It is a wonder she did not suicide after she survived her own execution, only to engender destruction.
Christine ducks into an alcove. The hiss and hum of the CIEL breathing system drones on. Metallic sentries and bloated white doilies—what is left of the human race—parade by her. She touches her free hand to her chest, feeling the raised words, reading them as Braille.
She holds the little Olms up to her lips and whispers to them, soft as a lullaby: “I understand it now. You have to let go of the idea that you are a singular savior or destroyer. Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy. Bodies are miniature renditions of the entire universe. We are a collective mammalian energy source. That is what we have always been. What an epic error we made in misinterpreting it all.” The Olms crawl up her wrist and forearm, then up to her shoulder, resting at the place between her jaw and collarbone, where she’s recently burned a plot twist into Joan’s story.
Chapter Twenty-Six
By one thick rock face along the dry riverbed, diving down from the decrepit remains of the city, Nyx stops. I stop, too. Nyx doesn’t even bother to acknowledge me. I see Nyx’s hands go up against the giant gray dirt edifice and I know something will move soon. I know to watch. I feel the ground under us tremor.
The wind stops.
For a long minute, the surrounding atmosphere seems to stop moving. I can swear that molecules of hydrogen and oxygen have slowed down enough to be seen. If I am delusional, well, then the delusion swallows me whole.
From the wall of dirt right in front of us, from stasis and earth, comes motion. The blue light at my head nearly concusses me off my feet; the song is so loud I feel something warm and wet dripping down from my ears. Blood. But that’s nothing. Two young and naked men—and to be sure, they are men; as long and old and dead as time has become, their masculine image is arresting, the dipping between the hips and the small dimples under each hip bone, the beauty of the thick muscle hanging between their legs, the musculature of their chests blooming between the rounds of their shoulders, their jawlines—two young men, one reddish in hue and the other a kind of ochre or sienna, emerge like statues coming to life. They stand in front of me, their gaze focused on something or some time so far beyond me that I may as well not even be here.
“Are they alive?” I say, sounding stupid even to myself.
“Yes. Their bodies, anyway. But they are . . . asleep. Only deeper.”
My head hurts. Not from the struggle to understand. More like a childhood thing. Like when my skull first came alive with song and light, which nearly killed me.
I look at Nyx. A little spit from my open mouth catches in the wind and strings outward.
“Matter,” Nyx says.
Nyx points to the ground between the two men. Immediately the two figures throw themselves into the ground. Not onto it; into it. Their bodies wrestle the earth, turning and convulsing. Their musculature constricts and expands. It is difficult to tell where one’s legs and arms end and the other’s begin. The earth, too, is dynamic, like clay. Their faces, their open mouths, the cords in their necks animate the space between agony and ecstasy.
My heart breaks with the violent beauty of it. I can’t move. I can’t not look.
Their bodies sink a meter or so, then begin to glow and heat and change colors—red to orange to yellow to green to aqua to indigo to a purple so purple it’s black. Soon their bodies are decomposing right before my eyes. I’m breathing so hard I nearly hyperventilate. I reach my hand out, and I think I shout, but Nyx pushes me hard away from them. As their bodies sink deeper and deeper into the earth, I feel another urge to dive down, grab at least one, pull him back to life. Surely I can save one thing.
Again Nyx blocks me. The song in my head pressures my skull and grows as loud as the sound I remember from the epic angry sea. When, after the terrible watching, I can no longer regard a trace of their bodies, their skeletons, their human form, the song subsides. Slowly and in waves.
At my feet, and extending away from Nyx and me, is a growing carpet of moss. Tiny white flowers. Insects. Vines. The roots of a tree. Life.
“Now you,” Nyx says.
“Me what?”
“What, have you suddenly become an idiot? Your turn. You bring the children.”
At the sound of the word children I stiffen, tree-like. “There’s no way,” I say flatly.
“On the contrary,” Nyx says, “this is the way. Put your hands against the dirt wall.”
“No.” In my head, I see the children in the graves I buried. How I hid them from harm, how they died because of me, how I resurrected them, how they died again at my hands. Every face. Every small body. Their eyes. Mouths. I can’t do it again.
But Nyx means to let things between us live or die here.
The wind subsides, as if Nyx asked it to. “You want up to CIEL? You want your beloved Leone? This is how. Your body. Engenderines were never eco-terrorists. On the contrary. Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another. We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that. Not Leone’s, not even yours. Now bring the children. They have a vital energy. Without it, nothing matters.”