His eyelids quivering.
And then he gasps so violently that his chest lurches upward and Leone falls backward, and when Joan’s hand lunges deeper into the gash they’ve cut open, blood spurts out in a blue-red surge. Joan suctions loose her fingers and then covers the bleeding cut with her hand flat, holding it hard against him. “The poultice,” Joan says.
Leone recovers her balance and applies a poultice and bandage they’ve prepared.
For a time, all three of them sit huddled together, just breathing. As their breathing quiets and settles into quiet harmony, a déjà vu joins them in the room. The last time they were together they were at war, the last battle so to speak, the one that included Joan’s capture, and they’d each been gravely wounded, and Joan had been taken from the world.
Joan looks into the face of her brother, the man whose life she’s restored. For however long that will last. His skin still glows faintly blue; slowly it takes on the color of flesh, human, alive.
He opens his eyes. Like hers.
He looks up at her and half smiles.
Perhaps he thinks he’s dreaming. Like Plato’s cave.
“Peter,” she says. His face is so familiar she almost doesn’t recognize him.
“Remember . . .” Peter says, then coughs violently. His whole body spasms and shakes. His voice sounds like old dead leaves blowing across dirt. “Remember when the sun was what we thought it was?”
Joan smiles and nods. As children, they believed what everyone had: the sun emitted energy from the inside out, that it was a limiting, self-energizing ball of gases that could burn itself up. But everyone was wrong. That’s how history works. New truths atomize old ones, endlessly. The world used to be flat, remember?
Her brother sighs the sigh of wavering life. “I don’t know why I said that just now. I don’t know why I thought it.”
“When you were very young,” Joan says quietly, “you used to think the sun was a benevolent being. You thought it was an alien watching over us and keeping us warm. Like the man in the moon, only better.” She smiles. “You also thought the sun would kill God someday. It was quite a theory. For a kid.”
Peter inhales a long, slow breath, then exhales what seems like years. “We were some weird kids,” he says.
Leone laughs under her breath.
Joan strokes his temple in response. Some of the tiny black worms she put on his forehead earlier remain. They give him a dark angel look.
“How long do I have?”
Joan closes her eyes and sucks in the air between them, holds it, and lets it loose, quiet as whisper. Wishing it could breathe years back into him. Or their whole childhood.
“Hard to say. A day? Maybe more.”
“Is there . . . pain?”
Joan considers the question. She can’t know. It has never happened to her. From what she has witnessed, people simply dropped dead, as if their power was suddenly cut. It looked . . . peaceful. Like fainting or falling asleep. Bodies going limp to dirt.
She could not perform the power on herself. The only death she’d experienced had been when they tried to burn her alive, and that was profoundly different, she surmised. The thought of it skull-shoots her memory, hard enough to make her eye twitch.
“Shhh. Save your breath,” Joan says.
He looks at her more intensely than a child. “Why?” he asks. “For what?”
Joan lowers her gaze.
He rasps another cough out. For a moment she thinks he will choke and die again right then. For a moment she almost wishes it. She does not want the responsibility of his life, or his death, or any of it.
Then Leone puts a cup of liquid to his lips. “Drink this,” she commands. “It’s got an organic stimulant and a painkiller in it. You’ll be alert and high at the same time. A liminal state that would make anyone jealous.” Leone smiles.
Joan winces.
Peter drinks. And drinks. Within twenty minutes he has regained his composure, which is unsettling for them all.
“When you died,” he says, “or when we believed you had, I felt sure you hadn’t died at all. I don’t know. I just didn’t . . . feel it. They took everything from us, you know. Everything. I’m not talking about how they slaughtered or enslaved us. I’m not talking about the rape of the earth and all that, or even about their refusal to give basic humanitarian aid—medicine, water, food. I’m talking about you. You were the only thing we had left to follow, to believe in. It was like they’d killed God. Isn’t that funny?”
Joan rests her head on her knees and holds her own shoulders.
“After a while, though, we made you undead. We re-created you.” He pushes himself up to his elbows. “We made a story of you to keep us going. So for me you never really died, do you see?” Peter touches the place on her hand where her finger used to be.
Slowly, in a voice bending back toward death or dying, he relates to Joan the story that emerged in her absence:
“In the year of the death-giving sun, as the demise of the world we knew grew ever closer—and, with it, the need to choose a destiny, to die out underground or be reintegrated into a floating consciousness under the ruling class of CIELs—a child courier emerged through a tunnel. No one knew the child. His eyes were sunken into his skull; his cheekbones revealed how long it had been since he’d eaten; his ribs were the main feature about him. He coughed, stood up straight as a dangling skeleton, and said ‘I am here.’ He closed his eyes and smiled, as if he’d arrived at the blessing of life itself. He handed us a cloth-wrapped object and dropped to the ground, dead.