cell at all. All night long he crouched on the edge of his cot, staring at the door, the portal of his murderers.
After some period of time in this tortured condition, Lucius decided he could endure it no longer. Only the thinnest vestige of his rational self remained; soon it would be lost to him completely. To die without a mind, its patterns of experience, memory, personality—the prospect was unendurable. Killing yourself in the cell wasn’t easy, but it could be accomplished. Standing on the table, a determined suicide could tuck his head to his chest, tip forward, and break his neck in the fall.
Three times in a row Lucius attempted this; three times he failed. He began to pray—a simple, one-sentence prayer seeking God’s cooperation. Help me die. His head was chiming from its multiple impacts on the cement floor; he had cracked a tooth. Once more he stood on the table, calibrated the angle of his fall, and cast himself into the arms of gravity.
He returned to consciousness after some unknown interval. He was lying on his back on the cold cement. Again the universe had refused him. Death was a door he could not open. Despair gripped him utterly, tears rising to his eyes.
Lucius, why have you forsaken me?
They were not words he heard. Nothing so simple, so commonplace, as that. It was the feeling of a voice—a gentle, guiding presence that lived beneath the surface of the world.
Don’t you know that only I can take this from you? That death is mine alone to make?
It was as if his mind had opened like the covers of a book, revealing a hidden reality. He was lying on the floor, his body occupying a fixed point in space and time, and yet he felt his consciousness expanding, joining with a vastness he could not express. It was everywhere and nowhere; it existed on an invisible plane the mind could see but the eyes could not, distracted as they were by ordinary things—this cot, that toilet, these walls. He plunged into a peacefulness that flowed through his being on waves of light.
The work of your life is not done, Lucius.
And, just like that, his incarceration was over. The walls of his cell were the thinnest tissue, a ruse of matter. Day by day his contemplations deepened, his mind fusing with the force of peace and forgiveness and wisdom he had discovered. This was God, of course, or could be called God. But even that term seemed too small, a word made by men for that which had no name. The world was not the world; it was an expression of a deeper reality, as the paint on the canvas was an expression of the artist’s thoughts. And with this awareness came the knowledge that the journey of his life was not complete, that his true purpose had yet to be unveiled.
Another thing: God seemed to be a woman.
He had been raised in the orphanage, among the sisters; he had no memories of his parents, of any other life. At sixteen he had enlisted in the DS, as nearly all the boys in the orphanage did in those days; when the call had gone out for volunteers to join the Second Expeditionary, Lucius had been among the first. This was right after the event known as the Massacre of the Field—eleven families ambushed on a picnic, twenty-eight people killed or taken—and many of the men who had survived that day had joined up as well. But Lucius’s motives were less decisive. Even as a boy he had never been swayed by the stories of the great Niles Coffee, whose heroics seemed transparently impossible. Who in his right mind would actually hunt the dracs? But Lucius was young, restless as are all young men, and he had wearied of his duties: standing watch on the city walls, sweeping the fields, chasing down kids who broke curfew. Of course there were always dopeys around (picking them off from the observation platforms, though frowned upon as a waste of ammunition, was generally allowed if you didn’t overdo it) and the diversion of the occasional bar brawl in H-town to break up. But these things, distracting though they were, could not compensate for the weight of boredom. If signing on with a bunch of death-loving lunatics was the only other option for Lucius Greer, then so be it.
Yet it was in the Expeditionary that Lucius found the very thing he needed, that had been