Bonan looked genuinely, momentarily horrified. Of course, they had had a very specific vision of what their great ancestral birthright was going to look like when it finally stepped out of the anonymous expanse—God and mother and father, all at once—and it was nothing like this. “No. We never got any . . . no, we didn’t know.”
“Well then, I guess it’s a true miracle,” Xenia snorted. “How very proud you must be.”
Bonan let out a little feral growl. “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter now?” she hissed. “We’ve already started bringing Elijah in. Everything is . . .” she squeezed her eyes shut.
Xenia realized that those were tears Bonan was trying to stop. And she knew, too, that their homeworlds lay so near each other that the Hidden God would be able to jump to not only Tero’s gleaming razorblade cities but to Sarai’s too, if it wanted. And by the way it tore through matter here, ripping apart Elijah’s skins of ice and nitrogen, Xenia knew, like a stone in her gut, that it wanted everything.
Something wet fell from the darkness above and landed on Xenia’s shoulder, filling the muscle there first with a frozen numbness, and then with the deepest, most perfect pain. She strained to turn the little outside light on the helmet onto it, only to watch a small puddle of viscous chrome seep through the suit as if to burrow, to hide. She could hear Bonan sobbing—the woman was holding her shaky, black-gloved hand up to her helmet. Straining to understand what had just seeped in even while more liquid oozed down the walls of the Paateni well. Only for a moment did Xenia contemplate scrambling up the smooth walls, like a rat in a toilet bowl, before the pain in her shoulder pulsed that, of course, there was no running from God. I told you, the pain was saying, sounding eerily like her father, I told you you’d be undone.
“Your radar will see it,” Xenia said, when she could no longer feel her limbs. But there were graves, and gardens, that needed protecting. “Your radars will pick it up. Even if it’s hiding. And then your missiles will blast Elijah to pieces.”
“No. They won’t.” Bonan still had her eyes closed. Now that God was hiding inside her, she probably would never open them again. How very much like the Paateni woman she looked, Xenia thought. And she, too, would be indistinguishable from them, in the end. “We would never destroy something we love so much. Do you know how long we’ve waited . . .?”
“A thousand years,” said Xenia. “Yes, I know.”
The chrome was falling faster now; more like a rain. But from her scalp to her toes, she understood that everything was all right because she had been chosen for something more. There would be no death, no abandon, only oneness, eternal. Purity filled her heart as elements organic and non-organic were remade for posterity—first, split open.
Then. Reconnected.
Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in, three of which have been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have been included in volumes of The Year’s Best Horror (Datlow), The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (Guran), and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction; in venues such as Nightmare, Fantasy, The Dark, and ChiZine; and in anthologies such as She Walks in Shadows and Aickman’s Heirs. Her debut collection, She Said Destroy, was published by Word Horde in August 2017. She has a B.A. in political science, an M.A. in international affairs, and lives in Washington, D.C.
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