Her hands ready to go to dirt.
He didn’t know.
He had no idea what this young adult had in her hands. He still thought of her as a female, a child, playing some kind of game in which he could outwit her.
It wasn’t quite killing or saving, what she had in hand. Not creation or destruction.
And yet it was all of these.
She closed her eyes and saw again the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned aquifer poisoned air poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power—the only star in the sky—a ruthless inhuman grotesque—a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world’s roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike—all manner of animal—including humans—hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.
She saw unstoppable and perpetual war as existence.
Her eyes stung and blurred with salted wet, but only for a few seconds. About the time humanity has lived on Earth compared to the cosmos. “Bring your last war,” she whispered into her headpiece, deciding in that instant that all life was already death. “This ending is just beginning.” She did not fire a rifle. She did not trigger a bomb. She looked once at Leone; she set her shoulders, her jaw; she put her hands down into the dirt. Sand. Oil. Molecules of air. History. Religion. Philosophy. Human relationships. Evolution.
From the carcass of the drone on the ground, Jean de Men’s voice yet warbled out, “Apostate, vile whore, immoral terrorist, this day you die.” Secure in his power and armed forces, his army already surging forth, drones going to wing the way insects and birds used to.
“There is no self and other,” she said, laughing into the mouth of death, the blue light at her temple gleaming laser-like into the sky and surrounding air, the song in her head crescendoing in tidal waves and reverberating in the bones of every man, woman, and child around her, her armies plunging and rising as if carried by apocalyptic body song.
And when she rested her body down upon the dirt, arms spread, legs spread, face down, there was a breach to history as well as evolution.
And the sky lit with fire, half from the weapons of his attack, half from her summoning of the earth and all its calderas—war and decreation all at once, a seeming impossibility.
Alive. Trinculo says she’s alive, down there, existing in spite of everything.
The song. In my head. It’s hers. I remember now. It went into us. I don’t know how.
Once, she had a voice.
Now her voice is in my body.
Book Two
Chapter Twelve
Night. Every time the dull gouache of day gives way to the ebony of night, Joan feels like an alien. Fucking lunar landscape. Nearly impossible to believe this is Earth; even she has to remind herself she is not belly-down on the moon. That the dirt in her mouth holds no nutrients, that it has become more like chalk. She knows all through her bones and her flesh that her body against the ground is closer to reptile than human, for—like that of a reptile stalking the vast desert wastelands—her existence has been reduced to the slender impulse of survival. Salvage missions. There’s no life left but them. Or what is left of Earth. That’s what she’s coming to believe. Earth is, now, a spotted apocalyptic terrain: muted sepia sun during the day, moon so faint it looks like a bruise at night. A lifeless ball of dirt. At least at the surface.
They wait. She and Leone. For the right moment.
Joan rolls onto her back, looks over to another boulder, where Leone crouches. Then she closes her eyes and feels her own face. It is calming to feel her face. When she closes her eyes and tracks the burns on her skin, her neck, shoulders, it is as if she enters another dimension, one in which her body becomes an undiscovered land and not the grotesque burned thing that she knows it is. Under her hands, she can reinvent things on the surface of her skin. She can imagine that her face is a terrain. The burns stretching and diving like microravines and mountains, or pinching and puckering like the foothills of a country. She used to have a country. Everyone did.
Once there was a girl from France. She heard a song and became a warrior for her country, but her country lost its shape and aim in the Wars, as all countries did, and then there were just combatants and civilians, and then just civilians gone brutal against one another, endless violence. Then the girl made a choice.
Once there was a girl.