building up, pulling and pulling and pulling. It was going to hit me. I was going to become lightning. I was going to die.
For one moment all the colors turned into white, a tunnel, a welcome. I looked over whatever it was that passed for my shoulder and saw the body on the table below me, convulsing against its straps.
It’s a big one, the child Da-Xia shouted, singing to the lightning. Are you afraid?
Yes.
The grey room. The beams—gone. The collimators and emitters, no longer firing, are supercooled points, as blue as stars in my overlaid vision—and the lights are out. And I am floating alone in darkness, in stars.
Information.
The memory of making love with Da-Xia presents itself on the recently accessed list, below the origin of the term “cascade failure” and the theory of quantum chromodynamics.
Clock.
Twenty-nine minutes, fifty-four seconds.
Since when?
Since the command count received.
Recently accessed memory: counting breaths.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—partial list of digits/real numbers/positive integers. Someone counting breaths. Greta. Time to check on Greta.
She is not breathing.
Rectify: command breathe.
She takes a breath.
Inventory: datastore running hot; redirect lymph for cooling. Severe bruising, frontal boss of the skull. Residual currents in inductive webbing. Hormonal imbalance: adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin. Minor fracturing, metacarpal of left thumb; scaphoid carpal of left wrist.
That is—
(Hang on, Greta. Hang on fiercely.)
That is ironic, isn’t it?
Why?
Recently accessed memory: struggling against the straps. Breaking. Compare. Twice broken.
Ironic, because—
I should breathe again, shouldn’t I?
I take a breath.
And.
To claim that . . . I had been tortured. To be I was to claim that. Review the file apple press: terror, pain.
What advantage in that? Easier to close the file. Close the I.
The memory comes without me calling for it, this time, rising in the organic structures and overlaying itself on the webbing, so that I feel it twice: Talis’s blue eyes, which are Rachel’s eyes, and Talis the bird behind them, trapped.
Stubborn as a mule with a toothache. Reasonable tolerance for pain. All in all, Greta— And another voice: There is a fair chance that what’s left of you won’t be recognizable. That you won’t, in any meaningful way, survive.
Recognizable. I recognize this body, Greta’s body, wrapped around me like a dress, constricting.
My ribs cannot move—I cannot breathe. I am only a painting, and yet I need to breathe. Then the artist—and it is Elián, of course, Elián— Elián. And Xie, taking my hand. I know it by shape. Da-Xia.
I am not a painting. “Greta?” Her voice comes softly. I hear the tears move behind it. “Oh, please . . . Greta?”
I open Greta’s eyes.
They are both there, Elián Palnik and Li Da-Xia, and each is fumbling with a buckle at my hands. Talis is leaning against the far wall with his foot tucked up, looking casual but with all his sensors on full: he is blazing like something falling to Earth.
The buckle on Da-Xia’s side comes free. She seizes that hand, lifts it toward her face.
That hand is broken.
“That hand is broken,” I say.
“Oh!” Flushed, she puts the hand back. “I didn’t—”
“I’ve overridden the pain,” I say. “You can hold it if you want to.”
“Oh,” she says again. She does not pick the hand back up.
Elián frees my other hand but does not touch me. “Can we get these screws out?” he asks Talis.
“It’s called a halo,” Talis says, straightening up and stretching. “Isn’t that right, angel?”
“I’m not an angel,” I say.
Angels are pure souls without bodies. Demons are the ones who possess, and ghosts are the dead, still living. I might be either a demon or a ghost, but—but— “What are you, then?” says Talis softly, privately, his sensors aglow.