My throat constricts. My breathing lurches. My eyes heat and swell. But I can feel the life left in Leone more than my own, and I can feel something else, too.
A woman I’ve never seen before, except in dreamscapes, throwing her white and glistening body straight at us, a human catapult. The woman is screaming at the top of her lungs—screaming some strange lyric, some poem or incantation that gains force and tenor the more she speaks. It is the woman from my dream. My song. My life. Her name comes to me with the same force as her body. Christine.
The blue light at the side of my head roars to life as if to provide accompaniment. Jean de Men’s grip around my neck loosens. Everyone in the room but me grabs at their ears as sound vibrations penetrate through bone and blood. The symphonic blast emanating from my body ripples the very air and walls of the room.
The song was never inside me. The song used me as a conduit. The song is all the universe in strange focus.
From within the flames—flames that are me—Jean de Men’s body contorts.
That’s when I see it. Something that inverts all logic. Jean de Men. He has a naked and withered woman’s body, or the horrible attempts at the creation or destruction of one, her full height towering above anyone in the room, her bleeding grafts and residual folds of skin undulating like an octopus.
I pull away from the horrid corporeal truth of her. Wrong mother. Woman destroyed. I push energy like a wall between us with my hands. She lunges at me, Christine biting and clamped to her shoulder like a barnacle.
“Burn, heretic!” Jean de Men sends a row of technological sentries hurling toward me, throwing their own flames.
But I do not burn.
“The flames you sent me to, I give them back to you. Your planet sends her regards,” I say. Almost as if someone had scripted the lines.
And then it is just the two of us at one another, trying to wrestle-kill each other, twisted into strands of light and sound.
“Hold the embrace!” It’s Nyx’s voice. Nonsense, I think, but I do it anyway. I hold Jean de Men in my arms as if unto death. As if we were lovers. As if it were a death grip or kiss. The ground beneath us begins to melt. When I look down, some neon-colored corridor is opening, a drop to something, I don’t know what. The song in my head bleeds out into the entire room. Olms flash on and off all around us like my memory of firecrackers. A hole. A hole of light.
I convulse with understanding: I’ve made my own Skyline.
I seize the moment, I grab Jean de Men by the throat with both hands, even as the enemy stands tall as a tree in front of me. I mean to send the energy the earth has given me all my life back into this hole. I mean to send this thing back into matter itself. Even if it kills me. I will take Jean de Men back down to the planet, to die in the heat and radiation of my embrace.
Music pulses through the floors and walls. The entire room has become an astral orchestra. For the first time in my life, the song in my head is not just in my head. It is omnipresent. In everyone. Of everyone and everything. I squeeze Jean de Men’s neck with a force even I didn’t know I had.
A flash of light. A weird calm surrounds us. I feel Nyx’s hand on my shoulder. Hear Nyx’s voice. “Let go,” Nyx says. “Let this destruction go. Collect the others. Take Leone. This killing scene has another side. Creation.”
Cutting into the moment, a ghoulish thing—a red corpse? A skeleton out of Renaissance art?—leaps onto the back of Jean de Men. Is it a demon? A harpie? Just before the creature brandishes a large scalpel, I can swear I hear the reddened thing say: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, you rat-hearted dung-wombed cow.” And the red creature slits open the chest of Jean de Men.
Then it’s just Nyx thrusting both hands into the carcass, opening up Jean de Men’s body, summoning an electrical current as old as a star.
Christine, burning white with skin grafts, stands up among the carnage, a new definition of the word beautiful emerging.
The three of them—Nyx, Christine, and the red and raw creature—circle and ravage Jean de Men. Slowly at first and then with increasing velocity and form, at de Men’s feet, children begin to materialize from nothingness and rise. First just a few, then many, a hundred or more. Naked children. The wail that emerges from Jean de Men reverbs my jaw; her head rocks back; some as-yet unnamed emotion beyond measure. The children of all colors and ages swarm from the ground up, devouring, consuming, like a swarm of bees at a honeycomb, until I see nothing left of Jean de Men beneath the multitudinous wave.
The simplicity of the next moment cleaves my heart.
I stride the distance left to my beloved Leone and scoop her body up. The aquamarine corridor of the Skyline I’ve created gleams like a pool on the floor in the chaos. I look at the small army of men who came with me, their battle now done, so beautiful just standing there. I look to the pool, where they gather. Then a surreal haze takes them all, a great rush of color and sound, a fire of indigo and purple, a great big ball of burning blue deathsong. The last thing I see is the white woman Christine holding the red-as-meat man in her arms like Christ: Pietà is the only word for it in the world.
With Leone cradled in my arms and only a faint hope toward Earth, I jump.
Chapter Thirty
“How long, my love?” Christine holds Trinculo in her arms and lap, her back against a window filled with space. Both of them dewy with something new. Something beautifully, erotically human. Unstoppable sweat. None of the CIEL environmental controls are able to keep up with the new trajectory, straight into the eye of the sun. Maybe they are not sweating. But they only believe that they are.
Around their bodies, nothing but carnage.
“You know, in some of the early representations of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, she looks to be fondling his tiny penis,” Trinculo says, steady voiced and serious.