There is a growl that rumbles deep in his answer, the sound of all the rage built up inside of him over the years, and I find myself called to it as much as he’s called to mine.
We each soak in peace for a long while. I think back to the memory of the invasion of Sur Kama, and then to the vision of young Red standing over me, his hand on the trigger of his gun. This time, I don’t tense at the thought—I wait as it drifts through our link to Red, then at his answering emotion of dread.
You must have sensed this thought from me before, I tell him. Couldn’t you?
I could feel the sudden hostility from you, he replies. I saw fragments of it in your dreams.
So he’s been able to glimpse my nightmares as surely as I could see his. It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps he soothes my dreams with his consciousness, just as I do for him. There’s another long silence before he speaks. I didn’t know you were the girl from that night.
The question I’ve been waiting to ask him finally comes out now. Why didn’t you shoot? You just stood there.
He doesn’t reply right away. I’d never shot a child before, he finally says.
Before. That means he must have already been forced to kill adults, perhaps women, mothers, sisters.
You knew what it would cost you, I continue. And yet you spared my life anyway.
It wasn’t honor, he answers, and in that answer is a lifetime of bitterness and regret. It was fear. I … just pictured nothing but the carnage in my head, of you as a small girl lying on the ground, your face bloodied. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Do you regret it? I ask him quietly.
It’s a difficult question for him, and I can feel him struggling against it, his emotions roiling at each possible outcome. He could have put a bullet in my head and spared his father and sister their fates, could have gone home to them instead of to the labs.
Finally, he says, I always did what the Federation told me to do, because I was afraid of the repercussions. So I killed others in order to protect my family. His words are laced with sorrow. But then you kill again and again, and each time the threat builds, the pressure to keep them safe. They escalate their demands. You first shoot a war criminal in the back. And then they tell you to kill a soldier who is innocent. And then they tell you to kill a civilian, and then a young girl. And you realize that if you keep agreeing, it will keep spiraling down, down, down, until you’ve killed your own soul. He shakes his head. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t know if I regret it. I don’t know. I don’t know.
To have someone you love held like bait, to forever deprave yourself more and more in the hopes of protecting them until you realize you can’t rescue them. Red had known the fate he would seal for everyone if he let me live, and yet he had stopped anyway.
When my mother and I first crossed into Mara, I tell him, I felt like I would never survive the horrors I’d witnessed during our escape. But then the days pass, turn into years, and we are still here. Somehow, you find a way to make it.
I am still here because of you, he answers.
It is a fact, a truth, because I had rescued him from his execution. But within his answer is also some other emotion from him, something intimate and secret that turns my cheeks warm again.
I’m glad you are, I tell him.
The afternoon sun has begun to fade, dimming the glow that streams into the baths. The air around us takes on the chill of a blue winter evening, made mystical by the haze of steam. The only sound is the lap of water against my skin, subtle ripples hitting the pool’s tiles in rings. I stay still, wishing we were close enough to touch each other, embarrassed that he might sense my thoughts, hoping secretly that he does anyway. The bond between us brightens and brightens until I think I can see it in the darkness, a thread of blinding light, like everything in the world that is good has concentrated right here.