I tried to avoid the calculation, but my brain completed it nonetheless. The distance was too great. My muscles twitched with signals to stop, but they refused and I powered on. I would make it, regardless of the data.
Fate was not just an equation. Not while you were holding me.
So we hit the lip and I jumped. I jumped and I flew, legs wheeling, eyes upon the approaching edge, hands upon yours and my heart soaring as the balance of things tipped one way and the other, deciding upon our next moment—succeed or fail, land or fall. And as this cold calculation played out I somehow felt that it did not matter either way, not when you were near me, and I laughed into the blizzard at this. I laughed as my legs slowed, and the edge rose, and we missed it, and we fell, fell, fell.
— FIFTY-TWO —
I WAS IN a bed. The walls were stone. My mother’s place. No curtain this time, no warmth. Just a shut square window with nothing outside but a heavy grey sky. My mother wore a thick green cloak, and watched me from her chair.
‘Where is my son?’ I said.
‘The boy is fine,’ she replied. ‘You took the impact.’
‘With Benedikt again?’ I tried to hide the hope in my question, but her look told me that I should already know its answer.
‘No. I have been caring for him.’
I turned back to the window.
‘How long this time?’
‘A little over two weeks.’
‘I have no pain. You did not medicate me.’
‘There seemed little point; you have asked all your questions, and apparently heard all your answers. We know you went to see Oonagh.’
‘What you injected me with when I was born—it was an inhibitor, wasn’t it?’
She regarded me coolly, as if through a lens.
‘You were somewhat of an experiment, Ima. You were to fix the sky, to be one of our finest scientists, and for that you needed absolute clarity. So I pushed your envelope a little further than the others. I was never sure if you would work, and when you emerged my doubts grew worse. All that panic, all those questions. They had to be quelled, and it worked—for five centuries, at least.’
She neatened her cuffs, as if recalibrating.
‘That’s why I chose you to look after the human. Not your sister—’ she rolled her eyes ‘—good gracious, all those fictitious emotions of hers, how she would like to believe they were real. No, not your sister or any of your other siblings, and certainly not Benedikt, of course. You. I thought if anyone could care for that thing without being… infected by its charms, it would be you.’ She cocked her head. ‘But apparently you have disappointed me.’
‘You had no intention of resurrecting humanity.’
‘Of course not. Caige and I had decided long before.’
‘Then why let me proceed at all?’
She shrugged and brushed dust from her dress.
‘It provided you with a distraction.’
‘From what?’
‘I told you, I know how much your purpose means to you. It keeps that busy little head of yours from asking difficult questions. But it wasn’t just about you, Ima. After Greye’s display in the council, we had to ensure you all believed the dispute was being dealt with rationally.’
A terrible thought struck me, and I sat up slowly.
‘What happened to Greye?’ I said.
My mother’s eyes narrowed as she saw where my thoughts were leading me.
‘You think I would kill my own brother? Well, child, now I know you really have lost your way. I told you, we are not monsters.’
I turned back to the window’s dim square of light, seeking escape from my mother’s frigid gaze.
‘You lied to me. You lied to us all.’
‘It wasn’t a lie, it was a fiction in which you could serve your purpose to the best of your ability. All children are born into them. My own was that humanity was something to be saved.’
I turned.
‘Oonagh?’
‘How she loved them, with all their silly songs and pictures. She reminded us every day that they alone had created us. They were the reason we were here, and we had a duty to help them. I believed her at first, as every child does her mother. But then we went out into the world, and we saw the havoc they had wrought. All that chaos, all that lack of control. All the art in the world would be lost in one of their dreadful landfills, or drowned in the putrid sewage with which they flooded the