Ayaan leaned forward and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “I’ve missed you,” she said. She had a trembling smile on her lips.
“I’ve missed you too,” Sarah said. She wasn’t crying. She thought she should be crying but the tears wouldn’t come. Maybe she was just too scared.
Ayaan reached into a pocket of her jacket and took something out. Something small and silvery. It looked half melted. “Here,” she said, and put it in Sarah’s outstretched hand. Sarah closed her fingers around its sharp edges, its smooth curves. "I was supposed to give you this."
Why, hello, someone said inside of Sarah's head. Someone pleasant and female. I’ve been waiting for you.
Chapter Nineteen
“They’re out of range,” Ayaan said, leaning over the edge of the flatbed. She had tried, with no success, to engage the army of ghouls who waited below them. Every time they made a move to come down off of the flatbed the dead men with their sharpened arm bones and their lipless grins would take a step closer. Every time Sarah moved toward the machine gun they would take a step back. “It’s a stalemate.”
Sarah clutched the half-melted nose ring in her fist.
You look scared, Nilla said. That’s the first thing we need to fix.
“He’s about to end the world. For real this time! Of course I’m scared.” Sarah sat down on the deck of the flatbed and watched Mael Mag Och’s body vibrate on the spikes. He wasn’t catching on fire, the way the Tsarevich had. Either he was stronger in some way or Nilla was acting as a transformer and stepping down the power of the Source as it flowed into his cells. It had to be the latter. “You’re part of this,” Sarah said, her voice very high. “Without you he couldn’t be doing this.”
That’s true. Listen, there are better ways for us to talk. Close your eyes.
“Are you kidding?” Sarah demanded.
She wasn’t. Just close your eyes. It won’t make things any worse.
That was fair enough. Sarah’s blood was racing too fast to let her truly relax but she leaned back against the machine gun’s pintle and forcibly closed her eyes.
Instead of darkness she saw bright white light. It filled her head and stroked her brain. It calmed her down and made her breathing slow.
“You’re inside the Source, sort of,” Nilla said. She came forward out of the center of things and moved toward the edge without walking or passing through any kind of space. “Or maybe its shadow.”
The white light dimmed and she could see her surroundings. She found herself sitting on a landscape of bones. Heaps of bones, piles of them. Unlike the bones that littered the valley of the Source this bonescape went on as far as she could see. The hills and rises of bones before her were obscured by a thin brownish-red mist that flickered in the air. Sarah turned around and saw she was standing ankle-deep in a pool of bright red liquid. Blood. She looked down at her reflection and saw that she, herself, had been skeletonized. She could see her bones, picked clean of all her soft tissues. Her hands were bony claws, her body defleshed, her sweatshirt draped over her pelvis and rib cage . She looked up and saw Nilla come toward her. Nilla was nothing but a skeleton as well. A skeleton dressed all in white.
Sarah had no idea what was going on.
“When we die, our bodies decay. You’ve seen plenty of that,” Nilla explained. She took Sarah’s humerus and lead her around the curve of the lake of blood. “Our personalities, though, and our thoughts, our feelings, all of the electrical patterns in our brains don’t just disappear. They’re stored here, in what he calls the eididh. It has lots of other names too: the Book of Life, the Akashic Records, the Monobloc, the Omega Point. Gary called it the Network. He imagined it as a kind of internet with human souls instead of packeted data.”
“It’s all written down and stored forever?” Sarah asked.
“Not exactly. This place is outside of time. There’s no storage. Here all of your thoughts and memories and beliefs are all still happening, all at once, forever. All of them you ever had—and all of them you ever will have. If you know how you can read them.”
“What about his memories and ideas?” Sarah asked. “The druid’s, I mean.”
Nilla nodded. Her skull swayed back and forth on top of her spine. It was impossible, there were no integuments or sinews holding it on, but somehow the skull didn’t fall off the vertebrae. The bones made a squeaking noise as they moved. “Yes. His personality is here. It’s what you’re looking at. None of this,” she said, and waved a bony hand at the bony world, “really exists. It’s simply how he imagines the network.”
“We’re inside his soul, then. So you must know he’s crazy,” Sarah tried.
“I’ve seen his visions here. They’re here and they’re real. I’ve seen the father of tribes at the bottom of his bog. He’s never lied about that—he really did see what he claims he saw. If you want me to stop him because he’s insane, you’ll have to convince me that what he saw was less true than what you’re seeing right now.”
Sarah’s rib cage flexed in despair. “So you believe him? You believe that he should kill everyone just because some moldy old god told him to? You think that gives him a right?”
“I think he’s a monster,” Nilla said, and her skull turned toward the sky. There was a moon up there, directly above them. It was, of course, an enormous skull. Sarah imagined that it might be Mael Mag Och’s skull. “But I don’t think that makes him wrong. I think we gave you a chance and you failed. I’m sorry, Sarah. I hate saying that, it just sounds mean. But it’s true.”
“Bullshit!” Sarah leapt up and down in her rage. “I didn’t fail anything. I was never told the rules of the game. I never knew what was at stake!”
“That’s one of the rules: no humans were allowed to know they were playing the game. You were asked the riddle and you failed to answer it correctly. That’s all there is to it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty much fucking well done with people telling me what a screw-up I am.” Shame made her arms drop to her sides.
“Relax, Sarah. Won’t it be such a relief not to have to fight any more? I can tell you from personal experience. Death is no biggie. You come here and you spend eternity with your own memories.”
“And your own guilt?” Sarah demanded.
“Yeah, there’s some of that, too. But I know what I’m talking about. Before Mael taught me how to access this place I was a mess. I had massive brain damage and I couldn’t even remember my real name. Now I’m back in touch with my life. It was a good life, if a little short, and I’m grateful. That’s what I owe him.”
“And me?” Sarah said, grabbing for Nilla’s ulna. “What do you owe me? Why did you bring me here?”
“You were so upset. I thought it might help if I showed you the other side. It’s so calm here. Peaceful. But maybe you don’t see it that way—you’re still alive, so maybe this place is scary to you.”
It wasn’t. That was the weird thing. Standing on the edge of a lake of blood, watched over by a moon that was nothing but a giant grinning skull Sarah did feel the peace, the tranquility. The permanence of the boneworld gave it a certain kind of security. Nothing would ever happen there—which meant nothing bad would ever happen there.
Which didn't let her off the hook. "Look," she said. "You have to help me. You have to stop him."
Nilla stood up very straight and tilted her skull back as if she were watching the moon. "Why?"
"Well, for, for humanity," Sarah said, but the words fell flat around her. "For the sake of your. Your soul." The word might have been a moth flittering around Sarah pointlessly.
Nilla looked down at her, as if waiting for something more. It seemed that inside the network intangibles and abstracts just didn't cut it. Sarah needed something more, something more concrete.
Nilla touched her jawbone with slender phalanges. “You can go back now, if you like. I won’t hold you against your will.”
Sarah thought about it. She was going to die in just a few minutes anyway. Would it be e
asier if she just stayed there in paradise or whatever it was? She kicked at some of the bones at her feet and a fine powdery dust blew up, the dust of bones so old they had been worn down by eternity and yet still something remained. Her own memories were in that dust, in a very real way. Everybody’s were. As the dust spun and billowed around her she felt her brain working, felt the memories flooding through her. Some of her memories concerned Ayaan. Ayaan was back in the real world. Would Ayaan think she was being abandoned? Sarah dug in the bone meal with her hallux. The dust brought up memories, random memories, but literally—as she stirred the dust her brain cast itself backwards on days she recalled of her life. The day she had ridden a camel with the Bedouins. Wow, that had been a good day. The day her father had told her she was going away to boarding school in Switzerland and she cried because she was afraid of all the white girls with their straight hair. The day Ayaan had first let her hold a pistol. The day Nilla told her that she had been asked the riddle and that she had failed to answer it properly.
Wait a minute. What riddle? She’d thought Nilla was speaking in metaphor. Yet there was something about the eididh, something in its very nature that seemed to make metaphor impossible. Things in that stripped-down place were simplified, unsophisticated. Complex thoughts couldn't even get started, much less develop.
“Wait,” Sarah said.
“There’s not much else I can do in here but wait,” Nilla told her. “And in another sense there’s no such thing. What’s on your mind?”
“The riddle,” Sarah said. “When Mael Mag Och said I had failed I assumed that my role was to kill the Tsarevich, that I had failed at that.” The thought in her head squirmed: it was getting too complicated and she might lose it. She calmed herself and tried to simplify. She said it out loud like a postulate. “He planned for me to kill the Tsarevich. I failed.”
Nilla squatted down at the shore of the lake and picked up a pelvis out of the piled bones. Perhaps she was accessing a memory of her own. “No, no. That was Ayaan’s job.”
“I’m just supposed to answer the riddle.” Sarah tried on the sentence for size. It fit like the second leg of a syllogism, almost audibly clicking into place. Now she just needed the conclusion.
“Yes. That was my idea. It was the only way I agreed to be a part of all this. I said we had to give the human race a chance. It’s only fair, right? So he thought up a riddle. If one of you could guess the answer he would submit to you. He would call off the end of the world. This wasn’t something he offered lightly, mind you. It took us years of arguing back and forth to figure out our deal. For him it means going against his god’s commandment. But druids think of riddles as a class of magic spells. They can’t resist them—he figured Teuagh would understand that.” Nilla’s head inclined forward, bowing in sadness. “It’s too bad you didn’t figure it out until now. You might have worked out the answer in time.”
“The next day,” Sarah said. She had it.
“I beg your pardon?” Nilla asked. She had no eyes, nor eyebrows or lashes to register surprise. But she dropped the pelvis she’d been holding as if it had turned red hot.
“The riddle. He asked me the riddle, just a little while ago. ‘What’s more important than the end of the world?’” Sarah wanted to slap herself on the forehead but she was afraid the bones of her hand would just fall off.
The answer was easier than the question. Ayaan had shown her as much, by way of example. By example of her entire life and also by recent events.
Her father had shown her the answer the day he left her behind. The day he turned her over to the Somalis and asked them to care for her.
In their own self-serving ways Gary and even Marisol had demonstrated the truth of the answer. Every survivor, everyone who had lived through the Epidemic had shown her the answer. The whole living world was the answer. It had been for twelve years.
The next day. The only thing more important than apocalypse was what you did afterward. What you chose to do when the world stopped making any kind of sense.
“The next day,” Sarah repeated. “That’s the answer. The one thing more important than the end of the world is the next day.”
The eididh itself bent and curved around the correct answer. Sarah was pulled sideways through space and time and plunked down on the flatbed, right where she’d been before. Ayaan was there, and all the ghouls, and the transfixed Mael Mag Och. Except none of them were moving. Sarah looked down and saw that her flesh was back, though she wasn’t breathing.
“I’ve stopped time for a few seconds, at least time as you perceive it,” Nilla said. She stood beside Sarah, perfectly clean and enfleshed in her white clothes. Where she sat Sarah was at eye-level with Nilla’s belly button, which was surrounded by a black sunburst tattoo. She looked up and saw Nilla looking down at her. “We have no time left to waste. You’ll need the sword, the noose and the armband. The relics, right? The Tsarevich knew that Mael was up to something and he figured out the right spell to truly trap him in that jar. He sent his best lich to collect them—Amanita, I’m sure you remember her. She was after the three items he needed to really bind Mael. Then you beat her to them. That was a really good thing, Sarah. It’s going to save us now. So show me the relics and let’s get started.”
“I, um,” Sarah said, actively pulling breath into her lungs and then pushing it out again, “I had the relics, yes. I still have the armband and the noose—”
Nilla interrupted her. “What about the sword? The sword is the most important part. It’s the only relic he bonded with in this epoch. At the height of the spell you have to drive the sword right through his brain. Yeah? Because that’s what binds him. I mean, it’s kind of obvious you need the sword. Please, Sarah, tell me you have the sword.”
Sarah bit her lip. “They took it away from me when they captured me. It could be anywhere.”
Time was already stopped. It couldn't get any slower. But it tried.
“Oh.” Nilla squatted down next to Sarah. “Oh.”
“I could look for it,” Sarah suggested.
Nilla shook her head. Her hair slid across her ears, her cheeks. “No, sorry. Not unless you could find it in the next thirty, forty seconds. He’s that close to dispersing the Source. I mean just maybe, like, against all odds you could find it in that time. But we can’t really take the chance.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. “I guess I failed. I guess we lose.”
Nilla shrugged. It was the most drawn-out, elaborate shrug that Sarah had ever seen. It involved the lich’s whole back and it took her up onto tiptoes for a moment before it started falling back. “Well,” Nilla said, finally.
She was winding up to something. “What? What is it?” Sarah demanded.
“There’s another way. But it sucks. For me at least, it really sucks.”
“Yeah?” Sarah thought she saw a sigh coming on. A long, extended sigh. “Yeah?” she demanded. “You killed the Tsarevich pretty easily. You could do the same to Mael Mag Och.”
“Well... sort of. Except... the Tsarevich was stuck in the one body. Mael isn’t. His consciousness right now is kind of inside the Source. He’s trying to end the world here—killing his body won’t even annoy him.”
Sarah rolled her hands, trying to make Nilla get on with it. It didn’t work. “Yes, and?” she finally asked. “What do you propose instead?”
“Breaking the circuit. I’m only able to get so close to the Source by making myself invisible. It cancels out my own aura so even the Source can’t detect me. Otherwise I’d be burnt to a crisp by now.”
“What are you suggesting?” Sarah asked, though she knew perfectly well.
“I make myself visible. Poof, I go up in smoke. It probably won’t even hurt that much. Without me to act as a conduit he’ll be trapped in here. Unable to get back into a body. Unable to do anything. And that’s it.”
“That’s it?” Sarah asked. “That’s... that’s pretty harsh.” She had wanted to say it was unacceptable. But the stakes were s
o high. “I can’t ask you to do that,” she lied, knowing she would beg for it if Nilla tried to refuse.
“You don’t have to ask. You solved the riddle.” She smiled with a radiance like the sun on a good day. “You won, kid. Listen, when you die, years and years from now I hope, come look me up, alright? We’ll compare memories.”
Sarah tried to smile. She forcibly tried to make the muscles of her face move upward. It wouldn’t work. Her facial muscles were single-handedly holding up the fate of the world. Nilla turned away—and then she was gone. As if she’d been cut out of existence altogether.
Time started up again. Ayaan turned to look at her. “What are you up to, girl?” the older woman asked. Sarah was still trying to smile.
Chapter Twenty
Banners of flame licked out of Mael Mag Och’s mouth and eyesockets. The scaffolding beneath him hummed and whined as it began to shake itself to pieces. Sarah knew she was only seeing the outer edge of what was really happening. The main event was not for human eyes to observe.
“What did you do?” Ayaan demanded.
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