Green Eyes Page 0,125

- and tried to shake free. He took a couple of turns of her hair around his wrist, pried a leg loose, walked over to the door of the Replaceable Room and slammed her against the wall. She lay stunned and moaning, her hair splayed out beneath her head like a crushed spider.

'Oh, God. Donnell,' she said weakly. She reached out to him, and he squatted beside her, taking her hand.

He should finish her, he thought; it would be the kindest thing. But she had regained her humanity, her beauty, and he could not. From the angle of her hips, he judged her back was broken; she did not appear to be in pain, though - only disoriented. She whispered, and he bent close. Her lips grazed his ear. He couldn't make out the words; they were a dust of sound, yet they had the ring of a term of endearment, a lover's exhalation. He drew back, not far, and considered her face a few inches below. So delicate, all the ugly tensions withdrawn. He felt at a strange distance from her, as if he were a tiny bird soaring above the face of the universe, a floor of bone and ivory centered by a red plush mouth which lured him down, whirling him in a transparent column of breath. Half-formed phrases flittered through his thoughts, memories of sexual ritual, formal exchanges of energy and grace, and he found himself kissing her. Her lips were salty with his blood, and as if in reflex, her tongue probed feebly. He scrambled to his feet, repelled.

'Donnell,' she said, her voice rough-edged and full of hatred. And then she pushed up onto her arms and began dragging her broken lower half toward him. Dark blood brimmed between her lips.

He stepped back quickly and closed the door.

He went to the carpeted depression at the center of the room, knelt beside the control panel and began flicking the switches two and three at a time. As he engaged a switch on the middle row, her voice burst from the speaker, incoherent. A harsh babble with the rhythm and intensity of an incantation. He switched her off, continuing down the rows, and at last heard the grumble of machinery, the whine of the pumps. He waited beside the panel until the whine had ceased, until whatever was going to die had managed it.

It was very quiet, the sort of blanketing stillness that pours in between the final echo of an explosion and the first cries of its victims. The quietness confused him, lending an air of normalcy to the room, and he was puzzled by his sudden lack of emotion, as if now that he had completed his task, he had been reduced to fundamentals. He stood and almost fell, overwhelmed by the bad news his senses were giving him about death: dizziness, white rips across his vision, his chest thudding with erratic heartbeat.

Done.

Stamp the seal of fate, tie a black cord round the coffin and make a knot only angels can undo.

Both life and duty, done.

Filled with bitterness, he smashed his heel into the control panel, crumpling the metal facing. Smoke fumed from the speaker grille. Then he spun around, sensing Jocundra behind him. No. She was elsewhere, coming toward the house, and she seemed to surround him, every sector of the air holding some intimation. He could taste her, feel her on his skin. He started to the door, thinking there might be time to go back downstairs.

No, not really.

Not according to the twinges at the base of his skull or the dissolute feeling in his chest.

The leaves on the ebony bushes seemed to be stirring, and the dark loom of the forested walls held lifelike gleams of color, a depth of light and foliage showing between the trunks. To the south a road of pale sand plunged off through the trees, and at the bend of the road was a tiny orange glow. He laughed, recalling the light he had seen earlier in the gap made by the toppled oak; but he walked toward it anyway. The place where the road left the clearing was choked with branches, and they scratched him when he crouched to gain an unimpeded view. He must be very near the edge, three floors up, yet all he saw beneath was the starlit dust of the road. He shifted his field of focus toward the glow. The orange light rose from a metal ring, and beside it, sitting