“What’s funny about it?”
“Everyone’s dead, is what.” The girl sits down at the desk, opens it, carefully pulls out a piece of paper and a pencil—two objects that momentarily stun me. Artifacts.
“Who is ‘everyone’?” I ask.
The girl sighs. I hear impatience in her sigh. “My sister. My mother. My brother. Like yours. The whole town. La fenêtre,” she says again, nodding her head in the direction of the blown-out wall and window.
I walk to the opening and look out. I know what she means. It’s like where I lived as a girl. It went like that during the Wars. Things were there and then they were not. People. Buildings. Animals. Sirens, and the sky lighting up with fighters and firepower and the ground and space and sound, and everything real lighting up and rumbling into nothing. Some people were fighters and some people ran for cover and some people just waited for death.
“My sister was practicing words with me. Every day she taught me new words, and numbers, every day of the Wars, she kept me reading and counting and drawing. To distract me, I guess. To not give up. When the cataclysm hit, my sister melted in front of me. I mean, I know that’s not really what happened, but that’s what I remember. She melted. Like a chemistry experiment. But I didn’t.” The girl concentrates on whatever she’s drawing on the piece of paper. Momentarily she looks up at me. “You didn’t either.”
“No,” I say. I didn’t know I’d be spared from genocide when I touched my hands to the earth. I thought, maybe even hoped, that I’d melt into raw matter like everyone else. This girl probably didn’t know she wouldn’t burn, either.
“Engenderines. Both of us.”
The word sits in the air between us, not materially visible and yet not nothing either. Like molecules. Engenderines were like mythical creatures or astrological signs dot-to-dot in the night sky. Stories of beings who were closer to matter and elements than to human. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know if I’m in a dream space of Nyx’s imagination or if I have somehow time-traveled back to her actual past. I don’t know anything. The girl looks straight up for a moment. “What are you looking for?”
“They’ll be here soon,” the girl repeats.
I walk the length of the dream, the room, whatever it is. The landscape around us matches the present tense, not the past. The wronged world. Lunar and scarred. The sepia light of a damaged atmosphere, sun, moon, a flattening color. The treeless horizon and hills made of dirt and dry riverbeds carving out directionless lines. Dead earth.
“There used to be a forest, there”—the girl points—“and a lake. And horses and cows and swans—even a black one like in fairy tales. Swans don’t really have a purpose. But I miss them the most. Maybe because of fairy tales.”
I walk back to the white-haired girl at her little desk. “Who will be here soon?” I ask, wondering if we are closer to or farther away from danger here. Wondering if I even care. There is a calm here. A still.
“The men is who,” the girl says.
“I see. How many men?” Even I don’t quite understand the aim of my question.
“Thousands,” the girl says. “Whole armies.”
I remember men. I just can’t remember how long it’s been since I saw them en masse. My brother’s corpse flashes up behind my eyes. Then my chest clicks my shoulders and spine into alertness. Wherever I am, I realize, I can’t stay. “What is this picture you are drawing? Is it about the Wars? With armies of men?”
The girl looks up at me as if I’m stupid or insane. Her brows furrow. “Real men are coming,” she says, “though they were just boys back then . . .” Her face loosens. “I saved them.” The hair on my arms prickles up like a tiny forest.
“Saved them from what?” I ask.
The girl puts her pencil down, picks up the beautiful piece of paper, and hands it to me. “For you,” she says, in a voice older than her years.
I look down. On the piece of paper the girl has drawn an intricate map.
“For you,” she says again. “This is the way to Leone.”
In the center of the map is a name: Christine.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Christine surveys her players. Their skin looks lifted and taut, like youth. But youth toward what? CIELers had no future. They glowed like dying stars, pretending their light and puffed-up cascades of flesh gave them presence and meaning. They carried stupid stories of themselves around like capes and headdresses. Underneath they were all atrophying bones and sacks of meat with half-century shelf lives.
Each player has a different silk robe on—her idea—in a palette of deep azures and burgundy reds, blacks and purples and the dark green of deep forests. Or what she remembers of forests anyway. It is more color than she’s seen in years.
When the time comes, of course, they will perform naked, their young and still-stinging grafts pearling and gleaming alive—as if to say, something almost human was here. Corrupted, white and wounded and unflinching. They will perform an epic poem written across their bodies. And at the apex of the drama, nearly Greek in its design, they will move to kill as many CIELers as they can, slaughter and liberate their targets.
To Nyx, she gave a special operation: find Joan. Bring her up. The execution this time would not be hers.