day,” I said, the words dragging up like vomit. “Were killed because of you.”
“I...”
“You could have stopped Them,” I said. “Before it happened. Isn’t that true? You could have stopped Them. Told Them to do something else. Some other day.”
She fell silent, and in that silence I thought: Dog. I was always meant to be her dog. I never had a choice but to love her, I never had a chance. We never had any other friends. Look at the others who tried to get close to her, and I never saw the pattern, only she would have: suicide, accident, relocation, incarceration. Look at the people who tried to get close to me and couldn’t. She took up all that space. The dog that gets kicked and kicked and kicked and still comes back for another kick. She took me away from my family, because that’s what you do with your pets. You take them with you and you erase their kin. Their own kind.
“You were a made thing,” Drozanoth hissed softly, just louder than the wind now. I stared up at stars, at the corner of its wing. “No better than a dog. Little better than a lalassu, which at least is shaped like a man. Had you never wondered why she could not love you?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Because she made it so. There,” it said, “die with that. Or leave. Whichever you choose. For now you know, and you have the choice. Do you not?”
Its flapping wings had laid clear a perfect path to the Range Rover, blowing the sand away, subsoil gleaming in the starlight. I glanced back at Johnny, pink-faced and shaking. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Nick, wait,” she said, stumbling over the dunes towards me, ducking under Drozanoth’s wing as if she had not seen it. “Wait, listen to me. It’s manipulating you, it wants you to do that, since when would you do anything that thing wants? This is the world we’re talking about, how can you—”
“It’s always been the world,” I said. My blood was heavy in my veins, weighing me down. “It’s always been the world, not me. How could you have stayed my friend for so many years, knowing that? Knowing what you did? And knowing that I couldn’t leave?”
“I... listen, it’s not as simple as that, it’s not as black and white as that. You know there’s so little that’s black and white.” She was hurrying over her words now, the green eyes wide and terrified, not remorseful at all. That cinched it. But I thought I would let her finish.
“What I’ve done for the world,” she said, “you, you’re part of that. You’ve made me what I am, not Them. Showed me what humanity is and could be. Made them worth saving—all the people I never would have worked for if not for you. I know it... it sounds as if... it sounds bad, the way everything began... I thought I would miss out on the chance to save the world. I changed the lives of so many people—extended my share of lives, by millions or billions of years. When it would have been so easy to become a force for evil instead of a force for good. So it’s not so bad, is it? You’re... the centre of that, the heart of what I’ve done...”
“You had no excuse,” I said. “None. None, to make me your slave.”
“That’s not what you are!”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you remember what my family came from? That we were slaves, born of slaves, shipped over from another country filled with slaves? The British gussied it up, changed the name, made us ‘colonials,’ part of their empire. Said we were part of a great undertaking: that we would change the world. Just like you. But there was no way home. Not then. I have one now, though. And that’s where I’m going.”
“Nick, you can’t!”
“I can’t? I can’t?” I said, watching as she stumbled to her knees. Her eyes were dry. I found myself unsurprised.
“Don’t you know what it’s like?” she cried. “Having the whole world tell you the same thing, tell you that you can do anything?”
“Do you know what it’s like having the whole world tell you that you can do nothing?” I said. “All right. So that’s why this fucker went after Ben instead of me. When I was standing right there. That’s why my family almost died. Why my family almost died. I thought: Oh, yeah, They’re leveraging the leverage,