“Greta.” I could feel Talis’s hands on mine, his thumbs rubbing over my knuckles.
“What’s happening?” said Elián.
Talis didn’t answer him. I wished he’d stop the movement of his fingers.
“What’s happening?” said Elián again.
“She’s skinning,” Talis whispered. “Oh, I didn’t think she would—”
My hands had been broken. Talis’s hands moved over them, relentless, restless— Reducing stimuli will always help. Why didn’t he know that? He ought to know that.
“Talis,” I said. “Why don’t you know that?”
Elián’s voice cracked. “Well, help her!”
There was nothing to be done for me. Talis would know that. I knew that. I could feel our sensors meshing on the backs of my hands, like to like.
Da-Xia had still not spoken, but it was no good. I could sense her heat as if she were a sun; I could smell her, in the pillow and right in front of me, in memory and in real time— “Greta,” Talis said. “Greta, listen to me. The two memories are the same, yes?” he said. “It’s only the thinker that’s different—but what does that matter, if the thoughts are the same?”
“What does it matter!” I heard emotion in my voice: the organic mind had pushed the limbic system way up; the heart was beating fast, fast, fast. “It’s only the whole construction of self, Talis!” The AIs of the First Wave—the overload. “They died, Michael! They all died!”
“What’s the trigger?” he asked. “What did you remember? The last clear thing.”
“Xie.” I gasped at the sharp pierce of her name. “Xie, cutting my hair.”
“Well, then,” he said. “Look at her.”
“Don’t look down!” I shouted at him.
“Nah. You can fly—I know you can. Look at her.”
And I heard the small voice again, no one’s voice. Saying, Greta.
I opened my eyes. For a second the world was wild, flashing color. No different inside than out. No flying. Then I saw. Elián had taken a step back—Elián, always most frightened when he did not understand—but Da-Xia was standing there, holding firm.
The colors were gone. I saw her only. Her hand on the tangled blue quilt, inches from mine. Tears running down her face.
Rain on the mountains, said the organics, and the datastore listed the other times I’d seen her cry. She was a strong person who cried easily; my lover, weeping in our bed. Rain on the mountains. “Greta,” she said.
There was a space inside me, cupped and still. It was small as cupped hands; it was large as the sky. It was untouched and it was touch itself. It was empty and it was full. I held love there, like a treasure. I held my own name.
“Greta?” said Xie.
I moved my broken hand two inches to the left. Opened it. Da-Xia laid her palm in mine, infinitely careful. I closed my fingers, one by one.
It hurt, yes. But it was me. I took a deep breath and let the pain of my broken bones and the feel of Xie’s fingers be everything I was. In that way, and slowly, I became something. I held on to that something. I held on fiercely.
“Li Da-Xia,” I said. I was not like the dying Abbot: I had only one voice.
She squeezed my broken hand in answer, and put her other hand against my face. “Greta. There you are.”
And thus.
Thus, I did not die. I, Greta: I put aside my title and everything I had ever known. I put aside the self I had once had, and perhaps even my soul. But I did not die. I went into the grey room and I did not die.
Thus, love saved me.
The crisis point—I knew there would be others, but that first and critical crisis—passed away under Talis’s cool voice, Da-Xia’s brave hands.
All my life I had waited for the grey room. Very deliberately, I had never thought about the graves, with the wild morning glories growing over them. Very deliberately, I had never thought about what came after.
This, for me, is what came after. On the evening of the third day after I died, that day on which I found a door into the stillness of my own heart—on that evening I went up to the ridgetop to watch the plume of dust.
Talis went with me, of course.
And all my friends.
Atta, who touched my hair and wished me blessings. Thandi, who touched my broken hand and wished me strength. And Han, who said without irony, “I hope you live.”
Da-Xia whispered something to them, and they hung back, letting the rest of us pass the rock pile, pass the ridgetop, and walk into the waving grasses.
Autumn was beginning on the tall-grass prairie, color coming into the stems and seeds of things. In the river bottom the noise of the cottonwood leaves was sharper, stranger. The monarchs swept through the coneflowers, getting ready for the journey from which they would never return. The spiral paths they traced were overlaid with mathematical patterns that were something close to music. Da-Xia took my hand, and Elián hesitated, and then took the other.
“So you’re gonna ride off into the sunset?” he said.
“We’ll need to go more south than west,” I said. “But you could go west, if you wanted.”